by Yuri Rytkheu
“Much alike, though . . . Head, shoulders, feet . . . You almost expect it to speak . . .” said the old woman with a shiver.
“Yes, when the motor starts working, it makes a buzz, like giving a long speech . . .”
On the whole, all the component parts seemed to be in order. Under John’s supervision, Pyl’mau and Yako oiled them and John, to everyone’s surprise and delight, reassembled the motor.
“Kakomei! Kyke vyne vai!” came from every side.
Still, the most crucial part still lay ahead: They needed to test it out, but had nothing on which to mount it. Again, it was Tiarat who came to the rescue. Immediately comprehending what John required, that same day, after a few hours, he brought special wooden trestles, tightly held together by lakhtak strips instead of nails.
“And this, for the water,” Tiarat suggested, “we’ll put the motor’s feet into the barrel.”
John could only marvel delightedly at the design talent that he so suddenly discovered in the quiet and modest Tiarat.
First of all, they had to test the magnet. Asking Tiarat to hold the wire to the cylinder, John wound the flywheel. Tiarat was knocked to the side with a loud scream.
“He hit me!” he shouted, pointing his finger at the motor from afar.
John burst out laughing.
Tiarat looked at him, confused: A person’s been hit and he’s laughing. John explained the origin of the knock to Tiarat, but the latter, listening politely, flat-out refused to touch the wire again. They agreed that it would be Tiarat who pulled the flywheel’s string. Approaching the motor with some trepidation, Tiarat hesitantly picked up the string, pulled it, and quickly ran off, fearful of receiving another blow from the perfidious motor.
There had been a spark. They poured the gas into the canister. The motor should now start. John made five, ten, twenty pulls, but the motor was silent. His shoulder hurt, his neck ached from the repeated pulling, already many of the spectators had gone back to their yarangas, and still the motor wouldn’t start. John tried unscrewing the spark plugs, fixing the gaps between contact points, adding gasoline into the carburetor, but the motor maintained its stubborn silence, with only a dumb and unwilling infrequent shudder. It was dead.
“Seems that with a person, too, if you take him apart and then put him back together, you couldn’t wake him, either,” was the weighty conclusion of Guvat, the most patient of the observers, as he headed back to his yaranga.
While John was fiddling with the motor, Tiarat had been rigging up the hide boat, drawing up additional ribs, and making the stern extra sturdy – so sturdy that you could hang two motors off it! But the hide boat had no use for a dead engine.
John wouldn’t leave it for the next few days. When it began to get dark, he would cover the taciturn motor with furs and head home a broken man.
Pyl’mau tried not to ask about anything. Silently, she’d serve the food and help him undress, and when her husband crawled inside the polog, she’d helpfully bring him the brightly printed instruction manual about the use of the smooth-running, gasoline outboard motor from General Motors.
John didn’t want to look at the advertising brochure, sick to death of it, but a little while would pass and he – yet again – would pick it up. Line by line, he scanned the instructions, trying to figure out just where the problem lay. In his mind’s eye he took apart and reassembled the motor, following the gasoline flow from tank to cylinders – and he just couldn’t understand a thing.
He had despaired of getting anything out of the stubborn device. Done with refitting the hide boat, Tiarat began coming by to help John more and more often. Together they picked over the motor yet again, but to no avail.
Once, when John had returned home and was finishing his tea, a victorious droning burst into the chottagin. It was the working motor! Except that the sound of it was somewhat strange, unusual. John was outside in a heartbeat.
Shaking on its fragile shelf, held together with lakhtak strips, the motor roared, spraying water from the barrel underneath the propeller in every direction. Tiarat was standing nearby, watching the quickened and unleashed engine fearfully.
“Who got it to start?” John asked.
“Himself.” Tiarat made a clumsy attempt at a fib, and sheepishly added: “I only wanted to touch him a little.”
John cut off the motor and then pulled the flywheel cord again. After two or three tries, the motor started working. It was alive again!
“So what did you do to it?” John asked.
“Honestly, nothing,” Tiarat pleaded. “I was just touching him a little, just like you do it.”
There was a pitiful, guilty look in his eyes. John considered it best to drop the question altogether, so as not to upset his comrade, especially now that the people of Enmyn had started to follow the motor’s noise to its source.
“You’re a real magician,” John had time to whisper to the bewildered Tiarat.
The next day they tested the hide boat. Just in case, they decided to do it in the lagoon.
The flimsy little craft was brought ashore and lowered into the water. John lugged over the motor and, with Tiarat’s help, carefully fixed it to the stern of the light hide boat. The boat sat low instantly. Tiarat and Armol’ climbed aboard. The others wished to observe the hide vessel’s behavior from the shore.
“Get in, get in,” Tiarat beckoned. “The lower the hide boat sits, the better.”
“What if sits too deep?” Guvat said, looking innocent from his place in the crowd, hands deeply hidden in the pockets of his deerskin kukhlianka.
Tiarat threw him a reproachful glance, and gave John a questioning look.
“Let’s go,” John shouted.
They rowed the hide boat a length from the beach and turned toward the opposite side.
John pulled the flywheel cord. The motor roared, yanking the hide boat with such force that Tiarat, standing beside it, almost fell overboard.
A wave of foam rose up behind the stern and rushed along with the hide boat as it sped across the lagoon, nose held high, scaring off the cormorants. The birds were all but knocking into the boat’s hide-bound sides. The people left behind on the beach were shouting something, waving their arms, but it wasn’t possible to hear them, as the motor’s triumphant song drowned out all other sound.
With a specially made leather ring, John held on to the motor’s steering handle. The hide boat was pliant, responding to the lightest touch. It vibrated from keel to sides, the leather stretched over the hide boat’s frame vibrated too, creating ripples that streamed by and lingered behind the stern.
The motorized hide boat was at least twice as fast as a wooden whaleboat. The yarangas, the Whale Jaws, the funerary hill sped by. John wheeled the hide boat around and made a flying pass of the beach, splashing the onlookers with water and the smell of gasoline.
Breaking out once more into the lagoon’s open space, John took course for the Pil’khyn strait that connected the lagoon with the ocean.
“What do you think, can we get past Pil’khyn?” he screamed into Tiarat’s ear.
“We can!” was the other’s confident reply. “Only we should keep to the right shore. The left has a large rock, the motor can break its legs on it,” and Tiarat nodded toward the motor, as though it was a living creature.
Navigating through the strait, they came out onto the ocean’s level surface. The water was thick, heavy, but even so the nose of the hide boat sliced through it easily. It seemed to John that this time, it had risen even higher and was flying through the air, barely skimming the water with its keel.
“Do you want to drive the boat?” he asked Tiarat, standing near, with a look. “I want to,” the other answered happily, and reached out his hand.
Feeling the engine’s live force, Tiarat shivered at first, but then his face took on such a contented and peaceful aspect that John had to turn away to hide an unbidden smile.
Smoothly winding the handle, Tiarat would curve around the sparse i
cebergs in their way and then revised the hide boat’s flight path, trying to keep to a straight line of course.
Not a half an hour later, the outermost of Enmyn’s yarangas came into view, and then the lonely figure of a fisherman, guarding the nets. John was surprised by the empty shoreline, but then he realized that all the people were waiting for them on the other side of the shingled sandbank, by the lagoon.
They had had time to come ashore and drag the hide boat out onto the beach, before they saw the people of Enmyn running in the distance. Guvat was in the lead, windmilling his long arms.
“How did you get here?” he shouted from afar, with sincere disbelief.
“We flew in the air,” Tiarat answered calmly as he was carefully unscrewing the bolts that had fixed the motor to the hide boat.
“Really?” Guvat’s eyes went wide. “True, true! I’d heard that the whites can do even that! Right?” he turned to John.
“We came into the lagoon through Pil’khyn.”
It was plain on Guvat’s face that he didn’t believe his fellows.
While they were walking up to the yarangas, Armol’ suddenly held John back by his sleeve.
“This is very important!” he whispered heatedly. “Now I know what I need to do! You don’t need to buy whaleboats – you need to buy motors! The main thing today is speed! Look, we went around the lagoon five times faster than on oars. That means it was more like five hide boats going, not just one. If I had a motor . . .”
In his excitement, Armol’ was even lost for words. He was seeing himself at the wheel of a motorized canoe, speeding across the sea.
“It’s dangerous out among the icebergs,”said John. “You hit one at that speed, and it’s straight to the bottom.”
24
And yet John was unable to make the first patrolling trip any time soon: Pyl’mau had given birth to his son. It was Yako that met John as he came in from a day of hunting. The boy was loitering beside the yaranga, at loose ends.
“A brother has come to visit us,” he said in the tone of a grown man imparting a very significant piece of news.
“You don’t say!” Joyfully, John rushed for the chottagin, only to be met with old Cheivuneh’s implacable stony face. She barred the way with her arm, dry and wizened like a gnarled branch, and sternly told him:
“Think about your son’s future!”
John spent a few days out of action, retreating to his long unused cubbyhole. He slept on the hard cot, surprised at how his own perception of comfort had changed over time. An he even wondered whether, if this were his native house in Port Hope, he would feel as peaceful and contented in the spacious living room in front of the fireplace on a long winter evening as inside the snug warm polog. Picking over his personal items that had become useless, John discovered his notepad and read the last entry with a smile. And then he had an epiphany: How unbelievable all this was! Here he is, reading the last entry, and a completely different person arises before him, a person left far behind. In turn, that person’s thoughts are read and even spoken out loud by a whole other person . . . Well, now, let’s see! John picked up a pencil, stuck it through a special holder loop and began writing on a clean page:My son was born. My own son, born on this barren ground. Last winter, I buried my daughter . . . How did it happen, that I cannot even conceive of leaving this shore? It isn’t that my daughter is buried here or that the people near and dear to me live here. Then what is the root of the matter? It’s as though each passing day takes me further away from that ideal of manhood instilled in me from childhood and reinforced in my studies. I’ve even started to believe in these idols, in my own way, or more precisely, in the forces behind them . . . Maybe it’s because here you need to keenly feel your humanity every day, every hour, in order to survive. Or, to be more precise, I am trying to feel my way toward the true ideal of humanity. Besides, what is a person, and what does he live for? What’s brought him into this orderly, clearly outlined world, and made him invade it?. . . Around here, they don’t ask such questions – of themselves or of others – they just live. A son was born. He will live and fight for the right to be called a human being in this cold land, hunt animals, learn to love the MacLennan line and continue it ... Somewhere in the distant future, there will live the legend of the white man who stayed among them, and who sired strange Chukchi – in whose line of descent sometimes unusual features surface. And maybe, some day, one of them will feel emotion rise up in his soul, but he won’t know that it was Shelley’s poem or Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 he was remembering. He will hear them in the inaudible breath of the flowering spring tundra, in the freezing wave that runs over a shingled beach . . . Be happy, my son, Bill-Toko MacLennan!
Snowflakes came down from a clear sky, and the sea was clear, too. The water had become heavier, it no longer had its summer weightlessness and elasticity. Lazily, the waves would roll over the frozen shingle and slowly draw back, leaving a salty layer of ice on the rocks.
They brought the hide boat down to the beach with great care. The light little boat was resting on the shoulders of four men, who walked over the slippery, hoarfrosted stones. Tiarat walked behind the hide boat carrying the motor on his shoulder, and Yako trotted in the rear, with an important look about him, dragging a long oar with leather-loop rowlocks.
The patrolmen who were stationed up on the high promontory had reported seeing a vessel in among the ice floes. It had passed a long way from shore, heading for the Invisible Island. The piece of news was alarming to Enmyn’s inhabitants, especially those who’d been given the task of guarding the breeding ground.
The news forced John to hasten the time of his going out to sea, despite the fact that the traditional quarantine for a new father had not yet passed. He talked to Cheivuneh about it himself.
“If you are concerned about my new son’s future,” John said respectfully, “would it not be better to think about what he’s going to eat? Remember last winter. How many lives were taken by the famine, how many newborns went beyond the clouds, though all the rites had been observed at their births and their fathers had stayed the full length of the required hermitage?”
“It was not I who decreed these customs, and not even my ancestors. They were born together with our people,” Cheivuneh answered him. “If you start thinking about whether it’s reasonable or unreasonable, then life itself will turn out to be unreasonable.”
“But still, we have to try and make it so that the custom works for the people’s well-being first of all. The ones who thought it up or created it, they were thinking of the people’s good, weren’t they?” John mildly objected.
Cheivuneh’s stony expression remained unchanged, but something twitched in the folds of her wrinkles, the spark of a new idea glimmered in her eyes.
“If we don’t go out to meet the white people’s ship, they could frighten off the walruses, as they’ve done before. If the Outer Forces punish me for breaking the tradition, then it’s better that I alone suffer than all of us together. Does this seem sensible?”
Cheivuneh bowed her head and said in a whisper:
“Just don’t forget to make an offering to all the directions – Dawn, North, South, and Dusk – before you go out to sea. And don’t forget your household god.”
“All right, Epekei.” 42
“And go see your wife and son.”
“All right, Epekei . . .”
With Tiarat’s help, the Outer Forces were endowed with bits of tobacco, deer meat, and drops of blood. John managed the household god himself, giving his face a generous smear of nerpa fat and drawing a tough stalk of chewing tobacco over his lips.
And now, calm, confident, they were walking to the shore to enter the sea and meet the unknown ship. John was propping up the hide boat’s stern with one shoulder, and his eyes took in the back of Guvat, walking in front of him, and beyond him – the sea’s expanse, which seemed so serene and peaceful at this distance. There was barely any ice on its surface, and it was hard to believe t
hat within a short while, this boundless expanse would be covered over with thick ice, piled with sharp-nosed ice hummocks, and they would have to seek open water far from shore, sometimes traveling tens of miles. John was trying to match Guvat’s step; even the sway of his torso was identical to that of the man who walked ahead. It was only right by the shore, when there was a single last step to be made, that John looked at himself as if from afar, at the way he’d sacrificed to the gods and even whispered incantations along with Tiarat, how he was walking with his countrymen . . . Something moved within his breast, a thought glimmered in his brain, but then Guvat’s voice interrupted his musings.
“Let’s set it down!”
There was hardly any surf. The water, heavy with frost, splashed lazily close to shore, and rainbow parachutes of jellyfish hung almost motionlessly over the clean bottom, rocking gently in time with the ocean’s breathing.
Yako spotted a tangle of seaweed in the frosty shingle, pried it free with the tip of one of his torbasses, bit off half and offered the rest to his father.
The seaweed, something John had grown very fond of, was pleasantly refreshing on the tongue, and its taste held something faraway, familiar, as though it were not a marine plant but a fresh cucumber, just plucked from the vegetable patch and lightly salted.
Businesslike, Tiarat checked on the stern rigging and carefully attached the motor’s little claw-hooks to a specially built system of thick wooden planks and lakhtak-skin lashings.
The motor’s propeller was raised high in the air, so as not to dent it when they pushed the hide boat off from the shore.
“You know, we’re doing everything wrong!” Guvat, who had also got lucky with some seaweed and whose loud satisfied munching filled the beach with noise, piped up all of a sudden. “It should all be the other way around.”
They had to suffer him a good while, until they could manage to fish a genuinely useful idea from his muddled speech: It would be safer for the propeller to push the hide boat into the water stern first. Then the propeller would immediately be in deep water, and the hunters could climb in more comfortably.