So Aklak started back to the summer camp to send up the herders and to help break the camp and move toward the winter home. Tuktu and her father, with a small skin iglu or tent wherein to sleep, and food enough for their immediate needs, started at once to catch up with the great herd. Through years of experience, Kutok knew in what direction the deer would travel and the shortest way to reach them.
They traveled too fast for much talking. Tuktu longed to tell her father what she had seen in the Valley of the Good Spirit, but somehow she couldn’t. “He will laugh at me,” she thought. “He will not believe, and he will laugh at me; and I do not want to be laughed at.” So she said nothing. But all the time there was a song in her heart.
It was not until Aklak had rejoined them that she told of her adventure in the Valley of the Good Spirit. At first Aklak laughed, as she had known he would. “It was a dream, Tuktu,” he cried. “It was a dream. You must have slept through that fog while Father and I were hunting, and the dream spirits took you with them. No one ever has seen the Good Spirit, and no one ever will.”
But Tuktu stubbornly insisted that it was not a dream, until at last even Aklak began to believe that it might be so. You would have laughed to hear him ply her with questions, all the time pretending that he didn’t believe a word of it. But Tuktu caught him looking at her with a respect in his black eyes which was new in her experience. And she noticed, too, that he no longer teased her, and that now he was never selfish. The biggest share of anything was always hers. Never had he been so gentle and thoughtful. Yet never once could she get him to say that he believed her story of the Valley of the Good Spirit.
Now there was one thing that Tuktu did not tell Aklak. It was that the last deer chosen was from their father’s own herd. Never had Kutok had a deer chosen by the Good Spirit from his herd until now. Tuktu had known that it was her father’s deer, because she had been near enough to see the ear-mark. Besides, there was no other deer in the herd to compare with it. Sometimes when Aklak insisted that it was all a dream, she would be almost persuaded that he was right. Then she would remember that it was her father’s finest deer Speedfoot, which had been chosen.
“If,” she would say to herself, “we cannot find Speedfoot in the round up, I shall know for a certainty that I did not dream. It will be the proof.”
Thereafter she spent many hours wandering in and out through the great herd looking for this particular deer and rejoicing that she could not find it.
CHAPTER XII
THE DEER PEOPLE
WINTER had come. The deer were on their winter feeding grounds. Could you have been there, you would, until you had watched them awhile, have wondered where they could find anything to eat. As far as could be seen, and far, far beyond that, there was nothing but snow.
But the deer people minded this not at all. They knew that the snow was but a blanket to protect and keep in splendid condition the food they loved best, the reindeer moss as it is called, which carpeted the ground, the lichens which nature had provided specially for the reindeer and caribou.