“It wasn’t his fault, mother. I had just been roped and thrown to the ground. One of the herders had taken two V’s out of my right ear and another V out of my left ear—so you’d know I belonged to you, I suppose—when I saw the loop of the lasso close over Bald Face’s left horn, near the end. The poor little fellow was running his fastest. The herder braced himself and held the lasso tight. My cousin’s horn was pulled off. Oh, it was horrible! A piece of Bald Face’s skull the size of my ear was torn off with the root of the horn, leaving his brain bare.”
“The herder was a new one,” said Mother Reindeer. “He had not learned his business. He will never injure another reindeer in that way. We must forgive him and try to forget it.”
“Mother, I can’t forget it,” cried White Sox. “These wild cousins of ours can look forward to a long life of freedom and safety. They are not the slaves of herders and dogs. I want to stay with them.”
“You are very young, my son. You have much to learn,” said his mother.
“But I know what will happen to me if I stay with the big herd,” he said. “I’ll have to draw heavy sled loads in winter and carry tiresome packs in summer, if I am not killed by the butcher’s knife when I am two years old. In that case the herders will eat my flesh and make clothing out of my hide. The skin of my white legs will be used for fancy boots for some herder.”
A herder.
Mother Reindeer nodded her head upward and downward. She knew the ways of the big herd and had seen these things happen many times. She knew that if her beautiful White Sox was intended for a sled deer, he would first have to be halter-broken. A herder would rope him and tie him to a piece of tundra surface that was higher than the rest of the tundra, called a “niggerhead.” Then would follow the tedious work of breaking him to harness. He would be a beast of burden in winter as long as his back-fat lasted. Back-fat is the fat that collects on a reindeer’s back in summer, when there are green grass and shrubbery to eat. Reindeer moss alone does not give the reindeer strength enough for much hard work.
If White Sox was broken to harness, Mother Reindeer thought it quite likely that he would be selected by the mail carrier for that terrible journey of five hundred miles to Kotzebue Sound. But she had reason to believe that, because of his perfect markings, this wonderful fawn of hers might escape the butcher’s knife and the herder’s harness and be kept for a leader of the big herd. It was because she thought this that she had brought him with her on a visit to the caribou.
