Brother Wind (36 page)

But now, doubt slapped up from the waves, and he heard the taunting voices of those spirits that so easily slid over the sea to find a man in his ikyak. They ridiculed, and their whispers were like needles piercing his body. “Ho! It was your power that brought the walrus. Your power! When have you called animals, any animals, even lemmings? Do you think one time of prayer and fasting can bestow power like that? Then every man should do the same. What hunter would ever come home without meat?”

“I called the walrus,” Waxtal said aloud. “I called them. Perhaps with my knife against the tusk, perhaps within my dreams, perhaps with my chants. I was the one who called them. Would one of the Whale Hunters call walrus? They hunt whale. Would Owl or Spotted Egg call? They are Caribou. I am the one who carves a walrus tusk. I am the one whose daughter is wife to a Walrus People shaman. I called them.”

Then the water spirits seemed to leave him, and suddenly Waxtal’s arms were again strong. He paddled hard until he came close to Red Feet’s ikyak and stayed there until the sounds came over the waves—the great echoing call of the bull walrus, the bleatings and growlings of lesser males. And turning their ikyan into the wind, the Whale Hunters came to the island. Hard Rock and Dying Seal stopped their ikyan, holding their paddles upright in the water until Red Feet and Fish Eater were beside them. They turned and waited for Waxtal to join them.

“The walrus are here,” Hard Rock said, then asked Waxtal, “Is this the island where you came to fast?”

Almost, Waxtal said no, but he closed his mouth before the word could escape. He raised his head and looked into Hard Rock’s eyes. “Yes,” he said, and thought, Who will know the difference? Owl and Spotted Egg are gone. They will never be back. He had been the one to call the walrus; why not take all credit? Why not get what he could for these hard months spent on an island cursed by the man who had cursed him? “Yes, this island,” he told Hard Rock and, lifting the blade of his paddle from the water, pointed toward the hills above the gray rock of the beach. “There in those hills.”

“You called these animals while you were here?” Dying Seal asked.

“I called them,” Waxtal answered, “but they did not come until I had left.”

“What if we had not found them? What if Fish Eater had not come this way in his seal hunting?” Hard Rock said. “You should have told us you called them.”

“Would you have believed me?” Waxtal asked. “Look at me. I am not a young man. I am not a strong man. Even all my trade goods, those many bundles of pelts, the bellies of oil, I gave all for the walrus tusks. So now, because I have so little, men in your village doubt that I am a shaman, that I have the powers of a shaman. Has any man ever seen walrus on this island? No. And someday when I have taken my powers up to the Dancing Lights, the walrus will leave here again.” He turned and looked at Red Feet, then back again at Hard Rock and Dying Seal. “If I had said, ‘Walrus have come to the Four Waters Island—go hunt,’ would you have believed me?”

The men did not answer, and for a time, in that silence, they watched the beach, the skirmishes of the giant bull, his large body like a mound of red-brown rock, his bellows like something heard in the groanings and crackings of ice rivers.

Then Red Feet took his sea lion harpoon from its lashings on the ikyak deck, fitted his throwing board to his right hand, and slid the harpoon into the groove of the board, the butt of the shaft against the ivory hook that held the harpoon in place.

“No,” Waxtal said. “We are not ready to hunt. We insult the walrus with our seal harpoons.” He looked at Hard Rock, realized he had spoken words that should be said only by the alananasika. He braced himself for Hard Rock’s anger, but to Waxtal’s surprise, Hard Rock showed no anger, only fear.

He is afraid of my power, Waxtal thought, and a rill of laughter lifted itself into his mouth. Waxtal began a chant, a prayer for protection, praise for any walrus that would give itself to a hunter’s harpoon. Who could say what good it would do? He had listened enough to the braggings and boastings of Walrus People hunters. Who did not know that the way to hunt walrus was on land, where they were slow and easily taken? In water they knew their full power. What chance did a hunter have against them?

Again Waxtal called out, “Wait!”

But Red Feet said, “That one, he is mine,” as though Waxtal had said nothing. He pointed at a smaller walrus some distance from the bull.

Waxtal looked, saw the stain of yellow on the walrus’s tusks. It was a seal killer, that walrus, tusks yellowed by the blubber of seals he had taken. Waxtal had heard stories of such walrus attacking a hunter’s ikyak.

“Wait!” Waxtal said, but his words were too slow, and Red Feet threw the harpoon, cried out when it hit the walrus in the chest, when a gout of bright blood left a trail as the walrus moved awkwardly into the water, then disappeared beneath the waves.

“Look,” Hard Rock said and pointed at the harpoon shaft, bobbing, butt up, in the waves. The shaft was attached by a line of braided sinew to the harpoon head, which was embedded in the walrus. Hard Rock, Fish Eater, Red Feet, and Dying Seal drew their ikyan in a circle around the harpoon shaft, waited for the walrus to surface as a man waits for seal or sea otter. But Waxtal did not move his ikyak into the circle, and when Hard Rock motioned to him, he shook his head.

Waxtal closed his eyes, put all his strength into the words of a chant. Then behind the darkness of his eyelids he saw the sudden brightness of light, and at the same time heard the screams of the hunters. As he opened his eyes, his ikyak was raised up on a swell of water, a giant wave, coming as though the sea itself fought the Whale Hunters. From the crest of that wave, he saw the walrus lift itself out of the water, and Waxtal knew that the walrus was pulling power from the wave, gathering strength to overcome the pain of the harpoon head. The animal flung itself against Red Feet’s ikyak, splintering the bow and knocking Red Feet from the hatch.

Waxtal pushed against his paddle, moved into those small chopping waves that sometimes follow the wake of a large wave. Almost his ikyak flipped, but fear added strength, and he righted himself, turned, and paddled quickly away from the beach, away from the strong towing currents that defy a hunter’s paddle. And when he had pulled himself far enough away, he looked back. Three ikyan still floated, a man in each. Waxtal watched, waited, and when he saw the sea was calm, he paddled back to the others, raising his voice in chants, so they would know he was praying for all of them, his strength not in hard arms or skillful paddling, but in prayers and chants and shaman’s powers.

“He cannot live,” Dying Seal said. Still he and Hard Rock tied their ikyan together. They pulled the man from the water and laid him across the ikyak decks.

Waxtal drew close, looked, then quickly turned his head aside. No, even with all his chants, with all his prayers, with the powers of the most powerful shaman, Red Feet would not live. What man could live with chest crushed, jaw pulled away, mouth gurgling blood at each breath?

Hard Rock looked up at Waxtal, moved his paddle in an angry slash. “Lead us!” he said.

Waxtal opened his mouth to remind Hard Rock that Red Feet had acted foolishly. He, Waxtal, had warned the men about using seal harpoons against walrus. But there would be time to speak when they were safe again on the Whale Hunters’ island. Who could say whether spirits, watching, seeing their harpoons, might send another wave against them, leave them all in the sea to join the whispering voices that the wind carries to hunters in ikyan? And so he started out through the waves, the paddle heavy and hard in his hands.

K
UKUTUX WAS ON THE BEACH
when the men returned, Waxtal in the lead, Fish Eater trailing, Hard Rock and Dying Seal with ikyan lashed together, Red Feet lying across the bows.

Kukutux closed her eyes in sorrow when she heard Red Feet’s two young wives begin the mourning chant, and she remembered her own agony when her husband was killed hunting whales.

Then over the mourning song, she heard Waxtal’s voice. His yelling was a rudeness that drowned out the women. “I called the walrus, but told you Whale men not to hunt. Who does not know that walrus are dishonored by seal and sea lion harpoons? What man is so foolish as to dishonor the animal he needs for food?”

Dying Seal came from his ikyak, grasped Waxtal’s shoulders, and squeezed his strong hands until Waxtal’s words faded to a whisper, until the old man’s mouth closed. “Who is so foolish as to dishonor the dead?” Dying Seal asked, then released Waxtal so quickly that the man staggered as though he had been hit.

Hard Rock, Dying Seal, and Fish Eater left the beach, Hard Rock without saying anything. But Waxtal stayed, removed ballast rocks and oil bladders from inside his ikyak, then began to rub oil into the seams as though there were no mourners, as though Red Feet had come back from the hunt alive and walked now on two strong legs like any other man.

Kukutux went back to the ulaq, took food outside to the cooking hearth. She hung a boiling bag over the fire, filled it with water and fresh and smoked fish, then waited for Waxtal.

He came, muttering angry words, but Kukutux pretended she did not hear. The man climbed down into the ulaq and then out again, walking stick in his hand. He swung the stick against rocks and clumps of grass as he walked, but Kukutux ignored him until the stick swept close to her bare feet. Then she stood up and said in a loud voice, “The food I prepare is food I brought in myself. If you want to eat, you will put down your stick.”

But Waxtal swung the stick again, this time slapping the end against Kukutux’s shins, leaving a stinging welt.

In anger Kukutux picked up her woman’s knife. In anger she slashed the blade across Waxtal’s fingers. Waxtal cried out and dropped his walking stick, raised his hand to his mouth to suck at the blood dripping from the cut. Kukutux lunged for the stick, grabbed it just as Waxtal reached for it. Then she raised one knee and broke the stick over it, and poked the broken pieces into the hearth fire, keeping Waxtal away with the blade of her women’s knife until the stick began to smolder and char.

“It was sacred, that stick!” Waxtal screamed at her, but Kukutux only swung a wide arc with her woman’s knife. Waxtal jumped back, and Kukutux stooped down to pick up one of the hearth stones with her left hand. She raised the stone as if to throw it.

Ignoring the pain in her left elbow, the protest of bone and muscle against the weight of the stone, she said, “You, Seal Hunter, do not think you can treat Whale Hunter women as you treat your own Seal women. Do you believe Whale Hunter men are the only ones who gather strength from years of eating whale meat? Do you think none of that power comes to the women? Be glad I broke only your stick.”

Waxtal opened his mouth, snarled, but Kukutux, strong with stone and knife, was not afraid. Then she heard a voice calling and carefully moved her eyes from Waxtal to see Hard Rock coming toward them. Waxtal’s voice changed to whining, and when Hard Rock drew close enough to hear, Waxtal pointed at Kukutux and at his walking stick now burning with bright yellow flames in the hearth fire.

“She used my walking stick to feed her cooking fire,” Waxtal said, his voice quiet, like the voice of a man considered wise, sought for his good counsel.

Kukutux dropped the stone back into its place and wiped her hand on her suk. “He hit me with it,” she said.

Hard Rock frowned. “With his stick?”

Kukutux nodded.

“You believe a woman?” Waxtal asked.

“Yes,” Hard Rock said.

Waxtal’s face pulled itself into a smile. “What man does not at times have to teach wisdom with a stick?”

Anger knotted tight in Kukutux’s chest. She opened her mouth to speak, but Hard Rock waved her to silence. “It seems whatever happened,” Hard Rock said, “Kukutux has been able to take care of herself. Now you must come with me to my ulaq. The hunters want to talk to you.”

Waxtal walked with Hard Rock back to his ulaq. Kukutux watched them leave. Hard Rock’s steps were heavy, his weight settling first on his heels, but Waxtal walked so lightly that even grass crushed under his feet sprang back quickly into place.

When the two men were inside Hard Rock’s ulaq, Kukutux used a forked stick to carry a burning coal to her own ulaq, now empty and dark. Her feet felt their way down the climbing log and then to each oil lamp. Two of the four lamps had enough oil so the wicks remained burning, then Kukutux laid the coal in one of the empty lamps and went back to the hearth fire. She used two strong sticks to take the boiling skin from the driftwood tripod that held it over the fire. Carefully she carried it, not to the traders’ ulaq, but back to her own ulaq, and hung it from the rafters over one of the burning lamps.

She made three trips to the traders’ ulaq. She took all things that were hers: sleeping furs, mats, basket grass and baskets, bellies of oil and dried meat, water bladders. And she brought them back to her own ulaq. Then she went into her dead husband’s sleeping place, found the few weapons he had not taken with him to the Dancing Lights. A broken harpoon head. A crooked bird spear shaft. A gaff to land fish. A boy’s spear. She laid these things at her side, then ladled herself a bowl of broth and meat from the boiling skin. If Waxtal came for her, she was ready to fight.

“What more could I do?” Waxtal asked. “I called the walrus. I brought them to your hunters. I told you not to hunt them with seal harpoons. Do you think whales are the only animals hunters must honor with careful taboos?” He made a rude noise with his lips, and blew out air from between his buttocks.

Hard Rock wrinkled his nose at the stink, and Waxtal said, “The walrus, they still smell the stink of your foolishness.” Waxtal stood and looked at the men. When he had come as a young man to help these Whale Hunters against the Short Ones, there had been so many hunters in this village that they could not all fit into one ulaq. Now, how many? He let his eyes move from one man to another, eight, ten, and many of them old. He pointed rudely at Hard Rock. “The curse that came to you from the man Samiq is still here.”