by Yuri Rytkheu
Sensing the nearness of home, the dogs ran without urging. Toko overtook Armol’, then Orvo, and together with John broke into the lead position. The pack had been about to make a turn for the yarangas, but Toko shouted at them and steered them toward the seashore, to the craggy shelter where the Belinda lay.
Awakened by the barking, people were spilling out of their yarangas. They ran after the sled, shouting something, but it was impossible to make out a single word against the furious gallop of the pack.
The sled flew down the shore. Joyfully, tenderly, John looked out into the open sea that was soon lost from view over a dark horizon. Not a single piece of ice – the storm had cleared the water’s expanse: Sail away to your heart’s desire.
But the place where the Belinda had lain was empty. Toko held back, but John yelled something impatient and motioned ahead into the darkness, closer to the crags. Toko started the sled again, and drove slowly, wary of falling off the high shelf of fast ice and into the water.
John peered into the darkness, trying to discern the lines of a ship, until his eyes ached. He begged Toko, pleaded with him to come closer to the water’s edge, but the sea was empty. Under the crags it was empty, too.
Joy was beginning to turn into worry and fear: What had happened to them? A shipwreck? But surely someone, even a single man, must have survived?
Slowly, almost by touch alone, and sensing the open water, the dogs nosed their way forward. The shouts of those who’d run after the sled were growing louder:
“Come back!” the people were screaming after them. “The ship is long gone! Nothing there, come back!”
Toko looked at John. But the other, not understanding the Chukchi language, was scanning the empty black stretch of open water in desperation. When his eyes met Toko’s, he shuddered.
“Is it true?” he asked Orvo, who’d made his way forward.
“Yes,” said the old man, head bent low. “They sailed on the very first day, as soon as the sea was clear of ice. They were in a great hurry, and didn’t even come down to make their farewell.”
“It can’t be! It can’t be!” cried John, and facing the sea, he howled: “Hugh! Hu-u-u-ugh! Why don’t you answer me? Have you abandoned me? Oh God, but it’s impossible!”
He jumped off the sled and ran for the edge of the fast ice.
“Hold him back, he’ll fall into the water!” Orvo shouted fearfully.
Toko caught up with him and grabbed him from behind.
John was struggling, kicking, but Toko held him close.
“Hugh, come back for me! Don’t abandon me here, don’t leave me with these savages! Oh, Hu-u-u-gh!”
John fell to his knees, and then forward, prostrate. He couldn’t speak at all now. His body convulsed with sobs, and his throat produced a drawn-out, animal howl – the cry of a man betrayed by his own tribe.
The Chukchi, observing the white man’s grief, stood motionless; not one of them had made a sound until John went quiet, pressed flat against the ice.
All around, silence reigned. And the people imagined that they could hear the rustling draperies of the Northern Lights overhead.
Toko approached John cautiously. The other’s eyes were wide open and gazing straight ahead into the distance. It seemed that he was seeing something far away, something that neither Toko nor any of his kin were ever to see. Yellow foam adhered to the corners of his mouth, and his face had taken on a strange aspect. It was as though a countless number of years had flown over his head, and it even seemed to Toko that there was a glint of gray in the hair escaping from underneath John’s fur-lined hat.
“Take him back to the yaranga,” Toko heard Orvo’s quiet voice.
Toko clasped John around the middle and prepared to lift him up. But John, though slowly, rose by his own effort and leaning on Toko, limped toward the yarangas, black against the snow and the spill of the Northern Lights.
And from the north, wordlessly, without wind or wave, with barely a rustle, came fields of ice – to shut up the wide waterway so recently opened by the storm.
8
John MacLennan moved in with Toko.
At first he lived inside the polog together with the rest, but then Toko, seeing the white man’s discomfort in living next to them, partitioned off one corner of the chottagin, to create for John a space somewhere between a closet and a dog kennel. Feeling generous, Toko built him something resembling a bed, laying some roughly sanded wooden planks over whale vertebrae and covering the whole with deerskins. Still, this “room” was a cold one, unbearably so on snowy nights – then, John would shyly clamber into the polog and settle close to the grease lamp, reaching his frozen stumps out to the hot flame.
He examined them and was astounded by the skill with which the sutures had been laid. The deer veins fell away after a time, and the even stitch-marks stood out against his white wrists. His left hand still had a whole little finger and a middle finger that was only missing a fingernail. On the right, an orphaned little finger wiggled dejectedly, and a pitiful half-finger stuck out from the middle.
At first John couldn’t look at his mangled hands without breaking into tears, but then grew used to them, and even felt surprise at the loss of his former self-pity.
Living in the polog, John discovered a simple but important rule – if you want to survive, don’t miss your chance to have an extra meal. It could well be that tomorrow there will be nothing to eat, and those who dwell in the yaranga will have to chew on half-rotted leather cords, clean out the meat pits, pry bits of blubber and flesh from the sides of wooden store bins.
More than once he’d caught his host’s contemptuous glance, but paying no attention, continued to hurriedly stuff chunks of half-boiled nerpa into his mouth, and take enormous gulps of blood soup.
Toko’s wife Pyl’mau treated the white man better than did the others. In any case, she was not as rudely curious as Enmyn’s other inhabitants, who – as if in jest, but really with the most serious intentions – would pull John’s covers off his body and try to peep at him undressed.
Pyl’mau was a young woman in the prime of health, with a round, ruddy, grease-glossy face. She was always bustling about – cooking meals, grinding seal blubber in a stone mortar, curing skins by soaking them in a trough full of stale urine, and then stretching them on the snow. Hers was the care of home, dogs, and infant – whom she always carried around on her back, outside of feeding him and changing the strips of moss that served as diapers.
Toko went hunting early in the mornings. In truth, it was still closer to night, since the hunter needed to greet the dawn out on the ice in order to make full use of the short daylight to spot a seal in the dark waterholes and kill it.
John watched Toko’s equipping himself for the ice with curiosity. A white hunting overall fashioned from a rough light-gray canvas flour sack was always hanging in the outer chottagin and smelled of freezing wind, salty sea ice, and the crispness of a mounting blizzard.
Next to the coat-kamleika, in a bleached sealskin case, rested the yaranga’s greatest treasure – the old 30x30 Winchester, with a neatly trimmed gun-stock and a locked sighting. Next to the Winchester – an akyn, a wooden sphere with sharp hooks attached to long leather ribbons. This was used to drag the kill up from the ice hole. Two walking sticks were propped against the wall – one with a sharp point, for testing ice thickness, the other blunt, ending in a flat round piece for packing down snow. Finally – a pair of snowshoes, which John initially mistook for tennis rackets.
Every morning, Toko would put on all this gear in a particular order. Besides the above items, he also wore accoutrements that were probably of great significance, but John had difficulty guessing their purpose. Among them, tiny figurines of marine animals, leather strips, bone buttons.
These figurines, John hazarded, were in some way connected with similar items nestling in the yaranga’s nooks and crannies. Sometimes Toko conducted long and earnest discussions with them. What these discussions concerned
– John could only guess. Even later, when he began to understand Chukchi speech, he could not make sense of these allegorical exhortations and pleas. These were conversations with the gods, private and heartfelt talks, where only the direct conversants could understand one another, and the joining in of a third would have been pointless.
While Toko was busy adjusting his hunting gear, Pyl’mau got breakfast going. In good times, when there was some store in the meat pits, the morning meal consisted of frozen ground meat and a few pieces of the previous night’s boiled seal. All this was washed down with a few mugfuls of brick tea, which Toko shaved off onto a clean wooden board.
Food was served on a long wooden platter of somewhat dubious cleanliness. At first, John would transfer the food to his own tin plate, but on consideration, decided that it was much more advantageous to eat from the common dish when the deciding factors are speed and strength of tooth.
Finally, Toko would pull the sackcloth overall over his head, festoon himself with various pieces of gear, take up the first walking cane in one hand and the second in the other, and stride off into the blushing horizon, gradually dissolving in the thick predawn blue.
John would usually stand by the yaranga in silence, and follow the bread-winner with his eyes, until the latter disappeared among the ice-hummocks on the shore.
He’d return to the yaranga and sit by the dying brazier, giving himself over to a kind of meditative doze. He tried hard to avoid dwelling on the past, dispersing thoughts of his lost friends, the green gardens of Port Hope and the caressing waters of Lake Ontario. With a malicious pleasure, he told himself that he’d become almost like one of the savages that surrounded him, primarily focused on food, warmth, and sleep. With a kind of nasty inner glee he observed his habits, ingrained since childhood, fall away like a useless old skin. It hadn’t taken very long before he felt quite comfortable not brushing his teeth, or indeed washing his face. He had long since exchanged his underwear, rotting from sweat and grime, for a bit of fawn skin.
At first, John had been appalled by Toko’s manner of house dress, when the latter, crawling into the polog, would strip naked but for the meager, largely symbolic piece of fur.
As for Pyl’mau, she strolled about the dwelling clad only in a thin loincloth, and her large breasts – so full of milk that there was always a warm white droplet at the end of her dark, almost black nipples – swung to and fro with a stately dignity.
All this became fairly commonplace for John, and he would have followed his host’s example long ago, if it hadn’t been for his white skin, whose contrast to the surrounding dark bodies excited unhealthy curiosity. The reddish down on his chest had elicited such a scream from Pyl’mau, that John had been seriously frightened. John’s body, for all its defects of red hair and unbelievable pallor, was a favorite topic of conversation among Enmyn ladies for a long time.
Despite it being winter, the days were quite long. In order to be of some help to Pyl’mau, John sometimes took the baby, singing him half-forgotten lullabies and even telling him stories.
In good weather, John would harness himself to a sleigh made of two halves of a walrus tusk and criss-crossing wooden slats, prop up the little boy and take him for a ride around the lagoon, stopping by the neighboring yarangas on the way.
The entire settlement numbered twelve yarangas, and John came to the conclusion that their inhabitants were all closely linked by blood. The majority of the women were from other settlements, and even had Eskimos from the Cape Dezhnev counted among them. To tell the truth, though, in appearance they were no different from the Chukchi women, and one had to be well versed in the language to be able to distinguish them by their accent.
He especially liked visiting Orvo. Little Yako was handed over to the care of old lady Cheivuneh, and Orvo would sit John down and pack him a pipeful of the precious mixture of tobacco and wood chips. The men would smoke and converse. Usually the conversation consisted of Orvo’s questions and John’s long-winded answers about the beliefs and customs of the white folk. In turn, John tried to find out what powers the Chukchi obeyed and what gods they worshipped. Either he didn’t understand Orvo very well, or it really was so, but John could find no evidence of authority or rank, nor even of a leader among the Chukchi. Each lived according to his own judgement, and matters of importance to the whole settlement were settled without too much debate – reason and practicality prevailed. People treasured the good will of their neighbors. Thorny issues were usually referred to Orvo, whose authority rested largely on his experience, since the old man possessed neither wealth nor unusual physical strength. In fact, his yaranga might have been shabbier than those of some others.
Around noontime, Pyl’mau would call her lodger in and feed him an extra snack. By midwinter, noon was spelled by the sun’s edge peeping out from a faraway mountain range. The snow grew pink, and the frost lessened, the chilling breath of the wind died down and stilled.
At times like this, the polog wasn’t as hot as usual, because in the interests of economy only one grease lamp would be lit, and only half-strength at that. The grease was conserved. In the murk, Pyl’mau managed not to slice off her fingers, shaving bits of kopal’khen onto a wooden dish. The lumps of fat in the walrus meat were somewhat rancid and greenish. It took John a while to get used to this sort of food, yet later on he even found a certain piquancy of flavor in the slightly rotting kopal’khen.
Twilight descended, long and quiet. The sound of a man’s footsteps carried far, and the creaking under John’s feet would wake the dogs, stretched out and slumbering in the forty-degree cold. Lamps were being lit inside the chottagins. Their flickering light flowed out through wide-open doors and lay on the snow.
The moon rose, and shadows began to creep into human tracks, hide behind the ice-hummocks. By the hour of the first hunter’s appearance on the invisible line dividing earth and sea, the northern half of the sky would be aglow with the many-hued tapestries of the Northern Lights. In profound silence, under the vaulting sky, the dance of pure colors commenced.
At such moments, John was overcome with a strange trepidation – as though he were listening to an organ from the immeasurable cathedrals of beyond. There was no sound, but the feelings born of the gigantic symphony of colors were akin to music in their majesty and depth.
Tears would burn in his eyes, his soul stilled and his thoughts turned to goodness and brotherhood. John would enter Toko’s yaranga with a feeling of enlightenment and turn a tender gaze on Yako and Pyl’mau. At such moments he found the young woman rather attractive; he would make her blush with his unusual stare and incomprehensible words
“There’s something about you,” John would say, addressing Pyl’mau. “And your name – Polar Fog – promises not just a storm, but also some kind of change of atmosphere. If you had a good bath and put on a dress, and had shoes on, instead of these old torbasses – why, I imagine you could even be called pretty . . .”
The hunters were returning to the settlement. Not always with a kill. John became as adept as the women at recognizing whether a person was laden or empty-handed, from afar. But until the hunter was clearly visible, the watchers were too cautious to voice their guesses.
This winter, there were a few lucky days when each hunter brought in a haul, some dragging whole strings of nerpa, and trailing long bloody prints in the snow.
When she was certain that Toko was indeed towing a seal behind him, Pyl’mau would fill an old and worn little pitcher with water, trying to include a sliver of ice, and with solemn ceremony step out to greet her husband.
Toko would approach the yaranga slowly, firmly planting his feet in the snow, plunging deeply the sharpened end of his walking stick. Half a step from the dwelling’s entrance he would halt and unhurriedly unbuckle his hunting harness used to drag the kill. Thus freed, he’d reach for the pitcher – but wouldn’t drink right away. First of all he’d wet the seal’s muzzle with water, as though giving it a drink after their long and fatiguin
g journey together.
Only then would Toko hold the mug in both hands and drink, deeply and with great pleasure. Still, no matter how thirsty he may have been, the hunter would leave a few drops of water at the bottom, spilling them out in the direction of the sea as an offering to the gods that had granted him a rich kill.
After this ritual, Toko would cease to be a significant personage who was fully aware of his importance, and turn back into himself – happy to answer questions about the condition of the ice, wind direction and the currents of the Arctic Ocean.
Meanwhile, John helped Pyl’mau drag the seal inside the yaranga. Here the animal would be stretched out on a walrus skin and left to defrost for a few hours.
Toko would pick up a piece of stag antler and start to pummel the snow out of his outer garments. Taking off his canvas overcoat he’d neatly place it back on its peg, clean the Winchester, carefully roll up the rope. Shaking the snow off his torbasses and kukhlianka, Toko would then crawl inside the polog and there divest himself of everything else.
This signaled the beginning of the evening meal. The first to appear was a wooden dish of pickled greens. The greens were immediately disposed of, but all manner of delicacies were already waiting their turn – seal kidneys, liver, mashed and frozen-solid meat. All this, in John’s opinion, was consumed in monstrous quantities. Finally the main dish of boiled meat came forth. It was heaped upon the platter in enormous chunks, and a tasty steam rose up to fill the crowded polog, breaking out into the chottagin through a vent and teasing the dogs.
Soon enough, John stopped marveling at the wealth of food consumed at the evening meal, as his appetite was scarcely less than that of Toko, who’d spent all day out on the spiky ice cover of the Arctic Ocean.
Finished with his dinner, Toko would lie down on the deerskins and play with little Yako, smoke, or simply follow his wife’s movements.