The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

"So many children," Dr. West began so that it sounded like a compliment rather than a question.

  "Eh-eh, many sons," Edwardluk agreed with pride.

  "Eleven children, more than the fingers of my two hands," Dr. West outwardly marveled, inwardly doubting. "You are both so young."

  "More than my fingers and my toes," the woman behind the lamp added shyly.

  "You are the mother of more?"

  "Three are older than Marthalik," she said, smiling past Dr. West at the young woman whose knees supported him, "and two who are younger but already have babies of their own. Grandfather Bear is pleased with -- them."

  The knees behind him hardened, and Dr. West turned his head thinking surely Marthalik and the woman nursing the baby had to be sisters. Their smiling faces seemed equally young. Were they lying? This young mother obviously couldn't have produced twenty children, some already older than Marthalik. "You are her sister."

  Marthalik's small hand rose to cover her startled giggle. "This person is only the daughter of my mother, and Edwardluk is my father."

  Dr. West blinked at Edwardluk, whose smoothly unweathered face indicated he still was in his twenties. By their thirties, the faces of Eskimo hunters were seamed by wind and frostbite. Edwardluk's wife, smiling behind the lamp, still had the fresh face of a teen-ager. Dr. West wondered why Edwardluk had adopted so many older children. Had their parents died?

  "This person wonders what it is like Outside," Marthalik said boldly behind him, her breath close to his ear.

  "Marthalik is a bad one who frightens away the boys," Edwardluk laughed. "They are afraid she will ask them to take her Outside again."

  "This person walked on the winter ice," Marthalik's soft voice added without laughter. "Where the lightning fence does not go, where Peterluk said our grandfathers fled, this person walked because -- "

  "The mosquito chased her back," Edwardluk laughed, and Dr. West imagined the Guard's mirror-windowed helicopter swooping down.

  "What is out there?" Marthalik said anxiously. "This person knows you are a whiteman."

  "Outside are many whitemen," Dr. West sighed. "White whitemen, black whitemen, yellow whitemen, more whitemen than all the birds nesting on all the cliffs." He grinned at Edwardluk. "None serve so much good seal meat as you, nor are their tents as warm with happiness."

  Edwardluk laughed with pleasure and pride, but Marthalik's hand tightened on Dr. West's arm. "Old Peterluk, he says in the old days hunters traveled far to get good things to eat from the whitemen. No one was hungry. Before Grandfather Bear came down from the sky, all hunters owned loud rifles. Peterluk says -- "

  "Peterluk is an old man," Edwardluk interrupted, and a hint of unhappiness appeared in his smiling conversation. "Peterluk is a bad old man who lies. Sometimes he boasts he has the only rifle in the world; there was never another rifle."

  "Then Peterluk is," Dr. West guessed aloud, "the man with the big sled and many dogs who -- "

  "Peterluk ran away from you," Marthalik said firmly, her knees against his back, "because you are more powerful."

  Dr. West couldn't help smiling at this. He was no warrior but he liked her compliment. From his parka he took out the notebook and looked through the list of names the McGill crowd had given him from their census of twenty years ago. There were two Peterluks listed. One was described as about sixty years old then, so he would not be this living Peterluk. The other's age was listed as twenty-three based on Family Allowance records. The McGill census taker had not seen this Peterluk but counted him anyway because: "Peterluk, years ago, fled with the wife of -- another man? Her name was Eevvaalik," Dr. West added.

  "Eh-eh, even then Peterluk must have been a bad man," Edwardluk laughed. "Now he flees from you again with Eevvaalik, but she is only an old woman now, a woman who talks too much," Edwardluk added, smiling past Dr. West at Marthalik.

  Smiling, Dr. West watched Edwardluk's wife oiling the baby.

  "Do you remember when the whitemen took away the rifles?" Dr. West asked her bluntly; if she'd lived long enough to produce twenty children she should remember what happened twenty years ago.

  She hung her head. "This person can remember the last caribou."

  "That was four winters ago," Edwardluk said loudly, making a spearing motion with his arm, grinning and trying to redirect the conversation to himself, the hunter. "This person speared so many caribou his arm died!" A right-hander, he reared back and threw an imaginary spear past Dr. West, who glanced at Edwardluk's wife.

  "How many winters ago," Dr. West asked her deviously, "was Marthalik born?"

  Beside his shoulder, Marthalik giggled. Her so-called mother looked confused, studying her fingers as if she had lost count.

  "A hungry winter," Edwardluk said loudly, "when Marthalik was born. No caribou. But," he laughed, "we did not leave her on the ice."

  "Grandfather Bear would not permit it," Marthalik retorted spunkily. "No one leaves a baby on the ice."

  "Peterluk still says babies should be left on the ice," Edwardluk sighed. "But we could not do that even when our other children were starving. Babies must live even if there are no more caribou for parkas."

  "There are no more caribou?"

  "No more for three winters," Edwardluk sighed, but then he smiled: "This person is a killer of many seals." Proudly he waved his arm toward Dr. West. "Give this big man more meat!"

  Dr. West felt Marthalik moving beside him. Her hand pressed a juicy chunk of meat into his. "You eat so much because you are stronger than Peterluk," she said. "That fierce old man, he fled from you with such speed because you are stronger."

  Dr. West laughed and chewed his meat; it felt good to impress a pretty woman, even better than when he was Director of Oriental Population Problems Research, which had impressed certain women, but his satisfaction now was more --

  "Even though he is an angakok , with powerful magic," Marthalik said emphatically, "Peterluk fled from you because you are stronger."

  "Eh!" Dr. West agreed. "Even though he has a rifle -- "

  Children were wandering in and sagging down against him in sleep. He tried to count them but they kept moving around and he was too full of meat, too sleepy.

  It was a pleasure to be an -- Eskimo again. Lying back against Marthalik's supporting knees, he watched Edwardluk's wife spreading out the caribou skins. No more caribou? Dr. West supposed the Director had not tried to teach his first Eskimos conservation because it was not an authentically primitive concept. Obviously Hans Suxbey's staff of instructors had not taught his Eskimos birth control. Such a large proportion of children indicated the population in the Sanctuary now must be increasing rapidly.

  "Where are the old people?" Dr. West muttered. "Everyone in this camp seems -- young."

  "Eh?" Edwardluk pondered the question while sleepily scratching himself; without his parka he was revealed as a rather wolf-ribbed young man, still lacking that good belly from years of successful hunting and eating which was a primitive Eskimo's pride. "Peterluk says the other old people ran away -- out of this land before we remember them. Sometimes Peterluk says the star frightened them away from the Burned Place. Is it the Navel of the World? Peterluk says the reason he camps there is to find more power. But his only power is his rifle. Peterluk tells so many lies, even a whale vomiting a man -- alive! All of this happened long before this person was born."

  Patiently Edwardluk played with the drowsy children, urging them naked under the caribou skins. They slept side by side in a long row on the sleeping platform. Watching, Dr. West smiled, feeling peace and inner warmth as if he were part of the family. Her plump skin glowing, Edwardluk's wife slid under the worn old caribou skins. "If this person may speak, that old Peterluk never should be believed. He never has good dreams, so how can he understand? He does not even believe in Grandfather Bear's love for us."

  Blinking with drowsiness, Dr. West undressed into his sleeping bag. Leaning on one elbow, he tried to count the children, now that they were motionless under the c
aribou skins. Fourteen? He recounted and got seventeen. Impossible. Maybe some of them are twins -- , or triplets or --

  He glimpsed Marthalik rising sleekly from the caribou skins. His pounding heart startling him, he looked away. He heard a crunching sound, and he watched her. Firm-stomached, she was kneeling beside the seal carcass, tearing loose a rib. The sinuous light from the lamp moved on her smooth skin. Her jaws crunched through gristle as she chewed her night snack. And he smiled to himself. All her darkly shimmering hair was drawn back, coiled up on her head as beautifully as if she were a modern city woman. Dr. West felt he had seen her hairstyle before: Phyliss proudly wearing a dark wig to that last performance of the San Francisco Opera Company, Phyliss striding ahead remote.

  Loudly chewing, Marthalik was moving. Squatting down, her thighs and buttocks swelling, she bent over the seal's rib cage, her breasts moving forward in the soft light from the lamp.

  Dr. West closed his eyes, breathing too hard. Apparently she was at least eighteen, he thought. None of my business. Keeping his eyes closed, he tried to count, not seeing sheep. His heart was so quick; even this tired he couldn't relax. Go to sleep. In two different years you lived with Eskimos as a detached observer.

  Day and night, the Alaskan Eskimo hunting camp had exploded with crude merriment, but he'd had his own pup tent and all those University of California graduate students to look after and set an example for -- for some reason, although he'd been only twenty-four himself.

  When he was twenty-six, in the Canadian Eskimo town on Baffin Island, it already was such a wealthy Co-Op that behavior seemed dominated by middle-class strivers with what they prudishly imagined were middle-class morals. The wife-trading took place in middle-class Berkeley, not on middle-class Baffin Island. Never, he thought, had he seriously experienced any serious desire for any Eskimo woman, and he smiled sleepily. Hardly ever --

  With his eyes closed, restlessly turning inside his soft sleeping bag, he could hear Marthalik walking back across the rattling floor stones. Now she was sliding under the caribou skins. In his warm sleeping bag he buried his face. Forget it. Sleep, dammit , he thought. Among primitive Eskimos the main cause of violence, he thought with self-cooling realism, always has been passion. So stay away from their women and keep a harpoon out of your heart.

  Fighting his excitement, he couldn't sleep. Restlessly twisting in his sleepless bag, he turned his back. My god, how did I end up in here? Trying to cool his excitement, he deliberately circled his thoughts back into his old grief, his distant guilt. Deliberately he remembered his father's robust face gasping in breathless agony.

  His father had been one of the "Flying Doctors of the Sierras." In his memory, his guilt revolved like the blades of the copter descending toward the mountain lake. His father was smiling at the controls, and he was nerving himself to disappoint his father. He remembered his father's raised eyebrows as the copter sideslipped, unable to hover in this alpine altitude. Cheerfully out of the smash his father climbed. "You're all right, Joe. Let's find the patient." The trout fisherman had suffered a coronary. Because the copter was inoperative, they tried to pack him out. Down the trail, Joe still was nerving himself to tell his father. Unhappy as a premed student at the University of California where his father had graduated, Joe had wanted to change his major to anthropology or demography, population statistics, anything instead of medicine, and he told his father this further down the trail. The patient lived. In the airtel in Bishop that night his father died of a massive coronary while Joe bent over him unable to do anything against death.

  After that Joe West studied premed so desperately he was offered medical scholarships to three top schools. He chose Harvard Graduate School of Medicine because it was a continent away from Berkeley and his mother, who had remarried so soon -- so terribly soon. Against death Dr.Joe West suffered from intern to hospital resident, still corresponding with Phyliss. From a sprightly graduate student in demography, Phyliss was becoming Dr. Phyliss Byars, Assistant Professor on the Berkeley Campus, still single.

  In Massachusetts, Dr. Joe West was being reassured by his hospital chief that he might be happier in research. Dr. West's research paper on Endocrinology of Hibernation in the Arctic Ground Squirrel as a Guide to Hibernation in Space Flight led to his first research grant from the Defense Department. Now he didn't have to peer down at the faces of dying patients and see his father.

  Continuously he wrote Phyliss. She wrote she couldn't marry, "this summer because I've been invited on the Ethnology Department's little study of the Alaskan Eskimos. What we need, and a live one is required by the Regent's because there'll be grad students along, is our own doctor to pass out the aspirin and chaperone the grad students. But who will chaperone us chaperones? Volunteer?"

  Before the expedition left Berkeley, Dr. West gave the required physical examinations to the members. Phyliss failed. At this irony she laughed: "You've already signed your contract. You go without me." And he had. Since then their relationship had been strained.

  Far from Phyliss, he had been fascinated by the sharp balance of life on the Alaskan tundra. The closeness of death was less disguised than in cities. The expedition's demographer was a pessimist. Population was pressing against starvation all over the world in spite of cheaper birth control devices.

  Dr. West thought he was making a second start in his life when the expedition returned to Berkeley and he enrolled in Phyliss's lecture class in demography, population distribution. Earnestly he attended graduate seminars in human ecology. Ecology not-so-simply was the branch of biology concerned with the interrelationship of living things with their environment and each other. By the time he earned his Ph.D. in human ecology he knew how he intended to fight death. He had bargaining power in the military-industrial-academic power complex because he was a rare interdisciplinary man. He had an M.D. research background in human glandular processes plus a significant Ph.D. thesis: Socio-Medical Political Approaches to World Population Control.

  Within three years, his proposal to the Defense Department drew to the University of California the largest federal research grant outside the "weapons" field. The men he recruited for this broad spectrum study had such a bizarre range of talents he was reduced to being another embattled administrator. "Joe, even when you're with me all you talk about is -- "

  "Dammit, Phyliss, you're the one who's cold." So they'd never quite married. As Director of Oriental Population Problems Research, the day came when he was human enough, guilty enough, to try to suppress the most terrible aspect of their research.

  Now his only escape from what had happened was sleep --

  He was startled awake by a child scrambling over his sleeping bag. Blearily, he saw that the caribou skin roof resembled a star map, hundreds of little round holes glowing with the morning outside. Each hole, his thoughts squirmed sleepily, marked an exit from the living caribou of a wriggling fly-larva as big as this child's finger which was poking him.

  "Hi." Dr. West sat up in his sleeping bag, and the surrounding children giggled. "So you know a better purpose in life," he laughed in English at them as he struggled into his pants, "than making children laugh?"

  Outside the tent, the sun's reflection from the gleaming wet gravel and glaring snow patches blurred his vision as he looked for Edwardluk. From the corner of his eye, he watched Marthalik scraping a pegged-out sealskin, her head lowered. She should have made some Eskimo kid a valuable wife, he thought and grinned. She was smiling up at him.

  "You sleep so long," she said, "this person thought perhaps your spirit had risen to Grandfather Bear."

  "You mean died?" he laughed; was she teasing him?

  "No-no! Some day you will understand -- when he comes." She rose, smiling again. "This person will boil your meat."

  While he ate, he teased her a little.

  "This person may be small," she laughed back at him, "but stronger than certain men who need wings to fly."

  "You mean me?"

  "How could th
at be?" She feigned innocence. "Wave your arms and you will fly like an angakok because you are so big and strong."

  Dr. West laughed at himself, wondering if Marthalik was considered too quick-witted and outspoken, insufficiently self-abasing to be an Eskimo boy's ideal of a wife.