Living among the 40 surviving members of the once-mighty Ihalmiut nation, Mowat observed a sight that would inspire him for the rest of his life: the millennia-old migration of Arctic caribou in their teeming multitudes. With the Ihalmiut, Mowat endured bleak winters, suffered agonizing shortages of food and witnessed devastating intrusions of interlopers bent on exploitation. First published in 1951, this was the first book to exhibit the prodigious literary talent that would produce some of the most memorable travel writing of the next half-century. People of the Deer is the lyrical portrait of a beautiful and endangered society, and a mournful reproach to those who would manipulate indigenous cultures anywhere in the world.
From the community