The Chukchi Bible

by Yuri Rytkheu

  They needed the aid of neighbors to pull the kill out of the sea. These were the inhabitants of Keniskun, a small settlement on the southern side of the peninsula, and the Inchoun people who lived to the northwest. The Aivanalin of Nuvuken also hurried to help.

  The trussed-up whale was rolled to shore by pulling on the hide thongs that girded it around. Then they set to butchering the carcass with long, wood-handled knives. It had been a long time since any of those present had tasted such delicacies, so both the villagers and their guests were slicing the itgil’gyn into neat squares to gobble on the spot. They chewed slowly, savoring the taste and texture of the life-giving, refreshing whale blubber that slid down their throats and into their bellies. The children, faces smeared with blood and blubber, capered along the shore, scaring the dogs and the seagulls, which were also circling for their share of the kill.

  The bloody, bony carcass was slowly coming into sight, along with the giant animal’s organs – intestines, stomach, the dark brown liver, the heart, all of which were crisscrossed with blood vessels and ribbons of fat. Three of the men climbed onto the tongue and hacked it off with difficulty, then hauled it away from the head. Carefully they peeled the dark baleen plates from the jaws. These immediately went to the children, as there was a special kind of blubber that glistened from between the whiskers, sweetish and tasty. Whalebone was highly prized on the Chukotka Peninsula. It was used to make thin fishing lines that never became hoary with frost, sled runners, ladles, the netting that was wrapped around snowshoes, and also for precision tools.

  Mlatangin labored alongside his comrades, cutting out neat squares of blubber and stacking them with the rest, peeling off whalebone. He did not feel fatigued; on the contrary, his excitement at making his first kill perfectly seemed to grow as more and more people learned about it. From time to time he caught a warm, keen glance from Korginau and his heart melted with tenderness.

  By the time the sun had climbed over the Inchoun promontory and was preparing to sink beneath the cold ocean waters, all that was left of the whale was a bony carcass with ragged bits of flesh and blubber. Now it belonged to the birds and the dogs.

  Mlatangin changed his clothes. His mother handed him a new summer kukhlianka, meant to be worn against the skin, a pair of nerpa-skin pants, and low torbasses with wide, bleached nerpa-skin laces.

  He and his father headed for the klegran, which was already ringing with song and the rhythmical jangling of tambourines. The people of Uelen crowded around the yaranga. Not everyone was allowed inside the sacred building before the ritual had come to an end.

  The shaman Kalyantagrau rose from a whale vertebra to greet them. In his left hand he held an astonishingly black wooden vessel. Dipping his right index finger into the coagulated whale blood, Kalyantagrau drew a few lines on the young hunter’s face. One lay across his brow, two marked each cheek, and three his chin. Then the shaman cut a strand of the young man’s hair and dropped it into the whale blood. He upended the contents of the vessel over the stoked-up fire and the yaranga filled with an acrid smoke, making the men inside cough and choke and their eyes water.

  Accenting each word by beating a springy whalebone baton against a tambourine, Kalyantagrau began to sing:With the smoke of the fire that rises to the sky

  We announce to all the world

  That a hunter is born in our village

  A provider, a bringer of sustenance

  It was not his brother he killed today

  But what the Whale Ancestors bequeathed us

  So that life on this shore could continue

  On this beach the ages have called Uelen

  We remember the ancient law

  Whales and people are but one nation

  And there is no killing between them

  Only help with sustenance and kindness

  Mlatangin had heard the song before. This time it was addressed to him.

  Only when the ritual was over was everyone allowed inside the klegran yaranga, and then the joyous dances in honor of the summer’s first whale began.

  The whales were migrating, swimming ever farther away from the shores of the Chukchi Peninsula. And Mlatangin, in his new role as Steersman, directed the skin boats ever farther out from their native shingled beach. Sometimes they spent several days on the open ocean. The herds of the marine giants were heading northwest, curving around the eastern banks of Rochgyn, the Other Land. It was as though the Aivanalin, who lived in small villages scattered along the low islands along the shore, were taking up the whale hunt in relay.

  Now the men of Uelen hunted young walrus, whose tender ruddy flesh was considered a rare delicacy. The nomadic chauchu liked it well, and were willing to trade for it with deer meat, soft fawn skins, and thin deer hides best suited for winter clothes.

  The light of day caught up with Mlatangin’s hunting boat in the Irvytgyr Strait, between the islands of Imeklin and Inetlin. In the bow of the boat was a special contraption to hold a brazier, over which a kettle was always kept warm. The hunters breakfasted on cold walrus meat, boiled the previous night on the beach.

  Every now and again a whale herd would pass by, but the hunters did not give chase; even if they had managed to harpoon one, they could never have finished it off without more boats and men, nor towed it back to the Uelen beach.

  “Look ahead! What is that thing?” And the hunter sitting at the boat’s fore gestured toward the dark stripe that separated sea from sky.

  He was pointing to what seemed like a floating island, swathed around with a multitude of white wings.

  “It’s a hairmouths’ ship!” Mlatangin guessed, and was right.

  The wing sails took up the whole upper portion of the vessel. The hairmouths appeared to be hunting whale.

  Mlatangin hesitated. Should they hasten away from the strangers’ ship, or approach to get a look at how they went after the ocean giants? Curiosity prevailed, and he gave an order for the men to row quietly toward the ship.

  There came a loud bang, like a walrus stomach inflated to bursting as it hung to dry, and then a little white cloud that dissipated in an instant. Now they could see three babies separate from the much larger ship.

  Mlatangin’s boat came to a halt. He had decided it was too dangerous to get too close to the strangers.

  The hairmouths proceeded to harpoon their whale, then dispatched him with some sort of deathly contraption and drew a long hose of intestine up to the carcass, which then remained afloat. It wasn’t hard to guess that they were forcing air down the intestine and filling up the whale like a gigantic pyh-pyh.

  Mlatangin knew that the hairmouths possessed special instruments that allowed them to see a great distance. That was exactly the kind of thing he needed now, so they would not have to row closer to the enormous ship that looked like a wooden island with great white wings, and its little whaleboats that skittered around the ship like babies around their mother.

  The Tangitans hauled the dead animal to the ship’s side. The first thing they did was prise out the tongue and rip out the baleen plates. Then they cut out the blubber in neat cubes, hooking their poles into each slab of flesh and hauling it up onto the deck.

  The big ship had noticed the little skin boat: one of the whaleboats was headed straight for them. They might have raised sail and fled, but the speedy whaleboat would have caught up with the skin boat easily. Cursing his excessive curiosity, Mlatangin tried not to show his concern and fear to his comrades and even told them to put down their oars.

  The whaleboat carried true hairmouths; some of them had so much facial hair that their features were indiscernible beneath it. From afar they had begun shouting and flapping their arms, but their voices and gestures did not seem hostile. Still, Mlatangin’s nerves were taut with concentration. He guessed that they were being invited up onto the big ship and considered it wise to uphold the friendly atmosphere. He turned the skin boat to follow the white whaleboat.

  Yet as they neared the ship Mlatangin and his
companions all felt a burgeoning anxiety and fear. Who could tell what these strange people would do? They had clearly singled Mlatangin out from among his fellow Luoravetlan, and he now keenly felt both his likeness to his tribesmen and his otherness. This worried him, and he would have given much to resemble his kinsmen completely just now. He knew the true story of his parentage, but considered Tynemlen his father in every way, and his own implied kinship with the Tangitans a kind of pretty fable.

  The wooden ship’s hull rose wall-like above the water. A rope ladder snaked down the side, falling precisely over the skin boat. The chief hairmouth, easily identifiable by his neat garments and the smoking pipe clenched between his teeth, was shouting loudly and motioning the hunters up on board.

  Mlatangin and two of his companions went up the ladder. When he set foot on the hard surface Mlatangin felt as if he were standing on solid ground, and not a wooden deck. It was a strange, unusual feeling, quite unlike standing on the much softer, more pliant hide bottom of a hunting canoe, water visible underneath. Here you couldn’t even feel the ship rock.

  The chief hairmouth was smiling widely, revealing large, yellow teeth that brought to mind walrus tusks. He talked loudly, gesticulating, and slapped Mlatangin’s back several times with a wide, shovel-like palm. None of these friendly gestures assured Mlatangin one bit. He even thought about how easy it would be for them to be kidnapped, taken as captives to a strange land and made into slaves. The legends of the Tangitan wars were rife with vivid episodes of tortures practiced on the Luoravetlan warriors. Wrists bound, they were hung from hooks, slowly branded with hot metal, their eyes gouged out, their balls and members crushed.

  The visitors were escorted inside, into the captain’s own cabin, a spacious wooden room with round windows. Strange faces and images hung framed upon the walls, and there was a huge round table with raised edges, which was set with large mugs full of steaming liquid.

  “Kofi! Kofi!” The captain exclaimed this several times, as he motioned the guests to be seated on some high stools screwed into the deck.

  Coffee turned out to be a marvelously tasty drink. Following the captain’s example, the visitors were soon dipping hunks of rock-hard bread in their mugs. Afterward, they were shown the vessel’s whale-hunting gear – gunpowder-charged harpoons and a round metal pipe with sharpened edges that was attached to a pump and used to inflate a dead whale – and then each man received a parting gift of some coffee, hardtack, and sugar.

  In the meantime, the whale had been all but completely butchered, stripped of whalebone and blubber. The mutilated, blood red carcass was freed from the restraints clamping it to the ship’s side, and in the blink of an eye it sank from view.

  Mlatangin’s boat raised sail and set course for its native shore of Uelen.

  This was the Luoravetlan’s first encounter with hairmouth whalers, though this encounter would later prove common in the Irvytgyr Strait.

  By 1848, the once rare voyages of American whaling ships to the northern part of the Bering Sea, to the Sea of Chukotka and up the Arctic coast of Alaska became more commonplace. For the most part, the Tangitans now set out from the rapidly expanding, thriving port of San Francisco, sailing to make their fortunes, pushing through the mists and ice fields of the Arctic waters.

  The commercial whaling industry materialized on a typically American scale. There was even a special coal refueling station for outbound ships set up in Port Clarence on the Alaskan coast.

  The disappearance of John Franklin’s expedition in 1827 set off an unusual flurry of activity from various would-be rescuers. American ships stopped at Chukchi villages to search for their lost comrades, often leaving the names of their vessels behind: Cape Plover, at the mouth of Providence Bay, was named after one of the ships attached to T. Moore’s Chukotka expedition of 1848.

  In the years that followed, the Bering Strait teemed with Tangitan vessels – whalers, explorers, and merchant ships. The ships would anchor off even the smallest of villages, where they were sometimes forced to winter. Some sank without a trace; others, abandoning hope of escaping the mortal grip of the moving ice fields, would be abandoned by their crews to drift along encased in ice, appearing here and there like ghosts.

  Meanwhile, the land swarmed with hordes of gold prospectors.

  In their ambition to gird the planet with landlines of instantaneous electric communication – and, in a race against time and a rival company laying a submarine cable on the Arctic Ocean’s floor – the planners and investors of the Russian-American Telegraph Line pushed into the most remote corners of northwest Asia and put up their telegraph poles, erecting metal masts in the heart of the tundra to match Mr. Eiffel’s tower in Paris.

  Within a few decades of the marauding whalers’ arrival, the giant herds of Greenland and baleen whales that once roamed the northern waters of the Bering Sea were all but exterminated. In Uelen, killing a single Greenland whale in the course of a season was considered a great stroke of luck. Mostly these days they “hunted” whale carcasses, left afloat after the blubber and baleen had been stripped off. In time, when municipal gas lighting was introduced to city streets in the Tangitan lands, the demand for blubber-oil fell dramatically – yet whalebone continued to be a sought-after prize. Mutilated whale carcasses continued to wash up on the shingled beaches of Chukotka.

  It would be another century before the descendants of the whalers who had destroyed the mighty creatures – and, with them, the lifeblood of the peninsula’s population – created the International Whaling Commission. Each year they would set miserly whaling quotas for the Chukchi and the Eskimos, citing their hypocritical “concern” for the livelihoods of the Arctic dwellers. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and the Tangitans are no exception to this rule.

  Mlatangin went on hunting whales with his harpoon. He dreamed of obtaining a mechanized harpoon cannon and amassed a store of baleen plates to trade. During his lifetime the whale herds still seemed inexhaustible.

  The hairmouths came into Uelen more and more frequently. They traded tea, sugar, rifles, cloth, and tobacco for furs, walrus tusk, and whalebone. But costliest of all was the bad fire-water; many of the natives of Uelen came to be willing to trade not only their last possessions, but their wives and daughters too. Some worried about this trend, yet were themselves eventually overcome by temptation.

  There were, however, several sensible people left in the village who saw the danger of the addictive, mind-bending beverage; both the shaman Kalyantagrau and Mlatangin, who by now had cemented his place as one of the best whale hunters, were among them.

  In the autumn, a season of damp, dark nights, Mlatangin took Kalyantagrau’s daughter Korginau to wife and set up his yaranga next to his father’s, plumb in the middle of Uelen village.

  PART TWO

  (From the New Legends)

  The Birth of My Grandfather

  As far as I have managed to ascertain by comparing various sources, my grandfather was born around 1868. His parents, as you may have guessed, were Mlatangin and Korginau, both natives of Uelen and inhabitants of the yaranga in the center of the village. This yaranga survived to my own childhood. In the beginning of the 1950s, when my tribesmen were being moved into new wooden housing, it was pulled down, along with the other ancient shacks not fit to shelter a Soviet citizen of those enlightened times. The last time I saw my family yaranga, or rather its likeness, was in the municipal museum of No me, Alaska, during my first visit to the United States in 1978. The photographer had shot a panoramic view of Uelen, with our family home at the forefront of the composition. I made a copy of the photograph and it is now stored in my archives.

  This was the yaranga where my grandfather was born in the early spring of 1868. His birth was attended with all the ceremony and ritual befitting one of whom great things are expected. It is always thus: whenever a new person is born, especially a boy, his parents invest in him all the aspirations and dreams they had for themselves but for one reason or another wer
e unable to fulfill.

  The newborn’s umbilical cord was severed with a blade of obsidian, which had been brought over from Koryak lands many years before. This shard of smoky stone had served my family for many generations and was kept in a special, ancient pouch of wizened nerpa skin.

  They carried the newborn boy out into the open air, where, oblivious to his squalling, his paternal grandfather, Tynemlen, rubbed him thoroughly with snow. Only then was the infant swaddled in the soft fawn skins made ready in advance, and then laid on his mother’s breast. The baby did not seek for long, clamping his tiny hands and lips to the object of his search.

  “He’s got a tenacious grip,” Tynemlen mused thoughtfully as he gazed upon his grandson.

  He was considering the new person’s future, and it seemed sure to be different from Tynemlen’s own life.

  Alien things were overrunning the Chukchi lands, encroaching on a steady, measured way of life that had been the work of centuries. The Tangitans, who had once been called hairmouths, had flooded into the tundra and its outlying waters. They were carving up its sandpits, scrabbling for the precious metals they used to mint their money, and exterminating the whales in a frenzy of killing. Most alarming of all, they insinuated themselves into the natives’ lives with their evil, joy-making water. Greedy for furs, walrus tusk, and whalebone, the Tangitans held out the promise of fleeting bliss and forgetfulness implicit in each gulp of the perfidious drink. If a man had no furs, tusk, or baleen to trade, he would go so far as to lend the Tangitans his wives and daughters.