Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Soon, she knew, village children would climb these same steps to look out at the ice and watch for the opening of the uiniq, the lead—perhaps even to see the misty plumes of agviq’s return. Now, Claudia climbed these steps to see the plan of the town, to see where streets had been and houses had been; to see where to begin digging for treasure.

  At the top of the tower she paused to catch her breath, then took out her binoculars and scanned the town. She looked at the town not as her home of some months, but the way she would look at a site. She looked at it to find things. She looked to see where houses would be, buried under the drifts, to correlate her street map with addresses and house locations.

  Claudia looked for whalers.

  Days before, she had pored over various books and reports still intact in the museum director’s office. That had been a start. In the museum Malgi had pointed out the guns, the tools, the artifacts he remembered as being useful for whaling, but most of the tools had been broken and useless—why else would they wind up in a museum? In the office they had found something equally valuable: all the old references, the classic texts of ethnography and history, archaeology and anthropology, stories and accounts. Helen Hughes’s whaling survey—with names and addresses of whalers—had proved invaluable. Claudia interviewed the surviving elders, interviewed Malgi, until she had come up with as many possible locations of old whalers. And now she stood on the roof, trying to figure out whose homes still stood, where the rubble would be of homes that had collapsed or had been looted. She tried to figure out who lived where and where they might find working tools and weapons, or the logbooks and maybe even journals of old whalers.

  A brisk wind rattled the steel panels of the building, robbing heat from her bare fingers. No matter. Claudia had long ago learned the trick of working with her hands in cold and rain. She marked block locations and house locations on her map with a big yellow marker. There, a neat green house almost directly across from the weather station: Igaluk’s mother’s family, whalers for six generations. At the edge of the site, the log home that had been robbed for firewood: Amaguq’s uncle, a big man in the corporation who had moved to Anchorage a few years back, a great whaler. And so on.

  The wind blew across the town, blowing in from the sun, throwing the snow into drifts. Houses and old cars and piles of junk became teardrops in the plain, round lumps covered with snow and spreading drifts like comet tails. Smoke rose from homes scattered around the town, beaten paths connected the houses to each other and to the gym, to the cable station, to the pack ice. Many of the old streets remained covered, discernible only as long open lines empty of structures. The tiny village clung to the edge of the sea, on a spit of humanity between ocean and the vast emptiness of the land. This could be all there is in the world, Claudia thought. There could be no one else.

  It could be like long ago, when the Inupiaq and their ancestors had only dim knowledge of people beyond their cognitive horizons. They would have known of others like them or similar to them, down the coast and inland, because it was from those people that they acquired goods they could not make or find: steel points in their later years, beads from the Russians, jade from the Nunanimiut far inland. This land and this place would be their center, she thought. It is now our center. The world cannot revolve around Washington or New York or even Tokyo anymore; those places did not exist anymore. It was only them, and whoever sent them Walter Cronkite. And the Soviets, if Grigor could be believed. And who else? she thought.

  Who else?

  * * *

  “Ah—here,” said Malgi. He pointed at a drifted-over house with his unaaq. “Simeon’s house, my father’s brother. He died long ago, but his daughter lived here, until . . . we never found her body.”

  “He was a good whaler?” she asked.

  “Ten whales in his lifetime, the first when he was but eighteen. My father and Simeon crewed with their father and then together when Grandpa died and I crewed with them.” Malgi scratched at a depression in the drift, on the leeward side. Claudia had marked the house on her map, but Malgi took her straight to it.

  She turned to Tuttu and Amaguq, to Aluaq, and smiled. She was on her turf now: boss lady of an excavation. “Dig,” she said. “Find the door and we’ll go in.”

  The three men moved snow off the side of the house, and quickly hit something hard and shiny. Ice? Claudia stopped them and crawled through the little tunnel they’d made. With her trowel she scraped at the snow, the old muscles burning in her palm and fingers. A trowel! The touch and texture of it thrilled her. She was back in her element. She scraped away packed snow and loose snow, layer upon layer the way drifted snow built up, then hit hard ice, solid ice. The tip of the trowel wouldn’t yield and squeaked against the ice. She frowned, pushed harder, trying to understand this new thing. Claudia smiled then at the realization. Glass.

  “It’s a window,” she said. She crawled out, looked at Malgi. “You want to save the glass or go right in?”

  “Save it,” Malgi said. “They don’t make glass anymore, you know?”

  She nodded and said, “Then we need to find the door.” Figure the house used plywood siding, she thought. It would be in four-by-eight dimensions. Two pieces of plywood end to end between the door and the wall, toward the middle of the house. Put the door in the middle? It made sense. “It would be”—she paced out two strides, about eight feet—“about right here.”

  The men dug, and when they tired briefly, Claudia took over. Close in work. She used the little folding shovel brought up from Pingasagruk, the one she had tried to bury the dead blond woman with at the ravine, the one who looked like her sister. The point of the shovel hit something solid. She slammed it in again, pulled the shovel out. A bit of packed snow with a splinter of wood stuck to the cold steel.

  “Bingo,” she said. “Go at it, guys.”

  Tuttu smiled, and began whaling away at the entrance. The way he swung the shovel, the way he raised the blade up and down with such earnestness, reminded her of Jules, another undergraduate student she’d worked with a few summers back. She had just started her master’s and Jules was finishing up his bachelor’s. Unlike Rob, Jules hadn’t been shy or intimidated. They’d had an intense affair that dig, and then he went off to do Meso-American stuff and she’d stayed with Arctic.

  Big pyramids suited him better, she thought, watching the powerful but cavalier work of Tuttu. Jules could never catch on to the concept of digging in narrow levels of ten centimeters. Unwatched and unrestrained, he could dig to sterile in two days, permafrost or not. But he’d been hell on piss-filled entrance tunnels.

  Tuttu swung down with his shovel, and suddenly he pitched forward and rolled down the angled hole to the door. He came up laughing, rubbing his head. He handed the shovel to Claudia. She took it, laid it down. Tuttu held his hand out and pulled her down.

  “It’s open, Nivakti,” he said. Her old nickname. Digger. Cute, she thought.

  She flicked on a flashlight and followed him into the cold house. Tuttu helped Malgi down into the house. It was one of those old government houses, either a BIA tin box or one of the ones brought up by Karl’s company that cost two hundred thousand dollars and had the insulation of a wasp’s nest. Claudia shined the flashlight into corners of the house, impressed by the bright beam. Lithium batteries, she thought. Good old Natchiq had found a stash at the cable company—for camcorders—and rigged up a recharger. Bless him.

  At first she thought the house had been abandoned and never lived in, so neat and sterile was it. No pictures on the wall, save an old North Slope Borough calendar and a dime-store Jesus print. One couch and two chairs. She moved toward the kitchen. A bloodstained piece of plywood lay against one wall, a set of two ulus hung on nails next to the sink. Nothing else but a few pans on the stove. And there, on a plastic cutting board, three pieces of red meat and black stuff like candle wax stuck to it. A microwave oven door had fallen open, and on a platter was another piece of the meat. The black stuff confused her fo
r a moment. She turned to Malgi, padding softly behind her, his unaaq tapping on the linoleum floor. Tuttu stood by his grandfather. She shone the light on him and back on the meat.

  “Maktak,” he said.

  Whale flesh and whale blubber. That shouldn’t be. All the whale meat should have been eaten before the last time the whalers could go out for whales. Or maybe some had been saved when Malgi’s Uncle Simeon had found out he couldn’t go whaling again. Maybe it had been the last. Maybe his daughter had found it in her freezer, and had been going to thaw it and eat it because the war had come. Something had stopped her . . .

  Claudia whirled the flashlight beam around, toward what would be the backdoor of the house.

  “Azah,” Malgi said.

  “Shit,” said Tuttu.

  “We never found her body out on . . . on the tundra,” the old man said. “Things came up. There were so many others to look for, we couldn’t look for everyone.”

  Claudia shined the light on the dead woman, crumpled by the door. A small hole pierced the little window of the backdoor, cracking the glass into a spider’s web. A small hole bored through the woman’s chest, the bullet pushing her against the wall opposite. She didn’t want to turn the woman over, didn’t want to seek the origin of the brick-brown stain on the floor. She didn’t want to find where the bullet had wound up. It didn’t matter. Malgi’s cousin had gone to answer the door and been shot. Or maybe she had just been standing by it, hit by a stray shot flying through town.

  Tuttu pulled a curtain down from the window over the sink—what a silly honkey idea, Claudia thought, a window over the sink—and covered the woman with it. “We’ll bury her in the summer,” he said. “I’ll—I’ll wait in the other room. ”

  His face seemed paler—pale, perhaps, not at the death itself but the deaths it recalled, Claudia thought. She felt herself go cold from the house and the body, and thought, Yes, we will find many more under the snow and bury many bodies in the summer.

  She shone the light back around the kitchen, moved down a hallway to a bedroom. One room was almost empty, bare but for an unmade bed and a small bookshelf holding child’s toys. Malgi had said his cousin had a son who had joined the Army, been kicked out, and wound up in Fairbanks. The boy had never come back. He said the son had been found hypothermic in the street, with a blood alcohol level of 25 percent. To the other room . . .

  A double bed, two big reindeer hide skins over it. A woman’s atigi hung from a hook next to the door. Claudia touched it, ran her fingers over the embroidery on the covering. The hairs of the ruff fluffed against her touch, and the sheepskin hide felt thick on the inside of the parka. She looked at Malgi, and he nodded.

  “Masu might like that,” he said.

  A massive dresser stood against the right wall, more like a big chest than a dresser. A hutch, actually, she thought. For fine china. On the shelves and behind the glass doors, though, row upon row of tiny white figurines shone like teeth. Ivory. Carvings. She slid back the doors and ran the beam of light over the carvings.

  Polar bears and seals. Musk ox. Walruses. Four cribbage boards with scrimshaw scenes: a racing dog team, a village scene, and two whaling scenes. One scene showed a skin boat coming up on the whale, harpoonist with darting lance raised; the other showed a group of people pulling the whale out of the water. And whales. Dozens of whales. Whales sounding. Whales diving. Mother and child whales. Two whales copulated face-to-face, snouts raised and flukes down, fins hugging each other. And a large whale, lines etched in it like a butchering diagram. Exactly. She picked it up, showed it to Malgi.

  “Ah, the shares,” he said. He ran his fingers over the lines, squinted at tiny words etched in an odd cursive script. “The names of them. I’d forgotten.” He smiled, slipped the carving in his pocket.

  They began opening drawers, sliding doors back. On a lower shelf were maybe twenty artifacts, mostly harpoon heads and points. Small points, for seals. Barbed points, out of antler, for arrows. Some heads had empty slots, others had ground purple slate points set in them. There were two massive harpoon heads bigger than her hand, each inset with shiny steel blades. Whale harpoons. At the base of one head had been etched twelve sketches of whales, the early ones crude and simple, the later ones more fluid, more lifelike.

  “Here,” said Malgi. She turned the light toward him.

  He stood by a gun case, the same Colonial style as the hutch. Probably mail order from a furniture store in Anchorage, Claudia thought. Malgi had unlocked the doors—the key still in the lock—and held out an odd-looking gun. The barrel of the gun was smooth, about eighteen inches long, and ended in a squat action. The stock of the gun was an open trapezoid, the butt rounded for the shoulder. Malgi clicked something on the action, and opened the barrel of the gun like a breech loading shotgun.

  “Pierce bomb gun,” he said. “I had one just like it, but on my last hunt it fell overboard. Someone in an aluminum boat ran into us.” He frowned, the remembered hurt and loss and anger flickering across his face. He hefted the bomb gun, and grinned. “If my uncle had bombs . . .” He rummaged in drawers at the bottom of the cabinet, pulled out two pointed rods the length of the barrel that looked like Fourth of July skyrockets without the stick. “Ah. Ah.” Malgi’s grin grew larger as he slid a bomb into the gun.

  Someone came down the hallway after them, and Claudia saw the light of a flashlight bobbing around corners and then come into the room. Tuttu swept the flashlight before him, stopped it on the old man. Malgi held the bomb gun with both hands, raised it over his head, and laughed.

  “Grandfather?” Tuttu asked. “I heard noise . . .”

  “Airigaaa!” Malgi said. “Look at this, Grandson. Look at this! Now! Now we can hunt the whale!”

  “Grandfather,” Tuttu whispered, seeing the gun, the ivory carvings on the case, the points and lances and harpoon heads and the atigi hanging by a hook on the wall. He raised his eyebrows and smiled a grin to match Malgi’s. “Such treasure . . . Ai, Grandfather. Perhaps we can hunt the whale now.”

  Perhaps we can, Claudia thought to herself, adding a silent prayer. Perhaps we can—if the whale lets us.

  Chapter 16

  CLAUDIA looked up at the weather tower, to Grigor standing at the railing with the darting gun in his hand. He attached the gun—iron, bomb lance, and wooden staff—to two pulleys on a wire that sloped down from the tower and to a mound of packed snow. Village kids had shaped the mound of snow to look something like a whale, but not the whale, not agviq, but more like a storybook whale: all head and little tail. Inside the snow a sheet of plywood with foam tacked to it had been buried.

  She stood well back from the mock whale, with Amaguq and Tuttu and the rest. Grigor, Natchiq, and Malgi fumbled with the darting gun from up on the tower. Malgi had decided that Natchiq would be the whaling crew’s harpoonist, since he was the best shot with a rifle and had the best eyes. Grigor took a special interest in the test, because he had, after all, loaded the charge that would explode the bomb.

  Tammy bobbed nervously next to Claudia, shifting her feet left, right, left, right in the cold. Their breath rose in steamy clouds and fell into a small fog over the swampy land to the northwest. Kids ran squealing across the field, climbing up and down on the “tail” of the target, away from the wire.

  “Ready?” Tuttu yelled up to Grigor.

  The Soviet finished clipping the darting gun to the wire, and shouted back to Tuttu. “Ready.”

  “Get those kids out of there,” he said to Tammy.

  She scowled at him, then sighed, and chased the five or so children back to the watching group. About thirty villagers had come out to watch the test of the darting gun, many of them convinced it would not work, some eager to see its spectacular failure. The people quieted, the children tittered nervously, and Grigor released the gun.

  The shaft fell down the wire, the wire that guided the gun down to the mound of snow. The cable went through the snow and to a post pounded in the ground beyond. As the
darting gun fell, Claudia thought that that would not be the way it would fly toward agviq. Natchiq would throw the harpoon into the hard skin of the whale. Gravity would do part of the work, true, but not like this. The real thrust would rely on human muscle and human aim and human skill, not on a wire guiding the bomb to some kid-carved whale’s brain. This was a test. It was only a test, not of someone’s skill at throwing harpoons, but of the powder, the bomb, the technology.

  The pulleys sang as they rolled down the wire. Tuttu glanced at his watch, at the Rolex he’d recovered from Karl’s body, and he counted the seconds as the lance hit the snow. “One,” he said, as the harpoon head slid into the packed powder. “Two,” he said as the firing rod followed the head of the iron. “Three, four, five—”

  Smoke and mist billowed from the packed snow. The wooden shaft shot back out, spinning around the cable in a wobbly spiral, the cable itself whipsawing back and forth, rattling the side of the weather tower where it had been attached, rattling the post on the ground. The villagers ducked as the cable threatened to work loose, but it held.

  Out shot, too, the darting gun itself, a unit two feet long set on top of the harpoon shaft that held the iron and fired the bomb. On the hunt the darting gun would be attached to the shaft, Claudia knew, and the darting iron would be tied to floats. Now everything was attached to nothing, free to fly on its own. And it did. The darting gun broke loose from the shaft and flew out end over end. The villagers ducked lower. Claudia glanced quickly to see that the bomb had come loose, that its charge had fired the bomb free from the gun. It had.