by Yuri Rytkheu
We are the kin that spans sea and land!
We are born in eternal friendship!
The humans dragged their kill out on the beach to butcher it, to the delighted shrieks of seagulls whizzing over the chunks of meat and blubber. The waves lapped gently at the draining blood, and whale spouts shone far out on the sea, bisecting the sky and fracturing the sun’s rays into glittering curtains.
Winters and summers came, one after the other. The firstborn human sons grew bigger; other children came in their wake. But there were no more whales born to the first people of the Shingled Spit.
Early in spring, as soon as the sharp southerly wind tore the ice away from the shoreline, someone would be the first to spot the whale spout appearing on the horizon and would greet the returning kin:
“Our brothers are coming! Our brothers are swimming to meet us!”
As Nau and Reu grew old, the people they had made and raised—not only men, but women—grew up. New yarangas were pitched next to the first, new hearths came alight, and virginal hearthstones grew thick with soot.
Reu was too old for hunting now, and his sons—strong and fearless men—took his place. These men had needed names, for they resembled one another just as their giant seagoing ancestors did. The two eldest were called Tynen, which means “Sunrise,” and Tyneviri, “One Who Came Down with the Dawn.” The other sons, too, were named according to their personalities or events that took place at their births. One was named Vukvun—“Stone”—and another Keral’gin, after the northeast wind that blew especially fiercely on the morning of his birth. The girls also had names. There was Tynena—“Little Sunrise”—and Tytyna—“Twilight.”
But autumn comes to human lives just as it does to the natural world. One day Reu asked Nau to make him a pair of white camuss trousers, using hide from the legs of a mature buck. This meant that the old man was preparing to go through the clouds and leave the earthbound world.
One stormy evening, as rain lashed at the wet roofs of their dwellings and wind ran along the walls, seeking an opening, Reu gathered together all of his descendants.
“Soon I will leave you,” he told them tranquilly, resting his gaze for a moment upon each and every assembled face. “As soon as the clouds lift and the way up into the sky is clear, I will begin my long journey…. But before I depart, I wish to speak with you all. The most important wisdom I leave you with is to never forget you have mighty kindred. You are descended from the giants of the sea, and every whale is your brother. To be a brother does not require that you look the same. Kinship means much more than that. When you climb to the highest crags and peer down, how often do you see tall rocks that look like people? Yet it would not occur to you to call them brothers, or to think you have come from cold stone…. We came to live upon the earth because of the greatest expression that life can have: the Great Love. It made us into humans, made me into a human. And as long as you love one another, love your brothers, you will remain human beings. Love is all-present. I think that we cannot be alone in this world. The old tales of my whale kin tell of others like me, so there may well be other Shingled Spits out there, where yarangas ring the shore and your human brothers hunt nerpa and walrus, singing songs of the sea. Find your brothers, and multiply, for only in unity will you be strong. And remember one more thing: my journey beyond the clouds lies through the sea …”
There was an astonishing congregation of whales by the Shingled Spit that year, as though they had all come to say farewell to their brother. One by one they approached the shore. Reu sat silently, facing the water. Sometimes Nau came to sit beside him, and they spoke of their youth, when Great Love came to the lonely beach to unite a whale and a human.
Reu’s thoughts turned to those he was leaving behind, in the sea and on land. He was satisfied with his fate. Probably he was happy. He had been the one to become a human, to know firsthand the Great Love of the ancient whale lore. Now everyone thought that what had happened to Reu was the stuff of legends…. Surely, then, a legend could be said to be a truth that people had ceased to believe in.
How wonderful it had been to live beside Nau! He had found a world entire, with all its beauty and tenderness, in this one woman, whose heart was wider than the sky and whose warmth matched that of the sun. It was her Great Love that had made Reu into a man. Reu turned to look at her. The long years had brushed Nau’s black hair with snow, and her face with wrinkles. Even so, she was herself and beautiful.
Gazing at her face, Reu felt his heart swell with tenderness and gratitude. For now, she would stay with their children. And when the time came, she would join him in eternity.
“I was happy with you,” Reu told her.
He died as the winter ice came to shackle the sea and the first powdery snow fell over the cracks and melt-holes. His sons carried out the ritual of farewell.
They dressed Reu in white funerary garments and tied his fur-lined malakhai hat firmly around his head. By his yaranga’s entrance, they lit a fire and passed the body over its cleansing flames. After placing Reu atop a sledge, the men stepped into their harnesses and went toward the sea, the runners creaking sharply as they ran over the fresh snow.
Nau, wearing a dark-colored kerk’her, watched her husband depart for eternity. She grieved but did not wail. Reu had come to the end of his earth journey and had left them with the dignity befitting a man who had completed all his duties.
It was a still, clear day. A cold sun shed miserly light onto the cortege dragging the funeral sledge over the ice hummocks toward the flat, white expanse beyond. A large ice hole was already prepared.
Nau never looked away, but now a tear rolled unbidden down her cheek, leaving a cold trail and dropping, like a shard of salty sea ice, onto her lips. How big and sad this world was! How hard it was to measure the span of your life all the way from the distant past, barely remembered, to the mist-shrouded future in the undiscovered country of the sky, where there is no death nor knowledge of another world … and everything along this journey was the stuff of life itself, a life that would carry on beyond the clouds with more force and duration than earthbound existence…. How big and sad this world was!
Their sons pulled the sledge in silence, picking out the smoothest route through the ice hummocks, so as not to disturb the body that would now sleep forever.
The water on the ice hole’s inner edges rose and fell, as though the sea itself, the cradle of Reu’s first breaths, sighed in sorrow. The surface soon churned with slush. With a ladle made of stiff deer antler and bound with lakhtak-hide thongs, one of Reu’s sons cleared the ice away again, revealing the dark green, almost black, water beneath. He looked toward his brothers.
Wordlessly, they unstrapped their father’s body from the sledge and laid it onto the ice, feet toward the water. After a moment’s pause, they gave the body a push, and it slid into the water with a surprising quickness and grace.
The sledge followed, sinking immediately to the bottom, as though it were made of heavy walrus bone and not light wood.
The eldest of the brothers peered into the water and saw the reflected sky and Reu’s receding face. Their father was smiling, saying farewell to the sons he was leaving behind.
And in the sky above, the sun sat low and shone on the horizon. The world was silent, as though all living things stood in awed prayer before the wonder of Great Love.
Part II
1
Enu sat by the fire, listening attentively as Nau spoke. For some time now, many of the inhabitants of the Shingled Spit had brushed aside her stories as only the ramblings of an old woman. She was something of a local sight, and travelers sharing news from other places would usually find time to inquire after the old lady’s health, and to hear her tales and teachings.
Enu did not let on that he didn’t really believe old Nau. Anyway, who knew? Perhaps she was right—never mind that her tales were all outrageously unlikely, especially the one about her youth as the wife of a whale, and her whale children. No
one could guess at her true age. Even the eldest of the old men swore that she was already ancient when they were just young boys, and even then full of the same tiresome stories about people tracing their descent to whales.
Enu studied Nau’s lined face, all wrinkled like a baked walrus skin, and each time he really looked into her deep, remarkable eyes, glimmering green like the ocean, he found himself uneasy.
Nau had no home of her own. She could step inside any yaranga on the Shingled Spit, make herself comfortable, and remain there for days, sometimes months. She insisted that all the people were her descendants, and maybe it truly was so. No one would have thought of refusing her shelter or food. And yet, when she moved on to another yaranga, her hosts would breathe a sigh of relief. No one asked her to stay longer.
Despite his youth, Enu was held to be the wisest man in the village. He knew everything that a skilled healer, seer of weather, and keeper of ancient customs must know. But there was one thing that Enu could not say with certainty, and that was whether old Nau spoke the truth about the origins of the coastal peoples. It was true that the people of the Shingled Spit esteemed the sea giants just as they might their ancestors, and yet how different were the men of the land and the whales of the water. Whales were so much bigger, and silent—they had no voices of their own. An inconvenient kind of ancestor, one whom it was hard to know how to honor. Still, no one would ever say so to her face, since the cult of the whale ancestors had now been observed for many generations.
Old Nau watched the fire impassively, and Enu could see the firelight smothered in the endless dark depths of her eyes.
“It was through me,” she said in a low voice, “that the land and the sea joined together, through my body that human beings were born the way we see them today.”
“What about words?” Enu asked tentatively. “Thoughts?”
“When I was young, I dashed about the springy tundra hillocks, cold and soft with groundwater, like a doe. I had no inkling of what I was—a sable, a wolf, a wolverine—and it made no difference to me. Not until Reu came and gave me the gift of Great Love. And Great Love was a mystery, too, because we knew not whence it had sprung, to come to us. This mystery gave birth to thought; while there is mystery, humans will always try to use reason to solve it.” She fell silent.
“So what you’re saying is that while there’s mystery, there will be reason,” Enu said courteously.
“That’s right,” Nau told him.
“Where does speech come from, then?” Enu was genuinely intrigued. “How did people learn to speak and communicate with one another?”
“Reu and I wanted badly to speak to each other. And so we found the words.”
Enu furrowed his brow. It was all too simple somehow …
“Things, you understand, have a life of their own, regardless of people naming and measuring them,” Nau continued. “But of all the living creatures, only humans have words. And speech is what makes us human.”
Enu now found he was listening not just with his mind but with his heart. Truly there was something of great meaning and wisdom in her words. For the old lady, the world had always been whole, unified, and complete, and the whale had always been the part of it she most revered.
“So where did the other gods, like the four winds, come from?” Enu attempted to tread carefully.
“There aren’t any gods,” Nau snapped. “People just made them up, because they feared mystery. When you can’t be bothered to use reason to understand mystery, that’s when you make up gods. As many gods as there are mysteries in the world. You can blame everything on gods. Whenever a person shows weakness, some strange powers must be involved. These days people even say their own powers are gods-given. Disgraceful!”
“We do revere the whales, though,” Enu pointed out.
“A whale is not a god,” Nau said with some force. “He is simply our ancestor and our brother. He lives beside us, always ready to come to our aid. That’s all there is to it.”
Enu brooded on this as he tramped along the beach, bending down to pinch off bits of seagrass and popping them absent-mindedly into his mouth. The damp wind, reeking of seaweed, birds, fishes, and animals, distracted him and scattered his thoughts. Instinctively he felt the merciless and terrifying truth of what Nau had said: that men had made a multitude of gods from their great fear of the unknown. It was an unnerving thought, but also appealing in its simplicity. What, then, should they do about their own long-settled customs? It would be hard to give up the familiar, harder still to give up gods…. Common sense told him it would be a mistake to try to upend people’s beliefs entirely, even if they were false.
And what to make of old Nau herself? Her very name was the stuff of legend, her story overgrown with mystery. She had said that mysteries spurred the human mind to doing and discovering. She was right in that. And yet reason itself seemed always at the ready to accept an easy solution to the riddle, or a weak semblance of the truth, full of holes and inconsistencies.
How long had Nau walked the earth? She had often said that in the beginning she was all alone and did not know herself from a sable or a wolverine, or a gopher. Could it be that she really had been some kind of animal, all the way back?
But as for her mating with a whale … a whale who through the power of Great Love had become a man …
There were many stories of whales helping the coastal people hunt and keeping them from harm in the water. No one disbelieved these fables, exactly. But this business of a whale changing into a human … why had that never happened again? Everyone knew about ter’yky, the changeling creatures who had once been hunters, borne away on an ice floe and then returning to haunt the village. Out on the cold sea, the creature’s clothes would shred and tear away, yet he would not die. Such a man might grow coarse hair all over his body, like a lakhtak’s fur, his features growing seallike, too, his speech deserting him. Such changelings had been seen in the tundra, wandering near human villages. They stole food, breaking into cold storage pits and tugging drying meat from hanging lines. They were known to attack women—and then there would be babies born with hairy heads and faces, sometimes dumb and deaf, or unseeing.
Ter’yky, yes. But after the humans fathered by Reu, no other people had ever been transformed from a whale again.
Still, how to explain the reverence their people had for whales, from the ancient days to now, and the tender regard in which these giant beasts were held by all? And on the other hand—how could one fail to respect and revere these creatures, whose gigantic bodies raised the highest waves, and whose great exhalations reached up into the sky? All other sea life stayed well clear of men, fearing them; whales alone sought encounter, always meeting the hide boats when they went out to sea. More than once, Enu himself had seen whales leading hunters to the hidden places where seals and walruses swarmed.
Enu knew that his people did not really believe old Nau’s stories. They were only tales for children, dreamed up by a senile old woman. And yet there was a silent, common understanding that to voice any doubt in Nau’s presence would be sacrilege.
Though she never set herself up as a healer or fortune-teller, old Nau never refused anyone who came to her for help. Her remedies were mainly herbal, tinctures of plants and roots. Her predictions were so precise as to frighten people—perhaps because she foretold both troubles and joys with the same remote indifference—and because she never concealed the truth, not many dared her advice. On the contrary, most villagers, wary of her sharp tongue, actively avoided speaking about matters of import with Nau around. They relied instead on Enu, who knew how to soften bad news with consolingly vague predictions and promises.
How long had Nau walked the earth? Could she really be as eternal as the seaward crags, the hills and rocky coastlines of their land? Yet she was aging, too; she was deeply marked by time and living…. How immeasurably ancient she must be, she who claimed to remember the first humans, even now, when the shores and the tundra teemed with people.
Everyone was used to seeing the deer herds grazing, staying perfectly calm at the herders’ approach. You could even use them to pull a sledge, like dogs. And yet Nau told stories of how, when Reu was still alive, the deer were wild, and the first people had to sneak up on them if they wanted to catch one. No sledge dogs either, just large wolves who prowled the tundra, coming close only to steal meat from the storage pits, though on a quiet moonlit night you could hear them howling fit to chill the blood.
The old songs called this the Sea of Whales—the great and mysterious body of water that lapped gently at his feet as he walked. How strange and different was life within the deep, with only its faint echoes washing up on shore: loopy jellyfish, prickly red starfish, seashells, little shrimps and mollusks.
Yet how strange, too, the world of stars and sky! You needed only to look up overhead, into that dark void that yet blazed with celestial fires, to feel your heart and soul trembling with a holy terror. The bright ring of the moon might reflect a human face, or the shades of dead kin, or the figures of living people who hunt and eat just as the inhabitants of the earth do. How, then, could anyone deny the possibility of many worlds, or of the mysterious, mighty powers pervading and connecting these worlds, the outer forces that were named K’elet, “gods”?
All right, let the whales be revered as ancestors—but it would be a mistake to neglect these other gods.
Not everyone was able to perceive the great powers at work, to know many things. Fate chose a few from the many and gave them not merely sight of the future and knowledge of the surrounding world but insight into things beyond human ken. These were powers given to them for the good of all people, to use in their service.
So where did Nau fit in?
It was a good and honorable thing to be descendants of whales. Awareness of this special ancestry lifted people up and made them strive to be as strong and independent as the sea giants themselves. And yet these origins were also cloaked in mystery—a mystery that could be truly understood only by someone deserving, chosen by destiny. If that were true, then Nau was the person who had most earned their reverence.