by Ray Hudson
“I don’t think so. Like I said, I can’t get it to work the way it’s supposed to. It got torn.”
Anna gave me a quick unapologetic glance.
Vasilii looked from me to her. “So, you are each other’s angaayu?”
We gave him a blank stare.
“Partners,” Vasilii said.
“I wouldn’t go that far.” We both spoke at once.
Vasilii raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “That still doesn’t explain this,” and he touched his gut kamleika.
“It’s probably the fox,” Anna said and removed the carving from its pouch. She flattened her hand and set the carving in the middle of her palm so that it faced away from the volcano. It just sat there. Then she pivoted it a quarter of a turn. The carving rotated back to its original position.
“Do that again,” Vasilii said.
She did, and again it pivoted back so that it faced down the beach.
“Let’s take it where it wants to go,” he said and stood up. “Haqada!”
Háh-kah-thah I said to myself, trying to pronounce the command to get moving that I had heard time and time again. We headed away from the volcano.
“If the Kagamil people come here for berries,” Vasilii said, “they’ll probably choose a bay close to Kagamil and away from the volcano. This eastern half of the island,” he gestured toward the gradually rising slope, “is our best bet.”
Walking wasn’t difficult once the grass was shorter, but it was up and down and up and down and up. The “ups” were always longer than the “downs.” Eventually, we had a view of the northeastern shoreline.
“I don’t see any berry pickers,” Anna said.
“I don’t see any berries,” I added and plopped down.
“You won’t find blueberry bushes like at home,” Vasilii said, and he bent over to pick a few smooth berries from the thick carpet of creeping evergreen foliage that covered the ground. The round berries were so dark blue they were virtually black. “More like these.”
“Moss berries,” Anna said to me as Vasilii handed me a half dozen. I tossed them into my mouth. They were full of tiny seeds.
“Raven’s berry,” Vasilii said.
“Not bad,” I said as I squeezed out the juice, leaving a mouthful of pulp and seeds.
“Spit,” Anna said.
I did and reached for a few more berries. “Actually, very good.”
We now worked our way closer to the shore, staying as much as possible up where the plants were low. Eventually, a wide expanse curved below us, and we began a gradual descent. Everything in front was shadowed by the hills behind us. By the time we arrived at the beach, evening had arrived. I wasn’t worried. I knew from experience that it would stay evening for a long time. It would get dark, I knew that too. But it wouldn’t stay dark for long.
“I guess we should have thought about where we were going to spend the night,” Vasilii said.
Now I was worried.
“You’re not suggesting we go back, are you?” Anna asked.
“No,” he said. He sat down on a wide driftwood log and removed a folded cloth from his pack.
“Time for some food,” he said and uncovered a curved reddish stick.
“Dry salmon,” Anna said as she sat down beside him. “I love that.”
“I’ve got something, too.” I unwrapped some fragrant rolls the chief’s aunt had insisted I take before we left her house.
“Alaadika!” Vasilii said. “Excellent.”
After we had eaten, Vasilii rewrapped his dried fish and put it away. He stood up and walked to where the beach grass was especially thick. We watched while he flattened a stretch of grass with his feet and then, over this space, he tied together two clumps of long broad grass, one from each side. He threaded a second handful of grass through each side of the first pair and tied those, again using the grass to tie itself. He repeated this until he had what resembled a tubular tent. He crawled inside, turned around, and smiled.
Our knots unraveled almost as soon as we tied them. Vasilii took over and by threading the tips of succeeding clumps through those already secured he had an almost solid surface.
“Good for one night,” he said.
“You’re amazing,” I said.
He might have smiled a bit, I wasn’t sure. Anna had gone inside her grass tent to inspect it, and now she crawled out. Vasilii gave her a hand to get up. Before he let it go he said, “Don’t tell me what happens. In the future, I mean.”
“As if I knew,” she said. I could tell she was upset. “Too much has happened. Too many years. Look at me! I hardly know what kind of Aleut I am.”
Before I could say Unanga and get walloped, Vasilii spoke softly. “Listen. Share. Don’t be boastful. Do the things you know are right.”
I gave him a blank look.
“It’s what it means to be Unanga,” he said. “Some things change and some things don’t. Those long-ago people used to do stuff we don’t do today,” he continued. “When they came to a new beach, they would stomp barefooted on sea urchin shells to make the place their own. My feet would bleed like crazy if I tried that. They used to give their kids names that would shame them and make them angry. Now we’re named after saints.”
“Strange thing to do,” I said. “The odd names, not the saints.”
“Not if you want your kid to be independent,” he said.
“What kind of names?” I was intrigued.
“Wart, Egg, She-Runs-at-the-Mouth.”
“Still, it’s an odd thing to do,” I repeated.
“There were others,” Vasilii said. “Lots of them: Pimple, Big Eyes, Stink.” Then he leaned over and whispered out of Anna’s hearing, “Wiping His Butt.”
I think I turned beet-red.
Anna said, “Tutuku. Periwinkle. That’s what my gram is called.”
“Do you have one of those names?” I asked her.
She had taken out the ivory fox and didn’t answer. Instead she asked, “Do you really think we’ll find the Kagamil people?”
“Fevronia said they would be picking berries somewhere on this island,” Vasilii said. “We’ll go out tomorrow.”
“How did they disappear?” I asked. “Anna told me nobody has lived on these Four Mountain Islands for a long time.”
Vasilii picked up a stone and threw it out to the darkening sea. “They were said to have been very war-like, those people. They were whalers who had secret rituals. The people on Umnak hated them and when the Russians came along, they thought they had found some convenient allies.”
“With friends like that,” Anna quoted, “who needs enemies?”
“One story is that the Umnak people got the Russians to destroy the villages on one of the Four Mountain Islands, killing the men and forcing the women who survived to move elsewhere. Maybe the same thing happened to the other islands.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
“But there were later Russians who said they had skirmishes with Four Mountain people, so some villages must have survived. Nobody knows for certain. When Captain Hennig got the mummies from Kagamil, my father asked Peter Rostokovich to tell him the story. Like Peter said, he and his sister are descendants of those people.”
“Do you think she’s a witch?” I asked. I mean, why not?
“See what I have to put up with, Vasilii?” Anna said.
“There are good witches,” I said, although I would have been hard-pressed to name one other than what’s-her-name in The Wizard of Oz.
“If anything, she’s a shaman,” Anna said.
“I thought shamans were men.”
“Not always.”
“Anna’s right,” Vasilii said. “Old women can have unusual powers.”
She didn’t have to look quite so smug.
“There’s a story about two old women who even changed the weather,” he continued. “They made it real hot and people died. Men who were fishing came ashore and dropped from exhaustion. Women who were cleaning fish collapsed and died. The whole vi
llage died except for the two old women.”
“Holy cow,” Anna said.
“Then those old ladies went from house to house. They collected all the containers of good seal oil (and left the bad) and took all the good dried fish (and left the bad). They carried it all home, spread out a grass mat, sat down, and had a feast.”
Vasilii paused. “This story actually came from Nikolski. Old Man Peter told it. Fevronia could probably add the juicy details.”
Like wiping their butts, I wondered?
“While they were eating,” Vasilii continued, “several skin boats came ashore. People got out and came up to them and said, ‘Raise up our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers! Bring them back! Bring them back!’”
“That’s an odd thing to say,” I said. “If everybody had died.”
Vasilii looked at me. I had to admit that time wasn’t behaving in a normal way even now.
“Anyway,” he went on, “the old women struggled to their feet. Their bellies were so full they had a hard time standing up. ‘We didn’t mean to make trouble,’ one of them said. Then they hobbled back inside their house and started singing and dancing. They sang and danced until everyone who had died stood up and laughed.”
“And that’s the end?” I asked when Vasilii didn’t continue. “It stops just like that?’
“That’s it,” he said.
We crawled into our grass tents before it was dark. I awoke once during the night. I heard the sea sweeping along the shore before I snuggled deeper into the warm and fragrant grass.
The next morning after a brief breakfast of the three remaining alaadika, we headed east up a gentle ridge of low grass. I knew it was east because of where the sun was. We walked for over an hour crossing several ravines that led down toward the shore. The grass again grew taller the closer we got to the beach. By this time, Anna had pushed to the lead. She clambered down a gully, and I could hear her struggling ahead through a tangle of blades and roots and who knows what.
Then she let out a yell, and I heard her crash to the ground. By the time Vasilii and I caught up, she was on her hands and knees, locked in a petrified crawl. And no wonder. A man stood about three feet away. He wore a raincoat a thousand times more beautiful than what the three of us had on. He was young, but he had gray hair, and more to the point, he was holding a wooden visor in one hand and a club in the other.
I just stood there.
“Aang, aang.” Somehow Vasilii still had his voice. “Excuse us for interrupting your work.”
The man lowered his club. “Not at all,” he said in a voice that showed no surprise. “Welcome. Visitors are rare. Even easterners on all fours.”
Anna struggled to her feet, blushing like crazy.
“Fine weather,” Vasilii said with a voice that was pretty close to normal.
“Yes,” the man said. “And it’s going to get better.”
Anna just gawked at him.
Vasilii pointed at himself and said his name. Then he indicated Anna and said her name. When it came my turn, I said my own name and put out my hand. The man didn’t seem to know what to do with it, and he handed me the wooden visor. It was decorated with colored bands and graceful swirls. Balanced halfway down the bill was a small ivory bird.
“Ash,” he said.
Finally a word I could pronounce.
“Hat,” I said, giving the English equivalent.
“What a dolt,” Anna perked up. “That’s his name, Booker. Ash.”
“We have been searching for you,” she said as I returned the visor. He seemed very happy with it.
“For me?”
“You and any other Kagamil people.”
The knuckles on the hand that held the visor turned white.
“Filth,” he spat with contempt and turned away.
“Wait,” Vasilii said. “We didn’t mean to offend you.”
The man looked from Vasilii to me to Anna. I could tell she was the most confused of all three of us. Fevronia had said we’d find the Kagamil people here. So who was this man? He slipped on his visor and said, “I can show you what they’re like.”
We followed him back onto the slopes at a pace that forced Anna and me to almost run. He limped, but it didn’t slow him down in the slightest. We hiked up several low ridges until we came to the edge of a wide valley that circled a bay. The slope below was peppered with clumps of deep-blue lupine.
“I lived with the Kagamil people a long time ago,” he said as he took a seat on the grassy ground. We joined him. “My sister and I were captured in one of the wars out west. And because of this”—he tapped his right leg—“they made me a slave. Well, I would have been a slave in any case, but they gave me the dirtiest jobs. Women’s work.”
I touched Anna’s arm before she could object. What a hothead.
Unanga had slaves?
“Packing water. Cleaning up their filth. They starved me and dressed me in rags. But now!” He spread his arms toward the distant bay, “Look at what they have become!”
We saw three heavily patched open skin boats approaching the shore.
“I count about a dozen people,” Vasilii said. The boats coasted onto the graveled beach and people climbed out, pulling the boats above the waterline. Even I could tell their clothes were tattered and mended. They glanced nervously around as they walked away from the water.
Ash stood up and circled an arm over his head as though he were stirring the air. The harder he swung, the stronger the breeze became.
“They have lost everything!” he shouted in triumph as he hurled the gust toward them. It swept down the mountainside. “Even courage has deserted them.” He smiled as the crowd panicked and rushed back to their boats and pushed away from the shore.
“Maybe they need their magic charm,” I said. Anna threw me an angry glance.
“You have one of those?” he asked gently. “That’s why you are looking for them?”
We just sat there without answering him. Then he said, “How you treat those charms is how you will be treated.”
I remembered almost identical words from Old Man Peter.
Finally Anna said, “It belongs to them.”
“I told you,” Ash said. “How they made me and my sister slaves.”
“Maybe they’ve changed,” Anna said. And then, forgetting we had just seen two boatloads of them, she added, “There’s almost nothing left of them now.”
It was like she and Ash were talking in and out of time. Ash was talking about a time not too long ago while Anna was talking about the future, where we had come from. Where I wanted to return.
“You saw how they are,” he said. “You can’t get near them.”
“Can you help us?” she asked.
He stared down at the now empty beach.
“Would you help us? I mean, help us return it?”
He looked back toward the volcano.
“No,” he said simply.
I thought that was the end of it. Time to go home.
“You could leave it there,” he said, gesturing toward the beach. “Maybe they would find it.”
“I don’t think so,” Anna said. I wished she wasn’t so stubborn. Of course, we could leave it there.
“You could show it to the Woman of the Volcano,” he said.
“Who?”
Vasilii picked a few of the round black moss berries from the carpet before him.
Ash again looked at the towering peak. “She is the guardian of that mountain, the caretaker of its fire.”
“Volcano Woman.” Vasilii pronounced each syllable softly as though for the first time he believed what he heard himself saying.
“Let me get this straight,” Anna said. “You won’t, but you think this Volcano Woman might be willing to help us?”
“You can ask,” he said.
For the remainder of the morning, Ash led us across the rugged eastern half of the island until we stood at the base of the volcano. The summit always looked like it was a week’s walk
away. The lower slopes were softened with grass and low-growing bushes. The upper sides were all rock, stiff and fragile surfaces. We zigzagged up a series of switchbacks and crossed ravines of hard snow.
We’re walking into trouble, I said to myself.
As the cone narrowed, the trail became steeper. We crossed to the opposite side of the peak. In the distance, a pure volcanic cone rose from the sea. A second island had some low land off to one side of its volcanic peak. Still another volcano loomed in the south. I had now seen all four of the mountains. The breeze was always at our backs as though it followed us around and around. After we had circled the narrowing cone three more times, we came to a wide expanse that perched on a long escarpment—that’s a word I learned in science and thought I’d never use. From here there was a nearly vertical descent to the sea. The ground was surprisingly green with lush vegetation forming a skirt around the muffled dome of one of those partly underground homes. Whoever this woman was, she occupied quite the piece of real estate.
“I will tell her we have arrived,” Ash said. It was like the Woman of the Volcano had been expecting us. A notched log protruded from a square framed opening at the top. Ash used it to descend inside. We stood there, admiring the view toward the jagged outcroppings of the eastern half of the island.
“What are you thinking?” I asked Anna.
“I’m thinking we need to be careful.”
Vasilii nodded agreement.
FOUR
FED UP WITH HISTORY
14. Anna
Awe and bewilderment flowed over me when the Woman of the Volcano climbed out of her dwelling and stood before us. I had a vague but impossible sense of recognition, a crazy mixture of foreignness and familiarity. Her eyes are like Fevronia’s, I thought, only stronger. I immediately stood a little straighter.
She wore a ceremonial parka, a reversible, full-length bird-skin gown with the feathers inside. The outside was a masterpiece of decorative appliqué. Both the sleeves and the lower half of the garment had red-and-white horizontal panels separated by narrow rows of intricately arranged squares of brown leather. Ribbons of dark fur-seal fur hung across the surface. The seams were decorated with hundreds of long wisps of white hair that brushed the garment like smoke. I probably resembled a bug-eyed loon, but, holy! as Gram sometimes said, this was amazing.