The Calling

by Ken Altabef

  Having hoisted the seal up onto the rack out of the reach of the dogs, Kigiuna gave the carcass a solid slap. “Your ears are sharp as ever, old man.”

  “Don’t you dare bare your teeth at me, Kigiuna,” roared Old Manatook. The shaman stood a full head taller than Alaana’s father. “Alaana must come to my household to learn. It’s not for you to decide.”

  Kigiuna stood his ground. “My house, my family.”

  “Your words are senseless things. This community lives and dies by its shamans.” Manatook’s tone was as sharp as a blade, driving home the notion that in a world of spirits and forces dangerous beyond mortal comprehension, the shamans were all that stood in the way of disaster. “There is more at stake than just your own family, or a father’s pride.”

  “Pride?” Kigiuna shook a bloodied fist up at Old Manatook. “I’ve lost one child already because of your folly. And for what? My poor Avalaaqiaq. An innocent girl. You shamans caused this.”

  Alaana saw the old shaman flinch. Was that a flash of guilt across his wizened face? Visible for just a moment, then gone.

  Old Manatook tilted his tangled beard down at Kigiuna. “Your daughter has received the call. Alaana is changed now. Surely her own father can tell. The entire world is different for her. And the world expects much of her.”

  “Now who’s not making sense?” asked Kigiuna. “You know as well as I do that girls can’t be shamans. There’s no such thing.”

  “Until now,” said Old Manatook.

  “No.” Kigiuna waved a pejorative finger at the old shaman. “That’s a man’s job. I won’t allow it.”

  “And yet she has been called!” insisted Old Manatook. “There are certain taboos she must follow. There is no choice.”

  More taboos! The idea struck Alaana like a slap in the face. Surely her burden was great enough already. The itching was unbearable, she was being eaten alive by lice, she couldn’t play with the other children. But those prohibitions would expire after the five days were up. What were these other taboos?

  “She shows the spirit light,” continued Old Manatook, “and her angakua is strong.”

  “You never said she had it before.”

  “Hmmf. She didn’t have it before. And that is peculiar. But she has it now.”

  “So you say.”

  No, wait, thought Alaana. She wanted to hear more about those extra taboos Old Manatook had hinted at.

  “She’s no shaman,” said Kigiuna. “She’s not going to wind up like Civiliaq and Wolf Head. I won’t sit for that.”

  Old Manatook turned away so that Kigiuna wouldn’t see a momentary weakness cross his dark eyes. From her place of concealment Alaana had a clear window on the old man’s soul. The shaman had lost two close friends, he was alone, and perhaps for the first time uncertain whether he could protect the people all by himself.

  Alaana feared for her father. She didn’t want to leave her family, but if Kigiuna didn’t do what Old Manatook wanted what terrible force could the shaman bring to bear? Was it possible to refuse the shaman in this? What would be the punishment? She didn’t want her father to suffer on her account. She couldn’t stand that.

  When Old Manatook turned around to face Kigiuna he was calm and resolute once again. “The duties assumed by the shaman are not easy, the struggles which Alaana must undertake are dangerous. But necessary.”

  Kigiuna was unimpressed.

  Old Manatook frowned. “This is senseless. We are not at odds with each other, Kigiuna. We are both trying to protect her. The spear has already been cast. She is changed. She must follow the taboos or she will die. That’s simply the way it is.”

  “Die?” The shaman’s statement gave Kigiuna pause. “Tell me. What are these new taboos?”

  “She must not eat outdoors, and never the liver, head or heart of any animal. She is not to sleep through an entire night. She must wake up three times so that she may report her dreams to me in the morning.”

  Alaana was stunned. Three times during the night?

  “Three times during the night?” said Kigiuna.

  Old Manatook nodded gravely. “Every night. The spirits do not require her to move into my tent. That’s usually just for convenience. But she must break the sleep in thirds. If you’ll see to it, I will put up a special tent for training at the new camp, and she can remain with your family.”

  Kigiuna glared back at him. “I’ll think about it.”

  With that, Old Manatook nodded politely and walked away.

  Still kneeling in the snow, Alaana began to shiver. The welcome sunlight of spring was deceptive, making the weather seem warmer than it actually was. As soon as the sun sank to the horizon it was winter cold all over again. Kigiuna restacked the meat on the rack with sharp, angry movements. One thing was certain. It was not a good thing for her father to be arguing with the Anatatook’s last surviving shaman.

  Kigiuna, whose name meant ‘Sharp Tooth’, held no position of authority among the Anatatook, but he had a reputation for being more outspoken than most. There was no disguising the aggressiveness with which he attacked every chore, from hunting to eating to running his dogs. He smiled and joked often, but never seemed truly relaxed. He was always busy doing something — if not mending his equipment, he endlessly carved little bone toys for the children. There was not a child in the camp who didn’t treasure some little thing he’d made for them.

  Above all else he was proud and strong and the image that most often came to mind when Alaana thought of her father was Kigiuna, just returned from a long absence on a hunt, having crawled through the knee-high entrance tunnel of the iglu, raising himself up straight and tall despite obvious exhaustion, his parka barbed with icicles and his lashes encrusted with snow, and calling out, “I’m home.”

  And in the ensuing race among his children to brush the snow from their father’s back, Alaana was most often the winner.

  CHAPTER 5

  SHE KNOWS

  Inside the tent was not much warmer than out in the open air. Alaana’s mother had left the lamp extinguished. She’d probably gone visiting with the other women. This meant she would come back all red-eyed from weeping. Most of the women, her mother among them, were walking about with sad, closed faces, and when they were together in groups they cried. Alaana wondered if the crying would last beyond the five days.

  Her sister’s soul hovered in the center of the room, halfway toward the hole cut in the skin roof for its passage. From the mussed hair, the round nose and crooked teeth to the spirit-parka and trousers, this was Ava just as she had appeared in life. Alaana ignored the actual body, pale and still riddled with blisters, which lay wrapped in soft skins on the side ledge. Mother had done what little she could to clean her face and straighten her hair but it struck Alaana as all wrong. Ava’s hair had never been straight when she was alive and the crooked smile was gone from the face.

  That wonderful, crooked smile lit up Ava’s spirit-face as Alaana entered the tent. She asked immediately for news of the day’s events. Alaana spoke directly at the ghost, telling how Mikisork’s mother had accidentally slid on the ice while scolding the children for doing so.

  Ava laughed at the image of Aolajut sliding on her rump, legs thrown into the air. The laugh was the same as it had ever been, a wonderful, joyous sound. Usually Ava’s laugh brought forth an echo of similar laughter from Alaana. This time it had the opposite effect.

  Alaana nearly broke down as memories of her sister came in a flood tide of tumultuous recollections. Ava dancing dangerously on lake ice which threatened to crack beneath her feet, felling a ptarmigan with a well-tossed stone, chasing Alaana up and down the hilly region near the tree line during the previous summer until the two of them fell down in the mud and slush, laughing, laughing.

  Alaana faltered, her eyes glazing over. But Ava, who shared a mirror image of all those happy memories, continued laughing in her own familiar way. And if her dead sister could laugh, Alaana was determined not to cry.

  “A
re you afraid?” whispered Alaana.

  “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Should I be?” answered Ava. “The thing I was always most afraid of was getting sick and dying. And now that it’s happened it isn’t so bad.”

  Alaana considered her sister’s words. Her greatest fear had always been that someone she loved would get sick and die, and now that it had happened it was even worse than she could have possibly imagined.

  “Ava, I think I caused you to die.”

  “I don’t think so, Alaana. There was this horrible old woman—”

  “Civiliaq was doing a healing,” Alaana interrupted. “He took the demon out of you but it didn’t work. I think it was because I didn’t believe.”

  “No,” said Ava, shaking her head. “It wasn’t you. This old woman took me away. She brought me to a dark, scary place. Her eyes were so hungry, staring at me like she wanted to eat me. She said she wanted to be my new mother.”

  “I saw her too,” said Alaana, shivering at the thought.

  She had suffered the touch of that same awful woman, only to be saved from death by the grace of Sila and Old Manatook. Now, without her sister, she thought perhaps it was worse to have survived the sickness than to succumb. No, she thought, that couldn’t be right.

  Of course if she were dead, she wouldn’t have to bear the endless maddening itch of the lice. In the fading daylight coming through the skylight Alaana could see their tiny white silhouettes jumping around on the sleeves of her parka.

  “Ava?” she said softly, “Would you be bothered much if I changed my clothes? The lice are eating me.”

  Ava chuckled. “No. Why should I care if you change your clothes?”

  “No reason,” said Alaana. Strangely, now that her sister had given permission Alaana thought better of breaking the taboo. It was said that if any taboo was broken during the five days the soul clung to its body, it might become an evil spirit, a tunrat, determined to wreak terrible revenge on the village. So Alaana decided to leave her itchy parka on until the end. She didn’t want her sister to become a tunrat.

  Ava asked, “Alaana, do you remember that time Maguan fell into the river?”

  Alaana remembered it well. It had felt awful, almost as terrible as this. “I thought we would never see him again. I thought he would be carried down and away forever.”

  “But father and Anaktuvik brought him out, and when they laid him on the ice he was all blue and still. Remember?”

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “Old Manatook breathed life back into him.”

  “I remember.”

  “But why couldn’t he do that for me?”

  Alaana didn’t have any easy answer. The old shaman hadn’t visited this house since Avalaaqiaq’s death. “I guess it’s different when you burn up with fever.”

  “I guess,” said Ava.

  “Maybe he was too busy,” said Alaana, “saving all the rest of us.”

  “He did good,” admitted Ava. “I’m glad you’re safe, Alaana. And Maguan and Itoriksak.”

  They were quiet for a moment.

  “I wish I could stay with you Alaana. But something is tugging at me, trying to pull me away. I don’t want to go, but I can’t hold out much longer.”

  “I know,” whispered Alaana. Once Ava’s ghost departed, she would be gone forever. Alaana couldn’t bear never to see her sister again.

  “The others are calling to me,” Ava’s ghost said.

  Alaana could hear them. A chorus of muttering voices, whispering indistinctly from across the great divide. It was not a frightening sound. Rather there was a certain cadence to the mutterings that felt soothing and welcoming. On the other side of the open ceiling flap she thought she saw fluttering shadows against the fading daylight. “I can hear them too,” said Alaana, “But who are they?”

  “I think they’re our ancestors. The father of our father is there. His name was Ulruk.”

  “Who are you talking to?” It was Kigiuna, having come inside to rinse his hands at the water bucket.

  “Nobody,” said Alaana.

  “So now she’s talking to herself?” asked Kigiuna. Alaana found this a little funny since Kigiuna was in fact asking himself a question, as he often did. Her father was always talking to himself.

  Still, Alaana couldn’t stand the look of frustration on his face.

  “It’s Ava,” she said.

  Kigiuna’s nose wrinkled as he scanned the interior of the tent. “You can see her?”

  “Yes,” said Alaana.

  “Where?”

  Alaana pointed to the spot where her sister’s soul was hovering, knowing it would do no good. Kigiuna gaped at the empty air before him, obviously seeing nothing. “What’s it look like?”

  Alaana didn’t really know how to answer. “It looks like Ava. Just like she always looked, but there’s something more. Everything she was, everything she thought or wondered about, those things she loved. It’s all there.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  Alaana could hardly keep from chuckling. There was no way she could describe the silly face her sister’s ghost was making at that moment. “Smiling.”

  “I don’t see anything,” whispered Kigiuna in despair. “Has my daughter gone crazy? Has everyone gone crazy?” He turned away to wash his hands in the bucket.

  Kigiuna hesitated. Before he went outside again he turned back to Alaana. “Does she know how we loved her?”

  “Yes. She knows.”

  Dripping pink water from his hands, Kigiuna went back outside. His face was as helpless and sad as Alaana had ever seen it.

  CHAPTER 6

  TWO BURIALS

  Alaana, again, sat alone. A flurry of activity animated the Anatatook people gathered at the fishing weir.

  The freeze at the river had only recently broken up. A line of men were arranged single file on the rim of firm ice which remained on either side. The broad, flat stones of the weir rose only a hand’s breadth above the level of the water. These stone walls led the spawning fish downstream into an enclosed central basin. Once inside the pocket, the salmon trout had no chance of escape.

  These traps were as old as the tundra itself, having been built long before the Anatatook had even existed. Their origins were credited to the Tunrit, a race of primordial men who were the first to live on the world after the Great Rift. In their struggle for survival in a world of perpetual darkness, that long-dead race of heroic beings had engineered these traps and left them behind, a legacy written in water and stone.

  The men went at it as hard and fast as they could, using double-pronged leisters to spear their hapless prey. Their frenzied activity had knocked some of the stones loose and Kigiuna and one of the other men were up to their waists in the ice-cold water fixing them back into place as fast as they could.

  One intrepid fish jumped the wall of the central basin, startling Oonark. He had enough troubles already. Having only one working eye made for a lot of difficulty spearing the fish. He tried to step out of the way as the salmon went slithering underfoot, but he wound up tumbling into the water. Everyone thought this very funny, including Oonark who waved cheerfully to the crowd before he hurried back to the camp to change his wet clothes.

  There was much excited talk and laughter, with every fisherman working to catch as many as he could as rapidly as possible, spearing in any direction the confused fish might go. Several thrusts came dangerously close to her father, but there was little cause for worry. The hunters’ aim was sure.

  Itching lice, Alaana marveled at the stream of fish souls as they went up, darting this way and that as they climbed into the sky. The fuzzy pink balls of light looked as if they were swimming toward the heavens. Perhaps they thought they were still going upstream to mate.

  The women stood behind the men, skewering the fish with long bone needles. When they held up the thong for drying, the fishmeat caught the sunlight in a bright flash of orange.

  Maguan, who had
a good eye for the leister, proudly represented their family in the spearing. He had tried to show Alaana the trick to it, given the way the water bent the view so that you had to spear somewhere below the fish in order to hit one. Alaana had been looking forward to helping string the fish this year, but mourning for Avalaaqiaq prevented it. Exceptions were made for the adults, who needed to work to survive, but a child in mourning could not work.

  And then there were the ghosts. Men who had died of the sickness were standing aimlessly about, looking sad and forlorn. The shade of Kukkook was there, peering over his widow’s shoulder. An elderly man with long crooked arms, his name stood for ‘Big Crab’. In particular he had been renowned among the village for the strength of his urine. His morning flow was so dark and powerful it was used to cut grease when preparing skins and women prized it for washing the dirt out of their hair at summer’s end. The ghost’s movements were slow and out of time with the rest of the scene. He didn’t seem to notice Alaana staring.

  A few of the dead wives and children were there too. The ghost of Inuiyak had her arms draped around her husband’s neck as he went about spearing the fish. Alaana could hear her moaning softly. As a girl she had been struck by lightning and survived, although her left arm had never moved properly after that. Alaana noted the ghost’s left arm worked perfectly well now.

  Alaana shut her eyes. She didn’t want to look upon the dead any longer.

  “Do they frighten you?”

  Old Manatook stood next to her. Alaana flinched. If she must be left in the care of one of the shamans she wished it didn’t have to be Old Manatook. Kuanak had been gruff, but he’d laughed as much as he’d grumbled. He’d always been at the forefront of any hunting party or whaling trip and any celebration of a good catch was not complete without his dancing and singing. Civiliaq had often entertained the children with amusing tricks and clever tales.

  But Old Manatook was serious all the time. He seemed much more mysterious than the others, going off by himself for long periods on end. He and Higilak had no natural born children and had never adopted. If anything, Old Manatook did his best to avoid children as much as possible. Alaana and the others had always avoided him in return, even feared him. And it was much worse now, with that thing on his shoulder and that unearthly light in his eyes.