“Gently, gently,” Malgi whispered to him, coaching him. Puvak snugged the hook against the sealskin, one point pressed against the side. “Now jerk, hard.”
He jerked, and the manaq broke the skin, the barb sinking below the flesh. Puvak reeled in the seal, laughing and laughing, throwing the end to his father, who took up the slack from the firmer ice. The manaq turned, the seal turned, head toward shore, and father and son pulled it up on the thin ice. Puvak reached down, picked up the unaaq, and scuttled back to his father, back to the hard ice. Tuttu and Natchiq dragged the seal up onto the ice. The blood froze on the seal’s coat, the seawater froze over the blood, and when it came out of the water, it had become sheathed in a thin coat of ice.
“Arriga!” Puvak said. His mouth opened wide to yell louder, but Amaguq shushed him.
“Do you want to scare away the other seals so your father won’t get any?” he teased. He hugged his son.
Tuttu and Natchiq dragged the seal by its flippers to the sled, laying it on its back in the snow as the blood dripped and froze. Malgi knelt down by the seal, looked at the bullet hole in the seal’s head—head on to the cerebral dome, shattering it—and patted the seal’s stomach. He whispered to it. Claudia remembered something.
“Get your thermos,” she said to Puvak.
The boy frowned at her, then nodded, and took out a quart-size steel thermos from the sled. He unscrewed the cap, handed the cup and bottle to Claudia. She waved a hand toward Malgi.
“Give it to Malgi. He knows.”
Malgi looked up at her, squinting, asking a question with his eyes. Claudia grinned, held up her hand to her lips, miming a person drinking from the bottle. Malgi nodded and smiled back, then took the thermos from the boy.
“You must give the seal a drink of fresh water,” Malgi explained. “To thank him for giving us his . . . parka.” He uncapped the thermos, poured steaming hot water into the cup, and with the seal’s mouth in one hand, let the water flow down the seal’s tongue. “If we give the seal a drink of fresh water, he will return to us again.”
Puvak looked at the old man, looked at Claudia, and she saw in his eyes a glare that seemed to say “You’re crazy, old man.” The other hunters stared back at the boy, at Malgi, glancing briefly at her, and Claudia saw in their faces the same expression. Then each man’s gaze flickered from disbelief to something else, some latent echo of their culture, and she felt the same shudder as the seal’s soul passed through them and back into the sea.
Perhaps that, she thought, or perhaps the cold. The custom, which she knew only as custom, as old words in old ethnographies, became something else: belief, fact, truth. Puvak stared into her eyes and the eyes of his father. He bowed his head, took the cup from the old man, and gave the seal the last of its drink.
“Thank you, natchiq,” Puvak said. “Thank you for my first good kill.”
A good kill, Claudia thought, catching the slight inflection in the boy’s words. A good, clean kill, not murder, not the kill of a soldier, but the kill of a hunter. Killing for food, killing to fill the belly. A good kill.
Natchiq turned to the open water, scanning it for more bobbing heads. “Let us kill more seals,” he said, and she caught the embarrassment in his voice. The boy had made the first kill and now the men would have to equal it.
If they could.
* * *
No more seals came to that spot. The seals knew, Claudia thought. They could smell the blood of their brother on the sea, had heard the sound of the rifle, and had understood the sound. Even after all those years, they had learned quickly. That cracking sound meant death; stay away, little brothers, stay away from the things that shout thunder and spit lead.
The hunters waited at the ice edge where Puvak had gotten his seal, and while a few seals’ heads popped up out in the lead, none came close enough for a good shot. Amaguq shifted nervously on a foam pad—hard and cracked in the cold—and it was all he could do to keep from pacing around. The other hunters waited no better, except for Malgi. The old man, Claudia observed, had never lost that essential Inupiaq trait. He sat still, knees straight before him, rifle on its open case across his legs, scanning the sea.
No seals came, and after what seemed like an hour, Malgi finally stood. At the movement, the other men and the boy got up, and Claudia stretched with them, stamping the cold from her feet. Natchiq uncapped the thermos and passed around a cup of still-hot tea. Malgi took the last sip, smiled as the warmth passed through his lips and down his throat, then handed the brown-stained cup back to Natchiq.
“Your inua does not honor us,” Malgi said. He glanced at Claudia, raised an eyebrow, and looked out to the uiniq.
She followed his gaze, peered into the gloom of the dark sea. The sun had never risen above the horizon, of course, but refracted rays had bounced up from the south, giving them enough light to see by for a few brief hours. Those hours were ending; even that light faded. Claudia guessed what Malgi thought as he looked out at the open: even if a seal rose up feet from the ice edge, would they have enough light to make a good shot?
“We should go back,” the old man said.
At his words the hunters gathered up their gear. Tuttu deflated the raft and laid it on the pulkka. He gently set Puvak’s seal in the raft, and strapped everything tight. Tuttu told Puvak it would be a great honor to drag the sled back by himself, but the boy laughed off the suggestion.
“I should share the honor with you, Uncle,” he said.
Amaguq clapped his son on the shoulder, beaming at his good humor, and took the harness for himself. All the way back the older men and Claudia traded off pulling the pulkka. Holes parted in the dark clouds and the light of the Big Dipper helped guide them home. Except for the huff of the hunter working as human sled dog, and the scrape of the plastic sled across the ice, the tuvaq was silent.
Claudia felt warm in her parka, felt warm from the exercise. The pull of the harness actually was pleasant, the extra effort resulting in muscles straining and cooking, the exertion warming the blood and pumping it through her extremities. Natchiq pushed the sled behind her as she climbed up the high ridge of the landfast ice. She let Puvak take the sled when they came to the end of the jumble of old ice and the flat plain of the tuvaq between the ridge and shore opened up.
Utqiagvik glowed to the northeast. The old man walked next to the young boy, whispered Inupiaq words into Puvak’s ear. The boy picked up the pace as the rhythm of the words beat through the night. Claudia let the words roll over her ears, smiled as Malgi translated the song for the boy.
“I have caught my first seal,” he said.
“I am strong and a good hunter now,
“My family will eat my first seal.
“I give my first seal to my aana.
“The seal that came to me that I shot.
“I thank you, natchiq, for honoring me.
“For letting me become a hunter.”
The hunters returned home.
Chapter 12
A FEW days after Puvak got his first seal, the hunters went out on the ice again. Malgi’s arthritic knees had been visibly paining him. When the old man made preparations to come with them, Tuttu asked him to stay behind and “commune with the seals and ask them to come with us.” Malgi admitted that they would need all the help they could get, since they were “lousy hunters,” and the face-saving suggestion worked.
Claudia set out with Amaguq, Natchiq, and Tuttu. Since Puvak had killed his first seal and proven himself as a hunter, the boy was welcomed; Natchiq thought he might bring good luck. Puvak pulled the pulkka across the flat tuvaq and up to the little mountain range where the ice pack pushed up against the landfast ice.
They’d left the village early, when the night was pitch black and the ice glowed like a scratched mirror. A steady southeast wind had blown snow across their old trail. Still, they easily picked it out by looking for the hard-packed path the weight of the seal-heavy pulkka had made on their last trip. The deep black canopy
of the dust cloud still covered much of the sky, but holes had begun to appear in it. Some brighter stars poked through the inky cap over the sky. It seemed to Claudia that the cloud of dust had shrunk, too; the sky was clear from the horizon to a declination of fifty degrees, so that only the constellations around the North Star were obscured.
The hunters climbed over the ice ridge and down to the edge of the uiniq, the open lead. Claudia knew no sun would rise for them still, but they’d learned from the earlier trip to arrive at the ice in complete dark, and wait for the sun to rise near the horizon, the rays bouncing off the atmosphere and granting them a brief twilight. Puvak took off the sled’s harness, pulled out the rubber raft, and began pumping it up. Amaguq smiled at his son. He smiled at Claudia, nodded. She remembered that the pumping had brought the seals before, and grinned at his gesture: the boy would bring the seals to the men and allow them the first shot, allow them to do what he had done on the last trip.
A dim glow spread out from behind them, the light like a city on the horizon, giving the chunks of ice relief and definition, making it easier to distinguish little round heads from floating icebergs. She looked at the open water, but saw nothing yet, nothing beyond the pack to the north and the cold, dark water between.
Claudia picked up a flat piece of ice, set it down quietly near the ice edge. She took her borrowed rifle out of its case, unwrapping the two-foot-square piece of foam padding from around the Ruger, and sat down on the pad. She laid the rifle across her thighs. In her parka pocket she felt the cartridges, warm and ready to be slipped into the rifle. Tuttu, Natchiq, and Amaguq had already loaded a round into their rifles. Whoever saw the seal first would have first shot; Claudia and Puvak would then load their rifles and back-up the shots, if necessary.
She didn’t think this ice edge sealing would work. The night before she and Malgi had discussed the merits of it with Tuttu. No one had any real experience with winter seal hunting, except Malgi, and that had been more than a decade before the war. Malgi argued that ice edge sealing worked if hunters could range up and down the open leads, going from one spot to another and following the seals when the rifle shots scared them off. It had worked well with snowmachines, Malgi said, but they couldn’t waste the gas on the snowmachines, not then. It had worked well before that with dog teams, but they only had the five dogs Tuttu had saved, and he didn’t want to risk the dogs until the bitches had a spring litter. Malgi argued that without snowmachines or dog teams such sealing would be worthless. Better to spend the time waiting at the allu, the seal-breathing holes, like the polar bears did, he maintained.
Maybe he was right, Claudia thought, but they should still give ice-edge hunting another try. If they got one more seal, Tuttu told Malgi, that would be one more seal than they had. Claudia knew what bothered Tuttu, though, and why he wanted to hunt at the open leads. The wait. Good as they were at waiting, Tuttu was right in guessing that no one had the stamina to wait for hours at a time in subzero weather, for a seal that would or would not come.
“This seal will come,” Tuttu had said earlier that morning. “I dreamed a great seal rose from the ice edge and that my shoulders ached from pulling it to shore.”
The twilight grew brighter. Some of the dimmer stars faded away. The cold water turned from deep black to almost blue, and they could see the ice and the things that moved among the ice clearly. Claudia watched the far edge of the lead, watched where the ice began again, a distance of maybe half a mile.
Something seemed to rise at the other side of the lead. At first Claudia thought it was a shadow cast by an iceberg against the pack ice, but as the light changed slightly, she felt that it was definitely something other than ice. Perhaps a whale, she thought. Would the bowheads come by here this late? That would be a boon; perhaps they could change their tactics, dredge up old whaling guns and harpoons and go for bowheads.
Perhaps it was even agviqluaq, she thought. She remembered seeing the whales the day her world ended, remembered the gray whales rising and falling. Hadn’t there been some gray whales caught in the ice off Utqiagvik once? When she was just a girl she remembered the story. It had been on TV nightly for three weeks and become the talk of her fourth-grade class. They had all saved milk money and sent a check to the “Eskimos at Point Barrow” to pay for the rescue effort to free the whales. That had been when she had first heard of Barrow, of Eskimos and whales and the Arctic. Could that thing be a gray whale?
No, she thought, any gray in these waters this late in the year would be dead, or should be dead. Only the bowhead, only agviq could survive ice. Agviq had already gone on, would not return, if he returned at all, until the spring.
The thing across the water seemed to shimmer, to change shape. As the twilight increased, as the sun came closer to the horizon, not quite rising above it, dark shapes became clearer and icebergs became more like icebergs. Claudia watched the whale shape move, become clearer. For a moment it seemed distinct and obvious, an object clean and not rounded, two straight lines perpendicular against the ice, with a straight line across the top, and a rectangular shape on a curved shape, like a box on the back of a whale. But then the light shifted again, and the whale thing changed again. She saw it for what it was: an iceberg. It had only been an iceberg. Claudia laughed at herself, at the things cold could do to the imagination and to eyes. She felt glad she hadn’t mentioned the thing to the others, and they hadn’t seemed to have seen anything.
But out from the lead a light did flash at them, a blinking light, a strobe, a quick pulse for every heartbeat. It should not have been there, not on the ice. Nothing so mechanical, so human, had a right to exist there.
“What the hell . . . ?” Tuttu asked.
He turned from the light to the sled and quickly undid the raft from the pulkka. The twilight had dimmed the stars, but could not dim the steady blinking of the strobe. By no stretch of the imagination could the strobe be seen as anything else but something artificial, something made, something other.
Amaguq helped push the raft to the edge of the open lead. Tuttu took the oars from the raft bottom, and set them in the locks. He got in the raft, quickly turning around to sit. Natchiq and Amaguq reached forward and shoved Tuttu and the raft into the water; the edge was firm and it held both their weight.
Breaking through new, thin ice, Tuttu rowed out to the light. The current pushed the light toward them, and Claudia wondered if that meant the pack ice would close the lead. Maybe. The raft and Tuttu disappeared against the black of the sea, but the hunters could hear the steady splashing of his oars. The sound of his rowing grew more and more distant. Claudia tried to estimate how far away the beacon flashed. Five hundred yards? A thousand?
Puvak rummaged in the bag of the sled and pulled out a Peak camp stove—my camp stove, Claudia thought. No, ours, she quickly corrected herself. He set the stove on a piece of scrap plywood, and Claudia went to help him.
The wind kicked up slightly, blowing from the northwest, and it brought a chill with it. Cold snuck into the gaps between her atigi and her mittens, around the ruff of her hood and against her face. Puvak had extended the legs of the little Coleman camp stove and had started to pump it, bringing the gas up to pressure. As he screwed the pump tight and slipped his gloves back on, Claudia took over.
Damned Peak stoves always need priming, she thought. She spread a squiggle of precious priming paste on the generator, cupped her hands and lit the paste with her pocket lighter. The little high-tech system—lighter, paste, stove—impressed her, but depressed her at the same time. They might have disposable lighters for a long time—Tammy had saved a whole box at Stuaqpak—but the gas and the paste would give out soon. And then how would they boil water at the ice edge in the middle of winter?
The paste flamed and the thumb tip of her left polypro glove melted back. She pulled her hand away, slipped off her other mitten, and then while the generator was still warm, turned the lever on the gas and lit the stove. Yellow flames licked up around the gray
metal of the burner. With her right hand she quickly pumped the stove. As air mixed with gas the flames turned from yellow to red to orange to blue, and the trusty camp stove roared like an engine. Claudia grinned at the fire, held her hands over the warmth, then slipped them back in her mittens.
Amaguq helped them and brought over a blackened pot, and dropped chunks of blue ice—ice chipped from the ridges back from the lead—into the pot. The stove roared and the pot shook and steam rose up from melting ice. Claudia and Puvak tended the stove, and it wasn’t until Natchiq tapped her on the shoulder that she realized Tuttu had come back.
The beacon flashed closer, now appearing, now disappearing behind some shape. As Tuttu got closer, she saw that he towed something behind him, and the beacon was on that thing. He rowed with the wind. Wind and current pushed Tuttu and the raft up the ice from them. Natchiq and Amaguq grabbed unaaqs and ran to meet him.
The two men snagged the guylines of the raft with the gaff end of the unaaqs, pulling Tuttu up on solid ice. He jumped out, reached to the stern of the raft for a rope tied to the thing behind, and yanked it up behind him. Natchiq and Amaguq helped him drag the thing up onto hard ice.
It looked like an orange seal, perhaps an ugruk, with three-fingered hands, broad feet. A white face stared up at them from inside an orange head, and the beacon flashed from the crown of the head. Green stripes reflected light back from the strobe, stripes running across the thing’s chest and around its shoulders. Claudia stood over the thing as the three men pulled it out of the water.
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