TUKTU was a little Eskimo girl. Tuktu means caribou¹. She had been given this name, because only a few days before her birth, a relative named Tuktu had died; and as is the custom, this name had been given to the baby. She was well named, for caribou were to have much to do with her life. On the very day that she was born, Kutok, her father, had killed a caribou when food was greatly needed. That year, for some unknown reason, caribou had moved from their usual feeding grounds, and Kutok and his family had had to depend almost wholly on seal and polar bear, and these had been none too plentiful². So this caribou had brought great joy to the home of Kutok. In the days following, he found the caribou back in their old feeding grounds. Later, Kutok was to become a herder of reindeer⁴, and the reindeer, you know, are first cousins of the caribou. So it was that Tuktu was well named.

 

Aklak, her brother, bore the name of the great Brown Bear. Aklak was two years older than Tuktu and gave promise of being like his father—a mighty⁵ hunter. Already he had killed his seal and none knew better than he how to snare⁶ the ptarmigan. In the summer he and Tuktu gathered eggs when the waterfowl came north in untold⁷ thousands for the nesting. Whatever Aklak did, Tuktu tried to do.

 

While the children were still small, their father had become a herder of reindeer, and the little folk spent much of their time with the deer. They helped herd³ them. They did their part at the annual round-up. In the spring they hunted for stray calves⁸ that had lost their mothers. Both learned to drive deer to a sled.

 

During the long winter nights, the herders often gathered in Kutok’s house, and there they told stories while the children listened. There were stories of hunting, stories of adventure, stories of many strange things. But the story that Tuktu and Aklak liked the best of all was that of the chosen deer of the Valley of the Good Spirit. This was especially true of Tuktu. She used to dream of that wonderful valley. And whenever she saw the Northern Lights, the

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