Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Huge and massive, she thought of it swimming through the cold water. If ice stood in its way, agviq would burst through it. The bowhead knows the path, knows where to go. Claudia sent her thoughts out to the whale, lurking unseen down the lead from them. Come, agviq, come to us who are unworthy. Give us your parka so we may become worthier. Come. Come.

  A shout! Puvak uttered only one syllable in his excitement. “Ag”—he scrambled down the ridge—“viq”—the last syllable lost in his tumbling fall down. “There! There!” He pointed across the lead, and down the lead.

  Claudia took the binoculars from him, focused on a plume of misty breath rising. Yes, the whale, she thought. One, no, two. Two plumes. “Two whales.” She handed the binoculars to Tuttu.

  “Too far,” Tuttu said.

  “We will chase,” Natchiq said. He moved to the umiaq, climbed in, looked back. “We can catch it.”

  “No,” Tuttu said. “Wait.”

  “Come, paddle for me.” He pointed at Tammy. “You, Qavvik, you are a strong paddler. Paddle for Natchiq.”

  Tuttu glared at Natchiq. “Wait, Natchiq.”

  Natchiq sighed, nodded. “I will wait here,” he said, crossing his arms across his chest.

  The whalers stood by the edge of the ice, looking again for whales. Now that Puvak had seen the two across the uiniq, perhaps more would come. They watched the water, some, like Tuttu and Amaguq, looking straight across the lead. Others, like Grigor or Aluaq, scanned the edges. Look, look. Come to us, agviq, Claudia thought again.

  “Azah!” Amaguq shouted. He pointed frantically at a shape moving barely ten yards down the lead, behind a little point of ice between them and the umiaq.

  “Quiet,” Tuttu said.

  Puvak helped Malgi stand, and the old man looked around the edge of the windbreak formed by the sled. He smiled. “Ah, it will round the point. Tuttu,” he whispered, “get the crew behind the umiaq.”

  Tuttu nodded, waved at the whalers. They scurried around to the boat, taking their stations at the gunwales. “Get in?” Tuttu asked.

  Malgi stood with his weight on one leg, leaning against an unaaq staff. He shook his head. “When agviq comes near, push the boat toward it, with just Natchiq in the boat. Push the boat onto the whale, and Natchiq can strike it with the harpoon—Now! Now!”

  The seven whalers leaned into the gunwales, shoving the skin boat across the ice and into the sea. Natchiq stood, raised the harpoon as the umiaq coasted across the five yards of water to the whale. Agviq rounded the little point of the ice edge, rose before them, one eye staring sideways at them. He does not see us, Claudia thought. He does not see the white boat, the white atigis. We have fooled him!

  They pushed the boat almost right onto agviq’s back, the bow of the umiaq intersecting the whale. Natchiq pulled his arm back, pulled the shaft of the harpoon back, and thrust. The iron and the shaft sailed barely ten feet, a coil of rope unwinding out from behind it. The point caught the sun, glinted in the bright light, and the flicker of light met the reflection of sun on the whale’s glossy back. It hit, point of steel hit hard flesh, the steel parted the flesh, cut into the skin, and the rope jerked the shaft back. The iron held, the bit of wood in the head snapped, and the toggle flipped back. A strike! Claudia’s heart soared at the thunk of the harpoon hitting, at the shaft of the harpoon sticking straight up from the whale’s back.

  Natchiq threw out the big orange fishing floats. One, two, three, the lines snapped out and the floats splashed into the water. The umiaq coasted to a stop, dead in the water. In the water, the lines uncoiled like snakes, and then the whale dragged the pink and orange floats behind him, billiard balls across the felt of the open lead. He took the floats with him, out into the lead, a thin trail of blood behind him.

  “Get the boat, get the boat!” Tuttu yelled.

  The harpoonist sat back down, grabbed an oar, and paddled back to them. Amaguq reached out, pulled the umiaq up to the ice edge. He and Puvak climbed in behind Natchiq, and the others quickly took their positions. Tuttu swung the umiaq around, stern to the ice, gave it a shove, and got in behind Claudia and Tammy. Malgi hobbled up to them, carrying something wrapped in white canvas that he’d pulled out of the tent.

  “Take this!” the old man yelled. He threw the object at Tuttu. He caught it, set it down in the boat. He turned back to Malgi, waved.

  “Agviq will not get away!” he yelled.

  “Don’t lose it!” Malgi said. “Chase it, tire it, and then”—he held up his arms, mimed the firing of a rifle— “finish it!”

  Tuttu looked down at the canvas-covered object, smiled.

  Claudia turned around, picked up her paddle, and concentrated. At the bow, Natchiq called out commands. “Forward, faster, faster,” he shouted. The whale had not dived yet, and still towed the big orange floats behind him. He must be tiring already, Claudia thought; the other whale had moved faster than this. They dug in, dug with the blades. Tammy set the pace for the crew, her strokes hard and deep and powerful. Next to her, the woman grunted, breathed, grunted. Her nostrils flared with each breath, each breath blowing on the men in front of her. And they paddled harder.

  “We’ve got him!” Natchiq shouted. “A little to port” —Tuttu corrected the direction at the stern—“now, now, up on him, up on him.”

  They pulled alongside, between two floats trailing behind agviq. Natchiq raised the darting gun, the gun without an iron, only a line attaching it to the umiaq. He glanced back at Tuttu, and Tuttu nodded. Strike when you’re ready, the glance said, Claudia knew.

  Agviq exhaled, and a fine mist sprayed them, a clear mist. The whale sucked in air, and she heard the noise again, like a tub draining the last bit of water. Natchiq leaned forward, let fly the darting gun. It arched, came down just behind the whale’s blowholes, and the trigger rod hit. The gun fired its bomb into the whale a full two feet from where the iron stuck up, on the other side of the backbone. Out and away the bomb kicked the darting gun. Natchiq yanked back on the rope, pulled the gun out of the water. When the bomb hit, thrust down into the skin, agviq dove.

  The end of the harpoon shaft disappeared beneath the waves. The floats were pulled under. The whale kicked its flukes, splashing the umiaq. Behind her Claudia heard Tuttu counting quietly, “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four . . .”

  And the bomb exploded again. A column of bubbles burst to the surface, first clear, then pink, then deep red. Claudia turned to Tammy, and they smiled at each other. “Ariggaaa!” Natchiq shouted. Grigor turned back to Tuttu and grinned.

  “Too much, you think?” the Soviet asked. Tuttu shook his head.

  “Just right.” He pointed at the end of a line of bubbles moving ahead of them. “Now, follow, and we’ll get agviq when he surfaces.”

  They paddled ahead, watching the bubbles, waiting. A float popped up, then another. The third float came up, and then the whale, the great massive whale, surfaced. It stretched longer than the umiaq, twice as long. Sixty feet, Claudia thought, sixty tons. My God, that’s enough meat for a year, maybe. Agviq floated in the water, kicking slowly with its flukes, flapping lazily with its fins. He looked up at them with one eye, the eye distant but not dead.

  Claudia felt something wet run down her cheek, wiped at the briny water, the tear. She stared at the whale, felt pity and sadness that they had to kill such a great thing. The whale stared back, blinked its eye—she thought—at her. Agviq turned its head down, ducking its great head below the water.

  “Finish it,” she said. She turned to Tuttu. “Put it out of its misery. Take it. Take it.”

  He nodded, reached down for the thing in the white canvas, unwrapped the object. Tuttu ran his hand over the smooth metal of the object, down the eighteen-inch barrel, over the action, along the open-trapezoid of the stock. He clicked a button and swung the barrel forward, took something else from the canvas pouch, and slid another bomb—like the darting gun bomb—in.

  “It’s Malgi’s gran
dfather’s,” he explained. “A Pierce bomb gun—1922, in case you’re wondering, archaeologist.” Tuttu clicked the barrel shut, turned off the safety. “You sure this will work, Grigor?”

  The Soviet shrugged. “Malgi said it’s the same bomb as the darting gun. That worked, didn’t it?”

  Tuttu nodded. “Too well.”

  The whalers paddled the umiaq up to the whale. Tuttu raised the butt of the bomb gun to his shoulder, sighted down the barrel. Agviq raised his great head, turned to face the umialik.

  “What if the bomb blows up?” Tammy asked.

  Tuttu hesitated, looked up at her, scowled. “It would not please agviq for the bomb to blow up in my face,” he said. “Shut up, Qavvik.” He aimed again. Agviq begs for the bomb, Claudia thought. He begs for death and the chance to honor us, we who are so worthy.

  Tuttu fired.

  The bomb, too, like the darting gun bomb, flew through the air, through the water. It hit the whale in the backbone, severing the spine, Claudia saw. Four seconds later and the second charge blew. She watched agviq’s eye the whole time, watched it watching her. When the second explosion hit, agviq shuddered, and the light in his eye faded. He flapped one fluke, kicked briefly with his fins, rolled halfway over, then back, and settled in the water.

  “Azah,” Tuttu said. He wrapped the bomb gun up again.

  “We did it,” Natchiq said. “We did it!”

  The great whale floated in the icy water, a black iceberg, a floating mountain of flesh. Blood streamed out from his wounds, from the harpoon. They did it. They had killed a whale. Claudia felt the tears stream down her cheeks now, rivers of water, tears for agviq, tears for themselves, tears of sadness at the death that had just come and the life that death would bring.

  Tuttu reached down toward the whale, took a long knife and cut a hole in agviq’s lips. He tied a line through the hole in the lip, cinched it to a cleat under the stern seat. “Now, paddle!” he yelled. “Pull agviq to the ice edge.”

  Dig, Claudia thought, dig. Behind her, Tuttu began to sing. The melody and the beat hit her before she comprehended the words. When the words came, though, she laughed and joined in, and everyone joined in, even Grigor.

  “I am the Captain of the Pinafore!” Tuttu sang.

  “And a right good captain, too!” the whalers responded.

  “I’m very very good and be it understood, I command a right good crew!”

  “He’s very very good and be it understood, he commands a right good crew.”

  Gilbert and Sullivan, Claudia thought. What would Reinhardt think? What would the anthropologists say? They had killed a whale.

  They had killed and recovered a whale.

  Chapter 21

  THE whalers turned the umiaq and the whale toward the shore, putting the sun at their backs. They strained at the paddles, digging in hard. Claudia concentrated, focusing on Aluaq’s neck; the younger man’s muscles bunched in tight cords as he pulled back on his paddle. On the shore, Malgi waved a flag—an American flag—on a staff.

  Natchiq took a flare gun from a seabag at the bow, and fired a shell toward the camp. Malgi waved the flag more furiously as the flare parachuted toward him. The flare burned out, but something else flashed from the top of the ice ridge, sunlight reflecting on metal. Claudia took out her binoculars and checked.

  “A boat,” she said. “Another crew’s coming out.”

  Tuttu took the Nikons from her. “Igaluk,” he said. “He has to have gotten together a crew.”

  Igaluk or whoever put the boat in the water, an aluminum boat, and they began paddling toward Tuttu’s crew. Four men, Claudia saw through the binoculars. No motor. The skiff came closer to them, and Tuttu hailed them as they got in shouting distance.

  “We got a whale!” he shouted.

  “You need help towing it in?” a man in the bow shouted back. Igaluk, Claudia saw—right, Masik’s brother-in-law, the man she thought might have fathered a child with his brother’s wife. He’d been one of the few not to ridicule Tuttu about whaling.

  Tuttu glanced over at Claudia. “We’ll have to share with him, won’t we?” he asked.

  Claudia nodded. “Yeah. But you still get the best share.”

  Tuttu grinned. “Okay!” he shouted back.

  She smiled, too. Okay. They’d need help getting the whale out of the water anyway—need help butchering it, hauling it to shore, she thought. The whole village has to help. One crew alone couldn’t do it all.

  Igaluk pulled beside Tuttu’s umiaq, reached down to the whale’s lips and attached another line through the whale. The crews talked back and forth across agviq, telling how they’d chased it. With the heavier boat and the smaller crew, Igaluk and the three other men wouldn’t keep up as well, but they did lessen the load slightly. The two boats paddled closer to shore, and then they saw a third boat coming over the ridge.

  “They’ll believe me, now,” Tuttu said to Claudia. “See? We’ll take many whales.”

  When they got to the ice edge, the crew of the third boat waited for them to come in. Someone had begun pounding four heavy car axles into the ice. Malgi hobbled around, shouting orders. He dragged out a heavy block and tackle from the tent, and someone took it from him and began to attach it to the stakes. Malgi pushed the line round and round the block, one end stretching toward the ice ridge, the other toward the water.

  Tuttu jumped out of the umiaq as they came broadside to the ice. He untied the lines to the whale from the boat, held them in his hand. Malgi hopped over to greet him, and Tuttu half caught him, half hugged him as they met. “Grandfather,” Tuttu said, “I got a whale.”

  “Ai, Tuttu.” Malgi waved his arm out to sea, out to agviq. “That you did.” He picked up the loose line from the block and tackle and walked over to the stern of the boat. “Help me in the umiaq,” he said to Claudia. She shrugged, and with Tammy boosted Malgi up into Tuttu’s seat. The old man held the rope from the block and tackle, wrapped it loosely around the stern cleat. Natchiq had started to climb out of the boat, but stopped at Malgi’s signal. “Paddle over to the whale.”

  Natchiq nodded, got back in, and they moved the boat around to the whale’s tail. Malgi took a long knife, leaned over the side of the skin boat, and cut off the very tips of the whale’s flukes. He handed the tips to Claudia, then took the line and tied it around the whale’s flukes.

  “Now, back in,” he said to the crew.

  Back on the ice, all the crew got out. The two women helped Malgi out. Claudia handed him the fluke tips. Malgi took a bit of string, and tied the tips of the flukes to a paddle. He gave the paddle to Puvak. “Take this,” he said. “Run to the village. Tell everyone to come out here, especially the old people. Tell them we got a whale!” Puvak smiled, nodded. “Run, Puvak! Go!” The young man turned, dashed off over the rough ice ridge.

  Less than an hour later, the villagers came. Old men, old women, toddlers in diapers, the entire town tromped out the path and to the whale. As the villagers arrived, each body got drafted into mule duty. In a tug-of-war with agviq, they grabbed the haul rope and dragged the great whale up onto the ice, until only the tip of his jaw remained in the water.

  Claudia could not keep track of the butchering after that. Malgi sat on the kamotiq, a stack of machetes and long knives before him. He took out the carving showing how the shares would be apportioned and used it to show Tuttu how to butcher the whale, how to share it. As the crews butchered the whale, the old man sharpened the knives. Men in hip waders walked over the whale’s back, hacking at the thick skin. When a sizable enough chunk of the whale had been cut away, the villagers leaned into the rope again, pulled the whale out more, again and again.

  It went on, faster than she thought possible. Sixty tons! The blades flashed, the hunks of meat came flopping down onto the snow. Tuttu ran around, jotting figures and numbers on a clipboard as people from other crews hauled the meat to shore. Somewhere in the midst of it all Igaluk asked Tuttu and Malgi if he could borrow the whaling g
ear, and damned if he didn’t go out with a small crew and get another whale.

  Sometime around midnight, when the sun had fallen to a point just above the western horizon and all the meat had been stripped from agviq, the whalers stood exhausted and bloody, staring at their work. The baleen had been removed from the whale’s mouth, the great horny combs that had the consistency of plastic. Yankee whalers had once taken the bowhead only for the baleen, and used the black plates to make corset stays and buggy whips. Now the Inupiaq whalers would use the baleen for toboggans, for baskets, Claudia thought.

  The ribs and vertebrae, the jawbones, all the bone but the skull and some of the larger backbones, had been hauled away: ribs for sled runners, vertebrae for chopping blocks, bone for carving, bone for tools. When they had taken all they could use from agviq, the whalers pushed and shoved and heaved on the skull, and returned the whale to the sea. Food for crabs, Claudia thought, food for plankton, food for other whales.

  As the skull of the first whale sank below the ice, it occurred again to Claudia what they had done. Agviq had blessed them; they had taken a whale. Two whales. She looked out at the setting—no, near-setting—sun, and realized what had happened, what truly had happened. They had taken a whale. And that, she thought, might mean they could survive forever.

  * * *

  The puddles on the ice grew larger, the edge of the tuvaq fell away in great pans, and soon even the ice ridge itself broke loose from the shore and floated away. By late May the temperature had risen to above freezing. Drifts dwindled to anthills of packed snow, and soon only in the shade did the snow linger. In Malgi’s qaregi the entrance tunnel became flooded as the surface ice melted, and they had to abandon the winter entrance and come and go through the roof. Puvak’s puppies had grown big and fat, and smelly. When the tunnel flooded, he moved them to a pen outside.