Brother Wind (6 page)

Still, though, he did not sleep, and near morning he finally got up, pulled on leggings, parka, and chigadax, and left the ulaq. The sun was new, gold and orange in a sky nearly free of clouds. He felt his spirit lift as he guided his ikyak through the length of the bay and into an inlet near its mouth. There he could see over the tide flats out to the North Sea, where the water rose in swells, then foamed into whitecaps as each wave crossed the sandbar shallows near the bay.

The auklets were gathering, flocks riding the wind currents, dark flashing to sudden white as they turned their breasts toward the sun.

In early winter the whole auklet tribe gathered, then flew away and did not return until the snow was melting in late spring. Samiq wondered where they went. Did they have winter villages on other beaches?

He closed his eyes and imagined the joy of wings.

“Like an ikyak when a hunter paddles with the wind,” some spirit whispered, and Samiq opened his eyes to see the auklets rise again, then fly close, turning just before they reached him. Samiq raised his paddle to them, then held out his left hand, open and empty.

“Brothers,” he called. “I am a friend. I have no knife.”

Then with the wind and the sun clearing his mind, the fears of the night dimmed, and he knew what he would do.

Samiq went to Kayugh first and asked him if everyone—men, women, and children—could eat together that night in Kayugh’s ulaq. Kayugh lifted his head to look at Samiq from under lowered eyelids. It was a look that Samiq remembered from the days of his childhood, a look that asked a question but did not demand an answer.

“After we have eaten, we will plan for winter,” Samiq told him.

“And does everyone eat from my cache?” Kayugh asked.

“No, no, they will all bring food,” Samiq said, then added quickly, “I have a good reason.”

“A good reason to meet in my ulaq?”

“Yes.”

“To save your lamp oil? To keep Waxtal out of your food cache?” Kayugh asked.

Samiq opened his mouth to explain that his own ulaq was small, that he wanted the women at this meeting as well as the men, but then he understood that his father only teased him, saw that Kayugh’s belly shook with silent laughter. Samiq let himself smile.

Kayugh laughed out loud and slapped a large hand against Samiq’s shoulder, then handed him a bowl. Chagak had made a good stew.

That night after everyone had eaten, the men settled in a circle close to the largest oil lamp, and the women gathered behind them. Samiq planned to ask the women questions—how much food was in each cache, how long that food would last. Perhaps his questions would make them uncomfortable—usually in village meetings only the men spoke. But how could he plan hunting trips if he did not know how much meat was needed?

When he began to speak, Samiq said, “The Whale Hunters have ways that are not our ways. Sometimes, during that year I lived with them, I thought they were foolish. Sometimes I thought they were wise. But I learned much. In Whale Hunter meetings, when plans are being made for hunts and winter storage, their women speak out.” Samiq looked over the men’s heads to the women. “We men know most about hunting. You women know most about food. Why should I make decisions without using what knowledge is available to me? So tell us,” he said to the women, “how much food do we have?”

But Waxtal curled his lip and said, “Women? You ask women? Since when have women had any great wisdom?”

Samiq pretended he did not hear Waxtal, and listened as Crooked Nose—Big Teeth’s wife—and Samiq’s mother Chagak told how much food was in their storage caches. Then Three Fish spoke, telling of the egg cache Kiin had made during the spring, the eggs stored in sand high above tide lines.

“You have seen the eggs?” Waxtal asked.

Samiq held his breath, afraid that Three Fish would tell the man where the eggs were, but she only nodded and lowered her eyes in the manner of First Men women, then looked slyly from under her lashes, showing Samiq she understood his fears.

“Blue Shell, “Samiq said, “your cache?”

But before Blue Shell could answer, Waxtal shouted, “We have nothing. This woman is lazy. She does not fish enough. She does not set enough bird snares.”

Samiq’s face grew hot in anger, but before he could speak, Big Teeth said, “So then, Waxtal, you have no food to share. Yet you expect us to share with you?”

Waxtal stood up, lifted the walking stick he always kept at his side, and turned to point it at Blue Shell. “She should be the one who does not eat,” he said.

“Ah, yes,” said Kayugh. “She is the one who sits and carves all day and does not go out with the hunters after seals. She is the one who eats in other men’s ulas and never invites anyone to eat in her ulaq.”

Waxtal drew back his lips. The hair that hung in a thin string from his chin quivered. He walked through the circle of men, in rudeness walked between them and the oil lamp. He grabbed a handful of Blue Shell’s hair and pulled the woman to her feet. Samiq stood, but his father’s hand held him back.

“Wait,” Kayugh said to Samiq, the word a quietness in the ulaq.

Blue Shell grabbed her husband’s wrist, twisted the hand down to her mouth, and bit. Waxtal jerked his hand away and drew it back to slap her, but Blue Shell blocked the blow with her arm.

“Do not touch me,” she hissed. “You cannot stop me. I will tell Samiq what he needs to know.” She turned to Samiq and said, “Besides the fish I caught today, we have four sealskins of fat and two sea lion bellies of rendered oil. We have three bellies of dried fish and a sealskin of puffins, whole. I have three baskets of bitterroot bulbs and one, not large, of dried seal meat.”

Samiq closed his eyes in despair. Waxtal had only enough oil for one, perhaps two moons. Did the man think he could live forever on other men’s hunting? He glanced at his father, but Kayugh’s eyes were lowered.

“Well then,” Big Teeth said, “we must hunt.”

“I hunt,” Waxtal said. “I would have as much in my food cache as any man if my wife did not waste what I bring in.”

Blue Shell began to laugh. Waxtal lifted his walking stick, but she brushed past him and left the ulaq without looking back.

The next day, Samiq sent First Snow and Small Knife to hunt seals and otters—whatever they could find in the inlets of the bay. He asked Kayugh and Big Teeth if they would be willing to go inland to hunt caribou. “Last summer, traders said there were caribou living on the tundra, one, two days’ walk from this beach,” Samiq said to the men. “We have never hunted caribou before, but …” He paused when he saw light come into his father’s eyes.

“Once when I was a boy, my father took me caribou hunting,” Kayugh said. “I am willing to try again.”

“If you want, take Waxtal,” said Samiq and smiled at his father’s grimace.

But that morning as all the men left the village, Waxtal was with Kayugh and Big Teeth, the three with throwing spears and seal flipper boots, walking inland toward the mountains.

The women went out in Chagak’s ik to fish for cod with handlines. After they left, Samiq went to his ulaq and painted his face red with ocher and seal fat, in the manner of the Whale Hunters. He did not go out to hunt. How could he hunt whales with his hand as it was? Perhaps someday he would hunt seals or sea lions, but even with Three. Fish’s birdbone straightening his finger, he would never have the quickness to hunt whales. He would be a retriever—one who followed the whale once it was harpooned, and helped bring it back to the village after it died. But first he must ask the whale spirits to choose another alananasika, a man to be chief whale hunter of the village, someone for Samiq to teach what he had learned from the Whale Hunters.

He took his ikyak out into the bay and began a Whale Hunters’ song, a song he had learned from his grandfather Many Whales, once alananasika of the Whale Hunter tribe. When the song was finished, Samiq sang his own words, a plea to the whale spirits. “We do not hunt so men will honor us with songs. We do not hunt so women will praise us. We hunt to live. If you choose a hunter from our village, we will treat you with honor. Any whale who gives himself to us, we will honor. We will fill his mouth with fresh water. We will give his heart back to the sea. We will do all those things that honor whales.”

He waited then, hoping to feel the power of the whale spirits, to know in his heart that the whale spirits understood his people’s needs. But he felt only emptiness under the high gray dome of the sky, and in his heart the same emptiness.

He looked down for a moment at his right hand, clamped tightly around the paddle, and as he turned his ikyak back toward the village, he asked himself why he had thought the whale spirits would listen to him. He was no hunter.

“You knew,” some spirit voice told him. “You knew. Why else did you go alone, without the others? The whale spirits, they do not see you as a hunter. The whale spirits, they see that your power is gone.”

First Snow and Small Knife came back to the village looking like old men, faces lined, backs bent. They had seen nothing, heard nothing, had had no chance even to unlash harpoons from ikyan decks.

“Tomorrow,” Samiq told them. “A hunter does not expect to bring back meat each time he hunts.” But even as he said the words, Samiq felt a chill at the center of his chest. What if they did not bring back meat? What if some curse had driven the animals from the Traders’ Beach?

They went out again the next day, and the next, and Samiq, too, went out, paddled his ikyak to the mouth of the bay and spoke to the whale spirits. Both days the men brought back nothing. Both days, in his prayers and in his songs, Samiq felt only the emptiness of sky and sea.

On the fourth day, Kayugh, Big Teeth, and Waxtal returned from their hunting trip. They, too, brought back nothing.

The women made a meal of fish and served it in Kayugh’s ulaq, and Samiq watched as the men sat with heads hung low, eyes dark and sunken with the need for sleep. After they had eaten, there was no conversation, only the heaviness of each man’s thoughts filling the inside of the ulaq, until finally Kayugh said, “We need rest, then we will go again.”

“You think I will go, spend four days walking, for nothing?” said Waxtal, his face flushed, his eyes narrowed into dark slits. “I could have been home in my own ulaq, carving something that I could trade for oil and meat. Go again if you want. I will not.”

Samiq met Waxtal’s eyes. “You do not hunt. You do not eat,” he said.

Waxtal pointed his walking stick at Samiq’s right hand. “And you?” Waxtal asked and laughed. “I am not afraid to live off what I can get for my carvings. Will you live off what you bring in with your harpoon?”

L
OW TIDE. WAXTAL STOOPED
to pick up a piece of driftwood. It was rotten, so soft that he could gouge it with a flick of his thumbnail. But what could he expect? The sea seldom brought gifts for his carving knife into this shallow bay. Even the driftwood was worthless. He tossed the wood aside and continued his walk down the beach.

He pressed his teeth together, ground them in irritation. He should have stayed in the ulaq, but at least he had not taken Blue Shell’s advice. Stupid woman! She had wanted him to travel all the way to the North Sea. He could have done what she suggested—spent a cold day in the ikyak, made the long trip to the mouth of the bay—and found the same there, nothing worth his efforts.

As it was, he had been following the inlet beach for so long that when he looked up at the sky, he could see the pattern of the beach sand on the gray of the clouds. He rubbed his eyes, then scanned the surface of the bay.

At first he thought he was seeing Samiq’s ikyak. For days, Samiq had been throwing practice spears, and this morning, Waxtal had seen him take his ikyak out and fling spear after spear at an inflated seal bladder.

Waxtal had watched, laughing. Did Samiq think the sea animals would give themselves to a hunter marked with deformity? Samiq was better off to go with the women to pick berries.

For a moment Waxtal let himself imagine the pleasure it would have given his son Qakan to see Samiq’s awkwardness with weapons. But Qakan was dead, killed by Kiin’s husband, Raven. Waxtal sighed. Was there no honor in the world that a man would kill his wife’s brother?

Waxtal stopped and turned back toward the water, hoping to see Samiq make a poor throw, or even better, overturn his ikyak. Then Waxtal realized he was not seeing Samiq’s ikyak but an ik paddled by two men. Waxtal waited, his hands gripping his walking stick, until the ik was close enough to see the bow markings: the yellow lines and red circles of a trader’s ik. Excitement filled Waxtal’s chest, puffing up his ribs and belly as though he had swallowed a great mouthful of air.

He ran to Kayugh’s ulaq, scrambled up the sod that layered roof and sides, then called down through the smokehole, “Kayugh, traders have come!”

Kayugh climbed up from the ulaq, shaded his eyes with his hand, and looked out toward the water. “Traders, this time of year?” he asked.

Waxtal shrugged.

“Get Big Teeth;” Kayugh said. “Find Samiq.”

Waxtal curled his lip. Who was Kayugh to tell him what to do? Instead, Waxtal walked back to the beach, waved to the traders until they followed him to the low place where waves gentled to allow easy landing at ebb tide.

“Traders?” he called, and waded out to help them beach their ik. The men were young, scarcely older than boys, and alike enough to make Waxtal believe they were brothers.

“Yes, we are traders,” the one in the bow of the ik answered. His words came from deep in his throat, in the manner of Walrus People, but he spoke in the First Men tongue.

The traders climbed from the ik, and Waxtal helped them pull it ashore. When the ik was beyond reach of the waves, Waxtal held his hands out palm up in traditional greeting. “I am a friend. I have no knife.”

The traders nodded and repeated the greeting. Waxtal looked back toward the ulas and saw that Kayugh was coming with Big Teeth and First Snow. Waxtal pointed toward them with his chin. “You see those men,” he said to the traders. “They are good hunters.” Then, smoothing his hands over the front of his suk, he said, “I am chief hunter and shaman. Welcome to our village.”