Secrets

by Ken Altabef

  “Leave it!” ordered Alaana as Otaq and Massautsicq advanced toward the carcass of the bear with their knives ready. “We will honor the spirit of the one who has saved us.”

  “But the meat…” protested Massautsicq. Annoyed grunts came also from many of the others. Six hundred pounds of bear meat could feed the village for many sleeps.

  “We must not eat the bear!” insisted Alaana.

  Tugtutsiak scowled at her. He would indulge the young shaman in many things, but not this.

  Alaana insisted he listen to her, taking the headman gently by the elbow and leading him away to show him the hideous thing she had found behind the cave.

  Tugtutsiak’s usually stoic face convulsed in surprise at the sight. Alaana paused to carefully fold the thing and conceal it under cover of her parka before she rejoined the men.

  “We’ll do as she says,” announced the headman a moment later. “The bear must not be eaten. Alaana will provide food. She will bring the caribou to us.” This last pronouncement, Alaana noted, again rang with a note of weary resignation rather than confidence.

  There was no hope of cutting through the thick ground ice for burial so late in the year. Alaana supervised the positioning of stones atop the bear’s body, making sure the spirit of the fallen animal received its due. The bodies of their foes were left where they lay, as food for the wild animals of the taiga.

  In darkness, they set out for home. The men marched quickly. Most were still upset at having to leave such a ready-made feast behind. But for all of them, the carnage they had witnessed in this dark and foreboding place left them unnerved.

  Alaana walked among them, relieved that the bodies in the bloodied snow had not been those of her own men. Her beloved Anatatook remained short on food, and some would die before winter’s end. But they would not be ripped to pieces by wolves.

  The dead calm they had enjoyed thus far was now broken by a wind, a gentle breeze blowing out across the ice field toward their camp, toward home. As the breeze blew past the back of her neck, tickling her ears, Alaana smiled and nodded her head. Farewell, old friend. Old Manatook had heard her call after all, returning from his far journey to protect the Anatatook people even at the cost of his very life. Higilak would soon receive her nocturnal visitor as the snowy owl tolled his passage. In death would his true nature at last be revealed to her?

  And as a mystery from the past had been answered, a new question rose to take its place. All the way back to the village, Alaana kept thinking about the discarded cloak of cured human skin with Old Manatook’s face. In all those years, Alaana wondered, how could his wife not have known?

  CHAPTER 4

  THE YUPIKUT

  “Tekkeitsertok, spirit of the wild caribou, heed my call.”

  Alaana’s stomach growled, ruining her concentration. The hunger, an undulating pain in her belly, would not give her a moment’s rest. At its peak she could think of little else beside the overwhelming desire for food. When its nagging voice temporarily ebbed she could reason more clearly, which left her to face the keen-edged panic of starvation. Through a slitted eye, she risked a peek at the ring of men surrounding her in the large ceremonial snow house.

  The men sat steadfast against the seeping chill of midwinter, their faces carefully composed into stoic neutrality. They prayed silently to guide and protect the shaman on her journey. Alaana was intensely proud of them, and by the same token shamed by her own inadequacy. Even in the darkened iglu her incessant fidgeting would make it obvious to them that her spirit had not yet left her physical body.

  “Tekkeitsertok,” she intoned, “Spirit of the wild caribou, heed my call.” Still the allaruk, the vision trance, would not come. The young shaman straightened her posture, intent on conveying confidence in the face of her losing struggle. Old Manatook had left her too soon and now, inexperienced and alone, responsibility fell heavily upon her shoulders.

  She raised a smoldering braid of sweet prairie grass whose aromatic smoke was especially pleasing to the spirits of the wild, and waved it carefully before her, invoking patterns to the east, west, north and south, skyward and earthward.

  It was the dead of winter, and there was no food. Each spring the migrating herds of caribou ranged farther and farther south, gradually drifting out of reach of the Anatatook settlements. This season the main herds, thick with summer fat and full stomachs, had presented the Anatatook hunters with only a few hundred stragglers where there should have been thousands. And it was all Alaana’s fault. She was angatkok, the shaman, and it was her responsibility to drive game into the village’s hunting grounds. In this crucial task, she had consistently failed.

  A loud gurgle sounded from deep in the crowd as hunger spoke its disapproval where words were not permitted.

  The young shaman continued her appeals to Tekkeitsertok but the barrel-chested turgat that controlled the supply of game animals kept a deaf ear to her pleas. Perhaps the great spirit was asleep in his home in the Wild Wood. She added a sprinkle of dried star anise to the burning embers within the soapstone vessel before her. The pungent wisps spiraled upward, carrying her song to the supernatural realm.

  “Heed my call.” Alaana felt ashamed. There was desperation in her voice, and that was something the shaman must never show.

  Tugtutsiak coughed softly, signaling to Alaana that it was time to end the ceremony. The headman’s lack of confidence in her only strengthened her resolve. Abandoning her attempts with drum and song she let herself fold inward, falling, falling, blotting out all feelings of shame and inadequacy. None of that mattered. She need only find the center.

  Concentrate, she told herself. Concentrate.

  In a blink the karigi was gone. The men were gone. Tugtutsiak was gone. Alaana sat alone in the dark, the taint of anise pungent in her nostrils. She extended herself in the way Old Manatook had taught, seeing nothing, but feeling all, every flickering spirit, every spark of life. She felt the steady heartbeats of the men, their gentle breathing. She heard the women in their tents, scraping skins and mending the clothes; she sensed the children’s discomfort as, playthings forgotten, they moaned and cried out with hunger. Alaana steadied herself. All would soon be made right.

  Her awareness extended outward.

  And suddenly she was flying, lifted up in the blissfully wild embrace of Sila, the Walker In The Wind. Invisible hands tore at her from every direction and she feared she would be lost, swept away and gone. Relax, she told herself. This was her element, Sila her patron. As wild and chaotic as it may seem, there was always order in the ways of the wind.

  The tundra rolled past, her spirit-vision painting the snow and ice in surreal layers of pink and purple. Soul-lights littered the landscape, visible to the shaman despite their concealment in burrows beneath the snow. Lemming and fox, wolf and musk ox — the myriad sparks of life marked a glittering tapestry below. She heard the ponderous crack of distant ice floes, the bark of a bull walrus, the hooting of the snowy owl, a white hare and its mate invisible against a drift of snow, breathing softly.

  She sought out any sign of the caribou.

  And she found them. The soft mewling of the does, a snort of challenge from an angry buck, the clash of antlered prowess, of stamping hoof and hindleg. One of the small stray herds that had not yet made the winter migration, ranging not far to the south. Two hundred strong, they were foraging the last shoots of bear grass along the banks of a frozen stream. The scent of the star anise gave way to the musky scent of unwashed fur, heady spoor, and animal sweat. As her inuseq hovered in the air, held up in the arms of great Sila, Alaana sought any who might be receptive to her pleas.

  She reached out to the lead stag, a magnificent deep-chested beast with a luxurious spread of barbed antlers, but found it much too proud and independent to submit to her influence. Next, she approached the bucks milling about the frozen watering hole, but suggestion only made them nervous. They snorted and trotted away. She explored several younger caribou, finding little success. Sh
e wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep her concentration as her soul hovered in the air, battling the currents of her impatient patron. If only she’d had more practice.

  She singled out an old stag, shuffling through the snow with bowed back and aching at the knees, its breaths ragged and uneven. “Come to me,” Alaana suggested. “Your end is near, turn about. We need your strength, your meat and sinew. You will live on in us.”

  The buck shuddered. Lifting its weighty head from the tundra, it sniffed at the frigid air.

  “Hear me,” she said in the secret language, a language that spoke directly to the soul. “Come. We will honor your spirit after you are passed. I promise. Turn about.”

  The old stag felt the pull but the herd had begun to move again. They turned as one, following the direction of the lead buck, turning south. Away from the Anatatook winter settlement. The old stag turned and stumbled after them; he would follow along until he dropped.

  Alaana felt herself slipping.

  Back, back again to the karigi and the men assembled. Back to the incisive glare of Tugtutsiak. Alaana met the headman’s stare and sadly shook her head. Inexperienced and alone, responsibility fell heavily on her shoulders.

  “Enough of this,” proclaimed Tugtutsiak. He stood and began working the stiffness out of his legs. He motioned the men to return to their homes. “We can at least be warm if we are to starve to death.”

  The headman’s criticism stung her very deeply. Ever since she was a little girl, she had admired Tugtutsiak. The headman always had a playful smile for her, but all of that had changed abruptly once she had become the shaman. Now their relationship had grown strained and serious, as she found herself thrust headlong into a lead role in the Anatatook struggle for survival.

  Kigiuna stood, offering Alaana a compassionate glance. Her father suffered along with her. He had come to believe that she did indeed have a connection to the spirit world — he could hardly refuse to accept what his very eyes had seen. But he feared that the spirits were going to get Alaana, and perhaps all of them, killed in the end.

  “She has too much responsibility for one so young,” he declared. The others answered with a variety of indistinct murmurs. They had heard these arguments before; there was no use in repeating them. The men shuffled away. They would need to explain Alaana’s failure to their starving families.

  An agonized scream sliced through the air.

  As if some hidden floodgate had been ripped asunder, a sudden tumult rang through the settlement. Wild war whoops, the thunder of approaching sleds, the frenzied barking of the Anatatook dogs. Shrieks of surprise and terror from the women, the angry shouts of men, a cry of pain, the yells of a dying man. Alaana recognized a woman’s anguished voice; it was Ipalook’s wife, screaming that her husband was dead.

  Alaana gazed frantically about. A vast number of sleds and dogs had appeared, cutting across the settlement, kicking torrents of snow into the wind.

  Like a ravenous tide a well-armed party had descended upon the Anatatook. As the group of men at the karigi had sat distracted, no one had heard the crack of the whip; they could not have known what was about to be visited upon them. But Alaana should have sensed the impending attack, if she hadn’t been so preoccupied by her failure with the caribou. She should have been able to warn her people.

  Between the whirlwinds of disrupted snow, she could only catch glimpses of the intruders. They wore dark furs with distinctive trappings almost exclusively relating to the brown bear. A shudder of panic chilled her heart.

  There was an old Inupiaq curse: ‘May the Yupikut fall upon you.’

  The Yupikut ranged over a broad area of the Northern peninsula, taking the brown bear or the caribou wherever they found them but bound to no particular hunting ground or territory. Their vicious nature was well known, and too often demonstrated in unpredictable raids against the settlements of the established communities. They struck like lightning, favoring surprise attacks and unnecessarily gruesome acts of violence.

  Now they swirled about the camp, living fully up to their reputation of fierce devastation. Unprepared for the attack, the Anatatook were easily routed. Women spread the alarm in shrill voices. Men popped out of their iglus only to rush back inside again in search of weapons. A group of marauders bore down on Alaana’s position, dropping Anatatook men as they came.

  This was all a horrific mistake, thought Alaana. Her people had nothing anyone could want. They had no food. Their stores were already gone, having been ravaged by wolves. But of course, the Yupikut couldn’t have known any of that.

  She could speculate no more. The tide of attack had reached the karigi. As a pair of sleds reached the big tent, attackers leapt from the braces.

  Kanak emerged from his tent bearing a pair of ceremonial spears, and tossed one to Alaana. She fumbled with it. Kanak already had his spear poised for the throw. An excellent marksman, Kanak was known to hit a seal in the eye at a hundred paces. He would not miss. But he didn’t get the chance to make his cast. A throwing knife imbedded itself in his throat. Kanak spun away, going down with a scream and a sickening gurgle of blood.

  Alaana made ready to fight. A young Yupikut warrior charged her, swinging a slender war club. She lunged at the youth’s chest with her spear but the stroke missed its mark. The warrior’s club smacked the spearhead with enough force to knock it from her hand, and Alaana took a blow to the shoulder on the backswing. She staggered, almost going down.

  The Yupikut swirled all around her, as if their goal had been the karigi all along. Alaana wondered what they could possibly want, but the swarm of attackers made the answer obvious. In her stark white ceremonial parka she was readily identifiable as the shaman.

  The Yupikut took another swing at her head. Ducking the blow, she slipped and fell in the snow. The tip of a spear hovered at her breast, poised for the killing stroke.

  “Hold!”

  The young warrior’s face, gleeful at the prospect of the kill, turned away. He stepped aside to reveal the largest man Alaana had ever seen. Swathed in dark bulky furs, he might well have been a bear himself. His wild hair and beard of deep chestnut brown rivaled the color and texture of the most luxurious pelt any such beast had ever claimed. Running down either cheek from eyelid to chin were four jagged lines of scarification meant to resemble the claw marks of the brown bear. At this startling sight, Alaana’s hand went instinctively for the handle of the ceremonial dagger at her belt.

  The giant stomped her hand into the snow. “Take him!” the main said.

  Him? Of course, they assumed the shaman was a man. The Yupikut men handled her roughly, dealing out vicious blows to the face as they tied her ankles with thick strands of sinew. Knowing her life was lost, Alaana looked toward the fate of her friends and family. It was almost impossible to see anything beyond the rush of fur-clad raiders. Through a red haze Alaana thought she saw her brother Maguan, standing fast outside his tent, struck down with a club.

  The Anatatook dogs were going wild in the kennel. Alaana heard the frantic barking of her own lead dog Makaartunghak, struggling so violently it threatened to shake the kennel to the ground.

  The Yupikut sled pulled out, dragging Alaana helplessly in its wake. Her hands could do little more than scrabble at the ice and snow that raked against her backside, shredding her parka beneath her. She twisted helplessly at the end of the line, shifting herself one way or the other each time her head thumped sharply against the ground. This was all her fault; she should have heard them coming. That was her last thought before darkness took her.

  CHAPTER 5

  DEATH’S ICE HOUSE

  Alaana felt a splash of icy liquid against her face and chest. The stuff stung her eyes when she opened them, and the stink wafting into her nostrils told her it was not water but rank piss.

  Her eyes burned. She couldn’t see anything. Her hands, bound securely behind her back, couldn’t wipe them. She felt an intense, stabbing cold. She heard cruel laughter.

&nb
sp; She struggled to remember where she was and what might have happened to bring her to this. Had there been a raid on her village, or was that the stuff of nightmare?

  Through watering eyes the scene began to take shape. She was inside a fair-sized illuviga, a living quarters made from cut blocks of ice arranged in an oblong pattern. She lay sprawled on a putrid mat draped across the floor. Other than the sharp edge of a sleeping pallet pressed against her back, the room was empty and bitter cold. It was too cold. Instead of a small ventilation hole, the dome had a large opening cut into the top. This place was not meant to keep the heat inside, but to release it.

  The opening revealed a circle of dull gray sky, the color of the short winter day’s end. Hanging from the dome were a series of inflated sacs, much like the seal bladders the Anatatook strung up each spring to honor the seals killed in the previous season. Unlike the festival bladders which were gaily painted and preserved, Alaana recognized these grayed and rotting vessels as human, and guessed they were not meant to honor the souls of the fallen.

  Three Yupikut men stood over her, engaged in a heated argument. They spoke with a different dialect than the Anatatook used but Alaana understood most of what they said.

  She heard the name Manatook clearly. She tugged at her bonds again, hoping to wriggle loose while her captors were distracted, but the thong wouldn’t give any slack. Every move brought searing pain from the raw furrows that had been etched into her back and buttocks by passage over the rough terrain.

  As she blinked away the urine, she came to see her captors more clearly. The huge man with the bear claw scarification on his face, who answered to the name Garagos, was gesturing at her.

  The sight of this man terrified her, bringing to mind snippets of all she had witnessed during the raid — Ipalook’s wife running screaming from her tent with blood streaking the front of her anorak, Kanak stabbed in the throat, Maguan struck down by a club.