Surfacing

by Kathleen Jamie

  After thirty minutes or so, I could see colours better, until the haze distorted them. Details emerged. How had I failed to notice the three grass stems next to my right knee, bound together by a ball of spiderweb? When a pale bee entered a fireweed flower, it was an event.

  A quiet meditation. Melia sat some yards away, half turned to look southward, occasionally lifting her binoculars, naming a bird she saw. My hearing sharpened too: after forty-five minutes I could distinguish the different sounds the breeze made in the various grasses. A little bird nearby was making a buzzing noise, like a small electrical fault. The ripple of pondside reeds, the light on distant mountains. Then an owl appeared, labouring toward us with a fat lemming drooping from its claws. It landed silently fifty yards away, watching us. We hoped it was feeding the young one we’d disturbed. Its cat-like owl eyes stared at us through the long grass-stems.

  We watched the tundra, but the tundra, they say, is watchful too. The people say, ‘It’s like something’s looking at you.’

  There are stories of disappearance and reappearance, out on the tundra.

  Was it John who told the story of the two men out on the tundra in fog? The fog was so low, just above their heads. But a hole appeared in the fog and from the hole they could hear laughter and merriment. ‘Give me a leg up,’ said one of the men. ‘I want to see what’s happening.’ ‘Okay, but you must reach for me in turn, and pull me up too,’ said the other. So the first man entered the world above the cloud, but at that moment the hole closed and the bank of fog moved on, and the first man was never seen again.

  The story of another man, who got lost on the tundra and was given up, but who walked back into the village years later, wearing the very same clothes.

  The story of the little spirit woman appearing to a lost hunter, with a drum, dancing to the beat of her drum. She was on a hillock. ‘But I knew I mustn’t follow her, I knew I mustn’t...’

  The story of the rain-cloud. The woman was out collecting berries and had stayed too long, become a bit exposed and sunstroked. ‘But,’ she said, ‘a little cloud came, right above my head and let down rain, it filled the leaves with rain for me to drink. How grateful I was to that cloud!’

  After an hour, my senses were still clarifying. Perhaps it would never stop.

  Now a loon was passing overhead, against the bright clouds, with a long thin fish trailing from its beak.

  Then Melia saw cranes. She called my attention and together we watched seven or eight sandhill cranes flying in, low and slow, then land one by one, and begin to stalk through the grasses on long legs.

  By then the grasses were so vibrant I could almost taste them. This, after only an hour of attention. What would a year be like, a lifetime, a thousand years? How attuned a person, a whole people, could become.

  Who can say which story is ‘true’ and which not, when the tellers’ senses are so acute? Rick says of the Nunallaq site that, if the inhabitants could come back now, walking over the tundra with their parkas and berry baskets, their piercings and tattoos, they would recognise their landscape. It hasn’t changed that much.

  ‘What would they have seen, back then, coming home?’ I asked.

  ‘Grass-roofed houses, fish-drying racks, dogs. Not so different, maybe, as now.’

  John Smith was on good form when we saw him later, in the red building.

  ‘We saw cranes!’ Melia said, whereupon he stretched his arms and hunched his shoulders in imitation of the cranes’ long-winged flight, his hands flapping slightly.

  ‘They come close and swoop over you,’ he said. ‘Have you seen them dance? They’re the first ones to lay eggs.’

  ‘Do you eat cranes?’

  That slow wide-eyed nod. ‘We put everything in there – spice, stuffing.’

  Now, with his hands and eyes, John became an owl. ‘This year there’s a lot of owls.’

  * * *

  * * *

  A couple of days after the birthday party, I left the red building after dinner intending to take a walk. It was another beautiful, calm evening, impossible to spend it all indoors under the strip lights.

  Outside, half a dozen kids had climbed the roof of a derelict-looking shed and were sliding down, dropping to the ground below then running round to climb again. I say derelict-looking, but that’s lazy. I was learning to read the village better. Some sheds were fishermen’s stores. Some small ones were smokehouses, where salmon was smoked. Wooden ones with a vestibule and a small chimney and a heap of dry driftwood, they were maqiqs: steam baths. Saunas. A couple of times a week someone would come to the red building and say they were firing up the maqiq and they had space for a couple more. Two or three tired and dirty students would go, according to gender, and arrive back very red and very clean.

  I turned left, but didn’t get far before Sarah drew up on a four-wheeler. It pleased me that there were people in town I could recognise and name.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘Nowhere. Just a walk.’

  ‘Want to come for a ride?’

  It wasn’t a Harley, but why not? I clambered up onto the luggage rack beside her and held on as she drove the track down to the creek.

  It was low tide, the water shone gold in the setting sun. Drawn up at the bank were a dozen metal skiffs, while out in the stream a man was using his own four-wheeler to nudge a boat to shore.

  ‘That’s my niece’s husband,’ said Sarah. She watched him for a few moments, then seemed satisfied, so turned and headed back up to town.

  ‘Are you going somewhere in particular?’ I asked.

  ‘No. The house was too ... I wanted to come out.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  Next we rode on down the road toward the derelict cannery. ‘That’s the old graveyard,’ said Sarah, as we passed a place I’d walked by often. There was nothing to mark it as a graveyard except knowledge, memory. We passed the cannery, then continued down the three-quarter mile to the beach, rocking down the dunes onto the sand. Sarah turned right toward the rivermouth, then stopped again to watch the few boats still out fishing.

  The low sun blazed, we blocked it with our hands, the sea was liquid fire. We watched a boat manoeuvring. It was looking, Sarah said, for the channel into the river. ‘He’s found it.’

  Again she seemed satisfied, turned the four-wheeler on the sand and asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Anywhere you like, Sarah. It’s nice to be cruising around.’

  We rocked back along the beach. It was as if she had come out purely to notice things, check all was well. Care-taking.

  We left the beach again, back over the sand dunes.

  ‘This rye grass, we use it for making baskets. My sister you met, she makes baskets. Her husband is an ivory carver.’

  After a few hundred yards, Sarah halted the vehicle again. This meant she had something to tell me. Sometimes she paused, the think-before-you-speak manner. Notice things, speak with forethought. She pointed toward the wind turbines and communications mast.

  ‘You see the fence next to the lagoon? Last September, I think it was September, my nephew was driving out past there, and he saw something. Something stood up real slow, and that fence only came up to its chest.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A Hairy Man! Another time my sister’s family was up at the old airport...’

  Then her cell phone rang and she fetched the phone out from the pocket of her grey hoodie and took the call.

  ‘I gotta go back.’

  We drove into town. Dogs were running around in the dust. Children played. In the north-west, the sun was hidden behind bands of purple, fire-rimmed cloud.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sunday came, and Melia had news. With the salmon running, Warren and his family were going upriver in their boat. They’d be fishing. We could joi
n them. We might even reach the mountains. We could help with the cost of fuel. We’d get a trip, they’d get fish. We’d all be out of the village.

  We were a party of six: Melia and me, Warren, his teenage son Patrick, his wife Jeanette and Teddi, Jeanette’s sister. I recognised Teddi from the grocery store, where she was manager. Teddi was the one who ordered in all the goods. Both women were petite, dark-haired and quietly competent. They tied their black hair back and wore combat trousers, hoodies and ball caps.

  To reach the boats we borrowed the yellow station wagon and drove about a mile and a half to where the road ended at a series of gravel pits. Hauled up every tidal creek were grey, flat-bottomed metal skiffs: every family seemed to possess at least one. But they’re small, so we split ourselves between two boats. Warren manned the first, standing next to the hefty outboard engine; young Patrick drove the other. Of course, they took fishing rods. Of course, they took a powerful rifle, tucked away in the stern.

  Out on the quick river, Warren and Patrick’s skill lay in putting their boats into the right channel, the best braid, in judging speed and cornering against the onrush as the river widened and narrowed.

  Hazards included half-submerged logs that had been swept down from forests in the distant interior, and the way the river looped right, then left. It was exhilarating to be out of town, to be moving at speed. Every fleet-flowing bend was paired with a reef of grey shingle. Gulls flew up from these reefs as we neared.

  I sat in the front, trying to be vigilant, hoping to see bear or moose or birds on the riverbanks, but the engines were loud. Warren wore shades and ear protectors; it was too loud to speak.

  Because it was salmon season we passed camps at the riverside and many fishermen standing on the gravel banks. These were big bearded men from the southern states. The Quinhagak Corporation owns the land and rivers, they provided the services, stores, boats and camps, and took the fees. The clients took the fish. That was the deal. Solemnly, the fishermen waved as we zipped by. They were surprised, I think, not at the dark-haired Yup’ik women in the boats – they scoot upriver all the time, berry-picking or hunting – but at the white women in their company. The fishing trips looked to be all male.

  After some miles of headwind and river spray with the mountains growing nearer, Warren and Patrick slowed the boats and nudged them against one of the shingle beaches. They could resist no longer: they had to catch fish. Teddi and Jeanette secured the boats with ropes and they all wasted no time in assembling their fishing rods. I wandered off a few yards, stepping over a bear pat, brown and crusty. It was the diameter of a saucer and decorated with undigested red berries. A paw print not much smaller was pressed into the silt nearby.

  ‘Did you smell that bear back there?’ asked Warren.

  I’d seen him wrinkle his nose and point to the bushes of the riverbank, but hadn’t understood.

  Thinking the fishing would take ages, I hunkered on a washed-up log to wait. I looked at the grey shingle at my feet and a spray of yellow poppies in bloom among the stones. I kept an eye out for bears among the willow scrub on the bank opposite, and watched Teddi casting her line out into the river. The air was not quite warm, not quite cold. Dark clouds were gathering and a breeze rising, the kind of breeze that precedes rain. I prepared myself to be bored, but within ten minutes Teddi and Warren had each landed a hefty coho salmon.

  The fish were smacked hard on the head with a stick and gutted at once, then stowed in a polythene bag. Out in the water further salmon twisted, trout too, all pushing and nudging up to their spawning grounds. I had never seen so many fish.

  With the salmon in the bag, we made to leave, but first Jeanette shyly produced lollipops – a flat boiled-sweet kind I hadn’t seen in years. The women sucked lollies, the men smoked cigarettes, and then we pushed the boats out and jumped in. The riverbanks began to rise higher, and in a mile or two more trees appeared, cottonwoods, releasing a dreamy autumnal smell. From time to time we passed beaver lodges. Then we turned a leftward bend and slowed because there was a bald-eagle nest nearby, and sure enough an eagle took off at our approach. In a shallow we idled, watching as the bird made a wide loop overhead, and listening for Patrick’s boat. It didn’t come. We waited some minutes more. Jeanette told us the Yup’ik name for the eagle. Warren told us that cottonwood is favoured for making harpoons to hunt seals.

  After a while, we turned back downstream to see what was up, and found the second boat pulled up on a shingle bank strewn with bleached driftwood. Engine trouble. This was the reason Warren had wanted to take two boats: just in case. The river felt like a highway, but like a highway, as soon as you stop and silence falls, you feel the scale of the vast land around, its pressing strangeness, your exposure. At least I did. We hadn’t seen any other boats or fishermen for a while.

  Washed up on this bank were plenty of sticks, so as Warren and Patrick concentrated on the engine Teddi and Jeanette set about making a windbreak. As with the fishing, they were quick of hand. First they gathered a few branches. They rammed these into the silt, wove more branches between and draped the frame with a blue plastic sheet. This we huddled under, because it was starting to rain. As they built a fire, I watched carefully. The sisters worked as a team, bent over with heads together, barely speaking because they didn’t have to. First they scooped out some gravel to make a shallow pit about a foot long. They filled the pit with dry grasses they’d gathered at the shore, then laid thin twigs over in a lattice. On top of that came bigger sticks. One lick of flame from Teddi’s Zippo lighter and the fire caught.

  Within fifteen minutes the sisters had provided shelter and heat. Food they had secured already. I felt like I was seeing them in their element. Not the day job, but the river, the tundra. Now, they went scouting for fresh willow wands among the thickets behind the beach. As the fire gained heat they whittled the willow wands with knives until they were sharp. Then, from the boat they took not the fresh salmon but hot-dog sausages, and rammed them onto the sticks. Everyone hunkered, cooking hot dogs over the fire. I didn’t want to ask about the salmon, maybe they were saving it, but Teddi read my mind, and smiled a calm smile. ‘Hot dogs cook quickest!’ she said.

  Jeanette was listening to her iPod. I don’t know what she was listening to, but I liked the way she travelled: with her iPod in one pocket and her ulu in the other.

  Something vital had broken in the engine. We were too many, strictly speaking, for one boat, so it was decided that Patrick would wait alone on this bank, with the defunct boat, the fire and the gun. The rest of us would continue upriver for a while. We wouldn’t reach the mountains, but we’d go see what we could see.

  As we left Patrick sitting cross-legged by the fire, I asked him, ‘Are you not scared?’

  ‘Scared o’ what?’ he replied, mildly.

  I shrugged. The size of the place. Loneliness. The cold, black clouds. Hungry bears.

  ‘Done it before,’ he said. ‘All night.’

  ‘Scared of what?’ said his father. ‘This is our backyard.’

  * * *

  * * *

  I don’t know how many miles we travelled, maybe thirty, because the river looped so much. In time, however, the riverbanks grew into soft hillocks, and thicker bushes crowded the banks. Then, at a place where the river split in two channels, Warren nudged the boat ashore at the north bank and anchored it with a metal plate thrust into the earth. We left the boat and scrambled up a bluff covered in low vegetation; we must have gained a little altitude because the leaves here were already crispy with autumn hints. When we’d climbed about two hundred feet above the water we reached a rounded summit. Bedrock was breaking through, the first rock I’d felt for weeks, and what I saw from that summit astonished me.

  I was looking out at land. Land, every way one turned. From this small hill the tundra was laid out below like a green sea, sedgy and subtle and glinting with secret melt-pools and waterways. It wa
s land relishing its brief summer, open and free to breathe. To west, south and north the land seemed unbounded, but inland there rose range after range of low, grey-blue mountains, the source of the river, with shadows in their glens and corries. Above all, the sky. Every hue of sky was present at once, here a shower, there rays of sunshine filtering through, there openings of blue, and every white and grey of cloud. Shadows of clouds drifted over the land. It was a dream vision, a mythic view of land before farms, before towns and roads, unparcelled, unprivatised, whole.

  We sat on the ground in the light breeze. Warren lit a Marlboro, Jeanette offered more lollipops. I sucked a red one, and could have looked out over that land forever. In a sense, Warren and Teddi and Jeanette have been. I wondered how their thoughts ran when they got out here, away from the village and the Corporation and all the social problems and well-intentioned schemes, and just looked at their land, land they had managed to retain.

  Warren was squatting a few feet away, his camouflage jacket hunched over his shoulders. After a few minutes of silent looking, I ventured to speak.

  ‘Warren. This is some backyard.’

  He smoked on wordlessly, but then with his cigarette between his fingers he pointed southward over the intricate, mazy land, all sage green and emerald green and russet. He said, ‘That’s where I go wolf-hunting.’

  Then he pointed east, over the plain spread before the mountains, and said, ‘One time, ’bout five years ago, I came up here and all that place was covered in caribou...’ He paused, carried on looking. Then: ‘Our elders taught us to look for ravens. When a raven swoops, something is down there. If there’s a bunch of them, they might be following a moose or a bear. If you suddenly hear seagulls, something’s crossing the river.’

  ‘How long have you people been here?’

  ‘’Bout ten thousand years. In winter we come up here on snow machines. Go over to Eek.’