by Yuri Rytkheu
Akmol’ threw the heavy walrus skin that served as the dwelling’s door roughly aside. The flame that trembled in the small stone lamp inside was tiny, but gave enough light for him to see a huddle of people in the far corner, terrified. Two burning coals – the eyes of a young woman – flicked toward the youth. Akmol’ took a step toward her, grabbed her by the hand, and began to drag her out. He didn’t even feel it when a set of teeth, sharp as a young dog’s, sank into his hand. The darkness around the stone huts was thick with women’s screams, moans, curses in both tongues, and threateningly loud shaman songs, accompanied by thunderous tambourine claps. Small moving lights began appearing everywhere, flitting from hut to hut as though alive. In some places the fires were stronger, spearheads glistening and the eyes of the warriors glinting in their skittish light.
Akmol’ had managed to drag the young woman down to the skin boat.
Uelen’s warriors were already regrouping back at the shore with their plunder of young women.
The Aivanalin of Nuvuken did not give chase. The men of Uelen raised sail and made for their native shingled beach by the light of a newborn day.
Akmol”s plunder lay at the bottom of the skin boat, and only when the Senlun crag, ringed with water, loomed before them, did Ermen give his son the signal to free the young woman. The Aivanalin girl struggled, turning away her head, and once even spit right in Akmol”s eye. He raised a hand to wallop the captive, but his father gave stern warning: Don’t you dare beat the future mother of your children!
So Akmol’ had to tame Ulessik as one might a wild little beast. Months would pass before she allowed him to come near.
In the meantime, the Nuvuken Aivanalin made an attempt to avenge themselves on the men of Uelen, but were roundly beaten on approaching the shingled beach in Ekven’s Valley,5 and retreated to their stone huts with heavy losses.
Ermen ordered that the walrus breeding ground by the Senlun crag be left alone, as another, more plentiful, had been discovered to the west of Uelen.
When most of the young women taken in the first raid fell pregnant, Ermen decided to make peace with the men of Nuvuken. This time they sailed in daylight, openly, rather than hiding in the shadows of dark cliffs.
Nuvuken is hard to spot from afar. It seemed merely a conglomeration of stones strewn about the slopes. But Ulessik had recognized her home settlement from a long way off and chattered happily in her croaking, guttural native tongue. Seeing her home again, she grew so impatient to reach it that she sprang forward, almost falling out of the boat’s prow.
Her countrymen had formed a dense row on the beach. Spearheads of sharply honed walrus tusk glinted over their heads. Behind the stretch of armed men stood the shamans, bearing gigantic tambourines, whose ominous thrumming could be heard from afar.
The men of Uelen had brought no weapons. Even their walrus harpoons had been left behind at home. When the skin boats neared the shoreline, a host of arrows whistled over the men’s heads: it was as though the Aivanalin were warning the others to turn back.
And then everyone heard a woman’s loud scream. It was the voice of Ulessik, Akmol”s wife. She was pleading with her kinsmen not to shoot, shouting that they had come in goodwill, without weapons. She was so anxious that more than once her voice broke into sobs. The bows fell silent yet Ulessik’s voice did not; now her shouts suddenly turned into screams of pain. Akmol’ feared that his wife had taken an arrow, but the Aivanalin women and the older of the men in the boats could guess what the matter was: the young woman was in labor. It was to the sound of those birthing pangs that the skin boat of the Luoravetlan touched shore. The elder women delivered the newborn, cut his umbilical cord with a plain hunting knife instead of the ritual stone blade, wrapped him in a fawn pelt, and handed him to the happy mother.
Akmol’ and Ulessik were the first to step onto the shore of Nuvuken. The eldest of the Aivanalin came closer and upon ascertaining that the child was a boy, broke an arrow over him as a sign of eternal peace.
The newborn was given the name Mlemekym, which means “broken arrow.”
The Life and Trials of Mlemekym
Mlemekym had several of brothers and sisters, and they all lived at the craggy foot of Uelen’s land spit in a tight family unit, for which they were given the name enmyralin, “those who live by the crags.”
In the summer the brothers hunted walrus, whale, and marine birds, while in the winter they went after nerpa, lakhtak, and umka, or polar bears. The women would use the umka hides to sew winter pologs (the separate sleeping chamber inside the yaranga), which were warm and cozy even in the most horrific winter frosts.
As was proper, the last of the brothers to marry was the youngest – his name was Goigoi. And as had become custom among the people of Uelen, he had taken his wife from among the Aivanalin in the neighboring settlement of Nuvuken. His young bride was called Tintin, which means “freshwater ice chip.”
Each morning, after seeing her husband off on his long and arduous journey across the frozen hummocks, she would settle into a cold corner of the yaranga and begin to croon her song of waiting.
One night Goigoi did not return from the sea.
Tintin peered at the hummocks, combing each fold and crevasse of the icy sheet, until her eyes ached and watered. When another day passed and still her husband had not come home, Tintin went to the shaman, Keu.
Together they performed the necessary ritual. Then the shaman told her that Goigoi had perished or else had surely turned into a hideous, hairy creature – a tery’ky.
Three frosty days, and the ice clasping the shoreline was frozen fast. The pressure of the ice had formed a ridge of hummocks, but between the hummocks and the shore spread an even, snow-covered expanse of ice.
Tintin had decided to go and collect some freshwater ice from a small waterfall beneath the crags. She strapped herself into a light sled and set off with the dogs at a run into the deep blue shadows of the looming crags. There, silence reigned. But a kind of wariness also seemed to hang in the air. Tintin looked over her shoulder and tried to calm herself: there was too little snow to worry about an avalanche, and a good deal of time yet before the first polar bears began to appear.
Then Tintin heard a soft moan. She snapped to attention.
Goigoi lay between two upended blocks of ice, seemingly fenced in. His face and body were covered in dense fur, his clothes were in tatters. He was barely recognizable.
A man who has turned into a tery’ky cannot take his own life. The ancient legend tells us that tery’ky’s fate is to die at human hands.
“Goigoi!” Tintin cried out. “I knew you’d come back to me, I knew you were alive!”
Tintin found a cave to hide her husband, bidding him never to show himself around the village. She visited him in secret, bringing food.
Goigoi could not bear to stay long within the cave. The stone walls pressed in on him and thoughts of the future drove him to seek freedom, his eyes searched for the beloved outlines of the surrounding mountains.
At night, Goigoi would crawl out of the cave. From a hilltop he could sometimes make out the dancing lights from the fires lit at the entrances to the yarangas. And one evening he could bear it no longer; forgetting caution, he crept down the hill and to the edge of his own yaranga, its silhouette dark in the approaching night.
Sensing his presence, the dogs erupted in hysterical howling. Mlemekym ran out of his yaranga, spear in hand.
He saw someone running away, disappearing in the gloom. Perhaps they’d only imagined it, he and the dogs? But perhaps it really was a tery’ky, the changeling remains of the unfortunate Goigoi.
Keu came up to Mlemekym.
“I felt very uneasy. I thought I saw someone running off over the hills.”
“Neither our father,” Mlemekym said, “nor any of our living ancestors ever claimed to have seen a tery’ky themselves. They only told stories about it. Can it be that it is our destiny to actually see one?”
“And to ki
ll him,” Keu said.
“But what if it’s Goigoi?”
“Goigoi is no more . . . There is only a tery’ky now.”
“So what do we do?”
“We’ll ask the gods.”
But the tery’ky Goigoi came to them of his own will. Close to dawn he began to make his way down the hill, slowly descending toward the yarangas. Mlemekym tried to peer into the changeling’s face, but the low rising sun blinded him, while the tery’ky’s long shadow preceded what once had been Goigoi.
Mlemekym returned to the yaranga and took up his bow and arrows. A similarly armed Keu emerged from his own yaranga.
Slowly the brothers walked toward one another.
Close enough to hear each other’s labored breathing, Mlemekym thought he heard something like words.
It was Goigoi, now within shouting distance of his brothers, who walked forward to meet him with bows at the ready. He cried out to them to kill him quickly, not to make him suffer.
“It sounds like he’s talking,” Mlemekym exclaimed.
“Tery’ky don’t have the power of speech,” Keu answered him firmly.
It was then that they all heard Tintin’s cry. Hair streaming, she raced past the brothers. Like the shadow of a windblown cloud she raced past the brothers, crying:
“Don’t kill him! He is your brother! Don’t kill him!”
Goigoi grabbed Tintin, tears in his eyes. For the last time he saw her, for the last time he looked on the world and the clouds, felt the cold wind; for the last time he saw his brothers, now taking aim at him.
With a final effort, Goigoi shouldered Tintin aside and stepped toward his brothers. And in the very same moment he felt two arrows bite into his chest with a dull thud. There was no pain, just an astonishingly bright, clear light – and he floated on it, to the receding shouts of those around him.
Tintin rushed toward him, but the snowflakes had already stopped melting on his open eyes.
Under the soft dusting of this unmelting snow, the tery’ky pelt around his face was vanishing, and he lay before Tintin and the astonished brothers exactly as he had been when he had left on that spring morning . . .
A third arrow, let loose from Keu’s bow, struck through the kerkher easily. Tintin pitched forward onto her husband’s body.
Mlemekym is also mentioned in the Rekken cycle, which numbered among the ancient legends – a mixed genre that told of magical transformations, and of how stones, mountains, waves, clouds, grasses came to life, in which animals turned into other animals and man himself could exist in a variety of forms, moving fluidly among them.
Mlemekym’s eldest son, from whom our line descends, was incredibly strapping and strong even at birth. One tooth stuck out from the front of his mouth and his mother was afraid of feeding him at first, worried he might puncture her breast with that tooth.
Mlemekym deliberated for a long time over a name for his son, anxious not to make a mistake, until one day the child banged his face on a wooden headrest and broke his only tooth.
And then everyone exclaimed in unison:
“His name is Mlerynnyn! Broken Tooth!”
Later on, he changed his name to Mlakoran, which means “stag breaker.”
But that is another story.
The Making of the Deer People
In the middle of winter, or more precisely, at its breaking point – when the sun, red and frozen stiff, began to peek over the horizon – came the time of near famine. The autumn stores of walrus kopal’khen and pickled greens were depleted, but worse still, more and more often the hunters returned without a kill. The fierce frosts of the season were quick to bridge any gaps in the drift ice and the sea lion herds were beginning their migration to the south.
Inside the cold yarangas, seal blubber – the sole source of heat and light – was used very sparingly now; in order to pass the long, dark, cold evenings, the storytellers would spin tales of long-ago times, magical transformations, and the creation of all living things on earth.
But it was the stories of the people who lived to the south, over the craggy ridges, that found the most attentive audience, for, according to the tales, these strangers had tamed the reindeer – a remarkable beast possessed of a warm, hairy hide, good for winter clothing that no freezing wind could penetrate, and a bony bush that sprouted from the marvelous animal’s forehead.
Herds of the antlered wonder grazed peacefully around the deer people’s yarangas. “Four-legged food just outside the door,” the storytellers would say, and lick their lips hungrily.
Mlerynnyn had already walked an enormous distance over an expanse of ice, thickly blanketed with snow, from the shingled beach to the farthest ice hummocks, but still could see no sign of open water. More than once he had clambered onto the peak of an iceberg to look around from above, but this only served to make his eyes water in the cold wind. The welcome sight of a dark little cloud or a rising plume of steam was denied him.
Usually, the nerpa would blow their airholes through thin, recently formed ice. Yet as far as the eye could see, the ice floor was level and undisturbed, save for a light dusting of snow.
The crimson dawn had turned into a red stripe, smeared over the edge of the sky. The sun peeked out for a moment, then receded back over the horizon, as though hiding from the awful cold.
The fur trim around the hunter’s face had grown needle-sharp with hoarfrost, which Mlerynnyn had to brush off every so often, just to look around. It was time to head home.
He walked up a small ice hummock and then, all of a sudden, looking across the bay and toward the island, he beheld the longed-for sight: a gigantic polar bear, sprawled belly-down on the new, level ice, waiting to nab a nerpa as it poked its head out of an airhole. The bear was so still, so silent, that it seemed dead, though Mlerynnyn knew this was a false impression. Quite on the contrary, this was the bear’s most alert and cautious state; just now the animal would be all attention.
The hunter took his approach upwind, careful not to let the snow crunch under his feet. At times it seemed that the umka sensed the man’s presence, and then the hunter would freeze, even halting his breathing for a while. It was especially dangerous to move when the polar bear occasionally raised his head and slowly peered around, as though half asleep. In those moments Mlerynnyn imagined his own heart stopping, skipping a beat, or ceasing to beat altogether. Of course he might have rushed the beast with his spear and tried to bring it down directly. But this was also a hard way to deal with an animal that was very agile despite its seeming clumsiness. Piercing the heart required a precise jab of the spear under the left shoulder blade. Best to attack when it was busy with the nerpa, though that would take time, and lying motionless on the cold ice was no great pleasure. You could freeze to death.
As Mlerynnyn considered, trying hard all the while not to betray his presence by a single movement or sound, the bear – with an astonishingly fluid motion – had hooked in his claws the sleek head of a nerpa popping up for a breath of air and yanked it up onto the ice. Blood spattered the fresh snow as the enormous animal growled with delight. Mlerynnyn watched the giant’s movements as if entranced; then it occurred to him in a flash that this was the time to attack. He launched himself from his hiding place and shouting wildly, spear aloft, rushed at the triumphant, upright umka.
The polar bear stood rooted in surprise at the sudden attack. Those scant moments proved enough time for Mlerynnyn to land several blows.
The bear fell to its knees; then, rasping and blowing bloody bubbles from its maw, it collapsed onto the ice, atop the nerpa.
In this kind of cold you had to be quick; while Mlerynnyn hurriedly hacked at the meat, tossing the heavy bones aside, the frost worked to make the warm flesh stone cold and stone hard. Mlerynnyn wrapped the bear meat in the bear’s own hide, together with the nerpa, and set to hauling the kill back to shore. Amid the excitement and his labors he’d lost track of time, and most of his homeward journey was lit by the nocturnal aurora borealis.
As was customary, each of the settlement’s inhabitants, from toothless ancient to infant at the breast, received his slice. The feasting inside Mlerynnyn’s yaranga went on from morning till night – and when the measured, unhurried conversations of well-sated people started up, again they spoke of the dream of owning “four-legged food just outside the yaranga.”
According to the tales, the Luoravetlan who inhabited the southern tundra were already keeping these astounding animals; many of them owned so many reindeer that they could not rightly count them all.
The deer came from the neighboring tribes, whose people did not speak the language of the Luoravetlan, or from the Koryaks, whose conversation could not be made out at all. In truth, the getting of deer was not a peaceful business, but often turned violent and bloody. This did not deter the Luoravetlan: in this sustenance-poor land, survival was paramount.
In early spring, when the snow was still packed densely enough to hold a heavily laden sled, Mlerynnyn and several well-armed comrades set off on a long journey to acquire deer.
At first they traveled along the coast, and only gradually veered deeper into the continental tundra, climbing over unfamiliar ridges, crossing mountain valleys and endless tundra plains fringed by distant blue mountains.
Mlerynnyn led his tribesmen armed with only a scanty knowledge of the valley-dwelling karamkyt, also called Kaaramkyn6 – the folk with the curious deer-herding lifestyle. They were not especially tall, nor stout. They did not even deign to walk, preferring to ride astride their antlered animals.
The lands Mlerynnyn’s small party crossed were notable chiefly for their emptiness and lack of inhabitants, though the landscape varied slightly; some of the valleys, shielded from wind, were home to tall gorse bushes and even real birches, which were good for light, flexible sled runners.