“This wonderful fawn of hers might escape the butcher’s knife and the herder’s harness and be kept for a leader.”
“Mother,” began White Sox, after thinking for a little while, “have you forgotten what Uncle Slim told us just before we became separated from the big herd?”
“No, indeed! But run away and play with the fawns now,” she said. “Watch them carefully. You have not learned your lesson yet.”
Mother Reindeer had intended to take a nap, but she had many things to think of after White Sox left her. Uncle Slim had told them that probably the big herd would be pastured on the ice-coated sea beach during the coming winter. This meant that the sled deer would grow very thin again. The herders liked to pasture the herd there so that they could live in their old sod houses and be near the big village at Point Barrow.
Lack of moss would not be the only drawback; there was also the terror of the Eskimo dogs. Slim’s brother had been crippled by a malamute dog, at Kivalina, when hauling mail on the Barrow-Kotzebue route. Last December, Slim and five other reindeer had been staked out for five nights near Point Barrow village. They were exposed to a fierce northeast wind while the drivers were enjoying themselves in the village, where feasting and dancing were going on. On the fifth night the wind had changed to the northwest, and the reindeer had been scented by hungry village dogs. After a desperate struggle, Slim and the other reindeer had broken their tethers and had outrun the dogs. They had run miles and miles back to the big herd, and so had saved their lives.
It was not all joy in the big herd. Mother Reindeer knew that very well. Many a time she too had been tempted to stay with her caribou cousins and adopt their free life. But always something had happened to make her change her mind. She felt sure it would be the same way with White Sox.
“‘When I bent my head to take a drink, I saw the picture of my antlers.’”
III
White Sox Learns Many Things
When White Sox and the fawns returned from the brook where the dwarf willows grew, he was full of a new subject that he could not understand, and of course he wanted his mother to explain it.