The Chukchi Bible

by Yuri Rytkheu

  He managed to put together a small team of sled dogs. Lilikey’s puppies were growing fast, too. Little Kmol’ received a sumptuous sled of his own, with runners carved from split walrus tusks. Givivneu had painted the polished bone surfaces with scenes from the legend of Pichvuchin, the benevolent fairy-tale giant. To everyone’s surprise, she turned out to be a talented artist. She colored the cartoons with ochre and a suspension of soot and grease, the play of light and shadow becoming vivid, three-dimensional.

  When the shipping season was nearing its end and the Tangitan ships had left the shores of Chukotka, drunkenness in Uelen lessened considerably. Yet from time to time a drunken man would be seen crawling from a yaranga on unsteady legs and making his way falteringly through the village.

  A few people learned to make an alcoholic brew from flour and sugar. Ope erected a homemade distillation device inside his yaranga, covered with old, tattered deer hides. Underneath, a stone brazier always glowed with a steady heat. The thick, beveled barrel of a Winchester rifle protruded from the clump of rags atop the contraption, while its owner perched by the gun’s foresight, licking his lips in anticipation as the transparent liquid slowly dripped into the mug he held in his outstretched hand.

  “If you have enough patience, you can make very strong ekimyl,” said Ope. For proof, he dipped his index finger in the mug and reached out toward the fire. A blue flame danced toward him. He wiped his finger and explained:

  “If you had enough flour and sugar you could make as much of that evil, joy-making water as you pleased. Want to try?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “After so many years in the lands of the Tangitans, you might have learned,” Ope mused.

  But Mletkin had not, indeed, learned to like the evil, joy-making drink, a fact that aroused not only the curiosity of his tribesmen, but the suspicion of the Tangitans, who saw his disinclination to drink as sinister and deliberate.

  The Tapkaralin had made out the best from the recent flush of commerce. They were lucky in whale hunting, and their bone carvers quick in gearing up the manufacture of handmade artifacts which the hairmouths were keen to buy: pipes and pipe bowls, hairpins, napkin rings, inkstands, pens and letter openers in ornately painted bone sheaths, powder-puff cases, and even miniature models of sailboats. A medium-sized model of a ship could fetch a Winchester. Gal’mo’s wife was the first in the village to own a sewing machine and made cloth kamleikas to sell – white for men and patterned calico for women. Tynesken bargained with Swenson for a schooner with an outboard motor, and even approached Mletkin to captain it, given his experience on American whaleboats. But Mletkin intended to purchase a wooden whaleboat of his own.

  John Carpenter paid special respects to Uelen’s shaman and, each time he visited from Keniskun, would stop and visit with Mletkin, always bringing gifts for Givivneu and little Kmol’. He must have missed being able to speak his own tongue, and drew Mletkin into long conversations, usually on religious topics. From time to time he even mentioned converting to the shaman’s faith.

  “You can’t just leave one faith for another,” Mletkin cautioned him, “like leaving a yaranga for a wooden house. When a man changes his faith he becomes another man. When the old faith departs the world, so does the old man who once belonged to it.”

  Carpenter seemed keen to glean Chukchi ideas about the makeup of the universe and the meaning of life. But as Mletkin later realized, what he was really after was to recruit Mletkin as a sales agent, and eventually open a branch of his trading concern in Uelen. As a permanent trading post, Keniskun was far from ideal: only five yarangas year-round, and poor ones at that. It had been chosen as a base simply because, in the face of ceaseless northerly winds, Keniskun Bay was a haven of calm waters. Beside the general store itself they had built two voluminous storage sheds of corrugated iron.

  Mletkin tactfully declined the offer.

  “I wouldn’t make a good merchant,” he told Carpenter. “I’m a shaman, and shamans don’t live by trade. Even your Bible talks about Jesus Christ driving the merchants from the temple.”

  Mletkin foretold the weather, performed the rituals associated with important occasions, made sacrifices, spoke incantations, buried the dead and healed the sick, making full use of the knowledge he had picked up working in the hospitals in Nome and in San Francisco, stitched up wounds, and consoled the grieving. He also acted as the chief officiant of the Whale Festival, when they managed to harpoon a lygireu – a true Greenland whale – and tow it to Uelen’s beach. He used his barometer to help forecast the weather and extracted teeth with a pair of shiny forceps.

  That fall, the seas took a long time to grow calm. No sooner did a ribbon of encroaching ice appear on the horizon than a southerly wind would drive all signs of winter from sight with swathes of heavy, slanting rain. Then a northerly wind would blow, monstrous waves crashing onto the shingled beach and threatening to wash the nearest yarangas into the sea. The barometer needle spun wildly across the instrument’s face and Mletkin’s own body thrummed with the atmospheric changes.

  He would make his way up to the sacred place, sacrifice to the gods who made weather, chant incantations. Finally, raging nature stilled in anticipation of the first frosts.

  Now Rentyrgin and his fellow deer people drove their reindeer herds to the opposite side of Uelen’s lagoon and began the autumn market. The chauchu had come to trade their deer carcasses, kamusses, hides, and sinews for Tangitan-made items, but more often for walrus, nerpa, and lakhtak skins, blubber and whalebone for sled runners. Carpenter too appeared, with his own goods to trade. He was after soft fawn skins and ready-made fur clothing, highly prized on the American side of the Bering Strait.

  Mletkin’s yaranga was redolent with the scents of reindeer meat and uncured hides. After a plentiful supper, they would spend the evenings stretched out by a smoldering fire, stripping the meat off boiled deer legs to get to the pink marrow inside. Old Rentyrgin, his father-in-law, mellowed from a mug of fire-water he’d traded from Ope, would launch into a disquisition on this new life of the Luoravetlan.

  “All these new things have appeared, and our people have changed. What will become of our grandchildren?”

  Mletkin strummed old Negro spirituals on his banjo. The old man listened for a time, then went on:

  “What songs will they be singing?”

  The old man had good reason to be concerned: he was reputed to be the foremost poet, maker of songs and dances, on the peninsula. At the end of summer, when marine hunting was suspended for a short while, Uelen hosted celebrations of song and dance, which were often attended by guests from as far as the American side of Irvytgyr. These festivals were a showcase of newly created works. No prizes were awarded, but audience appreciation could be measured by how quickly the new songs and dances became integrated into daily life and known in every yaranga. The people of Uelen tended to prefer Rentyrgin’s songs and dances above others.

  That autumn Rentyrgin was especially generous. In Uelen, a close kinship with the deer-herding chauchu was considered very prestigious. It promised plenty of reindeer hides, kamusses, and sinews, and boded well for Mletkin’s family’s supply of winter clothes.

  Givivneu was a skilled seamstress, and the clothing she made for her husband was neatly and handily made. Her dream was to own a sewing machine. Carpenter promised to bring one when the next season’s freight ships came in.

  Mletkin spent time with Kmol’ and rejoiced to see the boy growing up strong and hale.

  In the quiet winter days Mletkin would usually rise just as the dawn alighted over Irvytgyr. While Givivneu heated up his morning tea and set out a meagre breakfast (it was considered bad form to go hunting on a full stomach, or take any food along), Mletkin would check his barometer, poke his head outside to scan the horizon and note the direction of the wind, then begin to put on his hunting gear.

  As he left for the day he would see lights dance into life all over the village, as the other men got ready for
a day of winter hunting.

  Mletkin walked down the beach to the sea and turned in the direction of the Senlun crag, still black against a paling sky. Dawn had broken and half the sky was afire with crimson light, a vivid reminder of the heroic little snow bunting who had broken through the shell of the sky with her beak, to bring sunlight to the people of the earth.

  Clean, bracing air poured into his lungs, and Mletkin coughed involuntarily. He loved these morning hours. They gave him space for uninterrupted thought.

  While the people of Chukotka came into contact mainly with the Americans, or even the narrow-eyed, fragile Chinese and Japanese, bought Amercian-made goods, and learned English, Chukotka was officially part of the Russian Empire – whose chieftain was not a president, like that of the Americans, but Tirkerym, the Sun Sovereign.

  On occasion Uelen had been visited by the tsar’s representative, whose permanent station was at Mariinsky Post, by the mouth of the great Chukotka river, V’yen. Though the people of Uelen listened to the man’s speeches as if they were fairy tales, there were things in them with which Mletkin was inclined to agree. Especially with the Russian government’s efforts to curtail the importation of fire-water to Chukotka.

  At the face of the Senlun crag, Mletkin swerved sharply to the left and, donning his snow skis, set his course toward the sea, leaving behind the darkly rearing mass of Imeklin and Inetlin Islands. He came across several meltwater holes, or polynyas, but he was looking for a particular kind – one that could be used by nerpa surfacing for a gulp of air. He knew he would sense the right place with a kind of innate, inexplicable instinct, and he was grateful to the Outer Forces and those Spirits that governed the animal world. The main thing about hunting nerpa was to prepare a hide as camouflage, so that the animal would not see the hunter on the ice. Mletkin located a flat, upright plug of ice, hacked it down and positioned it as a hiding place. He had just made it in time to meet the start of the short bright stretch of winter daylight. Now all he had to do was lie patiently in wait.

  As always, the nerpa appeared soundlessly and without warning. Her smooth round head shone like a coquette’s slicked-back hairdo, as did a pair of enormous, bulging black eyes. Mletkin took aim. The icy oceanic silence was rent by a gunshot, the melthole roiled with bright fresh blood, and Mletkin’s akyn flew through the air. A moment later the nerpa lay on the ice at the hunter’s feet. It was still warm, though her large black eyes had already filmed with the mist of death.

  Mletkin bagged only the one nerpa that day, but it was by evening light that he made his way back home, a fiery sunset blazing over Inchoun Cape, and bright winter stars in the sky. It looked like the gods would be igniting the Northern Lights that very night; Mletkin’s heart was sure of many of these multihued celestial fires on the approach, and then nature’s usual way of settling into a long, quiet frost.

  Mletkin took a shortcut by the Crag. He could see Uelen’s lights from afar, as on such evenings, stone bowls with blubber-soaked, burning moss would be put out to guide the hunters home. The little dancing flames could be seen from a great distance and helped the hunters set a true course.

  Givivneu, who could always unerringly sense his approach, met him just outside the yaranga with a ladle full of fresh water, the requisite ice chip floating inside it, to give her husband’s kill the ritual “drink.” Only when she had finished did Givivneu inform him that they had guests from Nuvuken. After a momentary silence she added, “They have trouble.”

  Mletkin had felt anxious as he approached. Now he strode into the chottagin, where he saw a huddle of his distant relations by a low table laden with mugs of tea.

  Akosek rose to greet him. Simply, he said:

  “It’s our Galgayein.”

  “What’s happened to him?”

  “His leg is black. He had frostbite on his heel. We thought it would take care of itself with time, but the black flesh crawled up his leg . . . The boy is suffering, he’s begun to black out.”

  Galgayein, a young man of fourteen, lay inside the polog with his eyes closed, moaning softly.

  Mletkin drew aside the fawn-skin wrappings around his legs to reveal the blackened limb beneath. It had become one massive swelling that looked like a charred log. The foot was completely dead, its toenails fallen off. The young man was unconscious, and mumbled in his fevered dreams.

  “How could you let it get this bad?” Mletkin reproached them. “If the boy is to be saved, he’ll have to lose his leg up to the knee.”

  “Take the whole leg off,” said Akosek, “just as long as he lives. The most important thing is his hands!”

  “Legs are important, too,” said Mletkin, and sent for as much fire-water as Ope could furnish.

  Then he ordered that they borrow three more braziers from the neighbors. He took out his surgical instruments and submerged them in the big kettle that hung over the blubber lamp. He told Givivneu to be sure the water boiled. He might have used the ancient remedy of puppy blood as an antiseptic, but fire-water would be better still, if Ope hadn’t drunk most of it already.

  “He’d raised it to his mouth already,” said Akosek, handing Mletkin a full mug of fire-water. “I barely managed to wrestle it away from him.”

  There was nowhere near enough light to see by, and the patient’s curious kinsmen had clustered around him, eager to see what exactly Uelen’s shaman was going to do. Mletkin ordered everyone outside, saving Akosek and his brother, who would need to hold the boy down, and Givivneu. He levered the patient’s clenched teeth open with a metal spoon and poured the greater part of the fire-water down his throat. After a pause to make sure the drink had reached its destination, Mletkin applied a tourniquet of hide thongs above the boy’s knee, took up his sterilized surgical instruments, and set to work. He knew well that the key challenge was not to let the patient wake and to prevent the loss of too much blood. So he sent to Ope for another portion of fire-water.

  After examining the leg once more, Mletkin decided to cut it off at the knee, rather than saw through living bone. Leaving enough skin to wrap around the stump, he cut through the tendons and blood vessels. Like a seasoned nurse in an operating room, Givivneu swabbed the blood with wads of long-haired deer hide, filling a large metal basin with the bloody clumps.

  Just as Mletkin was setting the severed leg aside, Galgayein suddenly wrenched himself up and gave a heart-stopping scream.

  “Pour the fire-water down his throat!” Mletkin ordered.

  Choking and sputtering, the young man swallowed down the moonshine, screaming and shaking to fight free.

  “Be silent and wait!” Mletkin shouted at the top of his voice. With his own innate power of bending another to his will, he managed to make Galgayein subside back into his swoon. Now Mletkin had a grip on his patient’s mental state and could order him to sleep and feel no pain. He had done this to himself often, in the times he was being tested by Kalyantagrau. No one could have guessed that the burn marks on his hands, the many welts on his body, were reminders of agonies borne and pain suppressed by sheer force of will. He had learned to control and overcome pain. Now he was channeling that ability to the young man, who would live forever more without one of his legs. As he stitched up the stump with reindeer sinews, Mletkin gazed on the boy’s fine-featured, glowing face and long lashes sparkling with tears, and he wished for a son just like him. Kmol’ was still very small, uncomprehending, and it would take much time before the shape of the man-to-be could be seen in the child. For now he was still a child, still only a little boy.

  The name Galgayein meant “bird legs.” The Nuvuken Eskimos often gave their children Chukchi names to confuse and drive away malevolent spirits.

  Galgayein opened his eyes and met Mletkin’s gaze.

  “I’ve cut off your leg,” the shaman told him. “If I hadn’t, in a few days’ time you’d have been dead.”

  Now the tears that had nestled in the young man’s eyelashes rolled freely down his cheek. Struggling to stifle a sob, he said:<
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  “How am I to hunt now?”

  “In America, I saw a young man walking faster on crutches than a man with two legs,” Mletkin said encouragingly.

  There was of course the danger that the black blood might come back for another attack. Yet Mletkin felt certain that he had done exactly what was needed, and all that was left was for the young man to wait patiently for his wound, stitched up with reindeer tendons, to heal.

  Three days later, Akosek and his kin laid their son out on their sled and went home to Nuvuken. Tales of the Uelen shaman Mletkin’s miraculous ability to simply cut off broken body parts and throw them away spread across the Chukchi peninsula and into the farthest reaches of the tundra faster than the fleetest sled dogs or riding deer.

  Walrus hunting was on again in the spring and Mletkin took his skin boat to Nuvuken, where there was no ice shelf clamped to the beach and walrus were easier to kill and haul in from the moving ice floes offshore. There he met Galgayein once more. The young man dashed about on his crutches, heedless of his infirmity, and held the place of harpoon-man, with all the honor and responsibility that entailed, at the prow of a hunting boat. Later on, Galgayein became famous as a skilled bone carver; serious collectors considered it a great piece of luck to own one of his pieces – animal figurines, tableaux of the hunt, walrus tusks painted with scenes from ancient legends and magical tales.

  Life, meanwhile, went on. Tynesken bought his schooner and berthed it in the lagoon for the winter, Mletkin purchased a wooden whaleboat of his own and dreamed of getting a gasoline motor for it.

  He often thought of his years in America. He liked to strum his banjo in the evening, murmuring songs he’d heard from his friend Nelson, or he’d wind up the Victrola and point its mouth outside, to the great delight of Uelen’s small fry.

  But he still had no children of his own.

  Of Time and Men