Surfacing

by Kathleen Jamie

  * * *

  The next morning, as on every morning bar Sundays, the team took their filthy outdoor clothes and their packed lunches and climbed into a yellow pick-up truck. Rick drove, taking the one road, gravel-topped, which swung out of town and followed the coast for a couple of miles before it petered out. It passed under three wind turbines and a telecoms mast. Often we’d see short-eared owls hunting over the verges, and loons passing overhead, arrow-straight, bearing fish toward their young.

  It wasn’t quite true that the town’s junk had nowhere to go: there was a scrapyard/garbage site at the edge of town where a chain-link fence surrounded a fire-pit: a thin, constant plume of smoke dispersed over the land. There were always ravens perched on the wire, like janitors. That was where we parked to reach the site.

  Of course, the scrapyard joke wasn’t lost on the archaeologists. Come back in five hundred years, and we’ll be digging these beauties out of the mud. Look! A twentieth-century fridge! A bicycle wheel! But it’s a hollow joke: the rate the coastline is eroding, the dump won’t be there in five hundred years, or even fifty. Soon, the Bering Sea will be dealing with the crumpled firetruck and smashed windscreens.

  But such was the daily commute to work: the diggers would spill out of the wagon to jump tussock to tussock a quarter-mile down to the shore. Underfoot it was boggy, with patches of caribou moss and salmonberry and the herby-smelling ‘Labrador tea,’ which is like a spruce tree three inches tall.

  The first day, Rick gave me a short tour. On the edge of the tundra a semi-subterranean settlement was being excavated, or what was left of it, much having already been washed away. From the landward side there appeared to be an entranceway with logs laid like a boardwalk, and from that central alley, which would have been low and covered, there opened dwellings or work areas, all half-underground. Nunallaq would have been a winter home, because for the rest of the year people dispersed to camps, for fishing or hunting. A semi-subterranean alleyway, with rooms or houses off.

  ‘Like at Skara Brae?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, like at Skara Brae. Or like a cheapo motel!’

  Except here, there was no stone to build with. Here, people used sods cut from the tundra for their walls, and driftwood logs to support the roof. The sod-wall houses had long collapsed; they were now just lumps of compressed earth.

  Rick handed me over to Veronique Forbes, a delightful French Canadian and one of the site’s assistant field directors, who gave me a job and instructions. I was to fetch a trowel, dustpan and bucket from a large tent, and a pad to kneel on, and take a place at a sod-wall. Vero, her face half wrapped in a bandana against the bugs, wanted the wall removed to expose the hard-packed floor which appeared to run underneath.

  ‘You see how this floor comes? Take away this wall down to there.’

  ‘Take it away?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, just take it away.’

  At first I pussyfooted with the trowel, but there was no need to be too careful, not here. Vero came back to check my progress and laughed. ‘Just scrape quick,’ she said, in her singing accent. ‘Take it down.’ If we didn’t take it, the sea soon would.

  So we worked, bent figures in the mud. If the blackfly became intolerable, huge electric fans were produced and hooked up to a generator, to try to blow them away.

  The major find that day was a bentwood bowl, almost complete. Carefully excavated, it looked as if you could just lift it away, but at a half-metre down its base was still frozen in place. It was photographed, then just left for an hour or two, till the sun melted the ice.

  In the early years of the dig, the ice was only ten centimetres under the surface of the land. Now it is half a metre. Only six years before, when the dig began, everyone had had to wrap up in layers against the cold. Bring thermals! I was told. Bring longjohns! But my cold-weather gear came home unused. ‘It’s like the site’s been towed five hundred miles south’, said Rick, ‘in just five years.’

  The landscape was astonishing. There was nothing I wanted to do more than sit quietly and look at it, come to terms with its vastness. At lunchtime, while the others ate in the mess tent, I wandered along the beach a short distance away from the site and sat on a clump of earth new-fallen from the tundra. The sand was damp and dark grey, but the sea had vanished. In its stead lay a silent, shining realm. Almost to the horizon, and for miles north and south, lay silver mudflats, with the sky reflected in shallow pools. The sky held every sort of cloud, every season, and through gaps in the cloud a dreamy turquoise I’d never seen before.

  I hadn’t imagined it would be silent. Before I came I’d imagined waves and rocks, like the coast of north-west Scotland, tides and wind. Not this silver and silent reach. There were phantasms out there: wavering and floating forms. A flock of small waders flew low over the mudflats, settled again. Through binoculars, I saw a crimped edge on the horizon, which might have been waves.

  Sea, and land. Southward, it might have been miles away, a long spit of land reached out to sea, mere brushstrokes of greens with hints of fawn. Further yet, a range of mountains, just visible through a haze. On the spit, however, a shape caught my eye and, having seen it, I couldn’t not look, because I was certain it was a living creature.

  In a place with no rocks and no trees, the shape sat squarish, dark, prominent.

  I stood on top of the clump of earth and trained the binoculars. Even so, the animal was at the edge of my vision. How many miles away, I couldn’t say. Now I was fixated, waiting for the moment the creature moved and revealed its nature. It could be a woman picking berries, as it was berry season. Perhaps even a bear. We had been warned against walking down that way, alone. They kept a gun at the site, just in case. I wanted this distant creature to be a bear. It was surely large enough. A bear eating berries on the tundra – how thrilling! I watched till my eyes strained. But then, after long minutes, my woman-or-bear spread two black wings and took to the air. A raven! A raven, visible as an event on the landscape. I laughed at myself. Clearly, there was work to do with scale. One had to make allowances for this extraordinary light. But then again, maybe it showed how readily, in this unfixed place, the visible shifts. Transformation is possible. A bear can become a bird. A sea can vanish, rivers change course. The past can spill out of the earth, become the present.

  * * *

  * * *

  Back at the site the team was again at work. There was a general muddiness, a hum of good-natured conversation. Rick was making his way around the perimeter path toward the finds tent. As he passed, he showed me what he was going to record: a slender wooden dart with a tip of bird-bone, the length of his mud-stained hand.

  My own role being unfixed, I could spend my time digging at the site or not as I pleased. I could go to work for the morning, or help in the red building, scrubbing tables mostly, or ramble about the village, dodging the four-wheelers. People greeted me with a wave or a few words, no less and no more. Often I wondered about the cabins up on stilts, what they were like inside. Their owners were clearly hunters: there were sealskins stretched to dry on an outhouse wall, and rows of little desiccated corpses, ground squirrels, pegged like socks on a line.

  Hunter-gatherers with a grocery store. I went in there, also, to drift in fascination down its American aisles. Pop-Tarts, pizza, a few wilting cabbages. There were even coconuts, flown across the tundra in the shuddering plane. But no booze. Quinhagak is a dry village. We’d all been warned against bringing any. ‘Alcohol use has contributed to more death and injury in rural Alaska than bears, cold water and weather combined. Because of this we must have a zero tolerance policy regarding alcohol. If you violate this policy you will be sent home on the next plane.’

  One evening soon after I’d arrived, still jet-lagged, I was sitting on the steps of the Quonset hut watching this new world, when a terrible siren began to wail. I stood, alarmed, looking round. Not an air raid. Not even an ambulance – where
would an ambulance go? The siren wailed, and then a male voice called through a loud-hailer. ‘Time to go home! Time to stop playing!’

  It was the Community Safety Officer, all dressed in black, mounted on his four-wheeler, patrolling the few streets. ‘Time to go home now!’

  Ten p.m., curfew time for children. But it was still light, and summer is so short. Who would want to go in, when you could play outdoors in the gloaming, as my pals and I used to, long ago?

  But the next day was a school day, and also there are bears out there in the night. Hadn’t the villagers shot one earlier in the year, for hanging round the town too persistently? And here was the Community Safety Officer, a sort of Wee Willie Winkie, running through the town.

  * * *

  * * *

  In due course, the plane brought home Warren Jones. He’d been in Las Vegas. Warren was the president of the Village Corporation. The Corporation owned the grocery store, the hardware store, the fuel store. The Corporation owned the land. Almost everyone held shares in the Corporation; therefore the people owned the land.

  I’d been told: you want something done, you ask Warren Jones. In his forties, he was bigger built than most Yup’ik men and often wore a black bomber jacket with the Corporation’s logo on the back. If he seemed a bit brusque, it was because no one knew the pressures of maintaining a sober and functional village community better than he did. Hence the annual Las Vegas tip, to blow off steam.

  Warren was one of those most supportive of the dig, who’d argued passionately for it, and had called Rick when given the go-ahead. They worked closely together, dealing with sensitivities and politics, the sheer unexpected scale of the thing.

  One morning when the others had gone to the site, I stayed behind and in due course traipsed upstairs myself and found Warren at a desk strewn with papers and invoices. There were windows up here: his office gave a view of a silent square of tundra.

  I introduced myself, and said I was a writer and that I’d like, if possible, to learn something about Yup’ik life, but even as I said it, it sounded lame. Yup’ik life was all around me. The river and the land, the tatty cabins, the constant four-wheelers, the birds and berries, the matriarch in a florid kuspuk I’d overheard on her cellphone: ‘Yeah, but she’s family. You gotta look after your family.’

  Warren gazed out of the window. Had he heard this before? Of course. They’d had long, long years of Europeans colonising and disparaging their ‘savage’ life, then suddenly here we were supplicating, marvelling at their relationship with nature, the last of the hunter-gatherers.

  ‘Just tell ’em we don’t live in igloos.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘In Vegas they said – hey, don’t you guys live in igloos?’

  ‘I’ll tell them. I heard you had a mild winter?’

  ‘What winter? Last year, you could hit through the river-ice with just two blows. We couldn’t go anyplace.’

  Warren spoke about the dig. ‘We pleaded with those elders. We said it was for the youngsters. How are they to know their own culture? We had nothing. When I was growing up, all we got was the church! We knew nothing about our own culture.’

  ‘And is it working?’

  Warren relaxed as he spoke.

  ‘It’s pivotal. Last year we held a dance. The dig inspired it. Did you know that? On that site, they are discovering dance-masks that our ancestors wore. The missionaries told us our ceremonies were devil worship! They brainwashed us! There hadn’t been a ceremonial dance in this village for a hundred years. Well, one of the teachers put this dance together from elders’ memories and fragments from other villages. They made that dance and the youngsters performed it.’

  He looked defiant. ‘Well, the first time that drum hit, the hair on my neck stood up. I thought, It’s back! Now, I’m telling the hunters to keep the wattles of the caribou. It’s what the women’s dance-fans are made of. Now they are required again, for the first time in a hundred years.’

  ‘That’s thrilling.’ I said.

  ‘They had stopped it. The church. They said it was devil worship!’

  ‘Do you think fortunes have changed? In the village?’

  Warren nodded.

  ‘To do with this dig?’

  ‘Other villages are watching. We can show them how. There’s a lot of sites out there...’

  ‘Did you ever imagine how big it would become, how important...?’

  This time he slowly shook his head, his eyes wide.

  He said, ‘You know we do the “show and tell,” at the end of the season? First time, forty people came. Last year, it was eighty. This time we’ve got TV reporters coming, National Geographic are sending people... Since this dig began, kids from this village are hunting, carving again. They’re working on the dig, learning archaeology, learning their own traditions. We’re sending more kids to college. Is that a coincidence? I don’t think so.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Beyond the village, north and east and south, there was always the alluring tundra. Any offshore breeze brought a fragile summer scent; for miles inland grasses shivered. I could scan the land with my binoculars – a pile of old pallets behind the grocery store made a good vantage point. Small flocks of birds passed over with piping notes, to hide themselves in far-off waterways. But you couldn’t just strike off. You’d get lost in its hidden marshes and pools. Everyone said so. And there were bears, of course, a lot this year.

  One day, the team found fresh prints on the sand just below the site. Had a bear passed by while they were all at work? ‘No,’ said Melia. ‘We’d have smelled it. Bears stink. It must have come in the night.’

  On site, I came to enjoy screening. If you were working half a metre below ground level, you could almost forget there was a world beyond the site. A bear could pass unseen, if not unsmelled. Up at the screens, however, you were elevated. The screens were wire sieves, like waist-high tables, perched on top of the spoil heaps on the edge of the site; it was earth worked through the screens that formed the heaps.

  As the heaps grew, so the screens were raised ever higher; they now stood at a commanding seven or eight feet. On site, you trowelled the thick damp earth, dumped the spoil in buckets, then you had to haul your heavy buckets up the heap and tip the contents onto the screen, then work it with your trowel again, back and forth, checking for any small artefacts which had been missed. It happened: amber beads, carvings, flat sticks marked with smiling or scowling faces had all been found in the screens. Many objects had faces marked on them. Some, Rick said, showed the spirit of the thing looking out at our world. They didn’t seem to like what they saw.

  You could choose to work facing the sea or you could face inland. You could watch for birds – now and again a short-eared owl would fly low over the vegetation with deeply beating, slightly nervous wings. Sometimes harriers, hunting. You could see forever landward or seaward. But also they were sociable places. In the time it took to screen a couple of buckets, you could have a proper conversation with your neighbour, as your trowels rasped against the wire mesh.

  That was how I met Mike Smith, a likeable young man of twenty or twenty-one, born and raised in Quinhagak. Mike had a day job with the tribal council, but he came down to the site when he could, battering along the beach on a four-wheeler. He had the Yup’ik round face and black hair, the makings of a goatee beard, a gap-tooth grin. He often wore shades and a beanie hat. Some of the local folk seemed reticent, but Mike enjoyed the summer influx of the outside world to Quinhagak, part of the seasonal round.

  We coincided at the screens soon after I’d arrived and we spoke about the land. Eastward stretched thirty, forty miles of tundra, in shades of russet, green and fawn, then a rim of mountains. The vast sky, hosting every species of cloud. Mike said, ‘The bog cotton is abundant this year. We say when that happens, there will be bears around. Don’t know why, there just are.
And it’s true: there are more bears this year. Also, when the bog-cotton seeds blow away, then the salmonberries are ripe. You don’t have to go look.’

  ‘It’s some landscape...’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘It’s my refrigerator!’

  ‘Do you go hunting?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I asked Mike to tell me the story of the site.

  Though the village had been lost and buried, its story had survived. For five hundred years there had been handed down a story about an abandoned village, though no one knew where it was.

  He paused for a moment or two, trowel in hand. ‘Okay. This is the story I heard as a child. The story of the abducted woman. There was a woman, and she was out upriver. She came from another village up there, and some men from this village here caught her and abducted her, and brought her back here to be a slave. But, while she was here, she overheard them plotting. The men from this village were plotting an attack on her hometown. So she managed to escape and she made her way home again, across the tundra and rivers. It would have taken some days, probably. Two days, maybe four days. When she got home, she told what she had heard. So the men of her hometown decided to attack first. The hunters and the warriors got together and came down here, they came down on kayaks on the tide – you’ve seen how fast the tide comes in. They surprised the people here...’

  He paused. ‘Yeah. That was the story that we told, and then we found this site.’

  He paused again. ‘That was back in the “bow and arrow wars.” They fired in burning arrows and set this village alight. They set this village alight and when the people came out choking, they killed them.’

  We scraped on through the mud.

  ‘I don’t get war, me,’ said Mike. ‘But this dig is interesting.’

  When I’d screened both bucketloads, I looked out again at the mountains. The light was always shifting there, throwing some ravines and corries into shade, picking out distant summits. The ‘bow and arrow wars’ had happened five hundred years ago during the Little Ice Age. There was famine and want enough in Europe; here it must have been desperate.