He had a mop in his hand.
‘Whatcha looking at?’ he said.
‘The mountains.’
‘When I was little, I used to go with my folks right there.’ He pointed to a notch in the faraway hills. ‘We hunted ground squirrels, April into May. Ground squirrels, you know? For making parkas, the fur at the bottom? Lots of ground squirrels there.’
‘What else?’
‘Old gold mines. All along there. My pa used to haul water for them. Fifty cents an hour.’
‘Caribou?’
‘All over. One time a caribou walked right here, into town. We all made a circle round it and caught it.’
We stood companionably for a moment or two more, then, ‘Right.’ He said. ‘I gotta mop out the shower.’
I noticed that people notice. George had noticed me looking. They notice the bog cotton and its passing, an influx of owls, that there are bears around. The whole place must be in constant conversation with itself, holding knowledge collectively. One morning as I passed a wee boy on his way to school, he pointed to the sky and said ‘Ducks!’ Which there were, two of them, flying high.
No doubt they noticed us too, Melia and me with our binoculars, wandering round town.
On the beach halfway between the village and site lay the remains of a large sea mammal, long dead, just a big scapula and some leathery skin half buried in the dark sand. Not that I walked the beach, we’d been warned against it, and in truth it unnerved me with its silence and the cascading light, and the way the sea vanished to the horizon at low tide, leaving only sheeny pools.
But sometimes we got hold of a four-wheeler. Melia drove.
One day I asked Mike, ‘Do you know what that dead animal is, down the beach near the creek? Is it a walrus?’
I wanted it to be a walrus.
‘No, it’s a bearded seal.’
The point was, I knew I’d get an answer, and it wouldn’t be: ‘What animal? I don’t know. Can’t say I’d noticed.’
The sub-Arctic summer was fleeting. The village felt busy, with berry-picking and fishing excursions. The school was now closed, but every day more flocks of geese passed over. Soon the show and tell would be held, the site covered over and backfilled for winter.
But – an invitation arrived. There was to be a birthday party and we were invited: Melia, myself, Erika the photographer, and her assistant, Val.
That evening, the four of us picked our way past sheds and smokehouses, bikes and garbage to reach a particular house. We took two of the sixteen salmon as a gift.
Duckboards had been laid down over the black water that oozed between the houses. You could understand the longing for the winter freeze and all-covering snow.
Our hostess was called Sarah and she was waiting to greet us at the top of the wooden stairs to her front door. Sarah was in her forties. Her younger sister Misty was there too, ready to usher us in. Like everyone else in town, they wore plain shop-bought sweatpants, hoodies, T-shirts. I recognised these two women because they had arrived at the site the day before and been shown round. I’d spoken to them myself in the finds tent.
There were introductions. We filed in, shaking hands with Misty and Sarah. We each gave our names. As we did so, Sarah looked at us from head to foot appraisingly, and then bestowed on each of us a Yup’ik name several syllables long. It seemed to delight her, matching us to these names by I don’t know what qualities.
I understood that these names, which we now bore as well as our own, were the names of family members who had died. So it was as revenants, rather than strangers, that we were welcomed into Sarah’s home. She had a calm presence, a similar quiet, think-about-it-first manner to John Smith, as many of the people here.
We were shown through a vestibule crowded with overclothes and boots, and into a living area no bigger than a static caravan, with a kitchen/diner on the left and on the right a living space with a wood stove and sofas round a coffee table, where elders and toddlers were disposing of a large, pink-iced birthday cake. A pink banner read ‘Birthday Princess.’ The birthday girl was only two.
Every shelf and dresser was crammed with the goods of a working family; a family of fisherfolk and hunters. It was Nunallaq in its modern manifestation.
At table we were offered a seafood salad with salmon roe, then akutaq, with salmonberries and sourdock, which was fresh and excellent. Also jelly and doughnuts and tea in pretty cups. The akutaq initiated a conversation about berries and berry-picking, about excursions out on to the tundra of two or three days at a time. Any conversation about food – and these folk speak a lot about food – becomes a conversation about the land or the sea. The salmonberry was best of all, queen of the berries, but, as we knew, their season was passing now, and the fishing season well under way.
Visitors or family members came and went, just saying hello, lads in their workgear, round-faced wrinkled elders wearing anoraks. The family spoke between themselves in Yup’ik. The toddler was fussed over until she was tired.
When one particular elder arrived, I think the sisters’ mother, and we rose to greet her, Sarah introduced us by the Yup’ik names we were carrying. The invocation of these lost people affected the old lady and she hugged us all warmly one by one.
After a while, after the elders and toddlers had quietly disappeared, another woman arrived, an elder sister to Sarah and Misty. Her name was Grace. She had a similar oval face to Sarah, a similar calm manner. She had brought something wrapped in a blue towel which she wanted us to see. The table was cleared and the towel unfolded. Before us lay stone arrowheads, net weights, hammer stones, lithics which Grace had found over the years, on the beach, washed out from the land.
We picked them up, tested their edges. Grace said she took the collection to the school from time to time to discuss with the children.
I asked, ‘But you haven’t been to the site, to see the excavation?’
Grace shook her head quickly.
‘You’ve really never been? You should come, really – it would interest you so much. Misty and Sarah came yesterday...’
She shook her head again, emphatically. It was odd.
As with the names, I didn’t want to press for explanations. But then Grace said, ‘I found a mask once and brought it home. But I heard laughing. A woman. Like a shaman. A nasty laughing. So I took it right back where I’d found it.’
The talk turned back to fish and fishing, an easier topic, and ocean currents, and encounters with marine creatures. Misty spoke about dolphins, and of a moment once near Kodiak when two bow-headed whales had come rising out of the deep, flanking their boat.
Conversation was easy and we sat up late. The gloaming light lingered at the window, pinking and reddening as the evening passed. At almost midnight, when the northern horizon was a chalky amber, Sarah led us outside and down the steps and along the duckboards to her smokehouse. We stooped and entered. The shed smelled deliciously and anciently of woodsmoke. Strips of salmon hung from the low rafters. She cut some for us and we hunkered down to eat yet more food – strips of chewy smoked salmon.
When we emerged, the sky was the same deep red as the fish, and silhouetted at the creek were the rackety fish-drying houses, now filling with the year’s catch.
‘Don’t bears come, and take the fish when they’re drying? It looks like an open invitation,’ I asked.
‘We have people out on bear-watch.’
‘All night?’
‘Yes. My son is out there now. They watch up at the airstrip – that’s the way the bears come. Or down the other side of the river.’
‘And if they saw a bear, would they shoot it?’
Sarah shrugged mildly. ‘Shoot the guns, scare it away.’
It was a jewel of a night, I didn’t want to go to my windowless bunkroom, so waited up till the stars shone in an ink-blue sky. I was glad to have been welcomed
into a home, a warm clutter. I recognised much. Sarah’s cabin was as cramped as a two-room tenement. I recalled my own long-dead grandmothers, both called Margaret, whose names I also carry, and their homes I loved as a child.
Small cramped houses.
Next evening one of the village lads turned up in the red building with a big bandage round his hand.
‘What did you do?’
‘Punched a sign.’
‘And – why did you punch a sign?’
‘Uh,’ he said. ‘Family issues.’
* * *
* * *
The site attracted photographers and journalists. A radio reporter arrived on the plane. She was from the south, but now lived in Bethel, a predominantly Yup’ik town.
‘Is it as bad as people say?’ I asked her, when no one else could hear.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s got a lot of nicknames. Beth-hell, they call it. As you know it’s the regional hub, it’s got lots of problems. Alcohol. Heroin is there now. Domestic abuse. Suicides. The churches – they were the agents of colonisation – they’re all there.
‘We’ve had nine suicides in the region this year. They’re killing themselves and each other. STDs are the highest level in the state. Teenage pregnancy. It’s a huge mess. But the culture, the stories...
‘The big row now is whether to open a liquor store. You get these white people – they turn up, they’re all libertarian. “Hell, why should I have my baggage searched for booze?” But we’re guests, the way I see it. We should do what the Yup’ik people decide.
‘It needs strong leadership, but the leadership structures are those the colonists imposed, so they just replicate themselves and the Native leaders become self-serving.
‘My partner and I want children,’ she said, ‘but we wouldn’t do that there.’
* * *
* * *
A day or so later I was helping on the screens, shoving mud back and forth with a trowel. Out at sea, a dozen small, one-man fishing boats worked at the nets. Inland, a lone cloud was drifting over the tundra, as though looking for somewhere to rain.
The day’s earth was heavy and damp. Mike Smith arrived with a bucketful.
‘We’re becoming experts on dirt.’
‘That’s what archaeology is!’ he said.
I asked Mike how he became involved with the dig. He grinned. This was a story he likes to tell.
‘Well. I was sixteen, you know. Teenager. I was in a bad way. Didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t see any point in anything.
‘So I went off down the beach on my own. And down here, you know, I saw four or five white guys, sort of digging. I thought: Uh, just crazy white guys.
‘But I was curious. So I went back up and that’s how I met Rick. Before I knew it I was on the screen, like this, and I found a dart. Well that was that, I was hooked. And you know I’m down here as often as I can be. It’s given me...’ He didn’t finish the sentence.
‘Don’t you fancy going off to college?’
‘No, I’m a village boy. I don’t do too well out of the village. I’ve been to the Lower 48 on a school trip but I got homesick.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it takes brains to run a village.’
‘Yeah, a village boy. I’d just like a house here, and to go fishing. Maybe run a trap-line.’
A smell was rising from the earth in the screen. It was familiar, domestic, not unpleasant. I worked on, wondering if I was imagining it, because it was the smell of cooking. Specifically, the smell of mince and tatties, staple dish of my childhood.
‘Mike – I’m hallucinating. Can you smell that?’
‘The meaty smell? It’s because we’re down at the house floor now, where they did the processing. Seals, walrus meat, skinning, all that.’
The air is so clean and sharp, you can smell seal-meat from five hundred years ago.
We worked on. Below us, the daily routines and rhythms of the site. There were harriers around and ravens. Small wonder, if the smell of ancient meat was wafting over the land. I stopped to watch a harrier lift and tilt head down over the dunes, barely moving its wings as it hunted. Following the harrier were three ravens. Not only following, they seemed to be mimicking, even mocking, it. As it moved, they moved. Three ravens teasing a harrier.
* * *
* * *
Cheryl the cook produced her ‘subsistence supper’ and it was a triumph. She made a broth of barley and musk-ox meat, then a chilli dish of moose meat. Melia, devotee of fish, grilled two different species of salmon on a gas barbecue outdoors.
Mike stayed in the red building for dinner. He’d brought from home a wolverine pelt to show us. Thick and hardish guard hairs, coffee-coloured, very serious claws.
‘Are there wolverines in the mountains?’
‘Way far.’
‘Did you tell us you wanted to run your own trap-line?’
‘But I wouldn’t want to trap wolverine. They’re too dangerous. Their bite is lethal. A wolverine can kill a bear!’
Over dinner Mike talked us through the Yup’ik culinary year, which is to say the year on the land and sea and river. It is a tight timetable. Right now, as we knew, was the end of berry-picking: salmonberries, blueberries, they were almost done. It had been a good berry year, the women were happy. Now salmon fishing was well under way. The town was half empty; the river busy with roaring boats. A net strung at the rivermouth could yield sixty fish in an hour.
Upriver, it was line fishing. The fish must be caught, prepared, dried, frozen, smoked before the winter ahead.
After the salmon comes the moose-hunting season. Then trout. Then comes a settling down for winter, always with the hope of good deep proper snow and ice, like they used to get, because ice and snow mean you can travel quickly over the tundra, or up the frozen river to seek the caribou that come down from the hills with their attendant wolves. Upriver, you can collect firewood. You can visit other villages.
Winter also means ptarmigan, for ptarmigan soup, which is best served, Mike said, with a drizzle of seal oil. Spring ice means ice-fishing for walrus and seals.
Young Mike, in his calf-length shorts, his black hoodie and shades, told us now about seal-hunting. ‘I did my first sealhunt this winter. Me and my brother. But he’s too trigger happy.’ You shoot with your rifle first, and having shot the animal you get a tiny chance before it dives to throw your harpoon. The harpoon is fitted with a float so it doesn’t sink too. You know you’ve hit the seal because of the smell, you can smell seal oil heated by the bullet.
At table, he was enjoying a small, attentive audience, poised over our moose meat and fish.
‘I snare snowshoe hares too,’ he said. ‘Hare soup served with seal fat! You cook it up, mix in a little seal fat ... mmmm. I give the skins away to people who make mittens. But you gotta be quick before the fox gets the hare. Often I’ve gone back to the snare to find just a mess of blood and fur.’
Mike prefers walrus skin to the meat. Especially delicious is walrus skin with the fat still attached. He held up finger and thumb to show the depth of fat under a walrus’s skin – about three inches. ‘Mmm-mmm, I like that.’
‘Mike,’ we said, ‘you should open a Yup’ik restaurant! In Paris or New York. It would cause a sensation. Walrus skin with a jus of seal oil.’
‘Then, when the pools thaw on the tundra, women collect pond-greens. They have to dig ’em up with a stick before they flower. And birds’ eggs. I got seagulls’ eggs up at the airstrip. I think that seagull knows me now. It swoops at me.’
Our own dessert was fresh tundra berries with ice cream. Mike pushed his chair back to be first in line.
‘Hey,’ we teased him, ‘what happened to the walrus blubber and seal oil?’
He grinned. ‘Man, I like ice cream.’
* * *
* * *
There w
as a particular place on the tundra near the site where Melia wanted to spend a little time bird-watching, so we went there one bright afternoon. She led and I followed.
We were less than half a mile from the track but the tundra encircled us, under its dome of sky. We walked on a low bright carpet of berry-plants and mosses. Suddenly a young short-eared owl flew up right in front of us. It had sat tight till it could bear it no longer; we were close enough to hear the papery shiver of its wings as it lifted away, hopefully to resettle somewhere nearby where its parent would find it.
On a long tussock we set up the telescope. Here, we were visible, giving our presence to bears, as John had said. On the tussock grew dwarf birch, a few salmonberries with leaves turning red, and Labrador tea. The difference in altitude of only a few inches supported a different fauna to the lower land around. Between us and the mountains grew miles of shifting, breathing greens; damp-loving grasses that fringed invisible ponds and waterways.
We chose to sit quietly, and in a short space of time, maybe twenty minutes of looking out over the landscape, I realised my eyes were adjusting, my vision sharpening.
There was the close-at-hand, flowers and bright berries where we sat, then the middle distance, which resolved itself into bands of different grasses, each swaying in the breeze in its own way. In the far distance, a heat haze shimmered from the land. Black wavering shapes were ravens rising and falling through the air.
We looked at the land, and at a pond where Melia had noticed a number of different ducks and waterfowl; it was these she wanted to watch. Grebes and shovellers with little parties of chicks setting sail across the blue water. Sometimes, a rare and beautiful Aleutian tern flew in. I was happy just to sit quietly in the company of someone who also enjoyed spells of quietude.
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