When the Whales Leave

by Yuri Rytkheu

  In time, people began to approach him for many reasons, even when a child or dog was taken ill. So Givu gave counsel and supplied folk with remedies made of herbs, often also containing different bits of sea life, like polar bear bile and black, coagulated lakhtak blood.

  There were times that Givu felt the need of the voice himself. Then he would take up the tambourine, dampen its humming surface, and douse the polog fire. He would sing, occasionally pausing to listen.

  The words of his song came from beyond, and he never questioned this nor tried to puzzle out their source. Old Nau’s deep, bottomless gaze still troubled him sometimes, but these days all he had to do was think of something else and thoughts of her vanished.

  Slowly, imperceptibly, Givu had become the most well-known and important person in the village, and people felt compelled to consult him before any serious undertaking. They began to call him “Enenyl’yn,” which means “the one who heals.”

  Givu’s wife gave him a sturdy brown boy who, as soon as he was born, let out a loud and demanding holler. Old Nau wiped him down with blue spring snow and swaddled him in a soft fawnskin. She dusted his navel with ashes of burnt tree bark and placed the stone blade she’d used to cut the cord in a hide purse, stowing it away in a hidden place.

  “Like a baby whale, he is,” she liked to say, delighting in the infant’s shiny, smooth skin.

  The voices foretold good fortune for the newborn; Givu’s happy heart was full to bursting with affection for him. “Perhaps this is the wings of Great Love that I feel,” he wondered aloud at one evening’s meal.

  But the old lady silently shook her head. “Great Love stretches its wings over all people,” she said. And then she added, “If it was not merely satisfaction with your own deeds in your heart, then one might say that you have learned what Great Love is.”

  An unheard-of disease came down upon the village. People began to have trouble with their eyes and lose their appetite. For days they would lie inside their yarangas, indifferent to everything, until quietly they left through the clouds.

  The men were quick to take all the dead to Funerary Hill, but the unfed, starving dogs dragged gnawed arms and legs, and even heads, back to the village.

  Finally, the baffled people came to Givu. “You are our last hope,” they told him.

  Givu fell silent, not knowing what to say to the despairing, frightened villagers. He was himself aghast and worried. Each morning he listened to his small son’s breath, dreading to see the signs of disease. He felt as though he was always carrying with him the most fragile of vessels, filled with precious liquid: the essence of all his love for his new life and for the boy.

  “We know that you can see and hear better than anyone,” the people said to him. “And so we put our hopes in you.”

  Givu dressed carefully, pulling over his fur kukhlianka a long suede robe decorated with colorful deerskin strips. He wore low torbasses, painstakingly decorated with the same motif as the ceremonial oars, on his feet. Moving deliberately, he put on a pair of warm mittens and picked up his ceremonial staff. It was made from a light, jointed piece of wood and had a disk at the bottom to keep it from piercing through the snow.

  The weather was remarkably calm and still. The sun shone from the highest point in the vault of the sky. Its rays, bouncing off the glossy snowdrifts, were dazzling. Givu took out a strip of leather with two narrow slits and tied it over his eyes, to protect himself from snow blindness.

  Despite the bright good weather, the Shingled Spit was eerily deserted. Even the dogs curled up outside were silent and listless, unable to muster an interest in the one man who braved the outdoors and walked past them, wielding his ceremonial staff in wide arcs.

  Givu went past the last of the yarangas, crossed the flat, and found himself at the foot of the crags. Following some strange instinct, he turned toward the sea. After climbing to a low, snow-capped promontory usually covered by water, he paused and looked about.

  The ground beneath the overhanging rocks was blue with deep shadow. In the other direction, ice hummocks marched away into the sea and there sat everywhere a blinding, sun-bright silence that made the mouth dry and filled a man with dread.

  Just below lay the road taken by his people whenever they sledged from the village onto the sea ice or to the neighboring settlements. Usually the snow would be riven with runner marks, but today it was an untouched blanket of white.

  But wait, what was that?

  Some kind of insect? Flies? Mosquitoes?

  What insect could live atop the snow? During the day was one thing: they might catch a bit of warmth, though they’d have to stand stock-still, facing the light, for quite a while. But the night frost was enough to drive even the thickly furred dogs to beg to be let indoors. Never mind insects …

  Givu stooped down to look at the skittering spots, then stopped in his tracks, astonished. His heart raced in horror to see that one of the spots was a man, dressed in a kukhlianka and torbasses, a malakhai sitting jauntily on his head. A man in every sense of the word, with well-defined features, and smiling ruefully up at him, but so tiny … no bigger than the joint of Givu’s pinkie, or perhaps smaller still. Peering at him, Givu went cold—another step and he might have crushed the little person underneath his own lakhtak-skin torbasses.

  “Who are you?” asked Givu, kneeling.

  “We are the rekken,” said the man.

  Givu now saw many more little people rushing toward them. They had to bridge dimples in the snow, which to them of course were deep holes, and their windmilling arms made them hard to see properly until they came close. Givu was even more astonished to see a wee sledge with a team of fly-sized dogs hurtling over to where he stood.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We are carrying disease,” explained the man. “We know well the grief we have caused in your village. But this is our bitter duty. We do always try to skirt human settlements, but this time a blizzard covered our tracks and caused us to lose the way. Now your people will be sick until we’ve traveled well past. We are much smaller than you, and the distance from the first to the last yaranga on the beach is a great one for us. Our dogs will take several days to get clear of the village. We rest at night and travel by day.”

  “So what’s to be done?” Givu said anxiously.

  “Well, we don’t know what else we can do,” sighed the man with a miniscule plume of breath.

  The rekken had thin voices, like the chirping of birds, yet each word was clear.

  “Are there many of you?” Givu said.

  “Ten or so sledges,” came the answer.

  The other rekken were listening with interest. Several had even climbed onto Givu’s feet to examine his torbasses and marvel at the enormous stitches.

  “Why don’t I drive you all past the village in my sledge?” offered Givu.

  The little man was pleased with the idea. “That would be a very good thing! Just be careful with us—you’re a giant, after all.”

  Givu promised to do his best.

  “One more thing. Humans are not to know of our existence,” said the man pointedly.

  Givu said he understood. Returning to his yaranga at a run, he took his light sledge down from the roof and iced the runners so they’d slide more easily over the snow. He considered harnessing the dogs but decided against it; the hungry animals couldn’t be trusted not to gobble up all the rekken and their gear.

  Givu hastened back. He was almost anxious that he would find no trace of the little people. It was all too unlikely, especially the way they were so exactly a copy of real people. Givu remembered the puff of steam emerging from the rekken’s mouth, and the thought made him both excited and uneasy. But the rekken were still there, waiting for him.

  They brought over their tiny sledges, laden with some odd-looking baggage, tightly strapped on. The fly-sized dogs kept up a racket of barely audible barking, and looking at them, Givu struggled to hold back a smile.

  The rekken t
hemselves took things very seriously. They asked Givu to help them load their sledges onto his, as it was far too tall for them. Givu took off his gloves and, using only his pointer finger and thumb, gently and carefully transferred the rekken and their dogs onto his sledge. He could feel their warm bodies between his fingers, and the way their little booted feet and mittened hands moved. Peering into their grave faces, he wondered if he was about to wake up, and if the whole thing would vanish like a dream. But he didn’t wake up. He carried on gingerly loading the rekken onto his sledge, placing them so they couldn’t easily fall off. Finally all was ready, and he strapped himself into the harness.

  He walked at the edge of the sea ice, hidden from the yarangas’ view. From time to time he looked back at his sledge; the rekken had clumped together in the middle, holding on to one another and for dear life. His keen ears picked up the dogs’ whining and the little men’s exclamations. So Givu walked as softly as he could and took the smoothest path, aware that a bump that might seem small to him was a full ice hummock to the rekken, and that a sharp jolt from the runners hitting hard ice might well knock the breath right out of them.

  Passing the last of the yarangas, Givu headed southwest, leading the disease-carrying creatures away from the neighboring village as well. Loading them onto his sledge, Givu had tried to get a closer look at the diseases strapped to their small ones, but all was too well packed, and he had seen nothing.

  He halted near the Pil’khun Strait. One of the rekken walked up the wooden slats to him with word that they would continue on alone from there.

  Givu carefully unloaded the sledges, dogs, and little people. They immediately busied themselves readying the teams, untangling harnesses, and shouting at the dogs. Watching them, Givu felt awkward and somehow embarrassed, as if he were the interloper.

  Once the rekken were settled on their sledges, the one who had first spoken with Givu approached his right torbass and addressed him. “We are going on our way now. We thank you for helping us, but it was your people you helped most. We try to go around, but we don’t know the land all that well, and sometimes we just happen on a human place by mistake.”

  Givu felt emboldened to ask what the disease they carried looked like, but at this the man’s face contorted in horror. Dropping his voice to a whisper, he told Givu, “That’s not something anyone may know. The diseases are packed onto our sledges and we dare not unpack them. But when we pass villages, a spirit emanates from inside, striking the people down.”

  “Do you get sick too?” asked Givu.

  “We are spared,” the man said. “Otherwise, who would do the carrying?”

  The rekken drove off, leaving only the faintest tracks on the snow, almost invisible unless you bent low to the ground. Once they disappeared from view, Givu couldn’t help himself—he took a few steps forward, to catch up. But there was no sign of them, nor their sledge tracks, now. They had vanished into the pale blue air, shot through with sunlight.

  Givu slowly walked back to the village and back to his own yaranga and chottagin. From the threshold he called to his wife in a loud, clear voice, “The illness has gone!”

  Seeing the disbelief on the younger woman’s face, old Nau chided her, “He speaks the truth.”

  Later, when the sun bowed over the ruddy snow and all the villagers crowded inside Givu’s yaranga, the old lady told them this: “The truth is always more extraordinary than make-believe, and harder to believe in. A man may doubt his own eyes. But today you are all witnesses to a great truth: Givu has saved the people. Only chosen ones are given such gifts by fate, only the special people capable of believing things an ordinary person never could.”

  Part III

  1

  Givu had gotten old. Already he had grandsons; his son, the one he had saved from the disease brought by the rekken, was famed all along the coastline for his strength and good fortune.

  Givu sensed old age lying in wait for him like winter hiding behind the mountains. He was less keen to get up early in the morning and would lie in bed for a long while, head sticking out of his sleeping polog, so he could see the sky through his smoke hole. He liked to recline there, breathing cold, fresh air and ruminating on the secret of immortality. It was astonishing, but old Nau was just the same as she had ever been—all through the childhood, youth, middle years, and finally, yes, old age, of the most famous and respected man on the Shingled Spit and far beyond. Neither famine, which they had faced more than once, nor frost, nor rain, nor blizzard seemed to have any effect on her.

  Sure, during the sacred Whale Festival celebrations—to greet the arriving whale pods or fare them well as they left for the winter—they still secured Nau in the place of honor. But they paid about as much attention to her as they did to the ceremonial boat oars. There was no use in her at all: not in her wearisome yarns of how men came from whales, and not in her absurd insistence on being wife to the Father Whale, Reu, and on having given birth to baby whales. No one really believed that she had lived forever, because how could you possibly prove it?

  Givu, on the other hand, received a stream of praise as the great man, the one who knew all, who could tell where hunting would be plentiful, forecast the weather, and heal the sick.

  But Givu knew that even if old Nau were not immortal, she had already lived far longer than a normal person could. Whenever she came to live in his yaranga for a few months, Givu watched her intently, trying to puzzle out what it was that made her any different from all the other inhabitants of the Shingled Spit. The old woman was grindingly ordinary, however. She ate the same things that most very old people eat, avoiding hard-to-chew or tough food, as her teeth were ground down to stumps. She slept lightly and often woke during the night. She talked about everyday things, and if the itch to tell whale stories was in abeyance, she would gossip with the rest of the women, nattering happily about women’s things. He didn’t like to admit it, but Givu had even spied on her relieving herself, after her public habits and behavior proved unrevealing. It was all exactly as with other people her age, nothing special.

  What was it about her, then? Givu couldn’t resist trying her once more.

  “People keep asking me,” she said peevishly.

  But Givu wasn’t giving up yet. “Yes, people are curious.”

  “I don’t consider myself especially long-lived,” Nau said vaguely.

  “But you’re just the same as you were when I was a child, and now I am an old man myself.”

  “Why do you ask pointless questions, about things that don’t matter?” She was really irritated now. “Don’t you have other things to think about?”

  “If someone tried to kill you,” Givu persisted, “would you die from a wound?”

  Nau looked up at him in surprise. Two dull tears rolled down her face. “Why would you say such a thing?” She stifled a sob. “You must be feeling unwell…. How could a person raise their hand to another person? He would cease to be human, the moment he did another person harm.”

  It was only later that Givu realized this question, so carelessly blurted out, was the turning point that hastened his own going through the clouds into the other world. How could he even voice such a thought? After that, whenever he caught Nau looking at him, he recognized deep compassion and pity in her eyes, no matter that for an old man he was hearty and never ill. Yet now he felt his strength ebbing from him, like a stream drying up in summertime, once the mountain snow that fed it has melted away …

  At the end, he hadn’t the strength to hate old Nau. He understood at last that no matter how filled his life had been with pleasure and respect, it was Nau who had been truly happy. Yes, this ordinary-looking, ordinary-seeming woman—she who knew the secret of immortality and Great Truth.

  Tossing and turning in his bed all morning as he considered this, Givu would finally rise and go sit next to his yaranga, on a big boulder that weighed down the walrus-skin outer walls. As people passed by, they would greet him and ask for his advice.

 
This world would survive him—the sky, the clouds, the cliffs, and the sea—and his kinsmen would die, too, one day. But the old woman would carry on existing, just like the eternal mountains and clouds and wind and sky.

  His grandson Armagirgin bounded up to him, almost upending the old man from his seat. The boy thought it uproariously funny to see his grandfather wobble and clutch at the air in alarm.

  “How unkind you are,” Givu chided. “Is it right to laugh at someone weaker and less able?”

  “But it’s so funny,” Armagirgin assured him. “You look like the kanaelgin fish, when it’s flopping around on land!”

  Givu saw his child self in the boy. Unlike Givu at the same age, Armagirgin was hardy, lively, and sociable. All his inner traits were on the outside, like bright ornaments decorating a kukhlianka. Yet those traits—ambition, the yen to rule others, the pleasure in other people’s obedience—they were all so familiar. Where Givu had slaked his thirst for power with long toil and determination to think through his questions, Armagirgin simply grabbed at things with both hands. Of course much of this was simply because he was the grandson of a great man.

  How disappointed would he be, when inevitably he came up against the one person he could never dominate? Even if you pretended not to see Nau, not to be spooked by her very existence, still she was there among them like a silent reproach, a living conscience. She was always with them, the ancient woman who seemed to live—together with her whale tales—outside of time itself.

  Looking at Armagirgin now, Givu was reminded of what the boy had said on first hearing that the sea carried his whale brothers. He had been inconsolable. “I don’t want those ugly floating monsters to be my brothers,” he had screamed. “They are huge and black, and they scare me!”

  Old Nau watched the child with horror, muttering under her breath, probably some whale incantations of hers. They had managed to calm the boy then, but as he grew up, his feelings on the subject had not changed. Whenever someone told one of Nau’s timeworn stories about the beginnings of their people, Armagirgin could be counted upon to sneer his derision for all to see.