by Sue Harrison
He yawned, then heard Spotted Egg say, “Leave him!”
Owl answered, but Waxtal could not make out his words. Waxtal sat up, leaned closer to the sleeping curtain. The men were still talking, speaking in the low quick speech of the Caribou People, but Waxtal had learned the language well during the winter he had spent with Owl and Spotted Egg.
Owl was usually easier to understand, because he talked more slowly than his brother. But though Owl spoke now, Many Babies’ snores were too loud for Waxtal to hear what the man said. Waxtal scooted across the sleeping place to Many Babies’ side and covered her mouth and nose with his hand. She jerked her head and pushed his hand away.
“Many Babies,” Waxtal whispered. “Many Babies, sh-h-h-h. Be quiet.”
The woman rose up on both elbows. “What?” she asked.
Waxtal pressed his fingertips against her lips. “Sh-h-h-h,” he said. “You were crying in your sleep. It was a dream. Be quiet. Be still. You are safe.”
She snuggled against Waxtal and reached between his legs, but Waxtal pushed her hands away. “Go back to sleep,” he said, but hoped she would not sleep—at least until he heard what Owl and Spotted Egg were saying about him. Many Babies lay down, and Waxtal went back to his place beside the curtain.
He held his breath and waited. There was nothing, silence. He sighed. The men had probably gone into their sleeping places. Waxtal settled against the earthen ulaq wall. There was a chance Owl and Spotted Egg were eating and would talk more later. Best to wait. He had all night to sleep.
After a time Owl cleared his throat, and Waxtal smiled. He had been right.
“So we leave him,” Owl said. “What then? The Whale Hunters will not want him. He is lazy and cannot hunt. Hard Rock will be angry with us, and we will not be able to come back here to trade again.”
“You want to trade with these Whale Hunters?” Spotted Egg asked. “Already the curse of this place has sunk into my bones. We have stayed too long. I do not want to come back. What do we have to show for our time here? A few seal bellies of old whale oil. We have given more than that for their women.”
“Waxtal has harpoon heads.”
“Four, for three bellies of oil.”
Again there was silence.
“So when?” Owl finally asked.
“Tomorrow. Waxtal has said he will go into the hills to fast. What better time to leave?”
“And if the Whale Hunters try to stop us?”
“Why should they? They do not need our mouths to feed.”
“What about Waxtal’s ikyak? Should we take it?”
“We would need more than the two of us to handle both ik and ikyak over a long journey. It is many days’ travel to the next village.”
“What about the tusks?”
Again silence, then Waxtal heard laughter, low, quiet. “He has eaten several tusks’ worth of food since he came to us.”
“I will take those harpoon heads, too. In many ways the old man is a fool, but he knows something about trading.”
“He says the River People will give two women for one harpoon head.”
“I would be content with one woman.”
Waxtal lay back against the soft furs that covered the floor of the sleeping place. So Owl and Spotted Egg thought they would take his things and leave him. Laughter moved silently under his ribs.
Waxtal waited until he heard Owl and Spotted Egg go into their sleeping places. He waited until he heard their breathing turn into the long softness of sleep. Then he crept to the packs the men kept hidden in the back of the food cache. Most of their trade goods were there. Only their weapons, their necklaces, several bellies of whale oil, and a few baskets of dried berries were in their sleeping places. The rest—oil, hides, furs, dried meat—was bundled in their caribou skin trader’s packs in the cache.
Waxtal pulled out Spotted Egg’s packs, then Owl’s. He took almost everything from the cache and four of the water bladders that hung from the rafters. He brought his own weapons and his pack of carving tools from his sleeping place, then picked up a sealskin mat from the floor and laid it over the oil lamp until the flame drowned itself in the oil. In the darkness he hauled everything to the top of the ulaq. As he worked, he whispered prayers and promises to spirits, begging them to keep Owl and Spotted Egg asleep, to block their ears.
Finally he had only his tusks, one carved, one plain. He carried them up, then took everything to his ikyak. He packed bow and stern with the supplies and trade goods, pausing once to pull a string of shell beads from one of Owl’s packs and drape the beads around his neck. He tied everything in so it would not shift, and balanced the load, side to side, fore and aft. He finally had to leave six seal bellies of oil on the beach—those and the traders’ now empty packs.
It was dark, the black center of night. The tide was high, so it would be easier, Waxtal hoped, to launch his ikyak and avoid the rocks that reached up from the seafloor. He carried two of the bellies of oil to Hard Rock’s ulaq, called down softly from the roof hole. One of Hard Rock’s wives came into the central ulaq room. An oil lamp burned, throwing the woman’s shadow, long and dark, against the ulaq walls.
Waxtal could not remember her name. She had spent several nights with Spotted Egg; he remembered that, but nothing else. “I must speak with Hard Rock,” Waxtal said.
“Who are you?” the woman asked. She moved to stand near the waist-high boulder, flattened and hollowed out on top, that was the ulaq’s main oil lamp.
“Waxtal, the trader.”
She hesitated. “Hard Rock is asleep,” she finally said.
“I have oil for him, to pay for a trade we made. I have given promises to spirits and must go now, and fast. I want Hard Rock to have the oil before I leave.”
The lamp lit the woman’s head from the chin up and threw shadows across her eyes so that her face looked like a mask made to call spirits.
“Wait,” she said. “I will get him.”
Waxtal waited until the woman went to Hard Rock’s sleeping place, then sat on the edge of the roof hole so that his feet hung down into the ulaq. He wrapped his arms around one of the seal bellies and began to descend the climbing log.
He set the belly of oil on the floor and went up for the other. He was still at the top of the climbing log when he felt a hand clasp his ankle.
“Waxtal?” Hard Rock’s voice.
“Yes.”
“Good. You have brought my oil?”
“Yes. I want you to have it before I go speak to the spirits.”
“Good,” Hard Rock said again. He reached up and took the belly of oil from Waxtal’s arms.
“Can you eat before you go?”
Waxtal looked up toward the sky. It was still dark. “Yes,” he said.
Hard Rock went to the food cache and pulled out dried meat and oil. He handed a fistful of the meat to Waxtal. “Where do you plan to go?”
Waxtal bit into the meat, chewed. “That is something the spirits will decide.”
“You will come back?”
Waxtal shrugged. “I have had enough of Owl and Spotted Egg. Tell them to go on without me.”
“They do not know you are going?”
“They know, but they had planned to wait for me. Tell them not to wait.”
“I will tell them.”
Waxtal folded a strip of dried meat and stuck it between jaw and gum where it would soften in the damp of his mouth. He spoke over the bulge of his cheek. “I have been glad to trade with you. I hope to come back, but perhaps it will be another year. Watch for me in the summers.”
Hard Rock reached out, slapped a hand to Waxtal’s shoulder. “I will watch for you.”
Waxtal walked to the climbing log, then turned. He reached down into his suk and pulled out Owl’s shell bead necklace. “You trained your woman well,” Waxtal said. “Give this to her for me.”
Hard Rock took the necklace. “She trained me,” he said, and began to laugh. His laughter followed Waxtal up out of the ulaq, in
to the dark of the short night.
CHAPTER 34
OWL STRETCHED and scratched his belly. “For a man who has not had a woman all winter, he did not make much noise last night,” he said to Spotted Egg and nodded toward Waxtal’s sleeping place.
“They are both old,” Spotted Egg said. He laughed, a thin wheeze that came from the bridge of his nose. “Perhaps all he wanted was to sleep. Either way, he does not deserve a woman after the trade he made with Hard Rock. Three seal bellies of oil for four broken harpoon heads.”
“Two seal bellies.”
“So he says. He lied about the woman, why not the oil?”
“We should never have brought him with us. Then we would not have come to this cursed island. We would be at a Seal Hunter village, enjoying fat women and fresh meat.”
Spotted Egg dipped his finger into the oil lamp, licked the seal oil from his hand. Owl made a face. “It is rancid,” he said. “I can smell it from here.”
Spotted Egg shrugged. He went to the food cache and pulled aside its curtain, rubbing the coarsely woven grass as he did so. “These Whale Hunter women cannot weave,” he said.
“What is that to us?” asked Owl. He had taken his parka from a peg on the wall and was running his thumb along the stitches, smashing the gray-bodied fleas that had pushed their way into the valley of each seam. “We get mats from the Seal Hunter women. We get fleas from the Whale Hunters.”
Spotted Egg, squatting on his haunches, reached into the cache, made a mumbled exclamation, and sat down hard on the floor.
“What?” Owl asked, looking up from the parka.
“It is almost empty,” Spotted Egg said in a small voice.
“What?”
“Look.” Spotted Egg held aside the curtain.
Owl strode across the ulaq floor, bunched the curtain into one hand, and ripped it from its pegs. He reached into the cache and pulled out a partially full sea lion belly of oil, a flattened water bladder, and one sealskin of dried fish.
“Everything is gone except what was here when we came,” Spotted Egg said.
Owl went to Waxtal’s sleeping place and also ripped that curtain from its pegs. Many Babies screamed and sat up, clutching at mats and sleeping furs.
“Where is Waxtal?” Owl asked her.
The woman’s words came out in a rush, tumbling over one another. Owl finally crawled into the sleeping place, grabbed her arms, and pulled her to her feet.
“Speak slowly, woman. How do you expect me to understand your foolish language if you do not speak slowly?”
Many Babies jerked away from him and scrambled across the sleeping place. She picked up her otter suk, then, gathering in a long breath, rushed past Owl and out into the center of the ulaq. She looked around, then said to Spotted Egg, “Where is Waxtal?”
“That is what my brother asked you,” Spotted Egg said. He kicked at the sealskin of dried fish. “Everything that was in the cache is gone—our trade packs, our food, our oil. There is nothing left but what your husband gave us when we came to this ulaq.”
“Why should I know where Waxtal is?” Many Babies asked. “I was his for the night—as my husband the alananasika asked. That is all.” She pulled on her suk. It bunched in thick folds over her breasts, and she jerked it down.
“You did not see him leave?”
“I was asleep.”
Owl grabbed her shoulders, but Many Babies jammed her knee into his groin. Owl doubled over and sank slowly to the floor. Many Babies ran to the climbing log. “My husband will kill you if you touch me!” she screamed back at him.
Spotted Egg raised a fist. “Tell your husband this is what I think of Whale Hunters.” Then he went to Owl, crouched beside him.
“I am not hurt,” Owl said through gritted teeth.
Spotted Egg shook his head, picked up his parka, put it on, and climbed the log to the top of the ulaq. “I go to the beach to see if Waxtal left us our ik,” he called back to Owl. “Come when you can.”
Waxtal settled himself on the fur seal pelt and held his hands over the small flame of his hunter’s lamp. The walrus tusk incised with his carvings lay on his right side, the plain tusk on his left. He was on a small island east of the Whale Hunters’ island, and had found a ledge on the side of the mountain that rose above the beach where he had left his ikyak. He made a camp there, choosing a site where he could watch the sea as he sat on his fur seal pelt. The wind blew in from the water, cold and wet, biting deep into his bones.
He had worn his First Men feather suk, and so stood up, stepped forward to stand with the lamp between his legs, then hunched down so the bottom edges of the suk touched the ground. Heat from the lamp enveloped his legs. His skin prickled up into bumps, and he closed his eyes as the warmth spread to his belly and chest.
When he moved back to sit on the fur seal pelt, he began a chant, praise words that he hoped would please any nearby spirits. In the cold, his lips were stiff, and his voice sounded thin, almost like a woman’s.
Why did the spirits make things so difficult? Why send rain and cold on the day he began his fast? How could a man live without eating in a wind that pulled all the heat from his body? It was difficult enough to rise above the hunger of an empty belly. How could a man stay in his prayers when his body shook from the cold?
Waxtal cupped his hands around the oil lamp and continued his chant. His song was a song of thankfulness for the sea, for the animals in the sea. The chant rose from his chest, poured from his mouth, and circled back to him in the wind. The words came into his ears, drew pictures in his mind—of otters, sleek and swift; seals, dark and fat; sea lions, large and without fear. He saw walruses and whales, sea birds and fish. Finally he saw the gifts these animals brought: hides and furred pelts, meat and fat, oil, teeth for necklaces, bones for fuel, ivory for carving.
He laid his hands on the tusks at his sides. The tusks were warm, as though they remembered the heat of the Whale Hunter ulaq where they had last lain. Under the fingers of his right hand, Waxtal could feel the lines he had carved. Their power moved up his hand to his wrist, then to his forearm—a trail of warmth that spread to shoulders and heart.
Again he saw the sea animals, this time as traders see them: three sea lion teeth for a bear claw, a seal belly of oil for a caribou bone scraper, a fur seal pelt for thirty puffin skins; a sealskin of dried whale meat for a caribou skin parka and leggings; six sea lion bellies of oil for a cormorant feather cape. He saw himself wearing the caribou parka and leggings, necklaces, and a birdskin cape, saw himself with a new woman each night. He saw himself with a new ik, one large enough to hold everything he would buy in trade, more things than most people knew were in the world. He heard the women’s voices as they praised what he brought; he saw the fear in men’s eyes as they began to understand the power of his trading; he tasted the food the women set before him; he felt their hands at his loins, caressing.
His chants still came to his ears, but they were lost in the visions of what he hoped to have, so Waxtal spoke but did not hear what he said. And his thanksgiving became thanksgiving to a bear-claw necklace; his prayers became prayers to a traders’ ik; his praises became praises to fine parkas.
“Do something a wife is supposed to do. Sew. Weave a basket,” Hard Rock said and shook his head, rubbed both hands over his face. “I will be back.” He left Many Babies, still crying, in the ulaq.
He went first to the traders’ ulaq. When he found no one there, he went to the beach. Owl and Spotted Egg were beside their ik, running their hands over the walrus hide covering.
For a moment Hard Rock stood watching the men, saying nothing, then he called out, “I shared my wives with the traders. I gave food and water and oil. They stayed in a good ulaq. My wife is in my ulaq now and she will not stop crying. What did you do to her?”
“We did nothing,” Spotted Egg said, his voice loud, his words hard.
“Ask Waxtal. He is the one who had her,” said Owl. “We each slept alone.”
“Where is he?”
“He is gone,” said Owl. “He took our meat and our oil and what was in our packs.” Owl kicked at a caribou skin pack lying empty beside the ikyak rack.
“Look what he did to our ik,” Spotted Egg said. Pulling a knife from his sleeve, he used the blade to lift one edge of a slit that ran the length of the ik’s belly.
“You will go after him?” Hard Rock asked.
“With what? Will one of your hunters let us use his ikyak?”
“How can a hunter give his brother to someone else?” Hard Rock asked.
“You have no one who would trade ik for ikyak?” Owl asked.
“You want a hunter to give his ikyak for a woman’s boat? A man cannot hunt whales from an ik.”
“A traders’ ik,” Spotted Egg said.
“What is the difference?” Hard Rock asked. “Woman’s boat, traders’ ik. Both would dishonor the whale. But I will ask. Perhaps one of my hunters has become a fool.”
Spotted Egg’s face darkened, but he said nothing.
Finally Owl asked, “None of your women has an ikyak that belonged to husband or brother now dead?”
“Whale Hunter men take their ikyan with them when they go to the Dancing Lights,” Hard Rock said.
“Would one of your women trade her ik?”
“For what?” Hard Rock asked and, bending over, lifted one of the empty trader packs. “What do you have to trade?”
Owl lifted the many strands of beads that hung around his neck.
“A woman needs her ik to fish,” Hard Rock said. “You think a woman can eat necklaces? Besides, you cannot catch Waxtal’s ikyak in a woman’s boat.”
In two quick steps, Spotted Egg was face to face with Hard Rock. He grabbed Hard Rock’s suk in both hands. “We came to this cursed island, bringing our amulets and charms so you would gain favor with the spirits. Now we have lost everything. It is your fault. Your curse has come to us.”
Hard Rock jerked his sleeve knife from its sheath, held it so the blade lay close along the side of Spotted Egg’s neck. “I am responsible for you?” Hard Rock asked through clenched teeth. “You came to this island without invitation. You ate my food, lived in my village, used my women, and now you blame me for your loss?”