by Chi Zijian
‘It looks like it isn’t deer or bear meat you want,’ said Yveline loudly. ‘You crave the meat on Lajide’s body, eh?’
Yveline’s words made Nihau chuckle so hard that she swayed back and forth on her reindeer and just about fell off. And they made Maria, who was the furthest behind leading her horse by the reins, tumble onto her bottom with laughter.
The Malu King was right behind me, then the reindeer transporting coals for the fire, followed by a large herd of reindeer. Viktor was also riding a reindeer. Seeing everyone laughing so heartily, he said loudly to me: ‘Eni, if you eat Ama, don’t eat his feet. They stink!’ Viktor’s words made us laugh even more hysterically.
After we’d travelled a few hours, Yveline took the axe from my hand, helped me up on a reindeer and let me rest. Each time she hewed a marker, she grunted ‘Oh!’, as if the hacked tree had opened its mouth wide to speak.
Moving camp without the men was already very tough, and given that our destination was undecided, our progress was slow. What originally should have been one day’s journey became two.
In the end, it was the reindeer that helped us settle on the new camp’s location. They discovered a Fairy Ring – a circular growth of mushrooms – at the foot of a mountain near a river, and came to a halt. When they stopped, so did we.
We constructed just two shirangju. Nihau and I stayed in one, and Maria and Yveline in the other. Once they’d arrived in the new camp the reindeer no longer strayed far and came back promptly each day.
In the northern forests, autumn resembles a thin-skinned person. If the wind utters a few less than complimentary words about him, he pulls a long face and beats a retreat.
It was late September, and you could still spot the odd wild chrysanthemum blooming here and there on the south-east slopes. But two days of sudden fierce winds blew away the last vestiges of that world once so full of vitality.
Having shed their every leaf, the trees were bald and fallen leaves massed under them in a thick, thick layer. A frigid wind began to blow, and the weather altered in a flash.
The snowflakes arrived early. Usually the first snow is not a heavy one and melts as it falls. So when we saw the snow-blossoms dancing in the air we weren’t alarmed. But it snowed all day. At dusk, when we collected kindling around the camp, we discovered the snow was already very thick and a heavy layer of cloud had massed in the sky. Worried about the reindeer that were out searching for food, I asked Yveline: ‘Will it snow through tomorrow?’
Yveline glanced proudly at the sky. And then eyeing me as if I were a scruffy half-wit, she said with conviction: ‘The first snowfall is never heavy. Don’t be fooled by how nasty it looks.’ Yveline had years of experience, so I trusted her judgement and returned relieved to my shirangju.
Nihau was busy sewing a pair of mittens for her unborn child. Naughty Andaur occasionally stretched out his hand and grabbed the thread, hindering her progress.
‘When there are lots of white butterflies in the summer,’ said Nihau, ‘the winter snow tends to be heavy.’ I sighed and so did Nihau. We were both consumed with worry for our men. Did they feel the sting of a whip during their training? Did they have enough to eat? Now that the weather was cold, would the Japanese issue them heavy clothing? What if they caught cold?
In the slightly yellow light of the hearth, I could see the snowflakes floating towards the shirangju. They stuck their furry heads inside for an exploratory look through the small flue at the top. But they weren’t hard grains of sand; delicate and unable to withstand a wee bit of warmth, they melted almost as soon as they entered the shirangju. I watched the snowflakes for an instant and then placed a few pieces of damp firewood on the flames, for I wanted the fire to burn steadily until dawn. Then I fell asleep hugging Andaur.
The following day we were surprised to find that not only had the snow remained but it was falling more and more heavily. Outside the shirangju it was already above the knee, and the temperature had dropped dramatically. The mountain forests were a boundless mass, and the river had iced over.
As I came out of my shirangju, Yveline came staggering over. ‘What are we going to do?’ she said, stunned. ‘Is this going to turn into a “White Calamity”?’ That’s what we called a life-threatening snowstorm.
A White Calamity would not only interfere with our hunting, it would threaten our reindeer, which was an even more frightening prospect. Reindeer can’t break through the thickly accumulated snow to search for moss, and they starve.
We awaited the return of the herd apprehensively. The morning passed without any sign of them, the snowflakes continued to flutter and the wind picked up. If you stood outside just for an instant, the biting wind made you shiver uncontrollably.
Yveline decided to go looking for the reindeer with Maria and told Nihau and me to stay behind in the camp. At a time like that, two big-bellied women were a burden. Yveline had no inkling where the reindeer had gone. Normally we’d follow their tracks, but the heavy snowfall had buried any trace of them.
Nihau and I waited anxiously, but when the sky turned dark, there were no signs of either the reindeer or Yveline and Maria. At the outset we were just worried about the reindeer, but gradually the two worries combined, and Nihau and I became very restless. Again and again we left the shirangju to try to catch sight of them, but each time we returned disappointed.
Just when we were on the verge of tears, Yveline and Maria finally returned. Their bodies were clad in snow, and icicles had formed on their hair like a pair of snowmen. Yveline said all afternoon they had covered less than two li. The snow was simply too thick. You couldn’t even move. Unable to find any sign of our reindeer, and worried we might go out looking for them, they had returned.
We passed a sleepless night kneeling before the Malu, praying that the reindeer would emerge from this crisis unscathed.
At such a time we missed our men more than ever. If they were here – even in the event of a White Calamity – they’d find the means to cope. Yveline consoled us, explaining that during a big snowstorm the reindeer would take cover under a cliff. The wind and snow there are not only less intense; there is also edible moss. They can remain there safely three, four or maybe even five days. Once the snow ceased, they would naturally find the path back to the camp.
I reckon that snowfall was the heaviest of my life. It fell for a full two days and two nights. On the third day, just as we were preparing to go out and search for the reindeer, our men returned. Hase told us later that the Japanese still wanted them to train for a few more days, but Lajide could see from the clouds that the weather was about to undergo a big change. He was worried about the women left up in the mountains, and so he asked Wang Lu to tell Suzuki that they had to return to the mountains.
Suzuki wouldn’t allow it, so Lajide went looking for Yoshida who was in charge of the Kwantung Army Garrison. Perhaps because Yoshida’s own eyes had seen his wound disappear and his battle steed die, he had a certain reverence for Nidu the Shaman’s urireng. So he instructed Suzuki to return their rifles and allow our men to re-enter the mountains.
Snow had already begun falling when they set out. But before they reached the old campsite, they discovered the tree markers we had left behind. They realised we had moved camp and followed the markers along the Bistaré until they tracked us down.
It had been two days since they last rested, and on their way they had caught just one hare. After they arrived at the urireng and Lajide heard that the reindeer had been away from the camp for two days, he gulped a few mouthfuls of water, and they split into three groups for the search: Hase, Dashi and Ivan in one, Kunde with Luni and Jindele, and Lajide on his own. The others wore snowshoes but Lajide went on horseback. He said the horse had been with the reindeer for so long that it was familiar with their scent, so it could help him track them down.
Our urireng possessed a dozen or so pairs of snowshoes. They were made of pinewood with kandahang hide attached to the underside. Each snowshoe was nine han
d-spans long, curved at the front, sloped at the back, and in the middle were leggings with leather straps. The men often wore snowshoes when hunting after a snowfall: you could cover three days’ walk in just one day in snowshoes.
The men had no time to make idle conversation. They strapped on their snowshoes and left the camp straight away. Lajide was the last to depart. As he mounted his horse, he noticed that he and I were alone in the snow. He gestured to my belly. ‘Soon, eh?’
I nodded. Lajide winked at me and chuckled. ‘When she comes out I’ll send another in. Can’t have you idle!’
At dusk the next day, Lajide’s horse returned bearing Lajide. But Lajide didn’t greet me. He lay head-down on the horse, motionless. The horse was panting and collapsed upon reaching the camp. It appeared that Lajide, who had been dashing about for several days, had simply overdone it. He probably intended to take a short nap, and didn’t expect to doze off stretched out on his horse. He froze to death while dreaming. As its master didn’t move or shout commands, the horse must have realised that something was wrong, so it brought him back to the camp.
How I regretted not urging Lajide to search on foot with snowshoes like the others! Then he wouldn’t have fallen asleep, and I wouldn’t have lost him and the child he and I created at the salt lick.
Seeing Lajide frozen stiff, I fainted. When I came to, my belly was empty. Yveline had already placed the premature infant in a white cloth bag and thrown it on a south-east slope. It was a baby girl as Lajide had foreseen.
Yveline cried. She was crying for Lajide and the child. Maria was crying too, but besides Lajide, she was also crying for the horse. She had seen how thirsty and weary it looked and given it a bit of water. But after finding the strength to right itself and drink, it had suddenly hit the ground with a thud and stopped breathing. Imagining how upset Dashi would be over the horse’s demise, Maria’s heart ached.
I wept too. A small part of my tears surged down my cheeks, but most surged towards my heart, because what flowed from my eyes were tears, and what flowed towards my heart was blood. It was the thick, tender drops of blood that Lajide had implanted in my body.
The other men all returned to the camp on the third day. Our reindeer had separated during the White Calamity and two-thirds had strayed beneath a hillside facing the sunless north-west. The snow was already falling very heavily, and combined with the north-west wind, a towering wall of snow had formed, trapping the reindeer inside. Unable to exit or find food for three or four days, most had frozen or starved to death, and only four were fortunate enough to survive.
The remaining third of the herd, led by the Malu King, sheltered under a cliff facing a gulch. The snowfall was lighter and there was food on the rocks, so except for some fawns that froze to death, the remainder survived. But altogether our herd was vastly reduced now to thirty head or so, equalling the losses we suffered during the Year of the Reindeer Plague.
We conducted a wind-burial for Lajide near the camp. With him gone, we chose Ivan to be the new Headman.
***
That winter was an endless night for me. Even in the daytime when the sky was clear and bright, I still felt a swathe of darkness before my eyes. As soon as the steps of the men returning from the hunt sounded in the camp, I used to run out of our shirangju, full of expectation, to greet Lajide.
The other women welcomed their men and took them back while I stood there all alone in the winter wind. Those icy gusts awoke me to reality: Lajide truly was no more. I yearned for the wind to take me to his soul, but the sound of Viktor and Andaur playing in the shirangju summoned me back to the hearth.
Nihau gave birth to a baby boy in the spring and Luni named him Grigori. We all adored Grigori, except for Yveline. Every time she saw the baby in his swaddling clothes, she looked at him askance and said the reddish mole on his forehead resembled Ivan’s. ‘Ivan was ill-fated,’ she said, ‘and Grigori will be no better.’ Of course, she spoke these words in Ivan’s absence.
Luni paid no heed to Yveline. He knew that she nursed a grudge because of Jindele.
Indeed, not long after Grigori’s birth, Yveline arranged a match for her son. Named Zefirina, the bride was a very capable and mild-tempered girl, but her mouth was a tad crooked, as if she were always vexed about something or other.
Jindele clearly didn’t care for the girl. ‘Do you mean it’s not bad enough to have a mother with a crooked nose, and now I have to take a girl with a crooked mouth for a wife?’ he said.
At this, Yveline exploded with anger. ‘You don’t have the means to marry the ones you like, and the ones you don’t show up at your shirangju,’ she roared. ‘That’s your father’s fate and yours too!’
‘If you force me to marry her, I’ll jump off a cliff!’ said Jindele.
Yveline smiled icily. ‘If you really have the guts to do that, then you’re my son after all!’
When the rainy season arrived, the men went to Uchiriovo again. They took their catch with them, planning to barter them for the manufactured goods we lacked.
Hase said when they received training at the Kwantung Army Garrison, every day they had to run in formation, practise bayonet charges and wrestling, and they also had to learn how to conduct reconnaissance. Clever Dashi was assigned to the reconnaissance class where he mastered photography.
The Japanese also taught them their language, but Ivan refused to learn. ‘Whenever they told him to speak Japanese, he’d stick out his tongue at an angle for Suzuki to see,’ said Hase. ‘Ivan meant that his tongue was useless and he couldn’t say anything.’
And so, when it was time to study Japanese, Ivan went hungry. ‘Since your tongue can’t speak, I assume it can’t eat either,’ said Suzuki.
This training session lasted just forty days and the men returned in the autumn, but the goods they obtained for their pelts were meagre. Hase said if it hadn’t been for Ivan’s foresight in hiding twenty or so squirrel pelts and six roe-deerskins in a cave near the garrison – instead of exchanging them all at the Manchukuo Livestock Company – then they would have returned with even fewer goods.
When the training was over, Ivan ran to the cave under the cover of darkness and took the pelts to Uchiriovo where he located Xu Caifa who exchanged them for ammunition, salt and baijiu. Otherwise, that year – when our livelihood was already threatened due to the loss of our reindeer – would have been even more trying.
In the thirty-first year of the Republic of China, that is, in the spring of the ninth year of the reign of the Manchukuo Kangde Emperor, two big events took place in our urireng: Nihau became a Shaman, and Yveline fixed a date for Jindele’s marriage without his consent.
Just after that year’s Ané Festival – or ‘Spring Festival’ to the Han – Nihau started behaving oddly. One day at dusk when it was snowing, out of the blue she told Luni she wanted to go out and watch the sunset. ‘It’s snowing!’ said Luni. ‘What’s there to watch?’
Nihau didn’t reply and ran out barefoot. Luni grabbed her boots and chased after her. ‘You’ll freeze your feet off without your boots!’
Nihau just laughed loudly and kept running without a backward glance. Luni was the fastest runner in the urireng, but he couldn’t overtake Nihau that day. The further she went the faster she ran, and soon there was no trace of her.
Luni panicked. He called Ivan and me over, and just when we were ready to split up and look for her, Nihau returned like a whirlwind. She was still running bare-footed, as light on her feet as a nimble fawn.
Back in their shirangju, she took Grigori in her arms, lifted up her blouse and nursed him as if nothing had happened. And her feet weren’t chilled at all.
‘Nihau, where did you go just now?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been right here, nursing Grigori.’
‘Aren’t your feet cold?’
‘I’m next to the fire. Why would my feet be cold?’
Luni and I looked at one another, our hearts comprehending: perhaps Nihau was going to become a Sha
man. It had been three years since the death of Nidu the Shaman, so it was time for our clan’s new Shaman to emerge.
Not long afterwards, Nihau took sick. She lay next to the hearth, eyes wide open day and night. She did not eat, drink or speak for seven entire days. Then she yawned and sat up as if she had merely dozed off.
‘Has the snow stopped falling?’ she asked Luni. It had been snowing when she lay down seven days before.
‘The snow stopped a long time ago,’ he said.
Nihau gestured at Grigori. ‘I only took a nap. Why’s he looking so frail?’ Nihau hadn’t breast-fed Grigori for seven days and all Luni could feed him was reindeer’s milk. It was only natural that the child had lost weight.
Meanwhile Maria came running in all flustered and delivered the news: the Malu King had died. He had lived twenty years and died of old age. We were grief stricken.
Traditionally, after the Malu King dies the pair of copper bells around his neck are removed and placed in the Shaman’s shirangju where they remain until a successor has been chosen. It is the Shaman who hangs the bells on the new Malu King.
We walked into the reindeer herd only to find the Malu King collapsed on his side. His fur, worn away by years of wind and rain, resembled patches of lingering snow.
As we knelt before him, Nihau nonchalantly walked up to the Malu King, removed the reindeer bells, and abruptly placed them in her mouth.
‘Nihau, why are you eating the bells!’ exclaimed Luni. No sooner had he said that than she swallowed them in a single gulp. Each bell was as a big as a wild duck egg, and even a bull’s coarse gullet couldn’t ingest one so effortlessly.
Luni was appalled. But Nihau appeared quite unaffected, and didn’t even burp.
Every year at the end of April and throughout May it was the fawning season. At that time we normally began to look for a place by a river or a gully with abundant lichen where we could deliver the fawns. We’d corral the bucks and the castrated males in a crude pen to ensure that the deliveries went smoothly.