The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  I indulged a two-second daydream, myself the Arctic cinematographer, she the Bering Sea publicist. Me Tarzan, you PR woman!

  “And Cath,” Louisa pursued, “I believe you have many production gifts.”

  Itching in my soul, as if condemned by a deity to wear an eternal spiritual hair shirt, I rushed in to answer. “She does a lot of my production scheduling as well as her gifts as an editor. I’m hopeless at it. In the past I hardly even scheduled things, just let what happened happen.”

  “Well, a production schedule is no work of art,” said Cath in her flat, take-it-or-leave-it manner. Sometimes I found it admirable and even alluring. I didn’t know what I thought about it now. I just wanted everything to come to a close and resolve itself into a quiet night. I improperly desired both of them, but not in a proximate, breathless way. I was, for the rare moment, their aesthete.

  “How do you like your cabin?” asked Cath, changing the subject, for the truth was that she did think production schedules a lesser art, where to me anyone who could put one together seemed to have gifts beyond my imagining. But Cath, as always at sea, was very interested in cabins—we had had some hard ones off West Africa, great heat and a barely three-quarter bed, and closet space befitting a woman of only two kaftans and two shifts. That was when I was filming … Christ, I couldn’t even remember. Oh yes, heading for Namibia after the Mali elections, 1992!

  Along the way, Cath, as my companion, had learned to cherish a good cabin, and had one on this journey, and was willing to discuss it with people.

  “Are you sharing?” asked Cath of Louisa.

  Louisa laughed. “No, I splashed out on a full cabin,” she replied. “It’s an indulgence, I know. But I’m starting to get too old to share a cabin like a teenager with another woman.”

  I’m starting to get too old …

  Her journey was thus costing her the equivalent of a midsized sedan car. That’s how much the Arctic and the Eskimo meant to her.

  I saw across the dining room, at a bigger table than ours, Silver had found a chair and was talking with Angelo. I noticed the professor’s abnormally well-developed shoulders, although I suppose they weren’t abnormal by Californian standards, where people “worked out.”

  “I do love my cabin,” said Louisa with sudden exuberance. “I think I could live in it forever if they let me. All the Arctic explorers would have loved my cabin.”

  “I admire ours too,” said Cath. “And I agree with you. A person could happily live in that ship-borne stupor …”

  Across the room, Professor Silver was backing away from the camera crew’s table with his arms raised in an appeasing gesture. The production assistant, Sue, seemed to be the cause, and our pleasant soundman half stood, as if to avenge a slur.

  Louisa had noticed it too. “Oh God!” she said softly, as if she had a stake in what was happening.

  Cath put a hand on my shoulder to prevent me rising to whatever offense had been given or compliment misinterpreted. Louisa said, “He’s such a simpleton for a clever man. People get him wrong all the time.”

  “An idiot savant?” I asked cruelly. Across the room the potential for a fracas looked to have diminished, and I saw Silver with his hands extended begging for tolerance.

  “He’s brilliant,” Louisa said. “But maybe not gifted at ordinary things.”

  Cath was examining not the drama across the room but Louisa, who shook her head tightly. “All I know is that he means no harm.” And then she laughed. “I suppose George Bush would say the same.”

  “Kind of you, to be so understanding,” said Cath. I was thinking the same. I was thinking: noble, kind, whimsical, gentle, ample-hearted woman! Divine legs, divine ankles too! A concatenation of the graces physical and spiritual! I was right to perceive in her a special deliverance for someone. The problem was that once I had convinced myself I was the intended subject for rescue.

  When the dinner ended, I found I had in my nervousness drunk the main share of two bottles of wine and was exhausted. The strain of having thrown myself at, embarrassed myself with, Louisa, of knowing that I had once used her in a demented attempt at some sort of escape from my life, and of knowing that Cath did not know that, and of spending a night with both of them—all that wearied and jaded a man. And I realized that to allow Cath to talk to Louisa Wanstap from a position of ignorance was criminal. But how could I tell her here, on a ship in waters that were Arctic ice melt, in a place from which a brisk and angry departure was impossible?

  The awful, desolate Chukchi Peninsula was our nearest port. The easternmost and least populated corner of Russia, it had no buses, no planes, not even a train, and nowhere to link up with a quick flight home. Not even an amiable bar to sit in, absorbing anger while waiting for the cab to the airport. Especially after they closed the gulags of the region, and decided that liquor was bad for the Chukchis, the mainland relatives of the people at Diomede.

  If there was no escape for an outraged Cath off the coast of the Chukchis, there was no escape for me either.

  * * *

  Next day our landing was at dismal Cape Dezhnev, the easternmost snout of Siberia, from which we gazed out at the Bering Sea. It seemed spiritlessly empty in a way the Australian deserts never were. I would need to be a Chukchi to see its value, but the abandoned village on the foreshore seemed to say they didn’t see much value in it either. The truth is that, as with King Island, the indigenes were sad to go and needed to be forced from this barren shore and its bounteous sea, and enter a state-organized indigenous village somewhere else!

  I went ranging about the hill behind the cape, for the dinner had reacquainted me, even in Cath’s company, with my infatuation for Louisa. My mind and this murky air were pervaded by her. Out of the blue, she had become the universal question.

  Ashore, we filmed Yupik kids doing their best with the grim summer day, sliding and swinging on the play equipment in the grounds of the school. In the Palace of Culture, I got some footage of the Yupik and Chukchi dancing, then aimed my camera at ravaged Eskimos, men and women, looking hollowed and deathly as few alcoholics, even poor ones, did in the West, and who gathered by the door of a nearby communal kitchen.

  And through it all I madly believed I was once again enchanted by Louisa. I was returning to the crime. Did other men of my generation do the same? Yes. But I had believed I had repented.

  Laws of Hunting

  OF SO MANY of the animals, the mother is different from ours in the manner of bearing of the young. All our great companions on this earth beget a small wormlike creature which then makes its way from the womb to a pouch where it finds shelter and nourishment and protection while it grows. Then it appears in the world without anguish. There is a tale that as a punishment for the recklessness of one of our women at the beginning of time, women were deprived of this form of easy birth and that one day, when we have all fulfilled our duties, our women will bear less pain in their giving birth.

  By way of furless wormhood and ripening in a pouch, the slicer who killed my son was born to the earth.

  There are laws of hunting and there are customs nearly as rigorous as law. Dome noses are to be sought at special seasons of the year and can be approached by a party of no less than eight men, two harassers from the front, two flankers, two behind, and two to act according to chance. A dome nose can best be speared from the side, and when he falls, which is sometimes very sudden, it is better to be beyond the course and impact of that fall for the beast can crush a person simply in perishing.

  The slicer is the worst and most testing of prey, and hunting it is the work of ten men. No one ever draws near the slicer alone, for this creature is too terrible to confront even if fading with disease or weakness. Slicers are skilled at seeming to fade, and then returning in a moment to terrible vigor. It is also the law that the larger beasts with young in their sac should not be attacked. One can tell when this is the case by the condition of their fur, the way it has been thinned to supply the unborn.

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nbsp; I have hunted many dome noses, but slicers are only hunted for one purpose, as a test for those who seek them out. You need to think slicer-wise, for they are secretive beings and do not easily show themselves. One of our ancestors, Ring-necked Parrot, a creature of scathing tongue, sings the slicers so thoroughly that they choose to keep to their boulders instead of risking another withering encounter with a bird that they cannot bring down with their huge forepaw and slashing claw.

  Slicers mark their ground with an overpowering piss, and if you’re traveling alone you can tell it’s a warning and will run from it if you’re wise. Slicers are great travelers too, fast and near invisible, a force in the world of the spirit as well as a presence in the land. But as private beings, they are torn between occupying remote rocks, which they cherish, and preying in the grasslands, where they are so potent and so wary, able to echo flickering light on grass and shrub on their own pelt.

  If it’s a woman’s curse to bear a difficult birth, the slicer’s curse is to live an unfriendly life from which it finds the need to strike into open ground only now and then. Yet a man is not fully a man unless he has been in a hunting party that sets out to encounter a slicer and then participates in the hunt.

  When I set out from the Lake with my Son Unnameable, we had a hunting party of eight, Bandy being the eldest of the squad, then Dart, Stark, Baldy, Grass, and two new men—my son and a young man named Thorn—who were both to be tested by a meeting with the slicer, if that could be managed.

  We sang our way on the line that followed the slanting rack from the direction of Nightside to Morningside. We were out there some days, and met some Upper Waters people out on a pilgrimage to the flint pits. We feasted together on a red bounder they had caught, and took the opportunity to rehearse with them some of the songs they gave us for their country in case we ever had to go there. They were good fellows, and pleasant to be with. We celebrated together, trading some Flower Eater songs and dances, and I thought how the outer strangeness beyond the camp was diminished every time we met people like that. But I noticed they carried emblems with them as protection. An old man who was the guardian of their emblems sat at a small camp separate from the main one, tending a small fire of his own.

  The men from the mountains knew from our weaponry, and the care we had put into preparation of our spears, that we had an eye on the slicer. They realized then that it was a high hunt we were going to, and as we chewed thorngum they fell back on comic songs, inviting the slicer to give up and roll on his back, to forget his ferocity and his hunger, his unquenchable fire and his severity. They knew he could be invited by such tunes to come halfway towards us and to temper his magnificent fierceness to our weaponry and our souls.

  When we left the Upper Waters, Dart moved at a shuffle as he sang the song for the path we were on. He was an excellent singer and his memory for songs was astounding. He sang, for example, about the perentie, divinely sly, only half-committed to making the world, wondering whether it did him enough honor or service as he gouged out the restless rivers and backwaters to entice the thirsty ancestor sisters.

  We entered the trees around the first such lagoon. He sang and beat spear shafts against our shields in case the slicer had taken prey and was sheltering or drinking there. The slicer drank with a great delicacy, a humility, unexpected when you thought of his power. Leaving the thickets that marked the lagoon then, Dart sang us out into open country covered with bounder grass. The silver shrubs straddled a red plain where the leaves kept singing, with meaning, and so did Dart, as we got towards the places along the track of the perentie, where water had gone secret beneath the rocks and lay under each patch of clay. In his clear, incessant voice then, Dart sang us further forward on that slicer hunt so long ago and yet so sharp in memory. It was as if Dart drew the song from the earth up into himself and out into the air. The lines were holy in his mouth and praised the paradise to which the Heroes send us for a time as a mercy, so we may taste of it in the way of people, as the Heroes cannot. We must perish from this earth because the Heroes still have so many more children who are meant to be fruitfully placed here and entrusted with the country for their share of time.

  We came to a water place, the lagoon named Brown Snake, and beyond it some hillocks where amongst the rocks my son and his fellow first timer caught a little hopper and brought it into the fire we had already set. We spent a pleasant night with all the stars to perceive and envy our brotherhood. A mild wind rose and combed the tall, lush bounder grass. It was the last night in the world for my Son Unnameable.

  Jumping the Rapids

  IN A FRENZY, I woke early to go on deck and watched an undying, vivid light drenching the sea and gracing the merciless Siberian coast. Then, bobbing like a habitual item in the sea, there appeared a gray whale, harpoon in its flank, floating in smooth sea with a marker buoy near it to identify the place. The indigenes, I knew, were permitted to spear leviathans on both the Russian and American sides of the Bering Strait. And here was the great beast, dead in slick water. Nearby was the Russian island we were going to today. I hoped with an automatic cinematographer’s enthusiasm that the people would land their whale while we were there.

  There would be a seal-meat picnic ashore today, and I met Angelo and confirmed that we would take track and an Elemack trolley and use them for a tracking shot of the seal-meat feast. And behind, a little way along the coast, stood a great avenue of whale jawbones, a ceremonial thoroughfare bordered not only with the huger arched uprights, but accumulations as well of whale skull plates and vertebrae. Whales had been ritually venerated and slaughtered here, and whale-meat storage pits were dug in permafrost. Meat could lie refrigerated there for Yupik ceremonies. We headed ashore early in the day, and two Russian policemen in their baroquely peaked hats watched us unload gear from the Zodiac. We filmed the setup of the seal-meat feast, capturing visions of women in thigh-long kuspuks, or dressed like Muscovite shoppers except for their sturdy leggings and boots, along with children helping or playing about the tables. A man who might have been a shaman stood on a knoll in a tall and flimsy frame-worked headdress as if ceremonial and magical events were imminent, though his cheap trousers were too mass market for full-on mystery.

  We filmed the food but also the faces of those who served it. They put out bread and plates of boiled musk ox and seal meat, dried walrus and fish, with the fin of a killer whale, reddish and central to the feast, on its own small table. The police inspected this laying out of food with all the intensity of their boredom. The Zodiacs with the other passengers left the ship, and I saw them coming in past the killed and bobbing whale I had spotted that morning, which I’d hoped they would bring in for butchering before the arrival of the passengers. I got talking to a dark young woman who was a teacher on the island and asked her when they would land the whale. “I think this afternoon,” she told me carefully as if passing a language exam. “But they do not tell me,” she added with a laugh. She came from the far side of the Urals. She was as strange to them as was I.

  The people from the ship landed and the feast began. I shot it with my discreet handheld while Angelo got tracking shots in light so strong that the production woman, Sue, had to walk beside the dolly with a black light-cutter held aloft in her hands.

  I ate some seal meat when I could, and found it pleasant enough. Then, urged by a Yupik woman, and whether it was right for me to do or not, I tried a chunk of whale fin, chewing away at it, letting the whale-ness pervade my mouth and imbue my face with the sort of satisfaction the Yupik or Chukchi woman wanted to see me display. Up the beach came a smiling Cath in a yellow parka, apologizing for not seeing me off. Far down the beach, in lilac top and black ski pants, I saw Louisa chatting to various folk from the boat as they all advanced towards the set tables. My sight endowed her, making her so thoroughly luminous and central in the broad scene that I was amazed Cath did not see it and fall into a rage of jealousy. I forced myself to focus on the passengers as they were intercepted by elders who cal
led forth island dancers, girls in brown, some young men, who started performing a string of dances to the same walrus drums we had heard on the American side of things.

  It was then that we were interrupted by the anticipated landing of the whale. Crews came down to the walrus-skin boats and lifted them off their racks. Some of the rowers were women, others middle-aged men. Were the young men away, working in factories, serving in Chechnya? With the rowers were men wearing the same framework ceremonial hats I had seen that morning. The walrus-skin boats, translucently orange this bright afternoon, were put efficiently in the water and pulled away from the shingle beach.

  We shot the boats from behind the backs of the dancers, capturing footage of the Eskimo crew attaching the whale, the men in shaman hats standing in their places. Now the crews hauled away again, bringing in the great carcass. In the shallows, both crews slid over the sides and helped the dead creature ashore, the fatal harpoon still in place. An elderly woman, a bucket of water in hand, advanced down the shore and sang to the dead whale, while splashing water on its great head. Now there were even more intense dances by the feast. I climbed a hill and took in the scene with my handheld—the long shore, the bleak sea, the dancers, the whale, the cops, the schoolteacher, and the mass of passengers.

  Coming down again, I met up with Cath on the edge of the feast.

  “Are you enjoying this?” she asked, as we stood not so far from where the whale awaited butchery.