by Yuri Rytkheu
When their hunger pangs were quelled, and their eyes strayed seeking tasty tidbits, Toko spoke:
“We need to get some lakhtak. If a keral’gin19 comes, we’ll go out on the ice. We’ll go lightly, without the dogs. No need to get nerpa. We’ve got plenty in storage, all the barrels are full of fat, soon the walruses will be in season – what are we going to do with it all? We’ll go looking only for lakhtak.”
“Surprising, that all through the winter, only we two never came across any lakhtak,” John said.
“It happens,” Toko replied. “Someone is lucky, someone else is not. It’s rare good fortune to down a lakhtak. You can trade a piece of its skin to the deer-people for fawn skins . . .”
Pyl’mau didn’t interrupt the men’s conversation. From time to time, she would get up, add some more duck to the plate, and stealthily move her eyes from one to the other. And the insistent thought was rattling around in her mind: Why can’t a woman do as a man does? Why is what he’s allowed not given to her?
The ice that stretched over the sea was riven with cracks, pitted with meltholes from which the sea exhaled. There was almost no snow at all left on top of the ice, and despite a thick layer of dried grass and the fur chizhi they wore, their feet felt every inch of the painfully hard surface.
It was a hot business, the going. John could feel a trickle of sweat run down the furrows alongside his spine. Toko walked ahead of him. Never slowing, he kept a rapid, even pace. Exerting the last of his strength, John drove himself onwards. The Winchester that hung from his back in a white leather case, grew heavier with each step, and even the wooden akyn was starting to feel as though it were made of lead. Only his self-esteem forbade him to ask for a rest. He was breathing heavily and beginning to stumble, when Toko suddenly halted in front of a melting ice hummock.
“Let’s have a look at what’s ahead,” he said, and motioned toward the ice hummock’s peak.
“Have a look,” John called back, “I’ll wait down here.”
“All right, then.” Toko took out his hunter’s knife and fell to carving out some footholds in the ice. Transparent ice chips flew down to John. He caught a few small ones and put them in his mouth to alleviate the dry heat.
Toko clambered on top of the ice hummock and, putting a hand to his eyes, painstakingly scanned the horizon. Coming back down, he announced:
“Open water is very near. Let’s go.”
And he set off again.
Lagging behind, drenched in sweat, John was thinking irritably that his torbasses would have lasted quite well enough until the first ship arrived. He wouldn’t need new ones at all. Except perhaps as a souvenir of his sojourn in the distant Chukchi lands. He would hang them up in the living room, so that anyone coming for a visit could see them. And then he’d tell the story of how the Chukchi beauty Pyl’mau (he would call her by her full name then, not the name he’d grown used to calling her – Mau), would shape the water-resistant soles with her teeth, and then he would get up, take the torbasses from the wall and show them Pyl’mau’s teeth marks, preserved forever in the leather sole. Besides the torbasses, he’d have to take along a kukhlianka, his hunting gear and the snowshoes. Some of the items he could donate to the National Museum in Toronto, and he must remember to have some beaded slippers made for his mother and Jeannie. Just like the kind Pyl’mau had.
The open sea came into view suddenly, without warning. Water blended with sky, and the faraway ice floes were hard to tell apart from clouds. It was as though the still watery surface rose up to meet the edge of the sky, and the vastness that opened out was enough to take your breath away. John’s emotions were also shot through with the thought that this was the way home, back to his own world, where he was born, where he’d grown up, where he belonged.
“We’re there,” Toko drawled with satisfaction, and gave a few deep sighs.
Considering this an adequate resting pause, he now began fashioning a hideout.
“It would be better if you set yourself down a bit farther away,” he told John. “That way we’ll get the lakhtak faster.”
“You’re right. But how will I recognize a lakhtak?” John was doubtful.
“But you’ve seen them.”
“Just dead ones, already killed,” answered John.
“In the water, lakhtak look about the same as nerpa,” Toko started explaining, “except that he’s bigger and his whiskers are rough, and almost always black.”
“Let’s not guess,” John suggested. “I’ll just shoot at everything, and then we’ll sort out which is lakhtak and which is nerpa.”
Toko scratched his head, winced, and unwillingly consented:
“All right. But do your best not to get too many nerpa. What’s the sense in killing the animal for no use?”
He helped John make a hideout, and then the hunters separated.
Quietly, the ocean breathed. Water splashed by a thick faultline in the blue ice. Toko looked over to the eastern side of the sky, to where a distant cape pointed a long black finger at the vastness of the seascape. The sky above the crags was clear, nothing to indicate a change of weather. But you had to be careful in springtime. The wind could suddenly change, and the crevasse-covered ice could break into ice floes from a light breeze and carry the hunters out into the open sea.
It was a long slow wait for the lakhtak, time marked by the drops of water that fell noisily from the ice to the surface of the sea.
Nerpa kept on popping up over the water’s surface. They swam unhurriedly, and were sometimes so close that Toko could have reached them with his little boat hook.
A shot rang out. Toko leapt to his feet and raced to John, who was already unwinding an akyn over his head. A dead lakhtak was floating in a widening pool of blood. John threw his akyn just beyond it, jerked it back and hooked the animal.
Together, they could barely haul the dead lakhtak onto the ice. Toko didn’t need to inspect the creature to know that he had exactly the kind of hide required for hunting shoes – sturdy and thick.
“You’ve bagged a lakhtak!” Toko exclaimed, with a look of admiration and gratitude for his friend.
“I had trouble recognizing him,” John admitted with a smile. “More like I felt it really: that this was a new kind of beast. So I decided that this was indeed lakhtak, and I pulled the trigger.”
“Well done!” Toko praised him. “Now all you’ve got left to do is harpoon a walrus, go out whale hunting and spear an umka – a white polar bear.”
“Nerpa, ducks, and lakhtak are quite enough for me,” John said, and there was sadness in his voice, “too much for me, even . . .”
“How about switching places with me?” Toko offered. “We’ll sit together, it won’t be so dull, waiting.”
“Is one lakhtak not enough for us?” asked John.
“True enough, but we’ve only just got here,” said Toko, looking away.
John could feel a shade of upset in his voice. And really, their return would not have painted a pretty picture: a white man, a cripple, with his kill, and Toko empty-handed.
Toko deftly pierced the bearded seal’s whiskery lips, threaded a boat-tugging rope through the hole and dragged the animal over to his hideout, made from large blocks of ice.
Toko took up his post, and John got down nearby, his Winchester poised.
A nerpa appeared in the distance, slowly making its way toward the hunters. John was looking into her eyes. Noticing him, the ringed seal dove underwater.
“Why has the nerpa got such human eyes?” John asked. “Maybe she, too, is related to some human folk?”
“And why not?” Toko replied. “Every beast has relations among people. And those of us whom the wind carries off and imprisons in the ice, they slowly start to turn into tery’ky, changelings. The person goes wild and can’t live like people do. He wanders about the tundra and the mountains, attacking animals and eating their flesh raw.”
“Have you ever seen these tery’ky?”
“Once, I
saw one.”
John turned around to face him, thinking that Toko was joking. But the Chukcha’s face was serious.
“I was still very young then, unmarried. Hunting lakhtak in the spring, just like this. I saw an animal on the ice. Started creeping up on him. I was crawling a long time, froze my hands and knees. But just as I was about to aim – I see that it’s a tery’ky. He popped his eyes out at me, and he’s grinning. I bolted to my feet and ran out of there. Ran all the way back to the settlement, without a rest.”
“So what did he look like, then?” asked John.
“Smooth. Completely naked. Only a thin reddish fur on his body . . . Horrifying to look at.”
They heard a splash. A whiskered head came up through the water’s smooth, still surface.
“Shhh.” Toko took aim. “Don’t you shoot. I’ll do it.”
John lowered the muzzle of his Winchester.
A lakhtak was rapidly approaching shore. Evidently, he was intending to climb on the ice and warm himself under the spring sunshine. Two smooth waves radiated from the sides of the whiskered head. John was amazed at his speed. The beast was very close when the shot rang out. The bullet hit his head. Death was instantaneous, but sheer inertia still propelled the bearded seal to the shoreline.
Toko grabbed a light boat hook and threw himself onto the edge of the icy escarpment. He tried to maneuver the lakhtak onto the metal hook, but it turned out to be missing just a bit of reach, the length of an index finger. Toko bent over the edge of the ice barrier, hanging over the water. He had almost managed to reach the seal and was about to lunge forward to hook the carcass, when, all of a sudden, he was sliding down the ice, and a loud crashing crack and a fountain of spray, he fell into the sea. And immediately went under. Surfacing, his face contorted in terror as he made ungainly attempts to stay afloat.
Remembering that the none of Chukchi could swim at all, John rushed to the icy edge, thrusting out to the drowning man the first thing that came to hand – a Winchester.
Toko caught the faceted barrel and grabbed it tight. The sharp foresight cut into his palm, keeping his hand from slipping.
John made a supreme effort and, pulling backwards, dragged Toko halfway up. His water-logged clothes streaming, the not-so-tall and certainly not portly Toko became remarkably heavy. Toko bent over the edge of the ice-shelf. John felt easier. He looked down at his hands, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up: slowly, the thick hide loop that had been sewn onto his leather-covered stump was sliding down . . . But Toko was almost completely on top of the ice. John shifted the whole of the weight to his left hand, where the leather ring held fast, and tried to move his right hand further up, behind the trigger.
And then a gunshot rang out! John snapped around, jolted, not comprehending that the Winchester had fired in his own hands. When the recognition pierced his brain, and his eyes registered a spreading crimson stain under Toko’s limp form, he couldn’t hold back a terrified scream.
“Toko! Toko! Was it really my Winchester?”
“You hit me,” Toko moaned quietly. He let go of the gun’s barrel, and his body began a slow descent toward the sea, leaving a wide blood trail on the ice.
John lunged forward and grabbed Toko’s kamleika with his teeth, pulling him away from the edge. Making sure that there was no more danger of falling in, John turned Toko over on his back.
His face was leeched of color and deathly pale. Slowly, painfully, Toko opened his eyes and his dry lips whispered:
“The blood is leaving me . . .”
John moved his eyes to the wound. Ringed with a large bloody stain, a dark hole rent the kamleika. It was not very big, not even a finger’s breadth. Blood gushed from it in uneven spurts.
“Close it with snow . . . Snow dipped in water . . .”
John threw himself into gathering the meager remains of gray unmelted snow. He scraped up snow with his stumps and packed it over the wound. Carefully cutting open the kamleika and kukhlianka, he laid Toko’s chest bare. The snow, quickly saturated with blood, was melting. Then John pulled off his kamleika, tore it into wide strips with his teeth, and tried to wind them tightly around Toko’s chest.
The wounded man was groaning quietly, without opening his eyes. Finished with the bandaging, John leaned close to Toko’s face and asked:
“How are you doing?”
“Cold, and I’m thirsty . . .”
John put a handful of snow into the open mouth.
“How am I going to get you home?”
“Leave me here, go get the sled,” Toko managed.
“No, I won’t leave you.”
“Sson, you’re not to blame. It could happen to anyone. It’s not your fault.”
John looked at the lakhtak stretched out nearby with hatred, as though the animal were responsible, and then an idea came to him like a lightning bolt:
“Toko! I can drag you back on the lakhtak skin!”
No time to waste, John took out his knife, stuck it into the holder loop and fell to skinning the carcass. He left a layer of blubber with the sealskin, so that the wounded man would not feel the hard ice.
“Careful now,” Toko cautioned, “Don’t tear the skin.”
John had never had to butcher a kill before. He was soon covered in blood. Finally he pried the lakhtak hide from the body, and rolled the skinned carcass to one side. Carefully he lifted Toko onto the spread-out sealskin, wrapped the ends around him and stitched it closed, using a piece of leather thong from his akyn.
Putting on his snowshoes, so that the torbasses’ soles wouldn’t skid on the ice, John secured the harness around himself and set off for the shore. He was hurrying but, for the wounded man’s sake, went around the knots of ice and jutting cracks, trying to step only over smooth, even ice. At first glance, you might have thought that nothing extraordinary had happened: just a returning hunter, dragging a downed lakhtak behind him. From time to time John halted and went back to Toko.
“How are you feeling?”
“Not bad,” Toko tried to smile. “Put some more snow in my mouth. Even better, chip off a bit of ice with your knife. I am cold . . . and thirsty . . .”
“Just hold on,” John told him, hacking at the ice, “only a little left to go until we get to the shore.”
The sun was low overhead. Ice hummocks, shoreline crags, and men threw long blue shadows.
At moments it seemed to John that his heart was about to burst from his chest. It was thumping somewhere close to his gullet, there wasn’t enough air – but John couldn’t stop to rest. There was not a single coherent thought in his head, only a strange and senseless phrase that beat at him without cease:
“I killed a whale! . . . I killed a whale! . . . I killed a whale!”
Slowly, the shoreline neared. There they were – the Sacred Whale Jaws...
“I killed a whale! I killed a whale!”
It suddenly seemed to John that Toko was dead. Franticly, he threw off the harness and bent over the wounded man. John’s own breathing was loud and labored, his eyes swimming with tears and salty perspiration. Then he pressed his lips close to Toko’s lips. They were warm, and even trembled.
With renewed strength, John pulled the makeshift sled. He didn’t feel the harness strap cut through his kukhlianka. The yarangas came into view. From this distance they did not look like human dwellings, more like a configuration of enormous boulders. But already John could tell which yaranga belonged to whom, and even see its inhabitants with his mind’s eye.
He could see Pyl’mau’s eyes, Orvo’s face, rough as though hewn from dark stone, Armol’s narrow piercing eyes . . . He could even imagine the hunters, gathering by Toko’s yaranga, passing the binoculars from hand to hand . . .
But it was his gun that fired, and his bullet that is lodged in Toko’s breast! If Toko died, it was far from certain what vengeance the people of Enmyn would wreak on the foreigner. A life for a life – that law is not restricted to savages. In a civilized society it is d
ressed in the form of law. True, a court of law would consider the extenuating circumstances that lessened the accused man’s crime. It does happen that the defendant is cleared of wrongdoing. But John didn’t know what kind of court the Chukchi had, or whether they had one at all. And if Toko died, there would be no one to corroborate John’s story.
MacLennan halted once more.
Toko was breathing, he even opened his eyes halfway and again asked for some ice.
“We’re almost there,” John crooned to him, gently placing slivers of ice into his mouth. “We’re almost there. You’ll tell them it was an accident, right? You’ll tell them?”
Toko closed his eyes, exhausted.
“Why don’t you answer?” John shook the man by his shoulders, unconscious that he was causing him pain.
Toko moaned and opened his eyes.
“It was an accident? Right?”
Toko’s eyes were looking straight into the sky. They were still alive, but already they were seeing another world, a world amazing in that it was just the same familiar one, with all his friends and near ones. Everything was the same here – people’s faces, and their conversations, and the food, of which there was plenty. But the main thing was that there was no sadness on the people’s faces in this other world; they knew nothing of hunger, backbreaking labor, suffering, cold and pain. There was only one drawback – there was not much water here, and it was the only thing that people treasured. But since it was mainly sea hunters who lived here, they were used to thirst and did not suffer much, making do with whatever water fell to their share . . .
Sensing that something terrible and irreparable was taking place behind his back, John was not watching his path now, heading straight for the yarangas. He climbed the mounds of ice and even attempted to run over the flat stretches of ice. He was sobbing aloud, howling and groaning, swallowing sweat mixed with tears, and still the words hammered in his head:
“I killed a whale! I killed a whale!”