Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  “The pack’s moving in,” she said. “It’s early, I guess.”

  “Ai,” he answered. Tuttu waved out at the line of white. “Soon, a great storm will come and make the tuvaq, make the ice solid against the sea bottom. Malgi says it should never happen this early. The tuvaq usually comes in December, but Malgi thinks it will come by November, when the sun finally sets. He says this will be a blessing, because by then we will be low on food and we can then hunt seals.”

  “The nuclear winter,” she whispered.

  “Nuclear winter? Malgi spoke of that, too.” He stopped on the beach, looked out to sea. “What is this? More war?”

  Claudia shook her head. “Not more war—the continuation of war. An old theory that had become a little discredited. The logic was good, but no one really had the data, and you know scientists . . .” Tuttu squinted at her, and they continued on up the beach. “Well, maybe you don’t. Anyway, the theory goes that a nuclear war, even a little one, would put a hell of a lot of ash and debris in the atmosphere—remember how that volcano blew near Anchorage a few years back?”

  “Iliamna? Yah, holy shit, that was a big one.”

  “Right. Well, like an umbrella, all that ash would block the heat of the sun from getting in. Some said that was okay, because it would keep the earth’s heat from escaping, too. Anyway, it would make the planet temporarily colder.” She shivered. “I guess the theory’s right.”

  “Another spot on the seal,” Tuttu said. “It’s winter anyway. Come November, there won’t be any fucking sun anyway.”

  “Yeah.” She thought of that. Damn good luck, at least for the Arctic. “So it won’t really matter, will it?”

  “It will matter.” He raised the shotgun, sighted on an iceberg, mimed shooting it. “It will matter because we can get the seal earlier.”

  Something growled from the beach ahead of them. Claudia squinted, tried to make out the shape in the light. Nothing white—she’d see that, if it was nanuq, a polar bear. She reached up for the gun at her shoulder, felt the emptiness, then held out her left hand to Tuttu.

  “Give me my gun, Tuttu,” she said calmly. She pulled off her left mitten with her teeth.

  He hissed—he heard the sound, too—then turned, but by the noise his feet made as he shifted his weight, Claudia didn’t know if he was lining up his shot or turning to her. She squinted harder, and made out a dark shape against a patch of snow: something smaller, not a bear, about fifty yards away and moving fast toward them.

  “I know how the gun shoots, Tuttu,” she said. “I know how to hit that thing.”

  “No way, woman,” Tuttu said. “I can hit it.”

  Claudia glanced over at Tuttu. As he brought the gun to his shoulder, he slid the receiver back, sliding a shell into the chamber: click-chunk. She moved slightly to the right, giving him room. The animal growled, stopped, and she saw its head shift from Tuttu to her and back. Good, she thought, confuse the critter. She moved a little bit more to her right. It clacked its jaws, shut up, ran, and leapt at her.

  Tuttu fired. A flash of flaming gas burst out of the barrel, and a slug shot through the air. Yes, slug, Claudia thought, not hearing the sound of shot spreading; she heard the sound of one big slug ripping the air, not the sound of many pieces of lead. Tuttu grunted. She watched the animal tumble toward her, heard and saw the slug hit it just as she heard something clatter to the ground to her left. The slug hit the animal, at fifty feet a firm thunk; it expelled air—whoof! —then rolled, crunched into the snow.

  Something black moved behind the animal on the ground, a second animal, a hundred feet behind it, then fifty. Claudia looked over at Tuttu. He had fallen to the ground, and was now sitting up, rubbing his shoulder and shaking his head. Her gun lay on the snow between them, the stock of the shotgun pointing toward her. The animal clacked its jaws, whoofing.

  Claudia stepped to the gun, swung down, grabbed it by the barrel with her right hand, and put her left hand around the stock. Slug or shot? she thought. How did Tuttu load it? No time to ask. Sliding the receiver back, hearing the comforting click of the second shell moving up into the chamber, Claudia put the butt of the stock to her shoulder. She spread her feet slightly, braced for the kick of the slug, hoped to hell Tuttu had loaded shot second. Deer shot. As she settled the stock into her armpit she brought the barrel up, looking quickly for the animal, aiming toward where she had heard it stop clicking its jaw.

  The thing was black and the light was dim but its teeth were a white flash through the air. She put the teeth in her sights, lowered the barrel slightly, and pulled the trigger—pulled like her dad had taught her, slow, smooth, with the whole finger, not the fingertip.

  Another flash of flame and smoke spat out the barrel, thrilling in the twilight. The Winchester kicked slightly, not hard like the slug, gentle like with shot. She chambered another round, braced to fire again.

  The shot sang out of the gun, dozens of bits of steel whirring through the air. It hit the black beast, and the animal quivered in mid-stride. It flipped around, stopped, fell. Another? she asked herself. Claudia looked into the night, up the beach. No more. She lowered the shotgun, walked up to the two animals.

  They were each barely four feet long, not quite three feet from front paws to top of head. She rolled the first animal over with the tip of her boot. A dog. A thin, emaciated dog, ribs poking through its skin, a wet, red wad of hamburger where its chest had been. She ejected the third shell, caught it as it came out, loaded it back into the magazine. Tuttu came up to her.

  “That gun’s got a kick,” he said.

  “Why the hell didn’t you load buck first?” she yelled at him. “Of course it’s got a kick if you load a slugger.” She clicked the safety on, kneeled down to look at the dogs.

  Tuttu shook his head. “I had it loaded to kill,” he explained. “Slug, then shot. Slug to stop it, shot to finish it off. They don’t make a lot of shells anymore,” he explained. “First shot’s got to count these days.”

  “Second shot’s got to count, too.” Claudia rolled the dog back over. “Poor thing.”

  “Could have been a polar bear,” Tuttu said. “Ya know?”

  “Yeah.” She slung her Winchester over her shoulder, adjusting the strap so it rubbed against the little silver piece of duct tape; its weight felt good on her shoulder. “A dog. The village lets dogs run loose?”

  He shook his head. “We’ve been eating most of ’em. I saved three bitches, two studs—got ’em in an old house next to the qaregi. Going to need sled dogs someday.” Tuttu kneeled down next to the second dog, the black dog, and felt its neck. “This one slipped its collar. It’s not mine, though.” He pulled his knife out, began gutting it. “Good eating, dog—the Koreans are right about that.”

  “Shit.” She turned away, walked down the beach from him, felt the shotgun on her shoulder. Claudia sighed, slipped it off. Holding it in both hands, she glared at Tuttu. “Guess I shouldn’t have this, huh? Here.” He ignored her, kept gutting the dog she had killed. “Here.”

  “I don’t know, anguguq,” Tuttu said, glancing up. “Hunter.”

  Claudia stopped at the word, set the butt of the shotgun on the ground. “Hunter?” She rolled the Inupiaq word around in her head, translated the phrase: one who has grown into a hunter of small game. She smiled, touched the strap of the shotgun.

  “Hunter,” he said. He turned to her, held up the liver, no bigger than his hand, steaming in the cold. “Your shot, you get the good parts.”

  Claudia kneeled next to him, reached out to take the liver, then shook her head. “Uh, I think . . .” Christ, she didn’t want to eat raw dog’s liver. “I think, Masu, yes, she is the old woman, we should honor her with these kills . . .” What the hell are you saying?

  Tuttu grinned, stuffed the entrails back in the dog’s body, then lifted it up by its legs. He held her kill out to her. “Take it,” he said. “Take it back to the house and show them what you have done.”

  Claudia slung
her shotgun over her shoulder, grasped the thin legs of the dog. Tuttu stood, picked up the dog he’d killed, and they walked back down the beach. At the path up to the qaregi, he stopped and rested, putting the dead dog down.

  “You know,” Tuttu said, “some of the men say that a woman should not hunt.” He held up a hand as she started to protest. “But you are a good shot. Perhaps it is better that our hunters be good shots.”

  Claudia nodded. “Perhaps—”

  “Anthropologist . . . I spoke of this problem to Malgi, and he said . . . He said I should ask you.” He bit his lip, and his voice cracked a little. “Should women hunt?”

  Christ, Claudia thought, had he planned this, dogs and all? Had Malgi seen it? It didn’t make sense. The dog dripped blood at her feet, and its weight grew heavy in her arms, the weight of the shotgun digging into her shoulder . . . She wanted to scream, “Fuck yes, women should hunt, what did I just do?”

  Instead, she mulled the question, cleared her throat, feeling herself go into “lecture gear,” Rob used to call it. “In the old days, I have heard, some women hunted”—she hefted the dog—“if that is what they were good at. We—in these days, Tuttu, I think we will have to follow the ways of the old days. And they say, I think, that if women can hunt well”—she raised the dog high—“then they can damn well hunt.”

  Tuttu listened, his face solemn as he absorbed the idea. He raised his eyebrows, and then squinted his eyes, a hard look on his face that made Claudia tremble.

  “It is good that women can hunt,” he said finally, “because then they will also be able to shoot. They can have guns”—he waved at Claudia’s Winchester—“and I think we will want some women to have guns.”

  She squinted at him, shrugged. “I don’t understand.”

  “Soldiers,” he said. “Warriors. We might need warriors.”

  The weight of the gun, of the dead dog, felt heavier still, and the strap seemed to cut deeper into her shoulder. Warriors? Claudia thought. That was not what she wanted with the gun, not that, not to kill. Who would she have to kill, why?

  “But to hunt,” Tuttu added. “Women hunting?” His eyes opened wide, his mouth a little O, as if some imp had snuck up behind him and whacked him on the back. “Even whales?” he asked, whispering.

  Claudia smiled, thinking of the great mammals, thinking of the spring when the leads would open and the ocean would teem—she hoped—with the leviathans. God, yes, she thought. Whales. Agviq.

  “Even whales,” she said. And she said the phrase she would say a thousand times again. “If agviq is willing.”

  “Ai,” said Tuttu, standing, and they went back to the qaregi.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, when the time between sunrise and sunset was no more than a few hours, Claudia and Tammy walked at the foot of the bluffs to the beached barge, scavenging for firewood. One of the tugs had been pushed over onto its side, keel high out of the water. The barge itself rested solid on the beach, mooring ropes still attached to bulldozers high up on the bluff, the ropes rubbing across the name of the barge: MERCURY. Portable lights had been set up to light the barge’s unloading, but they had been knocked down. Broken shipping crates littered the deck of the barge, cardboard boxes and canned goods spilling out of the crates. Pieces of the crates had been washed up on the beach.

  Tammy stopped, pointed at a red pickup truck, its front wheels hanging over the edge of the barge. “Had a little looting there after the radiation came,” she said. “Tuttu tried to organize an unloading crew, but things got, uh, crazy. There’s still some stuff there, though: drums of flour and a whole bladder of fuel oil. We’ve been meaning to salvage it all.”

  Claudia remembered the Mercury moving by Pingasagruk in early August, the day of the war. The first barge of the short shipping season—the narrow window of opportunity when the shore ice had broken up and the pack ice had moved out to sea—there should have been half a dozen barges after that. She didn’t have to wonder what had happened to the rest of the barges; if the crews had had any sense, they would have landed at the first village and gotten out of the fallout. She marveled at the courage and dedication of Mercury’s crew. It would have taken another day or two to get to Barrow after the war day.

  “What happened to the barge crew?” she asked.

  Turning to Claudia, Tammy shook her head and pointed at the tug beached next to the barge. Its pilot house was scorched, its windows had been shot out. “A waste,” she said, “a damn waste. Those people may have saved our ass by coming here, and for what?” She jerked her head up the coast. “The ravine; they’re in the ravine.”

  Somebody fired a rifle from the top of the bluff, the bullets pinging maybe twenty feet over their heads.

  Tammy and Claudia looked at each other after the first shot, hit the dirt when a second bullet whizzed by, and by the third round they were down on their bellies crawling toward the base of the bluff. At the bluff they hugged the side of the hill, burrowing into the slight dusting of snow that had fallen the night before. Claudia slipped her Winchester off her shoulder; since Tuttu had given her back her gun and they’d run into the dogs, she had carried it whenever she walked around town. She released the safety and started to slide back the receiver. Tammy held her hand, put a finger to her lips, pointed up. Claudia nodded.

  She couldn’t see the person firing from the bluff; he or she must have been back a few feet from the edge. The rifle fired again, and Claudia tried to identify the rifle by the sound, a brief pock-pock-pock. Tammy cocked an ear at the noise, too, then visibly shivered.

  “Assault rifle,” she whispered to Claudia. “Military—heard a lot of them in that madness after the nukes.” She pointed at the barge. Pock-pock-pock: the windows on the red truck shattered.

  “Sounds like three-round bursts,” Claudia said. “What’s that old assault rifle the Army used?”

  “M-sixteen,” Tammy said. “Uh-uh—those are full automatic only. This guy’s firing bursts.”

  Claudia stared over at her. “You some kind of gun nut, girl?”

  Tammy blushed. “Worked at a rifle range once.” She glared back at Claudia. “Hell, it’s a living. Was.” The shooter fired again. Pock-pock-pock. “Could be some kind of selective fire model, maybe a Ruger Mini-fourteen,” she added.

  “Mini-fourteen,” Claudia said. “Eskimo scouts sometimes used Mini-fourteens.” She remembered a footnote to some research she had done on subsistence hunting. Back in the 1980s the Eskimo Scouts wanted a selective fire assault rifle, since as hunters they were used to shooting single shot; they wanted a military gun they could use for hunting, too, if they could con the National Guard into supplying it. “What’s he doing?” Claudia asked. “Target practice?” That would be stupid, she thought; everyone knew bullets were in short supply.

  Tammy shrugged, pointed at the barge again. Pock, pock, pock, the bullets flew through the air and hit the barge. One hit a pallet of plywood sheets, and the plywood began to burn. The line of bullets danced along the barge, through packing crates and tipped-over four-wheelers, to a big gray rubber bag that looked like a deflated whale. As the bullets hit they briefly flared in the early-morning light.

  “Incendiaries,” Claudia said, realizing what the bullets were. “Flamers.”

  “Flamers?” Tammy asked. “Shit, the fuel bladder.” She looked up, at the bare face of the cliff edge, the hard sand and snow and pea gravel sloping up to the top. Tammy shoved Claudia around, pushed her up. “You’ve got to stop him—he’s going to blow the fuel!”

  “What?” Claudia looked back at the barge, at the fiery bullets hitting more pallets of wood, then up at the cliff. Tammy shoved her again. “No,” she said, “not that way.” She imagined them coming over the bluff edge, scrambling up, the shooter hearing the sound and cutting them down as they came up. “No—this way.”

  Claudia scrambled north up the beach, back to where a cluster of houses lined the bluff edge. The shooter would be south of the houses. She ran up a n
arrow cut in the bluff, where spring snow melt had carved a vee in the face, like walking up a rock chimney. Pock-pock-pock, the man—if it was a man—fired. She came to the top, Tammy behind her, ran over to the north side of a house, the man still firing. Christ, she thought, couldn’t he get his range? Tammy stopped behind her; Claudia held a finger up to her lips, pointed north along the bluff, toward the qaregi.

  “Get Tuttu,” she whispered. Tammy nodded, ran off.

  The east wall of the building, the side away from the ocean, slanted south, so that the wall hid her from the shooter. Sliding along the wall, Claudia jacked a shell into the receiver, a slug, she remembered—Tuttu’s idea of a load. She shook her head, ejected the slug, and loaded the buckshot: one-ounce buck, enough to stop a man, and easier to aim. Better.

  Pock-pock-pock, the shots continued. What the hell, what the hell, she kept thinking. He was firing three-shot bursts, and she didn’t know if he would switch to full automatic or what. Claudia tried to imagine the man’s distance, his height, tried to line up the shot before she came out of cover. She had hunted small game before, tracked them and hit them on the run. She had killed ducks and one time even a coyote that had been harassing the family cattle. But rabbits were rabbits, ducks were ducks, and this was a man. Combat, she thought, this was combat, and she’d never done combat—not stalking combat, that encounter with Tuttu had been pure reaction, adrenaline moving her, not this conscious attack. And for what? Maybe the guy was target shooting. So she would shoot him for that?

  No, she argued with herself, that wasn’t it, she knew he was trying to blow the barge, blow the fuel bladder. Someone with a grudge, she thought, someone who wanted to wreck their fuel supply. She hadn’t even known about it before—Tuttu hadn’t told her, and she wondered what else he hadn’t said—but she didn’t have to think hard to figure out the importance of fuel. Fuel would power generators, if they needed electricity, it would power four-wheelers and outboard engines, give them the range to hunt, to feed themselves. That fuel bladder might mean death or survival. But she wasn’t sure she could kill him . . .