[People of the Deer] describes what has happened to the deer and the people since the white man began to trade in the Arctic…. It is at once a confession of regained faith in humanity by contact with a remnant of its most primitive and hard-pressed elements, a notable field study in human ecology and anthropology, and a sombre crusade against the decimation of Arctic natives by the fluctuations in the fur trade….

[Mr. Mowat] traces with a beautiful clarity the material and spiritual bonds between land, deer and people, and the precarious ecological balance which had been struck between the forefathers of this handful of men and the antlered multitude. The fat of this forbidding land, he points out, is literally the fat of the deer. Without it the Ihalmiut die though their rivers teem with fish, their sky with birds and their land with other animals...