Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Something rolled down her cheek from her eyes. She licked at the briny liquid and tasted it and imagined that agviq had blessed her with his sweat. That was what some old-timer told her once: our tears are agviq blessing us with his sweat. That is why you give agviq a drink, the old-timer had said. Our water is our sweat and it is like tears to agviq.

  Water, she thought with a start. We did not water the boat. She wondered if it would displease the whale. She wondered if her menstruating would displease the whale.

  They paddled forward, slowly, but faster or as fast as the whale. Natchiq held up his hand, and Malgi whispered, “Stop.” The whalers brought the paddles up, held them tips up and handles down, the seawater dripping down the clean wood and onto their hands. The umiaq coasted, bumping aside a small hunk of ice.

  It rose. Black like fine obsidian, the whale rose up, no more than twenty yards from them. Claudia did not think it could be so huge. The whale stretched at least as long as the umiaq. It rose farther, arching its back. At the bow of its head, two nostrils flared, two teardrop-shaped depressions on the smooth black back. Agviq exhaled, spraying a plume of misted sea spray down on them. Its exhalation was a roar, a great sigh, and the noise stirred them. Natchiq unlashed the darting gun, and Malgi shouted, “Dig, dig!”

  The whale flapped its flukes, the great black flukes, and pushed forward. Agviq raised his chin and head, and she could see the white spots, the bare white from where the old-timers said the whale had rubbed against ice. The whale did not seem to notice them, or if it did, took no bother. Did this whale know it could be hunted? Was it old enough to remember days when the Inupiaq had come out in boats to receive his blessing? Was it like the whale Claudia had read about once, a sixty-foot old whale killed in ’81 and found with an ivory harpoon head in its side?

  They dug in, struggling to keep up with the whale. How long would it stay on the surface? Claudia thought. She could not remember. She only knew that they had to catch it just before it took a breath, kill it with air in its lungs so it would float to the surface. They paddled, their strokes furious and mad. It did not matter now if the whale heard them. Of course he heard them. “Dig, dig!” Malgi shouted from the stern.

  And she remembered the word for “digger,” the nickname Tuttu sometimes called her: Nivakti. Little digger. Dig. Nivak? Was that the imperative verb? Or should it be “you will dig,” nivakniaqp? Whatever. Dig, though. Dig for treasure, little girl. Dig for the whale.

  She felt the ivory whale against her skin and around her neck, and wished that this whale would become that whale, that he would bless her. She prayed to the whale and heard Malgi next to her mumbling his own prayers. Come to us, agviq, she thought. Honor us. Let us take you. Give us your parka so we may live.

  “Slow,” Natchiq said from up front.

  Claudia glanced over and saw that they had come up next to the whale, that the paddlers ahead of her had to pull their paddles out of the water to keep from hitting the whale. They coasted next to agviq, skin of the umiaq against skin of the whale. She stroked harder to keep pace with it, the tip of her blade barely passing over the whale’s tail. Agviq was not just as long as the umiaq, but twice as long, perhaps forty feet. A ton a foot, forty tons. How much meat could that be? The boat wobbled and she looked up to see what had disturbed them. She saw Natchiq rise.

  Natchiq let out a length of rope attached to the ring of the iron on the darting gun. The rope, the whale line, was connected to three coils of rope in tubs and three orange floats beside the coils. Natchiq leaned into the gunwale, bracing one thigh against the side of the boat, pushing with his left foot. He raised the gun, held it poised over the edge of the boat, harpoon head pointing down at two ridges behind the blowholes, at the whale’s neck. He held the pose, waiting, waiting.

  One flick of agviq’s tail, Claudia thought. One flap of his fins, a kick of his flukes, and that’s it. They would be thrown over into the water, far from their camp, and they would drown or freeze. The whale held still, barely moving, and they held still, barely moving. Why does he wait? she asked herself. Why doesn’t he get it over with?

  Natchiq stared down at the whale, she saw. He looked at the whale’s blowholes. She saw what Natchiq looked for, then, and watched as agviq sucked in air, saw the edges of the holes dilated, pulling in water and spray. Agviq breathed. And as agviq breathed, Natchiq threw the darting gun at the whale, momentum driving the harpoon in.

  First, the harpoon head hit the skin. The weight of the darting gun and the shaft and the throw drove the point of the blade in. The paddlers on Claudia’s side pulled their blades out of the water, quietly setting them down on the umiaq’s bottom. Next, the head disappeared into the skin, and a foot of harpoon shaft followed. Claudia looked for the rod, the trigger rod. Natchiq had thrown the harpoon in and the rod would come next. The rod hit. She saw the orange painted tip touch the whale’s back and then the bomb lance exploded.

  The water erupted. At the touch of the harpoon agviq dove, taking the harpoon with him, and it was as if the harpoon pushed him and the bomb pushed him. The charge fired the bomb into the whale, the bomb lance shoving the gun away from the whale and back out of the water.

  Natchiq fell into his seat, still grasping in his right hand the rope that held the gun to the boat. The motion of the gun through the air jerked the rope taut from Natchiq’s hand, pulling him to the side. His left arm whirled as he flailed for balance, the arm whirling like an amputee helicopter blade.

  The lines sang! From the tubs in the bottom of the boat where the lines had been coiled, the lines whipped out. One long line pulled the other three lines out of the boat. The aft line flew away, snatching a paddle from Malgi’s grasp and wrapping around his arm. The line to the last float wrapped around a cleat on the boat, so that the whale dragged the first two floats and the umiaq, and the umiaq dragged Malgi. As the line fouled on the cleat, it shook the umiaq, paddles flying out of Grigor’s and Puvak’s hands.

  Tuttu sat to her right, his lips moving as he counted. Claudia remembered how the bomb would work. First, it would blow free from the gun and into the whale. Then, the second charge would explode. Five seconds. She watched Tuttu’s lips. One. Two. Three. The float line pulled the old man from the boat, and as he splashed into the water Claudia heard a bone crack. Malgi fell into the water, the boat wobbled, and Tuttu quit counting.

  Tuttu reached over the side to grab his grandfather, but the whale pulled the old man down. Claudia could see a white thing dragging behind them, held underwater by the force, and she could see two of the three orange floats streaming across the water ahead of them. The line between the first two floats and the third float—still in the umiaq—began to pull the cleat’s screws out of the gunwale. If the cleat came free, it would yank the remaining float away, and agviq would take Malgi down with him. Claudia saw this and yelled.

  “Cut the line! Get him!”

  In the bow, Natchiq pulled out the ax. He raised the ax to cut the line between the whale and the cleat, so that the line holding Malgi would remain with the boat, and the rest of the line would be taken by agviq. But as the ax fell, the cleat snapped free. The third float popped out of the umiaq. Tuttu caught the last length of line as it went by, but the rope burned through his fingers and he let go. Cleat, line, float, and Malgi went away with the whale.

  And then, like a kid farting in a bathtub, the bomb exploded ahead of them, from the flesh of the whale. A huge bubble of air burst below and rose to the surface—a red bubble. The orange floats suddenly slowed, then stopped. They watched the pink froth on the sea, looking to see if the whale came up.

  But Malgi sputtered to the surface, his white atigi rising full of air, like a skirt around him. Natchiq put the ax back in its sheath, then reached over with a grapple to pull in the last float, still attached to the sundered line. He passed the float back to Tuttu, who quickly tied it to the stern cleat, and threw it to Malgi. Malgi reached for the float, grabbed it. They began hauling in the line, the fl
oat, pulling the old man to them.

  Someone remembered to paddle and then Claudia got her paddle and they pushed the boat to the old man. Natchiq reached over, with one arm yanked him in, Amaguq and Puvak scuttling aside to make room for the old man. Amaguq pulled off Malgi’s parka and put his own over the old man. Grigor and Puvak reached overboard and recovered their paddles, while the two floats drifted away.

  Tuttu shouted for them to “Dig! dig!” but no one had to be told to do that. Claudia dug in, glancing at the man almost turning blue, trying not to look at the white bone sticking out of his arm. In front of her, Grigor pulled in the last of the nylon line. He held up the end of it, frowned at the frayed ends, the ends burned into little blobs of plastic.

  “The bomb was too big,” he said. “It must have killed the whale.” Everyone looked at the flat sea, but they could not see the whale’s body floating to the surface. They had killed him too well, and he had sunk.

  Claudia looked at the broken line, at Malgi dripping wet but alive. Thank God, she thought. Thank God the bomb was too big.

  Chapter 18

  THEY tried the CB to get help, but either Tammy or Masu wasn’t listening, or one of the radios was broken. So, Natchiq ran toward town to get a sno-go while the whalers got Malgi warm. Claudia didn’t think they should dare set his broken arm while out on the ice, but the sight of the clean, white bone sticking out of Malgi’s skin scared her. Grigor showed them how to bandage and splint the fracture—he seemed to know a fair amount of first aid, too, in addition to his bomb-making skills. Before they set the arm they stripped his wet clothes off, and put on dry clothes brought out for just such a catastrophe.

  While they waited for Natchiq to come back with the snowmachine, the wind had started to shift. Malgi, barely conscious, had made a point of warning them to watch the wind, to be ready to break camp in a hurry; then he had passed out.

  Just as Claudia began to wonder how long it could possibly take Natchiq to come back, she heard the roar of a sno-go, coming fast across the flat ice toward them. Gingerly, Natchiq brought the snowmachine over the ice ridge. He towed a metal sled behind a big, long-track military snowmachine, one of the sno-gos the Eskimo Scouts used. Grigor got on behind Natchiq, while Claudia held the old man in the bottom of the sled, on top of a foam bed and sleeping bag Natchiq had taken the time to throw in.

  Claudia held Malgi as they went back over the ridge and then bounced over the slight humps of the tuvaq. The old man winced at each bump. The cold air pushed her atigi hood back against her neck, and loose hairs from her braids whipped around her face in the wind. Malgi mumbled something.

  “Shh,” she said. He felt light and fragile in her arms. It dawned on her then that he was a small man, a small, old man, though he had always seemed so much larger: bluster and age could make little men seem bigger than they really were.

  “Did we kill the whale?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, because it was true. They had killed the whale, at least wounded it enough that it probably would die soon, somewhere under the ice. She hoped he wouldn’t ask the next question, but of course he did.

  “Did you recover the whale?”

  “No.” She held him tighter as she saw the sno-go hit a bump and first Natchiq, then Grigor, bounce up. Malgi hissed as the trailing sled flew through the air and then bounced on the ice. “No, the bomb was too big; it must have killed the whale and the whale sank.” Claudia smiled. “Fortunately for you, though. The line broke and agviq didn’t drag you under.”

  “He must not have liked me,” Malgi said.

  “I can see why. You’re a tough old coot.”

  He nodded, then drifted off to sleep. They came up to the bluffs, rode along the beach edge and toward the part of town where the bluffs sloped down to the beach and it was easy to drive up into the village. Masu came out of the qaregi as they came to the entrance. Tammy followed her and between the four of them they got Malgi inside and laid out on another mattress. Claudia helped Grigor take his pants off to examine Malgi’s knee. It had become swollen, and Malgi winced when they touched it, but it didn’t seem broken or anything. Grigor wrapped an ace bandage around it, the best he could do without a brace.

  Masu had started boiling water on the stove and Tammy had dragged out a medical kit. They sent Paula over to the medical clinic, and she found more gauze and tape and even a box of plaster of paris. Tammy came up to Malgi with another rarity, a nearly full bottle of Jim Beam whiskey. She held out a glass, opened the top of the bottle, and began to pour a shot for Malgi.

  “No,” he said. He stared at the whiskey and Claudia thought she saw his good hand shake as it moved out to take the glass and then fell away. His lower lip trembled. “Not even for this.”

  “Then take this, husband,” Masu said. She held out a strip of something black, turned it over to show pale pink on its underside. “Someone found this in an old frost cellar.”

  Maktak. “I . . . I cannot,” Malgi stared at the blubber in her hand. “I am not worthy.”

  “You are. You are worthier than any man I know.”

  Grigor took Malgi’s broken arm then, gently, by the upper shoulder, and Claudia reached over to hold his chest. Masu put the maktak between Malgi’s teeth as he opened up his mouth to cry out. He looked at his wife and she looked at her husband. He nodded and bit down on the hard, cold black skin. Grigor pulled his broken bones apart and began to set them. By the time the Soviet was done, the old man had chewed the maktak down to a little strip of mangled flesh. He swallowed the last bit of maktak, a smile on his face, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  After Claudia helped Grigor wrap the last strips of wet plaster around Malgi’s arm—making a cast—she went outside to clear her head. Tammy came out with her. The two women climbed up the ladder to the roof of the qaregi, to the old watchtower. Over the jumble of the flaw the sun slid down to the horizon, the jagged ridge casting long shadows toward them. A stiff wind blew from the southwest.

  The wind shifted, she thought.

  Somewhere beyond the ridge was the whaling camp, Claudia knew. She had brought her Nikons up with her, her good old battered Nikons, and scanned the ice out of habit. It occurred to her that she should have left the binoculars at the camp. Take ’em back tomorrow, she thought.

  A shadow moved from behind a ridge. Claudia quickly focused on the shadow, but the glare from the direct sun made it hard to see. Another shadow moved out from the jumbled ice, into the shadows cast by the ridge, and she could see what they were: the whaling crew. Two, three more men moved along the path, dragging the big umiaq on the kamotiq.

  “Tuttu’s coming back,” she said, handing the binoculars to Tammy.

  Tammy squinted through them, gave the Nikons back to Claudia. “Why?”

  Claudia shrugged. “I hope . . . I don’t know.”

  The two women rushed down back into the qaregi, out the entrance tunnel and down the bluff. Masu looked up at them as they went out; Claudia had quickly told them she was “going to meet the whaling crew,” and left.

  They met Tuttu and Amaguq and the rest halfway on the flat tuvaq. Claudia took Puvak’s line at the sled, relieving the boy; he scurried back to take one of the guy lines that kept the umiaq from tipping over. Tammy walked behind Claudia and Tuttu at the bow, pushing at the boat as it came to rough spots in the ice.

  “What happened?” Claudia asked Tuttu.

  “The uiniq closed,” he said. “The wind shifted and the lead closed. We would have waited for it to open again, but the wind started to move the ice at the flaw edge—move us.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Yeah, shit.” Tuttu grunted as he leaned into the harness, yanking the sled over a slight warp in the ice. “Anyway, we climbed to the ridge and saw that a lead had opened beyond, and that whales were in it.” He shook his head. “But we couldn’t get across the rotten ice between us and the lead: too thick to paddle through, too thin to walk on. We came back.”

  “
The wind may shift again.”

  Tuttu glared at her, grunted again. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  * * *

  So they waited. On the ice, on the shore, cold or warm, it didn’t matter, Claudia thought. They waited. They dragged the umiaq and the gear back into the PSO garage, and fixed the things they should have fixed first.

  In the garage, Tuttu passed out shares of blame instead of shares of meat. First, he berated Natchiq up and down for putting the brass cleats around the top of the gunwales. “Those damn cleats almost killed the old man!” he screamed. “What a dumb-fuck idea! You should have known the lines would foul on them.”

  “I didn’t, Cousin,” Natchiq said. “And why didn’t you know?”

  Why didn’t I know? Claudia asked herself. She should have. She’d read the whaling books, the reports, the accounts. She should have known, too.

  Tuttu snorted at Natchiq’s reply, turned his wrath to the Soviet. Grigor had come up to the garage to help when he’d heard the whalers had returned. “And you!” Tuttu yelled. “Crazy Commie! You said you knew bombs? What do you want to do—nuke us?”

  Grigor turned red, stamped his foot. “Fool! The bomb blew! I am not used to your powder—it is gunpowder, I do not know the proper charge. You would not let me test the charge, you did not want to ‘waste powder,’ you said. I didn’t, and we wasted a whale! Blame yourself! The cartridge worked, anyway.” Grigor turned, crossed his arms, ignoring Tuttu.

  “And you,” Tuttu said, turning to Claudia.

  Here it comes, she thought. The greater share of blame. It is all my fault, of course, me, the anthropologist—the woman.

  “Anthro-POL-o-gist.” He spat the word. “You told us nothing of our traditions. Do you know them? What ceremonies should we perform? How should we act toward agviq? Perhaps the whale turned from us because we insulted him. Perhaps the wind shifted because of you!”