The Chukchi Bible

by Yuri Rytkheu

  This was the morning of a special ritual: the Lowering of the Boats. In winter, the skin boats were stored on high struts made of whale jaws, to keep them away from hungry dogs. Over the long winter season the hide dried out and became brittle. To restore its elasticity, the boats were lowered from their struts every spring, carried to the beach and buried in snow. As the snow gradually melted, liquid slowly worked itself into the walrus hide, restoring its springy suppleness.

  Each of the larger families which comprised a hunting boat’s crew performed the ritual with its own boat.

  Tynemlen’s boat was stored very near the yaranga, so they didn’t have far to walk.

  Kalyantagrau was clad in a ceremonial shaman’s garb: a long red ochre-dyed kamleika, lined with wolverine fur at the hem, and shot through with napped suede ribbons, each with a colored bead dangling from its end. He smiled at his grandson and motioned for the boy to come stand beside him.

  “Today you’re going to be my helper,” said the shaman. “Here, hold this.”

  He handed Mletkin a round wooden dish, used solely for feeding the spirits and gods. The dish held a conical pile of cubed deer fat, kopal’khen, nerpa blubber, itgil’gyn, green with age, crumbs from American hardtack and even bits of sugar.

  “The luck of the coming hunting season depends on how the gods view today’s ritual,” Kalyantagrau explained.

  In the meantime, the men had freed the skin boat from its wide straps and lowered it slowly to the ground.

  Kalyantagrau walked around the vessel, all the while whispering incantations under his breath. From time to time he would pinch a handful of the sacrificial offering from the dish and toss it onto the snow beside the boat. The dogs were quick to bolt the divine food, snarling and nipping at one another. Mletkin, following close behind his shaman grandfather, worried that the gods would hardly get any food and tried to deter the dogs with shouting.

  As soon as the ritual was completed, the hunters shouldered their boat and carried it back to the beach. While it was being buried in snow, Kalyantagrau performed the same ritual with Uelen’s remaining five boats.

  The shaman completed the ceremony out amid the ice hummocks that furrowed the frozen sea beyond Uelen’s beach. Only Mletkin, who still carried the wooden dish and its remnants of divine offering, accompanied him.

  Kalyantagrau addressed the sea’s expanse, imprisoned by ice, riven with ice hummocks and the detritus of broken icebergs. Quietly, he intoned:O, you, Enantomgyn, and all your aides and incarnations!

  Those who reign over the sea, and the beasts within its deeps!

  Send us luck, and send the beasts in plenty to our waters.

  We will be sure to thank you, Gods and Spirits.

  Our good fortune will be your good fortune.

  Kalyantagrau tossed the remains of the offering in all directions, and they were immediately seized upon by the dogs, who had tagged along. He then turned to Mletkin, took back the dish, and said cheerfully: “Well, that’s it! We’ve fed all our gods!”

  Mletkin’s look was doubtful:

  “But the dogs ate everything! They gobbled up all the food meant for the gods, no matter how hard I tried to drive them away.”

  Kalyantagrau laughed and pressed the boy close.

  “I’m glad that you are watchful and take note of everything. And that you think about things . . . But now you are mistaken: all that was due to the gods, they have received, and I dare say were very pleased. They were pleased in particular that you were helping me with the ritual.”

  “But how?” Mletkin remained unconvinced. “Didn’t you see the dogs catch every piece? They even fought over them.”

  “One day you will learn to see beyond what is happening before your eyes,” the shaman mused thoughtfully. “On first glance it did look as if the dogs had eaten the sacrificial offering. And that is what the regular person thinks. But we, those Inspired from Above, see something else entirely. The gods are omnipresent, they permeate all things in life. They can inhabit any creature, even plants and stones. This time they came into the dogs, and through them were able to receive our offering.”

  The dogs continued to follow the shaman and the boy; as he listened to his grandfather’s words, Mletkin found it hard to understand fully what he was hearing. He knew that Grandfather Kalyantagrau possessed many skills and attributes that the other men of Uelen, the regular folk, did not. He could converse with Enantomgyn, the omnipresent Creator and Highest Power of the world. He knew much and could do much; this was acknowledged by all the men of Uelen. But how had he come to be that way? He seemed no different than the other men in the village – except, of course, when he donned the special shaman’s clothing . . .

  “And you, Mletkin, would you like to be like me?” Kalyantagrau’s quiet but intensely probing question interrupted the boy’s reverie.

  “I would like that,” Mletkin answered quietly, and looked at the dogs that loped beside them with a different set of eyes.

  From that day on, the young boy began to examine the world around him more closely, always looking for signs of forces and even creatures that were invisible to the human eye. He listened hard to the howling wind and there were times he thought he could hear voices, and even distinguish the occasional word. A vast human face might appear among the white crests of the stormy, breaking waves and look back at the boy, causing his soul to ring with an answering peal to the Great Mystery.

  It all puzzled Mletkin at first, making him feel like a stranger in his own skin, but eventually the feeling ebbed.

  To all appearances he remained the same boy he had been before: gregarious, fun loving, and subject to the same harsh, merciless upbringing as the rest of his young companions. Indeed, the treatment meted out to him was one of the harshest. And if his mother slipped him the occasional, furtively sweetened cup of tea, or a fatter morsel to eat, Mletkin quietly accepted the tokens of her love while continuing to observe all the more stridently the rules and strictures laid upon him.

  The family council took place one autumn night within Mlatangin’s yaranga. The fire was guttering, the women had retired inside the polog, and only the three men remained in the chottagin – Mletkin’s grandfather Tynemlen, the shaman Kalyantagrau, and Mlatangin, the boy’s father. Mletkin himself was absent, having sailed with his friends to Pil’khyn Bay to go for a bit of fishing.

  “I’ve watched him for a long while now, and I’ve come to think that he is the very person,” Kalyantagrau’s voice was measured, as he took another sip of his tea.

  Tynemlen did not speak at once. He knew well the kind of hard future that awaited his grandson should he choose the shaman’s path. He would have to forego many of the usual pleasures of life. Never to say the first words on his mind, or to joke, for people would search for deep, hidden meaning behind every carelessly spoken word. All eyes would be on him, his every word would be passed from one man to another, and they would say: “So spoke Mletkin.” The shaman of Uelen would be respected. But feared, too – the means to hurt or kill, even at a distance, would be his. Not one man would dare criticize, insult, or cheat him, for fear that a swift and merciless retribution might follow.

  Naturally, this placed the shaman apart from all the other people of his community.

  Would Mletkin be able to live this way?

  “What do you say?” Kalyantagrau addressed Mlatangin first.

  “I think the main thing is what Mletkin himself says. He is growing into a man with each passing day. Let him train his body, and when the time comes to test his spirit – we will see.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” Kalyantagrau mused.

  “But we are not going to make a shaman out of him by force,” Tynemlen cautioned them.

  “I chose to be a shaman freely, remember,” said Kalyantagrau. “And my grandson too, if that should be his destiny, will choose this life only of his own free will. No one will compel him.”

  The School for Shamans

  The inside of Kalyanta
grau’s yaranga was always permeated by a faint but potent odor, though there was nothing out of the ordinary there, nothing different from the contents of any other yaranga in Uelen. To the right of the entrance, behind two wooden barrels where stores of walrus blubber and pickled greens were kept, towered a voluminous chest for fur-lined clothing and deerskins; behind the chest were more barrels. To the left was the firepit, clad in a casing of flat thin stones, all of them blackened with soot; a similarly greasy and blackened iron chain, hooked at the end, was rigged to be lowered into the fire from above. Beyond the fire pit, more barrels and household implements. The wooden supporting walls were hung with hunting gear. The necessary kit for seal hunting was composed of an akyn – a wooden toggle hooked on the end of a rope used to retrieve a kill from the water – a spool of thin nerpa-skin string, bone hooks, buttons, and a small bag whose contents were as yet unknown to Mletkin. Next to it, were two pairs of “raven claws” – snowshoes fashioned from wooden frames netted over with lakhtak-hide thongs – and two matching walking staffs, one with a sharp hook at one end and a long metal spike on the other, used to sound the thickness of new ice. The second staff was the usual kind, for leaning on as one walked. There were storerooms along each side of the polog, too. Maybe that was where the shaman kept the objects he used in his rituals, the tambourines and holy vessels . . . There was not an idol in sight, though in any other Uelen yaranga the Keeper of the Home would be easy to spot.

  In addition to its master and his wife, Minu, their daughter Itchel’ and son Vukvun also lived in the yaranga. Both were older than Mletkin and he regarded them as adults. Itchel’, a stringy, sickly young woman, had some sort of an emotional distemper. Abruptly, she would go rigid and stare into space with unseeing eyes, as though absenting herself from the world. She could remain in this suspended state for hours. The whole village knew about the young woman’s peculiarity and left her alone during her spells. Eventually she would come to and resume her interrupted task or conversation as though the pause had lasted only a moment. Vukvun, on the other hand, was just the opposite of his sister. Cheerful, lively, quick-to-laugh, he was a great lover of women. His manly prowess was legendary. And he was not choosy in bed partners – young women or respectable mothers of broods were equally delightful. Caught in the act by a jealous husband or jilted suitor, Vukvun always took the blame and tried to shield his lady of the hour.

  Only last night, they had stretched a fresh walrus hide over the roof of the shaman’s yaranga. It was still somewhat translucent, and the chottagin filled with warm yellow light.

  The shaman sat upon a walrus vertebra not far from the fire, where there was the most light from the smokehole above. A large, smoothly polished walrus tusk balanced across his knees.

  “Amyn etti, Mletkin,” Kalyantagrau greeted him kindly, gesturing to another whale vertebra. “Have a seat there.”

  “What are you going to draw, epei ?”16 Mletkin lowered himself comfortably.

  In recent times the American traders had started to pay well for painted walrus tusks, which could fetch up to three times the price of raw ones. The gleaming surface of the tusk would usually depict scenes from Luoravetlan life – yarangas, sled dog teams, walrus, lakhtak and polar bear hunts. Sometimes carvers would inscribe the reverse with scenes of life in the tundra: reindeer herds, catching and culling deer, conical, portable camp yarangas. Or tundra animals such as red and silver foxes, wolves, and birds.

  This time, it was a strange, surprising image that took shape on the walrus tusk. A gigantic man held a whale by its fin, looking as if he were about to bite off the whale’s head. His huge mouth was full of teeth, but otherwise he looked like a normal man. Looking more closely, Mletkin realized that he was looking at Pichvuchin – a fairy-tale creature in the guise of a human, who could turn into a dwarf or a giant so enormous that he could use the nearest mountaintop for a pillow.

  “Recognize him?” said Kalyantagrau, turning the walrus tusk toward the light.

  “Yes.” Mletkin nodded. “You’ve drawn him so perfectly, how could I not?”

  “And to my mind,” Kalyantagrau told him thoughtfully, “the contents of the Sacred Book of the Russians, the one your ancestor brought back from the Anui market fair, are not at all the same as my drawing. It’s something else. It’s a recording of speech. Not images, but speech! Watch!”

  Kalyantagrau brought two crumpled paper wrappers from one of the storerooms. One came from an American packet of loose tea, and the other from a Russian tea brick, hard as a rock, which had to be scraped with a sharp knife.

  “Both papers designate one and the same item,” Kalyantagrau said. “But the marks are different. You get some that are the same, like this one – A – which looks like the rack for drying pelts. There are similar sounds in human speech, so there’s nothing surprising in that. And so we can tell that Tangitan writing is different among the different Tangitan tribes, just as Americans speak one language and Russians speak another.”

  “If only we could learn to understand the marks!” This was Mletkin’s secret wish voiced aloud. He knew that his grandfather Tynemlen had had the same dream.

  “First we would need to learn the Tangitan speech,” Kalyantagrau told him pointedly.

  The shaman poured a little tea into a cup and offered it to his grandson. Mletkin drank the bracing brew with pleasure. He’d been literally run off his feet since morning. Already, he’d jogged up the steep slope to the mouth of the stream, carrying a bundle of metal rods, then down again to the lagoon and back to the village via a boggy tundra path.

  Still, sheer physical exertion didn’t count for much: the other young men his age – his cousin Atyk, Vamche, another relative, and their young visitor Gemal’kot from faraway Tapkaran – would have been doing much the same. Mental exercise was always the toughest, especially creating incantations on the spur of the moment, being ready for any exigency of life.

  “Unlike the Tangitans, we don’t have a store of ready-made incantations, set in stone forever,” Kalyantagrau had taught. “He who dedicates his life to serving man and Enantomgyn must learn to respond to life’s twists and turns with his soul and his reason. And not with just the first words that come to mind, but words that are precise and appropriate to the time and place.”

  Mletkin already knew that in the future, much would depend on the context of events, but Kalyantagrau never tired of reminding him.

  Mletkin always left his shaman grandfather thirsting for solitude and peace. He would ascend the Crag by way of the steepest footpath, and with each step he sensed the horizon widen around him, fill with space and air. From the peak, Uelen’s two rows of yarangas, strung along the shingled spit, looked just like a walrus-tusk drawing. But Mletkin’s eyes wandered out toward Imeklin and Inetlin, the islands in the middle of Irvytgyr Bay, which looked like a single island from where he perched, so close were they to one another. He would look out at the bluish, barely visible stripe that was the shore of Rochgyn – America – and onward, over the sea’s expanse to the north, into an endless unknown.

  At these moments of deep introspection Mletkin sometimes felt as though he had left his body and were looking at himself from outside. Looking at a young man who stood at the edge of a cliff where no other dared to stand. For him – who had trained himself not to fear heights, not to feel dizzy and light-headed as he looked at the ground below, at the white foaming tide and the suddenly minuscule birds and humans – this was no trouble at all. On the edge of the Crag he felt as steady and confident as he did standing atop the level tundra or the surface of a sucking, boggy lake. And if he pushed off gently with his feet, would he stay rooted to the ground or crash to the jagged rockfall littering the slopes below? It was as if he were walking around his corporeal body, peering inside and wondering at the way the regular Uelen Luoravetlan in him merged with a person to whom the secrets of the true nature of things, the commingling and relationships of what seemed like random events, were slowly being revealed. Al
ready he knew how a person’s behavior alters with the phases of the moon, how suggestible a person is, how like a child, with a heart that is sensitive and easily wounded. He knew how powerful a plain, single word may be when spoken at the right time, in the right place, and to exactly that person for whom it was meant. “Many people are afraid of the uivel, a curse that can be sent across a distance,” Kalyantagrau had told him. “I have this power, I can even kill a person in another village. There’s no need to send anything material to accomplish this, concentrating strongly on that thought would be enough. I should say though, sometimes it takes me a few days to recover . . .” “And did you kill many people this way?” asked Mletkin. “A fair number,” Kalyantagrau answered calmly, as though they had been speaking of nerpas or lakhtak and not people at all.

  Such revelations made the young man uncomfortable, and more than once he had doubts about his chosen path. If a man was given the power to do evil unpunished, would he always be able to use reason to hold back malice, anger, or the desire to harm another? This happens often in life. How many times had Mletkin himself felt it? Now of course he remembered it with a smile, but when his parents had denied him sweet tea or limited his water, many times he had caught himself thinking: I hope they choke on that tea! As he grew up, he began to envy the other boys if they outstripped him in something. And then, instead of trying with all his might to do better, the desire that bubbled up inside him was to see his rival stumble, fall, sprain his foot.

  “So how do you get there?” asked Mletkin that day, as he watched Pichvuchin’s heroic deeds come to life on the polished walrus tusk, beneath a sharp, wood-handled awl that looked like a bird’s beak.

  “Hard to say,” Kalyantagrau said after a pause. “One day you will just feel it, you’ll know that you can. Something inside will tell you.”