Brother Wind (7 page)

Chagak frowned as Waxtal sat in the honored place between the traders, but she hid her irritation in the quickness of her hands as she prepared food.

When the politeness of introduction was complete, the traders removed their parkas, and Chagak, hearing Three Fish gasp, turned to see that both men wore many necklaces. The jumble of bear claws, shells, bone beads, and seal teeth made Chagak wonder how the men could stand straight under the weight of them.

But, Chagak thought, there is wisdom in a man’s wearing what he has to offer in trade. How do people know what they want if they do not see what they might have?

The women made a feast and served the food on mats inside Kayugh’s ulaq. Chagak did not let herself think about the emptiness of the village’s caches. What family would refuse to feed guests? What hunter would not share what was given as gift to his spear?

While the men ate, Chagak fed Wren leftover bits of meat and dried berries, scraps not good enough to give to guests. And as she fed Wren, she watched the traders. They were young, both with narrow faces, small hands and feet. They wore fur leggings and hooded parkas like the Walrus People, and their words, too, came harshly from their throats, like Walrus People.

The one who spoke the most had thick dense brows that met over his nose. The other had markings on his face, thin dark lines across his cheeks, much like the Whale Hunter lines that marked Samiq’s chin.

When the men had finished eating, they gathered near the largest oil lamp to talk. The women ate, helped Chagak clean bowls and put away food, then left.

Chagak took Wren to sit near her sleeping place and put a sheaf of dried ryegrass on the floor beside them. She pulled Wren to her lap and showed the girl how to split each blade of grass with her thumbnail so the grass would coil easily and could be used to weave small baskets.

Wren pinched her face into a frown and slowly split a strand. Chagak bent to whisper praise into her ear, then laid the split pieces on a mat. “Flat and straight so they will not tangle,” she whispered to Wren. She sat Wren on the floor beside her and handed her several blades of grass, then picked up a bundle for herself, laying it across her lap.

As she worked, Chagak let herself listen to the men’s conversation.

At first they spoke of weather, tides, and currents, so that Chagak would rather hear Wren’s prattle than the men’s words, but then one of the traders said, “We plan to go to the Whale Hunters’ village.”

“Now before winter?” Kayugh asked.

Chagak took a long breath. The Whale Hunters’ village. Who would be so foolish as to try to make a trip to the Whale Hunters’ island this close to winter?

“There will be storms,” Big Teeth said.

“Yes,” said one of the traders, the smaller one, the one who appeared to be the older of the two. “But we have survived storms before.”

“If there were more of you, it would be better. You could lash your iks together if a storm came while you were at sea,” Samiq said, and Chagak noticed that her son kept his right hand down by his side, out of sight. She felt a catch of sorrow under her breastbone and forced her thoughts from Samiq back to Wren, who was using her front teeth to split the grass.

“No,” Chagak whispered to her daughter. “Your teeth are too thick. The grass will fray.”

Wren sighed, but pursed her lips and picked up another piece of grass. Chagak reached over to stroke a hand down the length of Wren’s dark hair. It did not seem so long ago that she was teaching Kayugh’s oldest daughter Red Berry to split grass. And now Red Berry had two sons of her own.

And soon I will be grandmother again, Chagak thought. She smiled as she remembered Three Fish’s excitement. Chagak had been afraid that Samiq would find no joy in Three Fish’s pregnancy. But he had come to her with eyes shining, and with questions, worry edging his words as he asked once again about food supplies in Kayugh’s ulaq.

Three Fish will have a large, strong baby, Chagak had told Samiq. Then you will have three children, she had said, and saw the brief darkening of her son’s eyes, and knew that he was thinking of Kiin and Shuku.

But three children were enough for any hunter to feed. At least Small Knife, the son Samiq had adopted from the Whale Hunters, was old enough to bring meat for himself and others. Chagak thought of Takha, the baby now beginning to smile, to make small sounds that Samiq claimed to be words, and she tried not to think of Shuku, Amgigh’s son.

Amgigh. Chagak had fought so hard to keep him alive, first as a baby when Kayugh had come to them, his wife dead, Kayugh’s newborn baby starving. Then when Amgigh was a young man, he had nearly drowned in a whale hunt. At least he had lived long enough to make a son, even if that son was being raised by Raven.

Chagak looked across the ulaq through the lamp haze at her son Samiq. He was growing strong again. At first, after Kiin left, it had seemed that Samiq had not wanted to live, and Chagak had begun to think that each day some part of his spirit slipped away, perhaps to follow Kiin over the North Sea, to settle inside Kiin’s body and there live side by side with Kiin’s spirit.

But now Samiq was nearly Samiq again, learning, in spite of his injury, to paddle his ikyak, to throw his harpoon. Still, there was the darkness of grief in his eyes.

Then Chagak heard the voice of the sea otter, its whisper close in her mind. “Is that not true for all of you?” the otter asked. “You all mourn Amgigh. You wish Kiin and Shuku were with you. Do you not mourn your own beach and Aka, that sacred mountain, as well? So many things left behind. So many things lost during these few months since the mountains’ anger forced the First Men from their island.”

Chagak took a long breath to lift the heaviness from her chest and said to the otter, “Yes, we all mourn.” She bent her head over her work, tried to turn her thoughts away from her sorrow. From the corners of her eyes she saw Waxtal leave the circle of men. She shook her head at his rudeness. Kayugh was talking, but Waxtal behaved like a child, giving no attention to politeness.

“All of us mourn except Waxtal,” Chagak told the otter. “He thinks only of himself.”

Waxtal turned his back to the men and began sorting through a pile of the traders’ goods. Now and again, he held up a piece of ivory, turning it in the light that spilled from one of the oil lamps. The traders kept looking at Waxtal, and the oldest lifted a hand toward him, opened his mouth as though to speak, but then turned back to the circle of men.

Why not speak out? Chagak thought. What trader wanted a stranger going through his trade goods? Waxtal was not some shaman to be feared or respected.

“Yes, Waxtal thinks only of himself,” the sea otter said. “Of himself and of his carving.”

Chagak’s mind was drawn to the baskets of carvings that were tucked in the corner of her sleeping place. Shuganan’s work. She remembered how the old man had taken her in after the massacre of her people. How he had called her granddaughter and claimed her son Samiq as grandson, though Samiq was the child of one of those men who had killed her family.

By his caring and through his love, Shuganan had given Chagak the courage to live again. Who could not see the same caring in the lines of each ivory animal and the driftwood people he had carved?

Then she thought of Kiin’s carvings, so different from Shuganan’s, but full of grace and movement, as if she caught the spirit of each thing she carved.

Waxtal’s hands on the traders’ ivory suddenly made Chagak angry. “The smallness of Waxtal’s soul comes out through his knife,” she told the sea otter. “He does not carve ivory, he destroys it.”

But the otter was quiet, saying nothing, as though Chagak’s anger had stopped the animal’s words. Chagak sighed. “Enough, Wren,” she said to her daughter. “The men will talk all night. You and I, we need to sleep.”

W
AXTAL CLAMPED HIS TEETH
together to keep them from chattering. Walrus tusks, some longer than a man’s arm, thicker than a man’s wrist, were bundled together in the bow of the traders’ ik.

Waxtal leaned into the ik and stroked his hand down the length of one.

“Good, eh?”

The voice startled him and he jerked upright, catching his hand on one of the ik’s wooden thwarts. A sharp sliver of wood tore his skin. Waxtal raised the hand to his mouth and sucked the blood welling from the cut, then turned and looked at the trader standing beside him. Waxtal shrugged his shoulders. “I have seen better,” he said.

The trader’s eyes widened, then he laughed. “Where?”

Waxtal pretended interest in his injured hand. The bleeding slowed, and he picked at the sliver sticking up from the wound. “I am a trader,” Waxtal said. “My son was a trader—before he was killed by someone who stole his trade goods.”

“So …” said the trader, and he leaned down to touch the ivory, “you might like to have these tusks for your next trading trip.”

“I am also a carver,” Waxtal said. It would not hurt to let the trader know he was dealing with a man of many talents.

The trader coughed and looked down, hiding his mouth with his hand, but not before Waxtal saw his smile, a smile that said the trader knew the value Waxtal would put on ivory.

“I have seen better,” Waxtal said again, then turned and walked back toward the ulas. Let the man smile. The ivory itself wanted Waxtal. Its spirit would long for the joy of Waxtal’s knife. What chance did a trader have against the power of the ivory’s spirit?

Waxtal raised his upper lip in derision. Yes, let the trader hide a smile behind his hand. Waxtal would be the one laughing. He puffed out his chest, walked with shoulders high, back straight, but when he reached the leeward side of his ulaq, Waxtal suddenly felt as if all power had been taken from his body. He leaned against the ulaq and closed his eyes. It was the ivory, its spirit. It was dealing with the trader even now, bending the trader’s thoughts, and it needed Waxtal’s strength.

Even here, out of sight of the traders’ ik, Waxtal felt power leave his hands and flow with the cold beach wind to settle into the walrus tusks. He could hear the voices of the men and animals who lived in the yellow hardness of the ivory. They pulled at his hands as waves pull at the blade of an ikyak paddle. Waxtal held his hands out, saw that they trembled like those of an old man.

“That much power,” he whispered. “That much power, and I, of all the men here, am the only one who understands. The others, they will see the furs and the oil, the dried fish and caribou meat, and they will not know that those things are nothing compared to what I can do with the walrus tusks.”

But what did he have to trade for the ivory? He had lost so much in the move from Tugix’s island. A foolish move, he thought. He had told Kayugh it was a foolish move. All mountains have times of anger, but those times pass. What man did not know that? It was Samiq’s fault. Samiq wanted to move so he could find Kiin. Kiin. She had always been a problem. What father had ever lost more because of one daughter?

Waxtal sighed. Of course, he must remember that the traders themselves did not truly know the value of the ivory they carried. Perhaps they would take oil in exchange. Perhaps not for all the tusks, but for a few, and a few would be enough.

Kayugh, Big Teeth, Samiq, First Snow, and Small Knife left the next morning to hunt. The traders stayed, talking long with Three Fish and Chagak about the Whale Hunters, and Waxtal curled his lips at men so weak that they would find worth in women’s words. It was good, though, because they gathered in Big Teeth’s ulaq, leaving Kayugh’s and Samiq’s ulas empty.

Waxtal took unused sea lion stomach containers from his own food cache, rolled them, and tucked them under his suk. Outside, he walked between the ulas, staying out of sight of the water. Who could say whether one of the hunters would look back and see him? He crawled to the top of Kayugh’s ulaq and called down. When there was no answer, he went inside. He was cautious at first, peering into all the curtained sleeping places, but there was no one, not even Kayugh’s little daughter Wren.

Waxtal laughed, then went to the food cache. He pulled one of the rolled sea lion stomachs from beneath his suk and took a stomach of seal oil from the cache. He pulled what he had carved the night before from his sleeve. Yes, he thought and laughed again: a narrow end made to fit loosely into the opening of the empty seal stomach container and a wide end to channel the oil from the full container into the empty one.

He worked quickly, forcing the oil from one container to the other with gentle squeezes. He emptied only a part of the container, slipped in the stopper, then pulled out another container. He poured portions of oil from each storage belly, filling four empty stomachs from the ten and seven in Kayugh’s cache. Then, one at a time, he carried the containers from Kayugh’s ulaq. Waxtal’s heart pumped hard each time he left the ulaq with a full sea lion stomach in his hands, but no one came, no one saw him.

He took the containers into his sleeping place, covered them with pelts and skins and grass mats. Four sea lion stomachs of rendered oil, perhaps enough for two tusks, he thought, perhaps enough for three if he also traded some of his carvings. And if by some chance he could take oil from Samiq or Big Teeth …

When Blue Shell came back, Waxtal was sorting through his basket of wood carvings. She said nothing to him, only went to the food cache and brought out a handful of dried meat, put it on a mat, and set it beside him. He grunted and pointed at the water bladder hanging over him.

She handed him the bladder. He took a swallow of water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I have made prayers to spirits,” he said to his wife. “I have made promises. Stay out of my sleeping place so you do not curse me.”

Blue Shell shrugged and nodded.

Waxtal held a bit of the dried meat over an oil lamp flame, and when the meat had softened, he used his sleeve knife to cut off a chunk. He put the meat in his mouth and watched Blue Shell as he chewed. Who would believe she had once been beautiful? If he had known what she would become, as thin and dried-up as the skin of a smoked fish, he would have chosen a different wife.