by Yuri Rytkheu
“What?” John was amazed. “You fed them, too?”
“Of course!” came Orvo’s reply. “Gods need to eat. But the blood and blubber rotted the paper, and soon enough all that was left of the sacred image was dirty rags. Those who got wooden gods held on to them for longer, but in the end threw them out, too, or gave them to the children to play with.”
John was not a religious man, but such a casual approach to religion made him uneasy. Not without a secret design to trap Orvo, John asked him:
“So what would you say if a white person treated your gods the same way?”
“He’d probably be right to do it. It’s no good forcing your own gods on someone else.”
John was amazed at the simple and true answer.
“Yes, you’re right . . . I’ve thought about your way of life a great deal. To my mind, the less we come into contact with the white people’s world, the better. Do you agree, Orvo?”
Orvo took some time to answer. “I’ve thought about it myself,” he said. “We can’t withdraw from it completely. But I agree with you about everything else, Sson.”
They arrived at Il’motch’s nomad camp by midafternoon of the following day. John struggled to recollect a familiar place, but although the yarangas were the same, the surrounding landscape was different. It seemed that the nomads had set up camp in a different location from last year’s.
The dogs were straining to make straight for the reindeer herd, but the pack leaders drove them on, then veered off to the side, where a welcoming crowd was waiting for them. Il’motch stood out from the others by virtue of his height and his festive chamois-leather outfit. He greeted the visitors and, after giving his deer herders instructions to feed and chain the dogs, led Orvo and John into his yaranga.
John inspected the inside decor of the nomad dwelling with curiosity. The design in general was the same as the seashore Chukchi’s, but every part of the deer herder’s yaranga was notable for its lightness. There were no walls, as such, in the yaranga: A tent of sueded or simply shorn deerskins stretched over poles formed the yaranga’s outer shell. Inside it hung a polog, looking a bit cramped to a seashore dweller’s eye. There was a fire lit inside the roomy chottagin.
“I’m very glad that you’ve come to visit me,” Il’motch said with some ceremony, “make yourselves at home.”
John presented his gifts to his tundra friend. Il’motch accepted them with restrained dignity, giving them a cursory glance.
“Velynkekun!” he said, and ordered for the gifts to be cleared away.
Finding a quiet moment, John consulted with Orvo:
“Didn’t Il’motch like my gifts?”
“He did,” Orvo said with certainty. “It’s just that giving presents is the usual thing between friends, and it doesn’t do to look them over.”
“Il’motch,” John turned to their host, “could I see Kelena?”
“You can,” Il’motch nodded, “she’ll be glad to see a person whom she’s saved from death.”
The old lady didn’t keep them waiting. On seeing John, she gave out a loud wail:
“Kyke vyne vai!37 He’s come, the healed one! Kyke! How hale and hearty he is!”
John presented her with a length of cloth for a kamleika, tobacco, and beveled sewing needles.
“Velynkykun!” Kelena thanked him, and asked permission to take a look at his hands.
Deftly, the old lady’s lean sinewy fingers went over every stitch, every fold, with surgeon’s skill. Having looked her fill of her handiwork, Kelena couldn’t help saying delightedly:
“Well made!”
Orvo and John were put up in the camp leader, Il’motch’s, yaranga. A second polog had been made for them. In the night, John was awakened by the sound of the wind. He lay inside the darkened polog and the specters of the past crowded around him. It seemed to him that time had turned back, and once again he was in the same situation as two years ago. He even felt the ghost of pain in his wrists.
The storm was clearly audible inside the nomad’s dwelling – the walls here were thinner, and the whole of the yaranga smaller. John didn’t manage to fall asleep until morning, not properly. He kept nodding off, then waking, reality mingling with dreams. Hearing a slight noise inside the chottagin, he stuck his head out of the polog and saw Il’motch.
“You awake?” Il’motch greeted him and shook his head regretfully: “Blizzard. No good.”
A light snow fell through the opening that crowned the yaranga’s central cone. What an amazing construction is a yaranga. John had noticed that if there is the tiniest hole in the wall – from a nail, or something else – even the smallest blizzard blows in a snowdrift. But the smoke-hole, which could accommodate a person climbing in, admits only a snow flurry!
Il’motch drew back the deerskin that served as a door and disappeared into the glowing twilight of the blizzard.
All that day, Orvo and John were the only men in the camp – all the herders had gone to see to the reindeer. Il’motch returned late in the evening. He took a long time patting himself down in the chottagin, beating the snow from his kukhlianka and torbasses with a piece of deer antler.
“This blizzard is staying for a while,” he informed them. “It’s warm. The snow is wet, sticky.”
“A southern wind?” asked Orvo.
“That’s the one,” Il’motch replied.
“A bad wind,” Orvo gave John a worried look. “It could knock off the ice on shore. And when the frost comes after the blizzard, the snow will harden and make it difficult for the deer to feed.”
“As soon as the wind dies down,” said Il’motch, “we’ll move to a different pasture, on the southern slope. The wind blows off the snow, there.”
For three days and three nights the yaranga shuddered in the wind bursts. At the third night’s waning, the wind became weaker and the frost stronger. At noon, they began to roll up the yarangas. Barely an hour later, all that was left of them were black circles and the fire pits. The reindeer people packed all the equipment and household items into the sleds. The herders drove up the reindeer herd, caught the draught animals – enormous big-horned bulls with large sad eyes.
By midday the caravan slowly set off for the blue mountains ahead. Il’motch, having said his farewells to Orvo and John, raced to catch up with his moving camp in a light dogsled that looked as if it were made of lace.
21
The wind was at their back. It blew up their kamleikas like sails, made curlicues out of the huskies’ tails. The heavy snow didn’t rise up, and so the whirlwind only polished it, pressing it to the ground. John had never moved in a sled at such a speed. They only allowed the dogs one rest stop, feeding them and having a snack of slightly melted deer meat. There was no way to light a fire in such windy conditions, and the travelers had to make do without tea.
By the next afternoon, they sighted the familiar shoreline crags. It was twilight by the time the sleds drove up on the lagoon ice, where the blizzard had left long furrows of hardened snow. On the icy smooth surface, the wind was so strong that it drove the sleds faster than the dogs could run, and the shaft dogs had to turn away from the front.
The settlement seemed to be crouching to earth, afraid of being carried of into the sea by the wind. John and Orvo were scanning the yarangas.
Orvo’s sharp eye immediately registered that the repal’gyts had been blown off some of the yarangas. The hide boat supports had been knocked down.
A chill worry was creeping into their hearts. This kind of wind could do much damage.
John found his yaranga with his eyes and noted with satisfaction that it was still intact. Only the outbuildings’ chimney pipe had been completely sheared off by the wind.
Where the snowpath led from the lagoon to the yarangas, a welcoming party was assembling. There were only three. They stood there, bent in the face of the wind, barely managing to keep their foothold on the rock-hard snow.
They were Tiarat, Guvat, and Armol’.
&
nbsp; “Trouble!” Armol’ shouted from afar. “The storm has taken the whaleboats and the hide boats!”
Orvo braked his sled.
“How could it have happened?”
“We did everything to save the boats,” Tiarat launched into an explanation. “We froze the anchors into the ice, packed the whaleboats in snow, but it didn’t help. The wind knocked the snow away and tore the thick straps as though they were cloth threads.”
“The whaleboats flew in the air like they’d grown wings,” Armol’ butted in. “They all took off at the same time, like they’d decided to fly away home, and then they smashed on the ice hummocks and splintered to pieces . . . Oh, the misfortune!”
John directed his pack to his yaranga. The dwelling was filled with sadness, as though someone dear and precious had died. Even the children behaved quietly and in a restrained manner, and little Tynevirineu-Mary silently pressed up against her father’s soft curly beard, as though able to comprehend the immeasurable loss.
Orvo, who’d come to see him that evening, said:
“Nobody could have prevented this disaster. A storm like this only happens twice in a hundred years . . .”
The wind continued to rage. The yaranga shuddered and creaked like a ship caught in a stormy ocean. Stray air currents managed to get inside the polog some mysterious way and shook the lamp’s flame.
Pyl’mau was quietly crooning a lullaby to Tynevirineu-Mary, and her singing merged with the blizzard’s song.
John listened to her with a sense of wonder, that his wife’s voice weaved so naturally into the wind’s humming. The melodies of her song and the storm were the same.
For a long time Orvo sat deep in thought, listening with John to the singing of the woman and the storm.
“We’ve gotten too proud,” Orvo said quietly, “stopped honoring Narginen.38 The Outer Forces, they’ve shown us what’s what . . .”
John was about to teach the old man otherwise, explain to him that this was a natural disaster, against which there is no insurance, but some strange feeling of helplessness held him back. In Orvo’s words there was promise of explanation and consolation.
“We wanted to live other than the way nature decreed,” Orvo continued. “And it was as though a rainbow fog rose before my eyes. I couldn’t see rightly anymore. And everything was going so well – there seemed to be more animals by the shore, the sea often offered us ritliu, the weather as good as could be expected, we were fortunate in the hunting and in the meetings with white people . . . Even sickness passed us by for a few years . . . And here’s the punishment for our sins . . . It’s not the first time that I can remember. At first everything goes well, and such a life starts up that even ancient old ones, who are long awaited in the world beyond the clouds, are in no hurry to leave the earth. The yarangas are full of cheer, and the larders are full of meat and blubber. People come together for feasts and merrymaking more often than for sacred sacrificial rites, and man starts to believe that he is the strongest and the smartest, and that he is the only master of the earth. And this is how it goes, for a time. But then, nature, Narginen, the Outer Forces, take away all the extraneous things – people who were born not out of need, but out of lust. They send down diseases, famine, they destroy the food stores that breed laziness in people. This is the kind of storm the Outer Forces use to clear away all that can lift man above them . . . It’s as though Narginen is reminding us: I’m master here, and it’s only on my sufferance that man lives here at all . . .”
Orvo’s harsh, grim words dropped into John’s consciousness, and his soul grew with unease.
“How are we to live now?” It was a cry from the heart that John couldn’t stifle.
“Narginen will tell us, himself, how to keep going,” Orvo called back. “Let the gods go back to their places, and man return to where he’s always been.”
The storm raged for a few more days. The wind had blown the ice floes far beyond the horizon. The open water in a winter sea seemed strange and unreal. It was just as wildly impossible as a man promenading naked in the middle of a blizzard.
The blue sky and sparse clouds, racing in the wind, were reflected in the water. The people were impatiently awaiting the day the wind died down and they could venture out to hunt.
Before then, John had never noticed just how much the dogs consumed. And although it was enough to feed them just once a day, the twelve toothy maws demolished as much kopal’khen as three people could eat in two or three days.
When John fed the dogs himself, he tried to cut down on the regular amount.
“It wouldn’t do any harm if the dogs ate a little less these days,” he once told his wife.
Pyl’mau looked at her husband with surprise:
“But they’re half-starved as it is . . .”
“Well, they’re not really doing anything right now, or bringing any food . . .”
“There isn’t a single person in Enmyn right now that is hunting for food, but still everyone wants to eat, and everyone eats to stay alive,” Pyl’mau countered.
“That’s people, and this is dogs.”
“What’s the difference?” Pyl’mau shrugged. “They eat the worst scraps anyway.”
Despite the catastrophically dwindling food supplies, in each yaranga they continued to feed the dogs, and such extravagance was a source of astonishment to John. Once, he even suggested to Orvo that the number of dogs in the settlement should be reduced to the bare necessity.
“Maybe you want to start yourself?” Orvo chuckled.
After the blizzard, there came such a frost as to make the sea freeze over immediately. Always covered in ice hummocks and haphazardly strewn with ice-floe splinters, now its surface was unusually even and smooth.
The hunters wasted no time in going out to hunt. They raced on their sleighs, on runners made of walrus tusk. Pushing off with the sharp metal-plated end of their sticks, they slid to the polynyas39 over the slippery ice, and came home with a kill by eveningfall. Fires blazed again inside the chottagins, the delicious smell of fresh meat drove out the stench of rancid whale blubber. The hunters were in a hurry: The first light wind would crumple and destroy the mirror smoothness and raise up ice hummocks once more.
And soon this came to pass, the sea taking on its usual winter appearance, riven with ice hummocks and hoary rocks. The moving ice porridge drove the old ice floats back to the shore. The sleighs were relegated to the children, and the hunters hitched up the skinny dogs for the long journey to the polynyas.
The fierce frosts cracked and split the ice nightly, but the open water receded farther and farther from shore and you had to get up near the middle of the night to catch the short interval of daylight out by the open water.
One evening, an agitated Pyl’mau ran into the yaranga and told them that Mutchin and Eleneut were lying dead inside their dwelling.
The old people had breathed their last some days ago, and the hungry dogs had had time to gnaw on their bodies. John couldn’t look at them without shuddering and evaded participating in the funeral by pleading ill health.
After the funeral, Orvo himself set the empty yaranga alight, and the noisy smoky flame rose high toward the heavens.
“Each of these fires brings closer the hour when all our nation will go beyond the clouds,” Orvo said meditatively, watching the dancing blaze. “Have you seen how many empty camps and abandoned yarangas are rotting all along the shore? Some settlements have disappeared completely. Our people are waning quickly, and it scares me. Our women give birth rarely, and barely any children survive. So many of them die here, with not enough time even to get used to their names! And yet, once our people were great and mighty!”
“There’s no need to look at life in such a grim light,” John answered. “It’s not for nothing that man exists on earth. It can’t be that the Chukchi will simply disappear from the face of the earth . . .”
Snowfall powdered over the charred remains of the yaranga, and the names of the deceased
were quickly erased from the memories of the living. John felt that the unfortunates were so soon forgotten because in their heart of hearts Enmyn’s inhabitants secretly felt responsible for those deaths.
Once he mentioned this to Orvo, but the old man said, irritably:
“Here on earth, the only people with the right to live are those who can provide food not only for themselves but for their progeny.”
“And what if misfortune befalls you?” John knew that the question was a cruel one.
With a smile of unexpected serenity, the old man looked back at John and gave a firm answer:
“When I see this happen, I will go beyond the clouds myself.”
Hunting turned into a grueling labor. Having to climb out into the cold from underneath a warm coverlet was torture.
Pyl’mau would be the first to rise and prepare breakfast. The hunter had to be fed for the entire long cold day ahead. Only one grease lamp would be lit inside the polog. Its light and heat had been plenty, until the heavy frost hit. Now, silvery patches of frost appeared inside the polog’s corners.
The children slept under a deerskin blanket, tightly huddling together.
John would eat his breakfast in silence and, with a chilly revulsion for the cold and for the stars’ blue flickering, step over the threshold.