The Chukchi Bible

by Yuri Rytkheu

  Along the way they fished and hunted fowl; still, the winter-weakened dogs barely had strength enough to pull the whalebone-shod sleds over the wet tundra.

  Winter had ended long ago, the snows had melted and the earth was covered in grasses and flowers. Of the Kaaramkyn there was no trace – until one day Mlerynnyn caught a barely perceptible whiff of smoke amid the heady scent of the burgeoning tundra. The smell was as fragile as an autumn spiderweb, appearing and disappearing; it was a long while before Mlerynnyn could be certain of the smoke’s southeasterly provenance.

  This was the smell of the hearth, of long habitation. And now it also carried the aroma of boiled deer meat.

  As they crested the hill, the hunters saw the camping ground of the Kaaramkyn – conical, pointy-roofed dwellings with a slim plume of delicate blue smoke rising above each one. Children at play, women rushing to and fro, calling to one another in a throaty, strange-sounding language. But there were no reindeer to be seen, not a single “four-legged food.”

  It was later that they discovered the deer herd.

  At first Mlerynnyn thought he was looking at gorse. But this gorse was moving, and the roiling, living mass emitted a sound that vaguely resembled the grunts of walrus. The sound was punctuated by the muffled knocking of the deers’ antlers, which stirred Mlerynnyn’s heart with the expectation of a huge feast, akin to the feeling he normally experienced while bearing down on a large animal.

  Finally the Kaaramkyn themselves, the deer herders, came into view. Slightly bowlegged, they loped about, gathering the animals into a tight knot.

  Mlerynnyn divided his force: the larger part he sent to capture the herders and the deer, while he and two other warriors attacked the Kaaramkyn camp.

  The threesome barged into a darkened, smoke-filled, pointy-roofed dwelling. The smell here was very different from that of a sea hunter’s yaranga: a pitchy, wood smell, mingled with the sweetish scents of smoked deer meat, soured blood, and uncured hides.

  The frightened women cowered in the far corner. Looking at one in particular, Mlerynnyn was overcome with desire. He took the Kaaramkyn girl by the hand, led her outside, behind some disassembled winter sleds, and took her, upon a soft green tussock. He was astonished by the pallor and softness of the girl’s cheek and also by the almost total lack of hair on her feminine parts, which gave them the appearance of a child’s soft, smooth knee.

  The girl did not cry or resist very forcefully. She was pliant and soft under the man’s weight and for Mlerynnyn, deep in the sweetness of release, it almost felt as though he had escaped, for a time, from the harshness of everyday life.

  The Luoravetlan, though they had dreamed of owning “four-legged food,” did not know how to herd or tend them, and were even a little afraid of the deer at first. So from now on, the Kaaramkyn must be made captives as surely as their deer.

  Mlerynnyn was in a hurry to leave enemy territory as soon as possible, lest the Kaaramkyn attack and win back their tribesmen. On the third day, the eldest of the captives attempted to escape on a deer, but he did not make it far. Catching up to him, Mlerynnyn drew his long hunting knife and stabbed the Kaaramkyn through the heart. Had Mlerynnyn been taken by the Kaaramkyn, they would have acted exactly the same. He was doing his duty. Besides, a man from another tribe was not even really a person in the eyes of the Luoravetlan. He was a stranger, an enemy, deserving at best an instantaneous death.

  As the girl watched her father’s execution, her eyes were very wide, yet not a muscle of her flat face moved, as though she had turned to stone. The other Kaaramkyn, convinced of the Luoravetlan leader’s strength of purpose, made no further attempts to escape.

  They made their way back to Uelen by paths that were now familiar, under the warm sun that heated the depths of the tundra so well that one could have walked naked, had it not been for the mosquitoes. The Kaaramkyn seemed not to mind the bites of the bloodthirsty insects, lazily swatting them away from their faces as they continued to stride alongside the deer, unflappable.

  Mlerynnyn slept in the deer people’s dwelling and took the gentle, docile captive many times each night; with each passing day she grew dearer to him. With some difficulty, he discovered her name – Dil’ma, or perhaps Til’ma or Tul’ma. As he struggled to pronounce it rightly the young woman would give him a shy smile; then her flat face, which resembled the carved-wood visage of a protective spirit, would grow suffused with human intelligence, and Mlerynnyn’s heart would melt in a rush of sweetness and heat.

  This was an ancient custom, from the time when the Luoravetlan did not have constructed dwellings but lived, like beasts of the wild, in stone caverns, and warred incessantly with their neighbors. Aside from the ancient custom of killing enemies, there was another – the taking of women from other tribes and the begetting of new Luoravetlan with new, fresh blood. In fact, the people of Uelen owed their strength, health, height, and sturdiness of spirit to the time-rooted habit of taking wives from among the neighboring Aivanalin.

  So, none of Mlerynnyn’s comrades could fault his doings, though it was a shame that the young girl turned out to be the only one in the camp; all the other women seemed to be ancient crones, only good for keeping the place in order, cooking, and mending clothes.

  Every so often the Kaaramkyn declared it time to make a stop and allow the antlered animals an opportunity to rest and feed on lichen. Then Mlerynnyn would leave his beloved and go among the deer. He would walk a little apace from them, the animals slanting their enormous, silently accusing eyes at him, shaking their sharp, branching antlers. The Luoravetlan’s heart would overflow with a feeling of duty fulfilled: no more would his tribesmen die of hunger during the winter bridge of the seasons, as there truly would be “four-legged food” walking around the yarangas. True, the deer meat, tender and sweet to taste, turned out to be less filling than that of seal and walrus . . . But just look at how many there were, too many to count!

  Mlerynnyn ordered his people to watch the Kaaramkyn in action carefully, to learn their ways of handling the deer so that in the future they could tend the animals on their own. Riding turned out to be the hardest skill to master. Astride the antlered animals, the Kaaramkyn seemed to fuse with them into a single being. But then they were a lot smaller, and therefore lighter, than the Luoravetlan, and a good riding deer could easily carry the weight of a Kaaramkyn rider.

  The Kaaramkyn hooted with jolly laughter as they observed the fruitless attempts of the Luoravetlan to climb aboard their deer. The former did not seem at all disconsolate about their loss of freedom. They continued in their customary way of life. The only difference was that they could no longer wander according to their own whims, as it was Mlerynnyn who set the direction each morning.

  They traveled slowly, waiting for the coming of winter and the stilling of rivers. Mlerynnyn’s troop was capable of crossing water in its lightweight traveling skin boats, but the enormous deer herd required solid river crossings, despite the relative ease with which the deer could swim across narrower bodies of water.

  More and more, Mlerynnyn grew to believe that the deer were still relatively untamed animals, wary of people. Even the riding deer had to be carefully selected from a vast number of seemingly identical animals.

  The Kaaramkyn people’s dexterity in dealing with the deer was awe-inspiring. They could throw a lasso over a running stag, bring it down to the ground with a single blow, and kill it instantly. The butchering of the dead animal was achieved in scant moments; yet they managed not to spill a single drop of the precious blood, which would be collected in the deer’s own first stomach and hung up in a warm corner of the dwelling. This was filling and nutritious food, but took some getting used to. Every last part of the deer was used, down to its black, nutlike excrement, which was employed in tanning the inner sides of deer hides, softening and smoothing every last stretch. The hide on the animal’s legs was carefully removed and used for footwear and winter mittens, the remaining film scraped off with a knife and eaten
. The biggest treat was the marrow encased in the leg bones; pink, sweetish, and greasy, it left a clinging gloss on your lips.

  It was hard to name a part of the deer that was not delicious to eat. Even the hooves, after a spell over hot coals, became soft and tender, and sucking on them was a delight. Children would crowd in and wait eagerly to be handed the deer’s hide as soon as one went down. Beneath the skin, just under the hairy pelt, were the thick white horsefly larvae that were the children’s favorite treat.

  The “four-legged food that walks about the yaranga” turned out to require ceaseless attention. First of all, you could not leave the deer on their own: they wanted to scatter into the tundra and when that happened, it could take days to find the renegades and gather up the herd once again. That is why two herders always had to be on guard beside the herd. The animals had to be kept in places where there was enough lichen, a very unremarkable bluish moss that was nevertheless their main source of food. Proximity to water was important, and it was also desirable to have a breeze, even a weak one, to circulate among the animals and drive away mosquitoes and horseflies. Other deer hunters included tundra wolves – strong, ravenous animals. The men went at them with arrows, set traps, or drove them away with the help of specially trained dogs.

  In the second half of summer, when the calves had grown, the Kaaramkyn declared it was time for the slaughtering, as this was the time when the deer hides were still pliant and perfect for making into winter clothing.

  The Kaaramkyn requested that while they made the ceremonial sacrifice to the Deer Spirit, the Luoravetlan stand aside and not interfere. Mlerynnyn promised this: he had a strangely intense respect for the mysterious forces that guided the lives of men. Who knew how they might influence a man? Their invisibility, their anonymity, inspired a suppressed terror, and it was better not to offend forces unknown and inaccessible to a mortal man.

  Having returned with a large, empty wooden dish, the Kaaramkyn joined hands and began to shuffle around the killed stag, all the while producing heartrending guttural sounds that seemed to be their way of singing. Moving to a fixed rhythm, they would halt suddenly, thrust their clasped hands high and open their mouths wide, offering up monosyllabic exclamations. Their children, dressed up for the occasion, also took part in the round dance. Tul’ma threw coy glances Mlerynnyn’s way and made inviting gestures, as though calling him to join in the jubilation. But Mlerynnyn was in no hurry to answer her call; it all seemed strange and savage, mysterious, and filled him with a secret, half-buried fear.

  In the days that followed, the Kaaramkyn women were kept busy with the fresh hides. Just then, the tundra berries became ripe for the picking, and mushroom caps – to which the deer proved rather partial – popped up over the blue moss in their multitudes. The freshly picked berries were tightly packed into vessels made of tree bark and left to sit in the darkest corners of the Kaaramkyn pointy-topped tents.

  By now, the captives and victors were making some progress in communicating with one another. The Kaaramkyn seemed resigned to their fate. They had grown to accept that the strangers needed their deer, and their own skills in handling those deer. The captives started to look happier, and even the sound of laughter was heard emanating from their shelter. Sometimes they would sing their soul-rending songs, or do their round dance with its throwing up of hands. Watching them, Mlerynnyn would often think that these were not bad people, on the whole, and could be considered equals, if it were not for their lack of human language, the jarring noises they took for singing, and also their physical puniness, their flat faces and incredibly narrow eyes. When they squinted into the sun, it was anyone’s guess how they could see at all.

  Yet strangely, when it came to Tul’ma, those failings that separated the Kaaramkyn from the Luoravetlan seemed to be the very cause of Mlerynnyn’s arousal. It was exactly that exotic lack of resemblance to Luoravetlan or Aivanalin women that drew him in so strongly.

  The young woman was already with child, and Mlerynnyn kept her from hard work, especially when making new camp, when the women had to carry the long, smoke-cured, greasy poles and stretch the huge covering of many sewn-together hides over the structure to make the tent.

  When the first snowflakes fluttered in the air and, in the morning, the deer began breaking through newly iced puddles with a crunch, Tul’ma gave birth to a daughter.

  The baby girl squalled loudly in the smoky dwelling and refused to open her eyes for a long while, as though not wishing to look at the world.

  Mlerynnyn’s heart brimmed with a strange, unaccustomed tenderness. He already had children from his first wife, whom he had taken, according to custom, from the neighboring Aivanalin settlement of Nuvuken. He loved his children, looked out for their well-being, and when the hungry days came his own worst suffering stemmed from his inability to feed them. But this little creature with her amazingly narrow eyes released an ocean of unexpectedly warm feeling within him. Whenever he gazed at the little girl, at the way she suckled her mother’s breast with its tracery of blue veins, a spray of hot blood washed over him. Sometimes she would open her languorous little eyes and study her father intently as he bent over her.

  By the time they reached their native Uelen, the lagoon was ringed with fast ice.

  The men of Uelen peered with surprise and trepidation at the enormous deer herd that stretched over the level white surface of the lagoon. Even the dogs dared bark at the antlered animals only from afar.

  Keu walked up to Mlerynnyn and said: “From now on, you shall be called Mlakoran, for you have brought a priceless gift for our people, the ‘four-legged food that walks about the yaranga.’”

  Mlakoran made his way up to his own yaranga, cradling his fur-swaddled daughter in his arms. Tul’ma, dressed in a richly decorated woman’s costume, trudged a few steps behind him. She walked with her eyes down, but Mlakoran said, loudly and clearly so that everyone would hear: “This is my new wife and my new child – Koranau!”

  The Testing of the Shamans

  Now Mlakoran divided his time between Uelen and the nomadic herding camp, between his family on the shore and his family in the heart of the tundra, far from the sea. He became a bona fide deer herder and now went sea hunting only rarely, preferring to tend to the herd. He even learned to communicate with the Kaaramkyn, and little Koranau’s chirping in two languages at once brought kindly smiles from the grown-ups.

  Mlakoran chose two Uelen families, culled a smaller herd for each, and ordered them to go and form their own tundra camps. Their task was to learn how to tend to the animals, so in the future they would be able to replace the Kaaramkyn.

  But the first experiment was not a success. In the very first winter the Uelen deer herders ate the young-bearing part of the herd, making it impossible for the herd to increase. As sorely as he was tempted to beat his fellow tribesmen, Mlakoran could not do it in front of the captive Kaaramkyn, who, although they were allowed to move freely about the tundra, must not forget that they were, in effect, bondsmen. To add to the loss of the does, most of the deer had simply scattered over the tundra, and the Kaaramkyn had to spend several days retrieving even a part of the original herd.

  Deer herding turned out to be harder than it first seemed. The “four-legged food that walks about the yaranga” required undivided attention and a constant state of alertness, lest individual animals move in a different direction from the herd. And the antlered beasts were always just waiting for a herder to look away, busy with something else.

  The Luoravetlan deer herders muttered to themselves, cursing the day and hour they’d given in to the temptation of having food permanently just outside the door, and agreed to move to the tundra. Yet they did not speak these thoughts aloud: Mlakoran dealt forcefully with dissenters, be they Kaaramkyn or his own tribesmen. This was the source of many arguments between him and Uelen’s chief shaman, Keu – a man strong as he was ancient, seemingly fossilized into a changeless old age. Only he dared raise his voice to Mlakoran. He would c
hide the tribe chief for having abandoned his people and having married a foreign woman; this, despite Keu’s own marriage to an Aivanalin woman from Nuvuken.

  The people of Uelen had not accepted Tul’ma. When Mlakoran came into his native village and his own yaranga, the tundra side of the family was allotted a separate polog, as though they were untouchable or suffering from a contagious illness. Although by now Tul’ma could speak Luoravetlan, there were few who would speak with her, and she spent much of her time taking her daughter to the shore, where they spent hours observing the life of the boundless sea, watching the waves and the marine birds that were so plentiful in summer. Sometimes she would croon a song, long and plaintive, which seemed to come from deep within her throat; and hearkening to the strange sounds, Keu would shake his head reproachfully and say openly, within earshot of everyone, that it was plain to see, the woman had put an enchantment on Mlakoran.

  In an enormous klegran yaranga, Keu tirelessly communed with the spirits, trying to free his tribesman from the Kaaramkyn woman’s magical wiles. He called upon all his spirit helpers and sacrificed to them generously, but all was in vain: each time, Mlakoran quickly grew bored with life on the seashore and bolted for the tundra without even bothering to hide his joy.

  The “four-legged food that walks about the yaranga” did not save the people of Uelen from winter famine: just as the harshest season approached – the peak of winter, when the sunlight was least and the long frosts bound up the open water – the deer herds moved to their winter camp, away from the shore. Reaching the deer herd required a journey of many days, on sled dogs weakened by hunger.

  This angered and irritated Keu, who starved alongside the other villagers. He felt that Mlakoran was deliberately turning away from his hungry, inconvenient kinsmen, loath to give them an extra deer to eat. Watching the Uelen hunters come home empty-handed after a whole day out among the ice hummocks, in the freezing wind, he would remember Mlakoran’s luck – especially that last hunt, before they had set off to find deer, when he had bagged an umka and a nerpa in one go. And there was something else that Keu noticed: a true deer herder would think hard before slaughtering one of his deer, deliberating whether he could manage without.