ATTACKED BY WOLVES
Summer this year was shorter than usual. As if they knew that the winter
would come early and be long and hard, the deer left the Valley of the
Good Spirit earlier than ever before, and began the slow journey back
toward the winter grazing grounds. At the first movement of the herds,
Aklak and Tuktu had been sent back to the main camp to help break camp
and move to their winter home. So it was not until the deer were back on
the home pastures that they had an opportunity to look for the deer
Aklak had so carefully trained.
An unusually bold family of wolves had attacked the herd on the way.
There are no more cunning people in all the great world than the wolves.
For days they had followed the deer without once being discovered by
either the deer or the herders. Perhaps the latter had grown careless.
Perhaps they had allowed the deer to scatter too widely. Anyway, the
attack came when there were no herders near enough to interfere.
A wary, clever old mother was the leader of those wolves. She knew deer
as not even the herders knew them. She knew just how to cut out a small
band of animals from the main herd and drive them into the hills to be
killed at leisure. She knew how to do it without stampeding the rest of
the herd, and she and her well-grown children did it. It wasn’t until
one of the herders found their tracks in newly-fallen snow that the
presence of the wolves was suspected. Then it didn’t take long to
discover what had happened.
Two of the herders, who were also noted hunters, set out on the trail of
the wolves to make sure that the band was not still hanging around. They
also hoped that they might find some of the missing deer.
But those deer had been run hard and fast and all the hunters found were
the cleanly picked bones of several. The others had been so scattered
that it was useless to try to round them up.
There was no way of knowing whose deer the wolves had killed until the
winter round-up. Then when the count was made, it would be discovered
whose deer were missing. But it was a long time to wait for that winter
round-up, so Tuktu and Aklak spent much time going about in the herd
looking for those trained deer. And they were not the only ones who were
looking. Kutok, their father, had been very proud of those deer, and as
soon as the herd was back on the home pastures, he asked Aklak where
they were. Of course Aklak had to tell him that he hadn’t seen them.
Now trained sled-deer are valuable animals, and Kutok at once called the
other herders to him and told them to watch out for these particular
deer. He remembered the attack of the wolves and he feared greatly that
the eight sled-deer might have been the victims. This was the same fear
that was tugging at the hearts of Aklak and Tuktu. There was no way for
them to know whether the Good Spirit had chosen those deer, or whether
the wolves had killed them. There could be no way of knowing until the
return of the herds to the seashore in the early summer. Meanwhile,
Aklak was busy training more deer, and one of these was Little Spot. He
was still young for sled work, but he was such a splendid young deer, so
big and so strong and so willing, that everybody who saw him said that
in time he would make the finest sled-deer in all the Northland.
Of course, Tuktu and Aklak said nothing to their father of their hope
that the Good Spirit had chosen those deer. They suspected that should
they tell, they would be laughed at. Also, they were afraid their father
would not like it that they should have dared to think that they could
train deer for the Good Spirit. So, when the round-up came and none of
the deer were found, but it was discovered that several others of
Kutok’s deer were also missing, they pretended to think as did all the
other folk, that Kutok had been unfortunate and that the wolves had
gotten his deer. This was what every one believed and it was repeated so
often that Tuktu and Aklak found it difficult at times not to believe
that it was true. “Had it not been for those wolves, we should know,”
Tuktu kept saying over and over. “I hate those wolves! I do so!”
Kutok also hated the wolves. He hated them for the same reason that
Tuktu did, and he hated them because he knew that if those deer were not
safe in the Valley of the Good Spirit, they most certainly had been
eaten by this time and all his hard work had gone for nothing. So it was
that the wolves brought worry to the home of Kutok.