by Chi Zijian
Legend has it that during the Lena River Era our ancestors herded reindeer. The forest was lush with the moss and lichen that we call enke and awakat, providing reindeer with rich foraging. Back then reindeer were known as sugju, but now we call them oroong. They have the head of a horse, antlers of a deer, body of a donkey and hooves of a cow. And because they resemble these four animals yet are distinct from them, the Han dub them si bu xiang, ‘The Four Dissimilars’.
In the past, reindeer were mainly grey and brown, but nowadays they are multicoloured: mixed grey-and-brown, grey-black, white or dappled. I like the white ones the best. In my eyes, white reindeer are clouds fleeting across the face of the earth.
I’ve never encountered another animal that possesses the docile temperament and endurance of the reindeer. Despite their size, they are extremely nimble. Loaded down with heavy goods, they traverse mountain forests and cross marshes effortlessly. Their bodies are a treasure chest: their coat resists the cold, and their antlers, tendons, penises, placentas and even blood extracted from the heart after death are all precious medicinal ingredients, which anda gladly put in their pouches in exchange for the manufactured goods they bring.
The reindeer-milk tea that we drink in the morning is like sweet spring water flowing into our bodies. When we hunt, the reindeer is the hunter’s helper: just place the game you’ve killed on top of a reindeer, and it will transport it safely back to the camp on its own. When we move camp, they not only carry the things we eat and use: women, children and the old and weak also ride them.
Yet they don’t need much attention from people. They search for food on their own, and the forest is their granary. Besides moss and lichen, in the spring they also eat green grass, brambles and pasque-flowers. In the summer, they chew birch and willow leaves. In the autumn, tasty forest mushrooms are their favourite.
Yet reindeer forage very delicately. When they pass through a meadow, they nibble lightly so that hardly a blade of grass is harmed, and what should be green remains green. When they eat birch and willow leaves, they just take a few mouthfuls and move on, leaving the tree lush with branches and leaves.
As long as we tie a bell to their necks we needn’t worry where they go. Wolves are frightened away by the sound of the bell, and we know their location by its ringing, carried to us by the wind.
Reindeer were certainly bestowed upon us by the Spirits, for without these creatures we would not be. Even though they once took my loved one away, I still adore reindeer. Not seeing their eyes is like not seeing the sun in the day or the stars at night – it makes you sigh from the bottom of your heart.
I can hardly bear to watch the cutting of reindeer antlers, which is done with a bone-saw. Reindeer grow antlers regardless of gender. Typically, a buck’s antlers are robust while those of a castrated stag are more delicate. Every year between May and July their antlers mature, and this is the time when their horns are severed. Unlike hunting, both men and women carry out this task.
When its antlers are severed, the reindeer must be tied to a tree and held in place by two wooden poles. Antlers are flesh too, so sawing one off is so painful that the reindeer’s four hooves stamp to and fro and the bone-saw is steeped in fresh blood. After the antler has been severed, the base of the antler must be cauterised with a hot iron to staunch the flow of blood. But that is the old way: nowadays we just sprinkle a bit of anti-inflammatory powder on it.
Maria would cry when antler-cutting time came. She couldn’t stand to see the bone-saw tainted with blood. It was as if the blood flowed from her own body.
‘Maria, don’t go!’ Mother would say, but Maria would insist. She didn’t normally cry, but as soon as she saw blood, her tears would begin to fly – bzz, bzz – like a swarm of honeybees. Mother said Maria cried because she couldn’t get pregnant. Month after month she saw blood emerge from the lower part of her body and immediately realised that her efforts and those of her husband Hase had come to naught, and she wailed despondently.
But the one who craved a child even more than Maria and Hase was Hase’s father Dashi. Dashi had lost a leg in a battle with wolves, so at night when he heard their howling, Dashi gnashed his teeth. He was wizened and scrawny, and his eyes couldn’t stand the sight of sunlight or snow, filling with tears constantly. He normally stayed inside his shirangju. When we moved camp, he would sit on his reindeer, his eyes blindfolded even when the sky was overcast. It seemed he not only couldn’t stand the sunlight, he also couldn’t bear the sight of trees, brooks, flowers and little birds.
Dashi had the greyest expression and was the untidiest person in our urireng. Linke said after Dashi lost his leg he never cut his hair or shaved. His sparse, salt-and-pepper hair and equally sparse beard intertwined, covering his face with a layer of grey-white lichen. It made you wonder if he was a rotting tree.
Dashi was taciturn, but if he spoke, it was always something about Maria’s belly. ‘Where’s my omolie?’ he’d ask. ‘When will he bring back Aya’s leg?’ In our language, omolie means grandson, and Aya, grandfather. Dashi believed that if he only had an omolie, the child would slay the wolf that had left him lame. Omolie would recover Aya’s leg and render him fleet-footed again.
Dashi would cast his eyes on Maria when he spoke, and Maria would cover her stomach, exit the shirangju, lean against a tree and weep. So whenever we saw Maria leaning against a tree in tears, we knew what Dashi had said.
Later on, the arrival of a hawk altered Dashi’s fate. Originally he had no companion in his shirangju, but the hawk’s arrival revived his spirits. He trained that hawk to be a fierce hunter, and gave him a name: Omolie.
Hase caught the hawk with a bird-trap he set on a towering mountain cliff. Hawks that like to soar in the sky would spot the netting on the cliff and, mistaking it for a resting place, swoop down, only to be taken prisoner, entangled in the trap. Hase brought the grey-brown hawk back home and entrusted its training to Dashi. You could say he was looking for something to keep Dashi busy.
The rims of the hawk’s eyes were golden and its eyeballs emitted a glacial light. Its pointed beak hooked downwards, as if prepared to snatch something at any time. Its chest had black stripes upon it, and its soft and graceful wings shimmered with silky lustre.
Hase fastened its claws tight and placed a deerskin cover over its head so the eyes were blinded but the beak exposed. It was very fierce. Head held high, with its sharp claws it scratched one deep gash after another. We children ran over to observe the hawk, but cowardly Lena, Jilande and Jindele ran away, leaving just Nora and me.
When Dashi first saw the hawk he became extremely excited and uttered an ‘ululu’ noise. He limped over, bent down with great effort, picked up a stone from the hearth, and threw it. Paa! It smashed against the hawk’s head. The hawk was enraged. Even though its eyes were covered, it knew where the stone had come from.
Like a whirlwind it took flight, bound for Dashi. But it couldn’t fly far because of the cord. It screeched in fury while Dashi chortled. The sound of Dashi’s laughter was uglier than the howl of a wolf in the depths of night. The hawk didn’t frighten us, but Dashi’s laughter sent Nora and me scurrying away.
Every day Nora and I went to watch Dashi train the hawk. He let the bird go hungry for the first few days, and it grew visibly thinner. As thin as the hawk was, Dashi said he only intended to scrape off the oily layer in its abdomen. He chopped fresh rabbit meat into chunks, bundled them in coarse ula grass, and fed them like that to the mountain hawk. But since the bird couldn’t digest them, it spat them back out whole, and you could spot the oily droplets that now dotted the ula grass.
Dashi used this method to thoroughly clean out the hawk’s innards, and then he gave him a small amount of food. Afterwards, Dashi had me fetch a cradle. Luni could already scamper about and didn’t need one any more, so I carried ours over to Dashi’s. As Hase helped Dashi hang the cradle in their shirangju, Maria’s eyes shimmered with tears.
I’ve never seen a hawk in a cradl
e except at Dashi’s. Dashi bound the hawk’s legs and wings with straw so it couldn’t move. With one hand leaning on his cane and one hand crazily rocking the cradle, Dashi’s whole body was contorted. I’m sure that even a young child would have been rocked senseless. As he pushed the cradle to and fro, he continued warbling ‘ululu’, as if the wind had crept into his throat.
‘Why are you doing that’? I asked.
‘I want to make the hawk completely forget his past and live obediently with human beings.’
‘Are you trying to make him forget the clouds in the sky?’
Dashi spat out a mouthful of phlegm, and thundered: ‘Yes, I want to transform this creature of the skies into a creature of the land. I want to turn this cloud into a bow and arrow to devour my enemy – that cursed wolf!’
Once the hawk’s intestines had been cleansed and it had been tossed about in the cradle for three days, it did seem somewhat rehabilitated.
Next the deerskin cover was withdrawn, and I discovered that the hawk’s gaze was no longer glacial, but softer and a bit blank. ‘Now you’re really an obedient omolie,’ Dashi said contentedly.
To ensure it couldn’t fly, Dashi fastened a leather strip to its leg and tied a bell to its tail. Then he put on a leather coat, placed the hawk on his left shoulder, left his shirangju and walked towards us. He said this was in order to familiarise the hawk with humans. Once it recognised us, it could accustom itself to life among people.
Dashi leaned on his cane, and he held out his left arm to serve as the hawk’s perch. As he limped on one leg and leaned on the other, the hawk limped and leaned too, and all the while the bell on the hawk’s tail rang. It was a hilarious sight. Dashi had always been so sensitive to the light, but when he took the hawk out for a walk, he wasn’t at all timid in the face of the sunlight that enveloped him, even though tears cascaded from the corners of his eyes.
As soon as people heard the bell ringing they knew that Dashi and his hawk were coming.
‘Tamara, take a look at my omolie,’ he said when he encountered Mother. ‘Isn’t he dashing?’ Tamara quickly dropped whatever work she had in hand, greeted him, looked at the hawk and nodded her head repeatedly.
Pleased with himself, Dashi then took the hawk over to Yveline. ‘Put that cigarette out right now!’ he ordered. He said if the hawk were surrounded by smoke, its sense of smell would suffer.
Yveline discarded her cigarette, fixed her eyes on the hawk, and asked Dashi: ‘Does your omolie address you as Aya?’
Dashi was annoyed. ‘No, it shouts, “Yveline!” It says: “Yveline’s nose is crooked!”’
Yveline had a good laugh. She really did have a crooked nose. Yveline was very naughty in her childhood, Linke said. When she was four, she saw a grey squirrel in the forest and chased it. The squirrel climbed a tree and Yveline ran straight into the trunk and smashed the bridge of her nose. But I found her crooked nose pleasant, because she had one large eye and one small eye. Her nose leaned towards the smaller one, which rendered her profile more balanced.
Dashi continued to parade the hawk among people regularly, and then he began to feed it meat. Each day he gave it just a bit to keep it half-sated. He said that if the hawk were full, it wouldn’t be keen to catch game.
Dashi built a hawk stand outside his shirangju. The stand could turn freely. Worried that the horizontal wooden bar would injure its claws, Dashi wrapped the bar in deerskin. ‘A hawk’s claws are like the rifle in a hunter’s hands. They have to be well protected.’
Although the hawk was already very familiar with Dashi, to prevent it flying away he attached a long, thin lead with a swivel loop to the hawk’s leg so that when it turned around it wouldn’t get tangled.
Each day, Dashi petted the hawk’s head and chest softly, always making that ululu sound. I suspected that Dashi applied green colouring to his hands, because with each day the hawk’s wings not only stood out, they also changed colour. It was a dark green tint, as if someone had draped a robe of green moss over the hawk’s body.
Thereafter when we moved camp, Dashi rode a reindeer with his hawk perched on his shoulder. Along with his hawk, it seemed as if Dashi’s lost leg had returned and he was reinvigorated. The domesticated bird of prey no longer needed to be tethered. Even when it looked up at the sky, it had no intention of flying high and far. It seemed Dashi’s cradle rocking had not been in vain: the hawk had completely forgotten the sky in which it once soared.
Only when moving camp could we enjoy the sight of the hawk capturing prey. Hase often wanted to take the hawk on the hunt, but Dashi wouldn’t hear of it. Omolie had become his personal property.
I can still recall my first sight of the hawk chasing down a hare. It was early winter when the mountain forests were not yet shrouded in white snow, and we were proceeding south along the banks of the Pa Béra. The moss in that area was especially abundant and wild game copious, and everywhere you could see hazel grouse in flight above the treetops and hares racing on the ground.
Quietly perched on Dashi’s shoulder at first, the hawk grew restless. It raised its head, fluttered its wings slightly, and looked as if it would take flight at any second. Dashi spotted a wild hare running out of a pine grove. He tapped his hawk and shouted: ‘Omolie, jü! Jü!’ Jü means ‘Give chase’.
The hawk spread its wings and took off, overtaking the wild hare in the blink of an eye. At first, it used a single claw to grasp the hare’s bottom, and when the hare turned back to struggle, the hawk clapped its other claw onto the hare’s head and, with both claws, quickly suffocated it. Then, using its keen beak, Omolie ripped open its catch in no time. The hare’s innards spilled on the forest floor like a fresh red blossom emitting sizzling plumes of steam. Dashi warbled his ululu excitedly.
On the way to our next campground we didn’t expend a single bullet. The hawk caught five or six hares and three pheasants for us, so when we lit our bonfire at night there was always the scent of meat wafting in the air.
But when we got to the new site and erected our shirangju, Dashi wouldn’t allow Omolie to chase game. Instead, he laid a grey wolf pelt on the ground, and yelled ‘Jü! Jü!’ again and again, and forced the hawk to pounce on it.
The year that Dashi battled the wolves, when he killed the she-wolf with his bare hands, it was the wolf cub that bit off his leg and ran away. Dashi skinned the adult wolf and always kept her hide with him. Whenever he saw that wolf-skin he gnashed his teeth, as if beholding his mortal enemy. Yveline said it really seemed that Dashi was going to dispatch his hawk to exact revenge.
At the beginning, Omolie was very resistant to being forced to attack a lifeless wolf-skin. It retracted its head, and when it heard the ‘Jü! Jü!’ command, it backed away. Dashi became very agitated. He clutched the hawk by the head and dragged it over to the hide. But the hawk just remained planted there listlessly.
Dashi cast aside his crutch, threw himself down on the wolf-skin with a grunt, patted his only leg and cried. After a few rounds of tears, the hawk seemed to comprehend that this wolf-skin was his master’s hated foe, and soon began to treat it as a living thing. Not only did the frequency of its pounces increase, but each was fiercer than the last. Whenever Dashi noticed its neck bending and head drooping, he patted its wings immediately to keep his omolie vigilant.
So Dashi didn’t get enough sleep and his eyes were often pink like a hare’s. Whenever we passed by his shirangju, Dashi pointed at Omolie and said: ‘Hey, take a look! This is my bow and arrow, this is my rifle!’
When he spoke like this to others, almost no one contradicted Dashi. But when he spoke like this to Father, Father asked: ‘I use a rifle to kill a wolf. Can Omolie do that?’ Father loved his rifle second only to Tamara. He took a rifle on his back to hunt and he was always fiddling with it in the camp.
When Dashi heard Father speak sarcastically about his Omolie, he ground his teeth as if he’d heard a wolf howl. ‘Just you wait, Linke. You wait and see if Omolie doesn’t help me get revenge!
’
***
In the earliest times the gun we used was called ‘Ulmuktu’, a flintlock rifle that fired small bullets. This was a short-range gun, so sometimes you also had to use a bow and arrow and a spear too. Later we bartered with the Russians for a flintlock with bigger bullets, the ‘Tuluku’. Then came the ‘Berdanka’ which was considerably more powerful.
But following the Berdanka came an even more lethal rifle: a repeating rifle that fired several bullets in succession. Once we possessed the Berdanka and the repeating rifle, flintlock rifles were reserved for squirrel hunting. So to me, the bow and arrow and the spear were the hares and squirrels of the forest, the flintlock rifle was a wild boar, the Berdanka was a wolf, and the repeating rifle was a tiger – each fiercer than the last.
Linke possessed two Berdanka and one repeating rifle. When Luni was just three or four, Linke taught him how to hold a rifle. All those guns came to Linke through bartering with Rolinsky.
Rolinsky was a Russian anda who came to our urireng at least twice a year, and sometimes three or four times. When we moved camp, we always left tree markers, that is, after we’d walked a certain distance on our way we would cut a notch in a tree trunk with an axe to indicate the path we were taking. That way, no matter how far we travelled, anda could find us.
Rolinsky was a short fat fellow with a red beard and puffy bags under his big eyes. He always came to our urireng on horseback. Typically, he arrived with three horses, two laden with goods. He came up into the mountains with liquor, flour, salt, cloth, bullets and descended with our pelts and antlers. And Rolinsky loved to drink.
Rolinsky’s arrival was a festive day. Everyone gathered to hear him recount news of other urireng: Which urireng’s reindeer had been ravaged by wolves, which had shot the most squirrels, which had added a new member or lost an elder who had ascended into the Heavens. Since this anda had been in contact with six or seven urireng, he couldn’t help but know the details.