‘Sedna did not want to marry the stranger, but her father put her aboard the stranger’s kayak and off they went to the stranger’s country.
‘Soon they arrived at a barren island. There was no house or hut to live in, not even a tent, just bare rocks and a cliff. Sedna’s new husband stood in front of her and, letting out an evil laugh, he pulled down his hood to reveal his face. It was not a man at all, but a giant raven in disguise.
‘Sedna screamed in terror and tried to run away from him, but the raven dragged her to a ledge on a cliff, where she was going to have to live like a bird. There was nothing on the hard, cold rocky ledge but a few feathers and a few tufts of hair. This was where she was supposed to make her home.
‘There was nothing to eat, so the raven went in search of food. After a day and a night, he came back to Sedna on her rocky outcrop and dropped a raw fish into her lap.
‘Sedna cried and cried and called for her father, and through the howling arctic winds Sedna’s father heard his daughter’s cries. He realised that he had made a mistake and he decided he had better come and rescue her. So he loaded up his kayak and paddled for days through the frigid arctic waters to the island, where Sedna stood waiting for him on the shore.
‘Sedna was relieved to see her father, and she immediately jumped into his kayak and off they paddled, back towards home. But while they were out on the sea, Sedna spotted a black speck far off in the distance. She knew at once that it was the raven and that he was coming to get her.
‘Sure enough, the raven got closer and closer and they could see his angry beak snapping. He swooped down on the kayak bobbing on the ocean, and Sedna’s father struck out at him, using his paddle, but the big angry black bird dodged his blows and pecked and snapped at them.
‘Then the raven flew with a swoop over the kayak and flapped his wings menacingly, calling up a storm, and almost immediately the wind began to blow viciously and the rain and hail lashed down on Sedna and her father, out at sea in the little kayak. The sea raged around them and tossed the fragile boat on the waves.
‘Sedna’s father was seized with a terrible fear of the storm and he cast about, looking for some way to appease it. All he could think of doing was to return his daughter to her raven husband, so he grabbed Sedna and threw her overboard into the boiling, raging, icy ocean.
‘But the storm did not cease, and Sedna was tossed in the stormy waves, her screams disappearing in the roar of the ocean. She was freezing now, and desperate to get back into the kayak, before she went completely numb in the frigid waters.
‘She managed to swim back to the kayak and put her hand on the side of the boat, to pull herself back on board, but her father, terrified by the raging storm, thought that if he let her back into the boat she would only make the storm continue or get worse, so he grabbed the paddle and began to beat Sedna’s grasping fingers. Sedna hung on desperately, screaming for her father to stop and let her into the boat, but still he hit her on the hands until at last her frozen fingers broke and fell off the side of the boat and into the water, and as they sank through the water to the bottom of the ocean, Sedna’s fingers turned into seals.
‘Still Sedna swam beside her father’s kayak and again she reached out and clung to the side of the boat, but again her father grabbed the paddle and began beating at her hands. This time, Sedna’s frozen hands broke off at her wrists and started to fall to the bottom of the sea. As they drifted down, down, down through the water, they turned into whales.
‘Now Sedna had no fingers and no hands, so she couldn’t find any way to get into the kayak, and her strength was sapped. She gave up the fight and began to sink.
‘But she did not drown. She just spiralled down to the seabed and became the goddess of the sea. Her companions now are the seals and the whales that were created from her living fingers and hands. They live with her on the ocean bed.
‘Sedna is still enraged at how her father treated her, and every now and then this fury erupts into violent storms at sea. Because of this power of hers, hunters must treat Sedna with respect, lest she unleash her anger on them and overturn their boats.
‘When she is particularly angry, the shamans must swim down to the ocean bed to where Sedna sits, combing her hair that is now tangled by the sea. The shamans comb out her tangles for her and soothe her into a better mood. When she is calm, Sedna releases the sea mammals so that the people have food from the bounty of the sea. And that is why the sea yields up seals and whales and walruses in plenty for the people to eat.’
There was silence in the room when he finished.
‘Well,’ said Dad, after a while, ‘you certainly are some storyteller, Henry.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Cool story.’
‘Yeah,’ said Henry. ‘Freezing story!’
We laughed but then Dad got all serious and started to explain about how stories are not just stories but are how we explain the world to ourselves.
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you sound like an anthropologist.’
‘A what?’ said Henry.
‘An anthropologist,’ I said, ‘you know, a story stealer.’
‘What?’ squeaked Henry, looking all worried.
‘Don’t mind him, Henry,’ said Dad. ‘He’s just teasing you. Anthropologists study stories, they don’t steal them. It doesn’t hurt the story. You still have the story. We can’t steal it from you.’
‘OK,’ said Henry. ‘Anyway, I just told it so Tyke would understand about the whale hunt. Sedna gives us the whales and the seals and the sea creatures for food, so it’s all right if we take them for food, as long as we don’t take them in anger or for money.’
It didn’t make me like it any better to think of the whale being killed, but I was beginning to see what Henry meant.
Good News and Good News
It was coming up to the end of July, the nalukataq was long over and the days had stretched into one endless sunny day, and Dad and I were thinking of moving on to another village for one last bit of work before the end of the summer, when there was a phone call for Dad.
Nobody ever phoned us when we were in the Arctic. When we first started going, there had been hardly any phones anyway, so we’d just got used to the idea that we didn’t make contact while we were away. It was like a time out of time.
But Dad must have left Matulik’s number this time, because Leah said one evening over dinner, ‘Jim, you call home, you hear.’
Dad dropped his fork with a clatter.
‘Call home?’ he whispered. His hands were trembling.
I thought this was a bit dramatic, just because there’d been a phone call, and a strange, anticipatory feeling came over me. If people were phoning us, it must be something big. I hoped my grandad was OK. He was always having ‘little turns’.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Leah, spooning sugar into her tea. ‘Seems there’s news.’
‘News?’ said Dad. ‘What sort of news?’
‘Oh,’ said Leah, grinning, ‘kinda surprising news, but good news and good news.’
‘What? Good news and good news. What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You call,’ said Leah. Her English always went all foreign when she didn’t want to say something.
Dad pushed his plate aside and stood up. He left the table without excusing himself, which was very unlike him, and he went out into the little lobby where Matulik’s phone was.
When he came back into the room a few moments later, he was crying.
Oh my God, Grandad, I thought and rushed up to him.
‘Leah said good news,’ I shouted, pulling at his sleeve. ‘She said good news!’
Dad nodded. He wiped his cheeks with the backs of his hands.
‘Good news,’ he managed to get out. ‘And good news.’
‘What is going on?’ I yelled, frantic now.
Dad sat down and said in a wobbly voice: ‘What do you want to hear first – the good news or the good news?’
‘The good news, of course.’
/> ‘Well the good news is that you have a baby sister.’
‘What! What! What!’ I couldn’t stop saying that one word over and over. It was such astonishing news.
At last I managed to say, ‘And what’s the good news?’
‘Oh,’ said Dad, laughing now, though there were still tears, ‘the good news is that you have a baby brother.’
I put my head in my hands. I couldn’t work it out. ‘The good news is … and the good news is …’
‘Oh my!’ I suddenly yelped. ‘Oh my! Twins!’
‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘Twins. One of each!’
‘But I didn’t even know …’
You have to understand that it’s a long time since I was a child. Kids weren’t usually told when their mothers were expecting babies in those days, or not until it was almost time for the baby to be born. Of course, older children noticed, but we’d been away for so long, I hadn’t had a chance to see Mum putting on weight. I couldn’t imagine her pregnant. Mum with her floaty dresses and her cocktail parties. How could she go through with something so … physical? It seemed out of character.
‘How’s Mum?’ I asked, hardly daring to.
‘She’s fine. She’s ecstatically happy. She sends you her love. The babies came early. Twins often do. We weren’t expecting this until September. Well, we weren’t expecting it to be twins at all.’
‘September,’ I said, remembering. ‘Mum said we were to be back by September.’
‘And I promised that we would. I planned to be home by mid-August in fact, but now …’
‘Dad, Mum had to go through with this on her own. While we were up here … playing whalers.’
I felt really bad for Mum, and guilty about being so far away.
‘Well, we didn’t know, did we?’ said Dad. ‘But we know now, so we better get packed up and ready. We have a plane to catch, son.’
The Great Unicorn Hunt
The twins were lovely, of course, as babies are. Very tiny, even tinier than most babies, because of being twins and having come early. Very squirmy they were, and pink, and their shiny little mouths opened and closed a lot, as if they were trying to tell us something. Well, they were. Usually they were trying to tell us they were hungry. They were often hungry.
I was the best big brother you can imagine. I fed those kids, I changed their nappies – I did, I really did – I held one while my mum did something with the other, I bathed them, separately or together as required, I walked them up and down when they couldn’t sleep and I whispered whaley stories to them as lullabies.
They got bigger, as babies do. They got to be a year old. Soon they were walking. They got to be two. Then they were talking. Not real talk, not actual words. It sounded a bit like one of Dad’s arctic languages. But after a while it sort of transmogrified itself into English, beginning with the really important words, like dooce and appu and teese and toass and nana. (They had a very healthy diet in those days, before they discovered chocolate.) And, oh yes of course, Tyke.
Anyway, there was no question of Dad and me going off on expeditions to the Arctic while the babies were small. There was no way Mum could have managed them on her own. In fact, they seemed to absorb all our time as it was. It took all three of us to mind them and we seemed to do it twenty-four hours a day. Two babies seem much more than two, if you see what I mean. That is, it seems to be more than double one. Maybe it’s not, but it feels that way. Maybe it’s because one of them always seems to be getting into some sort of trouble when you can’t get to it, because the other one has trapped you on the floor with your knees pinned behind your head and is bouncing on your face.
That’s how it happened that so many years passed before Dad and I went on our next arctic trip. I never thought we’d do it again. As far as I was concerned, that was something we used to do, but early that summer when the twins were coming up to three, Dad suggested that maybe he and I might take another trip.
‘I can’t,’ I wailed. ‘Not this year. It’s my Inter Cert.’ That’s what the Junior Cert was called when I was at school.
Dad looked blankly at me.
‘Inter Cert,’ he said thoughtfully, as if I’d just mentioned it to make life difficult for him. ‘I suppose you have to do that.’
‘Of course I have to do it. You don’t want me to grow up an ignoramus, do you?’
Sometimes I got the feeling I was the grown-up and my mum and dad were the kids.
‘An ignoramus. Good heavens, no,’ said Dad. ‘I suppose you must learn Ovid and The Merchant of Venice and Pythagoras’ theorem and the modh foshuíteach and all those vitally important things.’
‘Well, they are important,’ I said.
I didn’t say I’d never heard of Ovid – I didn’t need to complicate the argument – but I worried that I must be an ignoramus already. They must have done it that spring term I missed when we went whaling.
‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘we’ll go after your Inter Cert. When is that?’
‘June,’ I said. ‘I won’t finish till nearly the end of June. But anyway we can’t miss the twins’ birthday.’
‘Oh right,’ said Dad, ‘July that is, isn’t it. Inconvenient, but …’
I glowered at him.
‘We’ll go in August,’ he said cheerfully, as if he hadn’t made that treacherous remark about July being inconvenient, ‘and we’ll go to Thule in Greenland. You have to see Thule, son, it’s the ultimate arctic experience, the wildest place of all. We can stay till the end of September. That will suit very well. It won’t hurt to miss a month of next year, will it? You haven’t got any important appointments with Hamlet the Dane, have you, or Robespierre?’
I didn’t like the way he said that. Snide it sounded, to me, but then it struck me that Dad really missed those trips, and taking this offhanded tone about the things that were important to me was his way of showing that. I don’t think it was the anthropology he missed, either. I think it was just him and me going off together. And he chose Thule, I think, because he wanted to give me something special, ‘the ultimate arctic experience’ as he put it.
So I shook my head, about Robespierre I mean, and picked up a twin – we called them Tom and Tessa, by the way – and dandled it on my knee.
‘The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown,’ I told him (or her, I can’t remember, though we usually colour-coded them). ‘The lion beat the unicorn all about the town.’
‘What about these two?’ I said to Dad over the twin’s shampoo-smelling curls.
‘Tum dave ’em whype-bwed and tum dave ’em bwown,’ said Tessa (or Tom).
‘And some gave them plum cake and ran them out of town!’ I finished and dropped the twin onto the carpet and ran it across the room with a whoop.
‘The lion and the unicorn’ was our special family nursery rhyme, because of my dad’s unicorn horn, and Tom and Tessa were able to say it before they could make sentences for themselves.
‘Well, your mum …’
‘Dad! You always said you couldn’t leave a child with Mum. You always said she’d leave it behind in a shop or something.’
‘She couldn’t lose two of them, though,’ said Dad. ‘Not even your mum could do that. And if she did, they’d look out for each other anyway.’
‘Dad! They are three years old!’
‘Well, I suppose we could get an au pair.’
‘Right. An au pair. For two months, one of which is in the summer and one of which is in term time. Doesn’t sound very likely to me.’
‘We’ll think of something,’ said Dad, but he didn’t make any more suggestions. He just sighed and gathered up his maps and charts and airline schedules and went off to his study, which he had carved out of the tiny attic, the only place, he said, in this whole damn’ house where he could think.
‘Wadda unicorn, Tyke?’ asked one of the twins, out of the blue that evening, while we were having our dinner. Tom I think it was. He was more thoughtful than Tessa, and he took a lot of interest in the
unicorn horn. We’d had to hang it high up out of his reach, but he would sit on the floor and point a small, chewed finger at it.
‘A unicorn?’ I said. ‘You want to know what a unicorn is? Why, a unicorn is a very, very special sort of horse, Tom.’
Tom made a clopping sound with his tongue, to show that he knew what a horse was.
‘That’s right, a horse. A fabulous white horse. And it has a horn, see, right in the middle of its forehead.’
I picked up my knife and tipped it to the middle of my forehead, to make a horn.
The twins laughed and clapped.
‘And it can fly,’ I said, flapping my elbows like magic wings. I jumped up from the table and pranced about the kitchen, nodding my head to show off my horn, and scraping the floor with my hoof.
‘And it flies over the ocean,’ I cried, whooshing around the kitchen faster and faster, ‘way, way, way over the ocean to Tír na nÓg,’ I said, and I galloped and flew even faster and I made sounds like the waves as I flew.
The twins were in paroxysms of giggles by now, loving my unicorn act. They threw their little bodies about and flapped their stubby little arms, and they started to follow me around the kitchen, trying to do the unicorn actions with me.
‘The unicorn loves flying over the sea,’ I intoned as I flew and galloped, flew and galloped, ‘because really the unicorn is a sea creature. The unicorn of the sea is its true name.’
‘And guess what, twins?’ Dad chipped in suddenly. ‘Your big brother and I are going on a unicorn hunt!’
‘What?’ I said, forgetting that I was a unicorn.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Thule, remember? Where the unicorn of the sea comes from.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I hadn’t known that about Thule. ‘Yes, twins, that’s it. It’s the Great Unicorn Hunt!’
And I pranced a bit more and shook my head and whinnied.
I meant to ask Dad what he meant about the unicorn hunt, after the twins had gone to bed, but it slipped my mind. And then I forgot all about it. I got caught up in the excitement of the trip to Thule.
Call of the Whales Page 8