by Yuri Rytkheu
There were bear tracks on occasion, and Armagirgin soon realized that if you followed the great predator’s footprints you just might find a half-eaten nerpa carcass. In the time before, bringing home such a thing was considered both sacrilegious and highly humiliating. But when you have ravenous kids and your own stomach is knotting with hunger, beggars can’t be choosers.
He followed the bear’s tracks now. They were clearly visible in the snow, and blue, brimming with the very color of the dark winter sky, the glittery stars and the rainbow shards of the polar lights.
The frost sliced through his lungs and wicked away the last vestiges of heat from his body. Armagirgin deliberately slowed his breath, conserving his energy, and adopted a long but unhurried stride. The bear had chosen a level path, skirting ice hummocks big and small. His tracks were unbroken, and this made the hunter wary: if the bear was without a kill, he would have nothing to share.
Armagirgin was ready to give up the chase when he saw the bear. The umka had climbed a small hummock and was standing upright, watching the human approach. He was unperturbed, sure of himself and his own strength. His slightly pointed face, with its black-tipped nose, seemed almost to be mocking the weak and hungry man.
Armagirgin felt his temper flare. He was on his own, without a helper to distract the beast—the way the umka was usually hunted—but so what? Why shouldn’t he take on the bear?
The bear, however, seemed unwilling to do battle. He climbed down unhurriedly and loped away, shuffling the dry, powdery snow aside with his wide paws as he went.
Spear aloft, Armagirgin rushed the bear. The animal looked back at the source of the noise and his impassive face finally registered surprise. He halted and turned.
Armagirgin drew close and, with all his might, stabbed the point of the spear under the bear’s front paw, where the heart lay. The bear gave a humanlike groan and fell, breaking the shaft. His eyes still flickered with surprise, but soon enough the fog of death had extinguished them.
Armagirgin stood over the fallen beast for some time, coasting on a huge, hot avalanche of pleasure and pride. Finally, he could hold it in no longer. He shouted wildly into the world, and his booming voice rebounded from the sharp edges of the ice hummocks and filled the deserted white expanse.
“I alone killed the umka! My hand drove the spear, and here he lies, the lord of the ice, defeated! Anyone else want to come at me from the sea? Anyone else to test their arm against mine?”
He shouted these words again and again. Finally, he got down to butchering the dead animal; in this kind of weather, you had to work fast. Once the carcass had stiffened, no knife would be sharp enough to cut through it. As he worked, Armagirgin lobbed chunks of still-warm meat into his mouth, sating his hunger, and his body flushed with the thick warmth of bear’s blood.
He took as much meat as he could shoulder. The heavy load felt light to him because it was meat he carried—it was life, the promise of plenty, of good sleep, of an assured future. It was the glad proof of his power.
He was met by the kinsmen and neighbors who had sighted him from afar, knowing from the way he walked, with his burden on his back, that it was a bear he’d killed; he would have simply dragged a nerpa. They met him with cries of delight. He tersely gave the precise location of the rest of the bear carcass, and the strongest and fleetest youths hastened to retrieve it.
The women set up big cauldrons over their fires, and by dawn, when the meat was boiled, the most respected and important villagers were summoned to Armagirgin’s yaranga.
“Don’t forget Nau,” he said.
So the old woman came, too, her haggard visage all but obscured by gray tangles of matted hair. The skin of her hands put Armagirgin in mind of a rain-battered walrus-hide overshirt. For an immortal, she certainly seemed to be aging by the minute!
Nau settled beside a blazing brazier, where it was warmer and smelled more strongly of fresh cooking. “Fortune has come to you,” she addressed the hunter, quietly.
Armagirgin preened. “I grabbed it with these two hands!”
“That’s right,” nodded old Nau. “Fortune comes to strong hands.”
“And to those who know themselves to be masters of their own fate,” added Armagirgin.
“That’s right, too,” she agreed. “But to live life wholly, we must also love one another, love our brothers, and not just ourselves.”
“Again with your old nonsense,” laughed Armagirgin. “Better we get to eating already!”
The women entered with a long wooden dish, filled with steaming, smoking umka meat, which they set before the gathering. Everyone set upon the food, and for some time only the loud lip-smacking of the eaters and their moans of satiety broke the silence inside the spacious polog of the strongest and luckiest man on the Shingled Spit.
As their bellies filled, their tongues loosened. People began to reminisce about the days when hunting was plentiful, longing for summer, when there would be plenty of walrus meat and none of the cold, hungry nights of winter.
“It’s going to be a hard summer,” said Nau. She dropped a small bone, picked clean, back onto the empty wooden dish.
“How would you know that?” Armagirgin challenged.
“I just know,” she told him calmly.
“Who told you?”
“I know it myself,” returned the old lady. “Why should I listen to anyone telling me?”
Armagirgin gave her an appraising look. “Give us a foretelling, then, so we may have better luck.”
“You should have thought of that before,” Nau said. “You have to love not just yourself, but all people, and to love them unselfishly. You didn’t call your guests here today because you wanted to share meat with them, did you? No, it was only your desire to boast, so that everyone could see and know it—here am I, Armagirgin!”
“Well, even if that’s so, it isn’t any of your concern!” he said crossly. “Your concern is to tell tales, not to teach people how they should live.”
“Fine, I’ll tell you another tale,” said Nau, unruffled. “Listen …”
“Oh, what’s the point of listening to you, anyway?” Again Armagirgin dismissed her. “Even the little kids know all of your stories already. Stories of a life that is long past.”
“I’ll tell you a story of the future …”
Suddenly wary, Armagirgin gave a condescending nod. “All right. Now our stomachs are full, why not a story?”
Nau made herself comfortable and began, in her throaty voice: “Every tale begins with the words ‘This is how it was.’ This story begins differently—with the words ‘This is what will be.’ This is what will be, then. There will be born a man, luckier and stronger than you, Armagirgin, though his name will be different. He will best the stoutest and fattest creatures of the sea, catch the fastest on land, and with his bare, mighty hands will be able to strangle wolves and bears. Far and wide, people will praise him and even make up tales and legends of his doings.
“But it will not be enough for him that people can see his glad face when he is in front of them; he will wish to be present always, in each and every yaranga. Skilled carvers will cut his likeness from walrus tusk, and his image will be painted onto white hides and hung from high poles. He will wish, too, that his very smell be present in every yaranga, and will order people to sniff him whenever they meet him, and will fill yarangas with his scent.
“But this will also not be enough. He will be clothed in the newest and best garments, but these will not do for him, and so the most accomplished embroiderers will decorate his clothes, and he will shine like the sun’s twin…. Yes, and they shall liken him to the very sun, too, but even this will not be enough for him. He will desire that real stars be brought to hang from his clothes, and will send people to gather them, and these people will perish on their journeys. And he shall be left all alone then, and the shore will be wild and deserted, just as it was when I first came here, young …”
Nau’s tale was finished, a
nd she fell silent. Everyone else was silent, too, for there was much that was baffling in the old woman’s words.
Armagirgin gave a wide yawn. “Time to sleep, I think. Now that we’ve eaten well and heard old Nau’s tale, what more can we want but a long, sweet slumber?”
And with that, everyone returned to their own homes.
4
By spring, things were bad indeed: people were reduced to scraping down the walls of the meat pits, soaking and boiling up lakhtak-skin straps, and rooting for withered greens under the snow. Many starved, especially the babies who vainly tried to draw milk from their mothers’ thin breasts, dried up like winter mittens.
Against expectations, the warmth of the returning sun did not cause the sea ice to break. It was only by the time the birds reappeared that a few melt holes formed and hunters began to have more luck.
Yet it was nothing like the plenty of yesteryear. Something had changed in nature, and no one could explain it—except old Nau, who insisted it was all to do with human greed and foolishness, with people’s lack of respect for one another, for nature, and for all the other living creatures on sea and land.
The villagers, exhausted and hungry, could only shrug and roll their eyes at the senile old lady’s pronouncements. Everyone knew that nerpa would never go to a hunter of their own accord, nor birds seek to entangle themselves in nets to please the trapper.
No, fortune favored those who did not stint in their efforts, spending days and nights out on the ice.
When the ice finally broke, life became a little easier. Men hunted in large seagoing canoes, sneaking up on walruses as the herds moved from the southern to the northern waters. The hunters would lie in wait, harpoon them, and drag them ashore, where the women stood ready with sharp knives. Fires burned in the yarangas, and once more the smell of boiled meat spread across the village, cheering men’s hearts and inspiring glad songs in praise of Armagirgin, the man who had challenged nature.
Spring was a time of eating to make up for the ravages of winter, and it wasn’t just seal and walrus meat. The villagers had discovered that bird eggs were exceedingly delicious, and so were the birds themselves—and it was easy to catch them, in big deer-tendon nets.
On still, quiet evenings, the villagers pillaged the shallow streams, scooping up somnolent fish. They found that the little blue flowers, when mixed with nerpa fat, went down a treat. In short, they experimented with anything edible, catching up after the ravages of the long hungry months. Lakhtak and nerpa ribs lay drying atop yaranga roofs, and when the meat dried and blackened, and white grubs could be seen to appear, they made the best eating. Seal flippers could be stowed in warm, close places, then after a while skinned and cut up into small pieces—the process gave the flesh an unusually sharp flavor, like needles on the tongue.
Food became not just a way to recover spent energy, but an object of pleasure—beyond satiety, to the tasting of delicacies. Someone had the idea of stuffing cleaned walrus gut with chopped-up hearts, livers, lungs, and gut fat, and braising the lot over a low fire…. The people of the Shingled Spit were in the grip of a mania.
Yes, now people ate well, perhaps even better than in the famed years of plenty. But there was a kind of uncertainty, too, in their gluttonous haste to fill the belly. A kind of dread.
They ate everything that could be got but did not manage to store much away. When hard weather came, they would have to scrape together the last of what remained, then live by fishing. Finally they would tighten their belts and screw up their patience to wait for the wind to die down, making it possible to hunt passing walrus herds.
The waters of the Shingled Spit did not swarm with creatures as they once used to. There were no nerpa faces in the water or lakhtak bobbing up like curious children. No birds dashing about, no walruses bathing in the surf. Every living thing had gone, swam away, flown off. It was as though the animals had heard, somehow, about the insatiable greed of the villagers and took themselves elsewhere. And the people of the Shingled Spit really were insatiable, no matter that they of all the coastal folk were the stoutest, barely able to fit inside their own hide boats. They even spoke less, their mouths more often occupied with chewing on something or other.
Meanwhile, the short summer was coming to an end, and the walrus breeding grounds—where the villagers always got their winter provisions—lay drearily empty. Only the foamy surf came to play with the bare and spotless shingle. It rolled about broken walrus tusks, detritus of previous hunts; it slurped up shattered seashells and retreated, hissing, back to the cold, nearly deserted sea.
Only the whales stayed true to their native shore. Their pods continued to line the horizon, spouting sun-bright jets high in the air.
Rowing home in his empty boat, Armagirgin watched them with unconcealed hatred. He gazed at their smooth, giant bodies slowly descending into the deep and thought about their vast carcasses, treasure troves of meat and blubber. Why should anyone believe old Nau’s preposterous stories of his people’s ancestry? Why should whales be his forbears, rather than walruses or seals? If anything, seals looked a lot more like people, especially when they lay on the ice, looking up at the hunters. It was the resemblance that often did in a seal—a creeping hunter would imitate its movements, and the whiskery lakhtak would mistake the hunter for one of its own kinsmen … and at that, why not have wolves for ancestors? Wolves live on dry land and eat flesh, like humans. Who knew what these gigantic mounds of meat and blubber ate? All anyone knew was that it did not seem to include seals or walruses.
No, if you thought about it seriously, humans and whales were nothing alike—and that was why no one really paid any mind to the old woman’s ramblings.
These were Armagirgin’s thoughts, and with each passing day they grew more pressing. Eventually he shared them with the others. As it turned out, they had long thought the same as he did. As for old Nau’s tales—well, there were lots of stories about human-seeming animals, tales of crows that spoke the language of men, of walruses singing songs, of foxes building yarangas …
For a little while longer, something held Armagirgin back. There was still the occasional walrus or seal to be caught, and people were not yet starving. Or perhaps it was old Nau. She was so weak that she no longer left her yaranga; she barely ate and never raised her voice above a whisper. Again and again, she spoke of giving birth to baby whales, who were brothers to all the living people. But no one paid her words any heed now.
That autumn the Shingled Spit saw an uncommonly large gathering of whales. They roamed very near the surf line, dousing onlookers in rainbow drops of water.
Armagirgin was hoping the walruses would return to their former colony beaches; there was even yet time to lay in a store of meat and blubber for the winter. But the beaches were empty. The walrus herds did not just avoid these places; they cut a wide, cautious berth around them in the water too.
Whenever he passed a pod, Armagirgin would mentally size up one whale or another, picking out the most vulnerable places on their bodies. He made long spears and took his friends off to the tundra, where he kept a dummy of a whale made from sod and mud.
Returning from the tundra one day, he heard old Nau moaning as she lay within her yaranga. He stuck his head inside the chottagin.
She seemed to recognize him. “Are you sick?” he asked her, feigning concern.
“It’s bad,” she whimpered. “There are times I feel like a spear is piercing me.”
This was disconcerting. Could it be that his spear throws came to rest in the old woman’s body? But that was impossible! Incredible! Maybe someone had told her of Armagirgin’s secret training, and she was trying to warn him off?
Some whales were still gathered nearby, so close that you could see them from the beach. This was the last remaining pod, the one to whom they had paid homage and made sacrifice in previous years. The whales seemed to be waiting for this customary gesture of farewell, and they headed toward the shore as soon as they spotted the boats�
� launch.
Suddenly, with an apparent premonition of danger, they banked sharply and headed for the open sea. The hunters gave chase.
“Spear the one at the back!” shouted Armagirgin. He was the first to throw his spear, piercing the skin of a young whale. First blood sprayed and colored the water, and other spears followed. But the whale was not vanquished yet. He launched himself after his companions, while the pod, as one, hastened away from the humans who chased them.
Armagirgin raced ahead and cut the young whale off from the rest of the pod. Spears outfitted with sealskin buoys rained down on the wounded creature. The buoys prevented the whale from diving; spent and weak from blood loss, he slowed. Blood poured from his many cuts, and the sight of it was intoxicating to the hunters. Each man tried to get a stab in.
The whale made one last attempt to rejoin his pod, but boats full of screaming, oar-waving humans barred his way. He stopped, seemingly resigned to his fate, and they finished him off in the water and lashed his lifeless body to the boats.
A rising wind filled their sails, and the victorious flotilla headed home.
It was a long trip. Night had fallen over the beach, and in the deep darkness, the hunters could barely tell one another apart. There was not a star in the sky, and even the moon did not appear. Proud Armagirgin sat at the stern of the lead boat and steered with a long oar.
They were met with joyful cries at the beach. Armagirgin ordered everyone back to their homes. “We’ll butcher the whale come morning,” he said tiredly.
Passing old Nau’s yaranga, he heard a moan. Armagirgin went to lift the deerskin over the entrance.
Fixing her burning eyes on his, old Nau spoke hoarsely: “Today you have killed your brother merely because he does not look like you. Tomorrow, then …”
Her head dropped back. The eternal woman was no more. The woman of legend, who had outlived everyone and outlasted death itself…
Early in the morning, with their sharply honed knives, the men descended to the beach to begin the work of butchering the whale. Armagirgin strode in the lead, staring straight ahead with keen, wide eyes.