by Yuri Rytkheu
In the Americans, Mletkin discerned a different breed from the Russians. He saw people who were decisive, relentless in the pursuit of their goals. Their voices – loud and ringing – matched their appearance. Their motley garb, made of deerskins from the autumn cull, suggested that these were people who knew the value of things and treated their clothes with care. Gingerly pulling their kukhliankas over their heads, the visitors turned out to be wearing woollen sweaters underneath.
The chief American, distinguishing Mletkin in the gloom of the chottagin, addressed the young shaman.
“Do you speak English?”
“No,” Mletkin replied, “but I know Russian.”
The Americans did not speak Russian, and so they had to speak through the interpreters. One translated into Russian, which Mletkin understood, and the others needed a second translation, from Russian to Chukchi. The two interpreters worked so hard they barely had a chance to partake of the meal.
Normally, in winter food is cooked inside the polog, in a cauldron hung above a stone brazier – but in order to feed so many guests they’d had to make a fire in the chottagin, using a supply of last year’s firewood hastily dug out from under the snow.
The idea of starting up deer herding among the Alaskan Eskimos was the brainchild of the famed American preacher and missionary Sheldon Jackson. He had spent several years among the most remote camps and smallest islands of the Alaskan Eskimos, not just preaching God’s word but closely observing the aboriginal way of life. As everywhere among Arctic marine hunting communities there were lean, famine years – especially after the native seas had been colonized by whaling armadas, ships that went after whales, yes, but also exterminated any other living thing they came across. In a matter of years the multitudinous whale and walrus herds of the Bering Strait were greatly diminished.
The Americans were driving across Chukotka in order to buy some deer come spring, and transport them to Alaska.
“If we can manage to fulfill Sheldon Jackson’s plans, our Eskimos will have a guarantee against famine and the capricious seas,” explained the Americans.
“Deer herding only seems straightforward,” Mletkin demurred. “In reality it’s a hard job. My ancestors, who began deer husbandry, also looked at the Kaaramkyn and the Koryaks with envy, thinking: aren’t they lucky, to have the four-legged food circling their yarangas. But if a hunter can’t go out in foul weather, for a deer herder that’s exactly the time he needs to be out with his deer, to keep them from harm.”
“We’ve heard all this from the opponents of domesticated deer herding in Alaska,” the chief of the Americans objected. “But we are certain that deer herding will save our Eskimos.”
“Maybe better just to ask the Tangitan whalers to stop hunting in Alaskan waters?” said Mletkin.
“Now there’s a hopeless task!” the American gestured dismissively. “Why don’t you tell me why the Chukchi refuse to sell us their deer? I’m offering enormous sums for a single animal. They refuse. They’re afraid. What are they afraid of? Don’t they cull many more reindeer throughout the year? What’s the difference between losing a dead animal and losing a living one?”
While living in Rentyrgin’s camp, Mletkin had seen how much the deer meant to the tundra chauchu. The killing of reindeer was strictly circumscribed by rituals, which also applied to the animal’s remains, the stripped bones, the skull and antlers. There was no question of giving away a live animal, much less of selling one. Every so often they exchanged deer with other tribes, to improve the breed, or even gave them as gifts; but to sell them, and into a foreign land at that . . . This was seen as a great sin with heavy consequences, epidemics among people or deer, or wolf attacks, since wolves were a favorite guise of the kel’eht, the evil spirits.
Mletkin had a hard time making the Americans understand his tundra kinsmen’s reluctance. But he agreed to accompany the visitors to Rentyrgin’s camp. It was an unexpected opportunity to see Givivneu, to whom his thoughts turned more and more frequently. Eyes glowing like embers in a pure pale face, and a lofty forehead, like the slope of a snowy hill.
Reining in his dogs by the side of the yaranga Mletkin saw her, Givivneu, walking out to meet him. The young woman glanced at him, then lowered her eyes. A sleep-rumpled youth clad only in his under-kukhlianka appeared in the doorway behind her. White deer hair glinted in his own black mane.
“Where’s your father?” Mletkin asked Givivneu pointedly. The sight of the young man, staring at him as he scratched himself with a surreptitious hand, was producing an unfamiliar, unpleasant sensation. He suddenly imagined the youth pressing close against Givivneu in the thick, impenetrable darkness of the yaranga, running an impatient hand over her body, with her parents barely asleep. Not bothering to conceal his dipleasure, Mletkin addressed the young man brusquely: “So who are you, then?”
“A suitor!” came the obviously pleased reply. The young man grinned widely, revealing rows of white, shiny teeth. “I’ve got another half-year to go, working out the bride-price. My name is Yanko. My people come from Kurupkan.”
He cast a tender look at Givivneu and Mletkin was swamped by a wave of bestial jealousy. It took all his self-control not to lunge at the young man.
He allowed himself a quiet reproach to Givivneu: “Didn’t you promise to wait for me?”
“He came of his own will. But I haven’t accepted him yet . . .”
The herders rushed back to camp, and the camp master with them.
The dogs sensed the herd’s proximity and strained wildly against their harnesses.
“I’m glad to see you in our camp again,” Rentyrgin told Mletkin. “How you’ve grown!”
They had left questions and serious talk until after the guests had been fed and warmed up after their journey.
Rentyrgin had much to complain about.
“The wolves are getting to me. I can’t remember such a number ever born in one season. Something strange is happening to our land. The hairmouths were hunting whale by Raupelyan all summer. Some of the ships had fire-breathing machines in their bellies, and could give chase to the fastest of the whales. There were days the sea was blood red from shore to horizon. These hairmouths, they’ll empty our waters yet.”
“And now they want our deer, too,” Mletkin quietly confided. “Those over there,” he threw a subtle flick of the chin toward the Americans who were busy smashing deer leg bones with their knife-butts and skillfully extracting pinkish-white bone marrow, “have been driving around the camps since autumn, offering a heap of goods in exchange for a single animal.”
“I’ve heard of this,” admitted Rentyrgin. “All the chauchu I know have refused them. We’ll give them as many dead deer as they can take away on their sleds, but not a single live animal, no!”
When he discovered that this camp, too, was refusing to sell, the chief American flew into a red-faced rage. The interpreters could barely keep up with his rapid, angry speech:
“Why don’t you want to help your tribesmen across the Bering Strait? We’re not asking for the animals as a gift. No one has ever offered you such prices, never in your lives. Don’t you know that?”
Rentyrgin was silent for a time, slowly stoking his pipe, which contained the visitors’ gift of aromatic tobacco.
“We know the worth of the goods you offer for the deer. And we know what a deer is worth – a dead deer, whose meat is for the cooking pot and whose hide will go for clothing, tendons for thread, and antler for tools. We’ve performed the sacred rituals over it, spoken the incantations, anointed the earth with its blood in four directions. We can sell as many of those deer as you like. But a live deer we cannot sell, nor give away. It’s impossible.”
“But why?” persisted the American.
“Because each deer is a part of our lives,” the camp’s master answered him. “Can a man sell a piece of his motherland? Sell a mountain, or a river, or an island? Can a man sell a piece of his body? An arm or leg, a chunk of his belly? Even for the hig
hest price? No, he cannot! Or he will cease to be a human being. Cease to be a Luoravetlan.” Rentyrgin’s concluding words rang grave and clear.
The American muttered something in his own language, likely some strong swear words.
The visitors departed on the following morning, without a single deer. Deep inside, Mletkin felt a kind of sympathy for them, but Rentyrgin was right and there was nothing else to be done.
Having seen the sleds on their way, Mletkin returned to the yaranga. Yanko had gone out to watch the herds, fulfilling his obligations as a suitor. His hard work and diligence was to be the proof of his worthiness to be Givivneu’s husband.
Rentyrgin treated Mletkin with respect, welcoming him as was befitting a famed shaman, word of whom had reached even the farthest corners of the tundra.
“Yanko ought to leave here!” said Mletkin.
“But he’s working out his bride-price,” objected his host.
“Givivneu is promised to me.”
“She promised you herself, without my approval. You know that the word of a maid means nothing if it is not endorsed by her father,” Rentyrgin said.
“It’s my fault, and I should have asked you earlier. But I’d like to rectify that mistake now.”
Mletkin bowed his head. Though a shaman, he was much younger than Rentyrgin, and though he was an honored one, he was still a guest in the older man’s camp.
“If I was in no hurry, it’s only because I thought she had yet to grow and grow.”
“Women grow up fast,” said Rentyrgin. Then added: “There’s been many an eye cast on Givivneu, and Yanko proved the quickest off the mark. He’s lived in my yaranga for more than half a year now.”
“And sleeps separately, I hope?”
“He tried to lie with Givivneu once, but my daughter was firm: she told him there’d be nothing of the sort until he’d worked the term in full.”
“Let him leave the camp as soon as possible.”
“Would you like to stay in his place?”
It would have been good to stay in a deer-person’s yaranga. But Mletkin could not allow himself that comfort. There was much in life that was mysterious, much he had not yet experienced. Most of all, he had not yet had a chance to see how the Tangitans lived, to learn about their habits and customs – the way that Bogoraz Tan, the man whom the Luoravetlan called Veyip, the Writing Man, had studied Mletkin’s people.
“I can’t offer to work for my bride, but I hope you will give her to me all the same,” Mletkin said firmly. “I’ll come back for her.”
“So she’s to be on her own all this time?” asked Rentyrgin.
“She promised to wait for me. And she will, no matter how long it takes.”
The former suitor spent the night in the guest chottagin, which was still unpacked, while Mletkin took his place near Givivneu. Love between two Luoravetlan has no words. It is silent and beautiful, like falling darkness over a deer herder’s camp, a shimmering night of aurora flares, the night of myriad stars that pale beside a dazzling moon.
On the following morning, Yanko harnessed his sled pack and hurried away to the south, and Mletkin headed back toward Uelen.
Givivneu stood beside the yaranga to see him off, her future husband – though perhaps in truth they were married already.
Of Whales and Men
Archaeological findings testify that whaling is an ancient trade on the Chukotka Peninsula. Temples – colonnades of whale jaws and ribs erected on Yttigran Island and dotted along the shores of the peninsula – bear silent testament to the people’s memory of the marine giants’ crucial role in Luoravetlan and Aivanalin lives. The pyramids of bleached whale skulls piled atop beachheads and promontories served as a kind of beacon for the ancient mariners. Ancient legends tell of the close blood ties between the Ankalin and the whales, and the Luoravetlan marine hunters are directly descended from Reu the Whale and the legendary first woman, Nau.
And how could the Luoravetlan not revere the gargantuan beasts?! The kill of a single lygireu – or “true whale” – as the locals called the Greenland whale, the giant that is known to the world as a blue whale – would provide Uelen with blubber for eating and for warming their fur-lined pologs, as well as nutritious whale meat and itgil’gyn over an entire winter. Quite apart from native legends, scientific data confirm that for the shore dwellers of the Chukotka Peninsula, famine and disease were rare occurrences, the natives of remarkably sound health. This did not escape the notice of the first Europeans to encounter them. A steady food supply allowed time for creative endeavor. A hungry people, constantly struggling for survival, could not have created either the masterpieces that served as decoration for tools, clothing, and household goods, or the highly artistic oral tradition, characterized by soaring imagination and deep wisdom that was lovingly passed from generation to generation.
The hungry times and the decimating epidemics arrived with the Europeans.
In large part this was due to commercial whaling and the rapacious destruction of the walrus herds and breeding grounds – which began in the second part of the nineteenth century, from 1835 or so, when Barzilay Folger, captain of the whaler Granges, sent news of plenteous whale pods in the waters off the Bering Strait. This at a time when whale blubber was in high demand for street lighting in large cities, and whalebone indispensable for fashionable ladies’ stays and crinolines.
From 1845 on, there might be 250 whaling ships in the northern part of the Bering Sea in a single season. Even the ice fields did not deter the greedy blubber and whalebone traders. In the decade between 1840 and 1850, New England whalers alone slaughtered thousands of Greenland whales.
It was in 1845 that the first American whaler, the Superior, sailed through the Bering Strait and into the Sea of Chukotka itself. Other vessels soon followed.
At the peak of the whaling industry, whalebone fetched up to five dollars a pound, and baleen plates from a single whale could net upward of seventeen thousand dollars. The blubber was rendered on the spot, in gigantic vats that rested on deck in fireproof brick cradles.
The walrus herds of the Bering and Chukotka seas were similarly disposed of. A walrus would be stripped of its tusks and blubber; the rest of the carcass was simply thrown overboard. The skinned, headless hulks would wash up to rot along the beaches, at times for miles on end. It has been estimated that eighty-five thousand walrus were killed to make fifty thousand barrels of blubber between 1869 and 1874 alone. Altogether, in the last hundred years or so, white hunters have exterminated two to three million of these creatures, helpless as they were against human cruelty.
The natives continued to hunt by traditional means. Silence would descend over a shore village as soon as the first whales were sighted. Uelen’s sled dogs would be removed to the southern end of the lagoon, people were careful to speak quietly, and not to let metal implements clink together. They carried squalling infants inside the fur-lined pologs. Open fires were forbidden and people had to make do with cold or dried meat.
Each morning, Mletkin would climb the Crag to observe the horizon from his perch using a pair of binoculars, for which he’d traded ten bundles of whalebone the previous summer. He was itching to dismantle the instrument and learn for himself the magical means of bringing objects closer, but he was also fearful of spoiling the wondrous mechanism inside. Lowering the lenses from his face, he’d gaze at the skin boats beached on the shore in anticipation, their sails and oars at the ready. If there should be no wind, it would take hard rowing to give a whale chase. But today a fresh southerly wind prevailed, just the right strength for a whale hunt.
A ship on the horizon suddenly pricked Mletkin’s keen gaze. From this distance it looked like a white bird, its many wings stretched low over the water. In the stillness of the sea air Mletkin heard the thunderclaps of harpoon cannon very clearly; the hairmouths were at work. The large ship would be carrying up to six smaller vessels, each about the size of a canoe, which hung strapped to its sides like the young of th
is strange species. The hairmouths did not harpoon from the mother ship, but closed in on their prey using these little boats.
The ship, its full sails stretched tight in the wind, made a silent approach. It dropped anchor and the men on deck lowered a dinghy. There were eight men inside, one of them different in appearance from his shipmates. He shouted: “We come in peace! We want to trade!”
The man turned out to be a native of Unyyin, an Aivanalin village situated on a land spit in the southern part of the Chukotka Peninsula. It was also home to the luckiest and most skilled whale hunters.
“This is my second season with this ship,” Panliu informed Mletkin. “Spent last winter on Alaska. That’s where I learned to speak American.”
The tambourines inside the klegran yaranga now fell silent and everyone poured out onto the beach. The Tangitan men made an immediate dash for the women, their frank wide gestures a clear indication of their desire for closer acquaintanceship. They must have had the experience before, as many had brought along little bribes: sewing kits, bright ribbons, patterned kerchiefs. Others came ashore carrying bottles of fire-water. They treated the villagers to a sip from the bottle, but for anything more, they demanded compensation: sable and fox pelts, chamois-soft fawn skins, walrus tusk, bone-carved figurines of seal, walrus, lakhtak, polar bears, and deer. The small clearing before the klegran yaranga turned into a market square. Couples would disappear inside yarangas, the women emerging later in high spirits, if unsteady on their feet.