When the Whales Leave

by Yuri Rytkheu

  “That is, until Great Love came to her. Great Love turned a whale into a man, and he took the first woman to wife.

  “The woman gave birth to baby whales. They lived in the lagoon at first, but when they outgrew that home, they swam up the Pilkhun Strait to meet their whale kindred and live on the open sea. After that, the woman gave birth again and again, but this time to human children. These children were our ancestors, the very first people of our tribe.”

  Kliau paused, then said, with feeling: “And our very own Nau, she is that first woman! She lives among us, and we revere her!”

  Drifting off to the last words of the story, Kliau’s children dreamed of the impossibly long-ago, mythical time when a whale could turn into a man, and a person could live on berries and seaweed. They had heard this legend more than once and, too, the story of Kliau’s own miraculous rescue by whales.

  They grew up watching the Sacred Dance of the Whale, and had instruction in it, in readiness for the day that they, too, would dance in thanks and exultation among the brave hunters that gathered in the Great Yaranga.

  Each daybreak saw Kliau depart for the sea ice, leaving behind the Shingled Spit and its yarangas, sunk deep in snowdrifts, with only the puffing smoke holes to hint at the life and warmth kindled within.

  The bluish light would grow tinged with rose as he went on, as though full sun was about to spill from the southerly sky, instead of the red glow of a sun that never showed above the horizon.

  As he skirted the big hummocks and picked his way carefully across the patches of new ice, Kliau pondered the past, not for the first time. Say that you believed the story of the whale turning into a man…. Why had the things that happened so long ago never happened again?

  So much of what lay within the ancient tales was strange and incomprehensible. Kliau even once quizzed Enu about it, only to receive the stern reply that the harder to understand such a tale was, the truer it was, and therefore the worthier of faith.

  Still: why could the world not be just as clear and clean as the first breath of cold winter air after the heavy, warm morning closeness of the polog?

  The starry sky, like the earth, was peopled with a multitude of creatures: hunters, maidens, deer. Human imagination had filled in the lines tracing the stars into constellations, illuminating the lives of the celestial-dwellers. You might think that this was where the dead went, but apparently not! The dead departed through the clouds, but they went to live in yet another world, one whose location was hidden even from wise men like Enu. As for Kliau, he looked up at the shining dots overhead and thought, privately, that the sky was like a great drumhead—a giant rettem—stretched over the earth, pierced with holes through which the rain and snow got in. Elsewhere beneath this tent there lived other nations. And the smoke from their fires rose into the sky to form clouds, shutting out the sun and bringing on bad weather.

  How could the world around him be so different from the one in the legends? Unless the wise men deliberately kept everything hazy, to hide their own ignorance …

  Farther and farther he walked over the shackled sea. All around him unfurled a breathtaking vista of chaos clothed in ice. Enormous hummocks reared up from frozen sea to sky. Among them were chunks of calved iceberg, of a white so pure it glowed blue, as if from within. Some of them had cave-like indentations—terrifying anyone who ventured inside with a soft, eerie crackling sound, like an unseen stranger walking overhead in soft, bearskin-soled torbasses.

  At first glance, even the wild icescape looked homogenous, but this was not so; up close, the hummocks could be surprising. And venturing far out from shore, out where the strong sea currents broke up the ice, you would encounter nerpa. Quietly gliding in and out of black water holes that billowed with pale mist, they gazed at the blue-white world with large, round eyes.

  Once out to sea, it was hard to make out the yarangas left behind on the pebbled beach, even if you climbed atop a tall hummock. They appeared as black flecks, like rabbit droppings in the snow, and beyond them sat the frozen lagoon, measureless. But looking south, hills rolled like waves toward the faraway blue mountains, and the land went on just as endlessly as the sea.

  The winter sun meandered, hidden, beyond the toothy peaks of the Far Ridge. What else lay beyond those peaks?

  The deer-herder people who wintered in the foothills were but distant kin to the shore people. They had splintered off a long time before, in days which only Nau could remember.

  Kliau used to think that as he grew older, life’s mysteries, and the things that the elders left unsaid, would be revealed. Knowledge that grown, steady hunters could be trusted with was no good for a callow youth. But now he believed that, on the contrary, these mysteries could ignite the kind of curiosity that drove a person into the unknown.

  Wasn’t that what was happening to Enu? Some people went so far as to say he’d gone mad, for no rational man would have gone on and on about some distant land where the summer sun spent four times as many days in the sky, where summer was so long that no sooner was it over than there came the first stirring of spring again.

  “It is not just another fable,” Enu had insisted. “I’m convinced that this land exists, and you and I will find it. Do you remember that terrible day we almost perished? That’s when I first thought of the warm lands. Who knows? Maybe it was the whales who put the idea in my mind.”

  Each time Enu spoke like this, Kliau grew more determined to join him.

  4

  The people gathered around a big hide boat resting on a patch of spring ice. The ice was old and pockmarked by the sun’s rays, but the boat, newly clad in a covering of semitranslucent, freshly tanned hide, thrummed at the touch, like a gigantic yarar drum.

  Enu was finally setting out on his incredible, long-plotted journey—and Kliau was coming with him. The third man to go was Komo, a lazybones who was always joking around but was also an expert at making images of things he had seen in drawings on the stony cliffs.

  Old Nau was among those seeing them off. Her face had grown more deeply tanned, just as the yaranga roofs darkened after weathering the winter freeze, snowfall, blizzards, and fierce spring sun.

  Kliau had not anticipated how terrible it would be, saying farewell to his family and friends, his wife and children, the whole of the Shingled Spit and the view from his front door, the nearby hills and crags. It was like a big stone had fallen hard onto his heart, and he nearly cried out with the pain of it.

  The stone lay heavy upon him while they sailed along the ice shelf still attached to the shore and past the tall cliffs, which Kliau used to climb to contemplate the jagged peaks in the distance and wonder what lay beyond. The task ahead called not merely for faith in the old tales but for them to venture forth and see for themselves the faraway place of the long sun, where the whales—their ancestors—lived.

  It had been hard to leave his wife, and especially hard to leave his children. At the last minute, he suddenly thought of those blissful early days when he had resolved to bring Ainau into his yaranga, and the two of them would walk far beyond the village, into the tundra hills, where the grass was so soft and tender …

  The villagers gazed at the receding boat as it grew dimmer and dimmer in the light, the way a dying person dissolves in endless eternity. A dying person is exactly what many of the villagers were thinking of, as all stood in silence.

  Old Nau watched the villagers for a little while, then said, with force: “This is the call of our ancestors. For whales are eternal wanderers, endlessly traversing the measureless seas. Just so, humans cannot live forever in the same place. First they invented boats, to tame the great waters and return to their beginnings …”

  “What, and soon someone will take to the skies?” one of her neighbors interjected.

  Nau did not rise to the mockery. “And why not?” she mused. “Why shouldn’t that happen? For now, let the sons of whales sail the sea and discover new and unknown things. Only then will humans feel that they are truly
alive.”

  She went on like this for a long time after, and since the men’s departure was fresh in their minds, the villagers listened attentively to her words.

  But time passed. Other events came and went, obscuring the memory of the three madmen who had followed in the wake of the whales to search for the long summer. Only their relatives still spoke of them, and then only while honoring the dead, who had departed through the clouds forever.

  Old Nau’s tales grew wearisome. The villagers humored her, but solely because it was a sacred duty to show courtesy to the old lady who had outlived time itself.

  Kliau’s children grew up. If ever anyone told the story of the three madmen who went on a long journey, it was as a kind of legend, half-forgotten.

  No one measured the passing of time back then; it was obvious. Folk marked it in people’s faces, in the birth and maturing of children who would one day grow old and depart through the clouds themselves.

  One clear winter day, as the low, cold sun arced its shivery rays far over the hummock-riven sea, three dots appeared among the hills on the lagoon side of the spit. The dots grew larger as they approached the yarangas, but one could tell even from a distance that these were not the deer herders, who were recognizable by their bowlegged gait. Neither were these visitors from the far side of the lagoon, for they always arrived on dog sledges, in a tumult of noise.

  No, these travelers walked slowly. A few times they even paused to scan the shoreline.

  Every inhabitant of the Shingled Spit came outside to watch, and as the strangers came ever closer, unease crept into the villagers’ hearts. The travelers were oddly dressed, in garments very unlike those of the coastal people, marked by the traces of long, arduous adventures. And another disquieting thing: the men were by no means young, but were instead of an age when people didn’t go journeying without pressing need.

  The travelers came closer still. Their weathered, deeply lined faces shone with joy.

  One of the old village men, dressed in white deerskin pants to signal his readiness to pass through the clouds, greeted them: “Who are you, and where are you headed?”

  The travelers were silent. They scanned the faces of the crowd, as if looking for people they knew.

  And then an old woman, who had stood painfully squinting at one of them with her failing eyes, cried out in a loud and terrible voice: “Kliau! It’s Kliau, my husband! I know this man!”

  And then they all knew that these travelers were the men whose journey had passed into legend, the ones who had gone mad with the idea of learning the paths of whales.

  “So you’ve returned,” old Nau said to Enu, who was now a white-haired, shrunken old man, his eyes shining with wisdom and warmth.

  They led the travelers toward the yarangas. As they walked, the men gazed deeply around them, as though imbibing the essence of their native home, of which they had dreamed for so long.

  “We have journeyed across wondrous lands,” Enu began. “We saw fire-breathing mountains, and marveled that those who live among them spoke our language and honored whales as their ancestors as well. They believe that the true homes of the whales lie inside their mountains, like yarangas, and that we were seeing the fire and smoke from the whales’ hearths. Our distant kinsmen told us many stories of the whales. They told us that whales have the same kind of family life that humans do, and speak to one another in their own language, just as we do. They even quarrel, though very rarely—and it makes the earth shake. The smoke from their giant hearths thickens, and sometimes burning rocks shoot out from the peaks also, because the whale wives are too busy quarreling to tend to the fires properly!”

  The travelers took turns telling their story. When one of them tired, another took over, and then the third. Old Nau sat among the villagers and listened too. Each of the returnees wondered that she had outlived so many and yet remained as indomitable as when they’d left her many years before.

  “In those first of the far lands, we never saw the beasts that we here are used to hunting,” Kliau told the assembly. “There were no walruses, and bears never venture there either. There isn’t much ice to speak of, in truth, just a narrow strip by the shore, and beyond it the dark, streaming water of the free sea. People in those parts live by deer herding and fishing, which isn’t food you could grow tall on, sure, but there is an inexhaustible supply of fish in the rivers. The people even feed it to their dogs.”

  Now Enu took over. “We followed the sun, for our first aim was to reach the lands of the long sun, where the earth remains swathed in warmth. We saw real trees, covered in green leaves, their rustling branches like the arms of giants. The trees spread over enormous distances, and it’s hard to imagine how men can live in that green murk, or how they ever find their way toward the rivers and sea. We were wary of going too far into the forests, and tried to keep to the coast, always mindful that the paths of whales are sea paths.”

  “When we first saw the fire-breathing mountains,” said Komo, “we thought we had reached the gates of the whale homelands, but we still needed to find a way inside. We didn’t see whales anywhere near there, which was strange. So we carried on, getting across watery parts with the aid of the natives, as our boat was by that time in tatters and useless. At last we came across a people who could no longer make out our speech. But most of those that we met treated us as brothers, and didn’t harass us.”

  “Not everywhere was like that, though,” Enu sighed. “In one place, where people live by gathering plants in summer and raising animals whose milk they drink like water, some armed men seized us and locked us up in a special house of gloom and shadows. They kept us there for several years, enough time that we began to understand their language. They never lost their suspicion of us, saying that we were changelings who had come to their land to do them harm—and yet they did not kill us, fearful of bringing even greater disaster upon themselves.

  “They fed us plants, and at first this kind of diet weakened us thoroughly, but eventually we got used to it, and regained our strength.

  “One day they led us out—we had been so long in darkness that we could barely keep our eyes open in the bright sunlight—and took us inside a huge yaranga made of piled-up stones. An important man waited for us there, wanting to know where we had come from and what our intentions were.

  “So we answered this curious man that we were descendants of whales, traveling along whale paths to discover the lands of much warmth and little coldness, where the sun and the migratory birds went to spend the winter.

  “The important man listened to us carefully, then asked how we knew of our ancestry. We told him then that our first ancestress—old Nau, who gave birth to all our tribe—still lived among us in our village.

  “This caused great tumult with the people of the warm lands. The man explained to us that they, too, descended from whales, but that the tales of ancient times were regarded almost as fairy tales. Many among them no longer believed that the ancestress of all the coastal people still lived.”

  Ainau, Enu’s elderly wife, gazed at him happily, seeing not the silver-haired old man but the young husband who had set off on a momentous journey.

  “They told us the legend of their origin, and as they spoke we heard the voice of old Nau and the words we learned in childhood. And the people told us that they were bound by an ancient promise that while brother honored brother, helped him and cared for him, that while love and accord existed between people, somewhere in the world the ancestress of all human beings, the Whale’s Wife, would still live and breathe.”

  “We carried on,” said Komo, “because we wanted to know endless warmth. We cut through giant grasses and forded rivers that that ran with water warm as walrus blood. The sun was always high overhead there, and the snow would melt overnight, though the people that lived there considered even that snowfall a real torture. They came in droves to gawk at us sweating in the heat, which they held to be cold weather.”

  “Further still the whale pa
th continued,” said Enu. “They swam on into the warm fogs, their spouts sparkling. But we had only strength enough for the return journey, for we knew well that what we had discovered belonged not just to us but to all of you, part that we are of a great whole of the shore people. We had seen much and reached the edge of the world. From the people we met, we knew that there was no winter in the lands still further, only an endless summer. But that life was not for us. We turned back.”

  “We hurried home,” Kliau told them, “longing to see familiar faces, to hear the half-forgotten voices that reached us only in dreams. Our native land drew us back just as the whales are drawn to cold waters with each coming of spring.”

  It took several evenings for the travelers to finish their tale of adventures and meetings with other tribes, strange customs, foods, and animals. The villagers heard, silent and amazed, how in some lands people had never seen snow and would hardly believe that water could harden into stone, or that raindrops could fall as fluffy white flakes from the sky.

  When the flow of storytelling at last began to ebb, and the three men started to lapse into silence, old Nau spoke once again. “Now that you have seen new lands, strange tribes, and unfamiliar beasts, tell us: What land did you think was the most beautiful?”

  The men looked at one another, and Kliau gave answer. “It’s true that we have seen much. But we have also learned a deep truth, and it is this: there is nothing more beautiful than your native land, the place of your birth, where your near and dear ones are, where ancient tales are told in the tongue of your childhood.”