Four Quarters of Light (38 page)

And that was exactly how we found it. Charlie and Lena's ‘fish camp' was marked by a large white tent erected on the riverbank. Beside and adjacent to it was a long, rough table sitting on a platform of old timber boards. Around the table sat a collection of plastic basins and buckets along with barrels, tin oil drums and aluminium baths. Beside the work table and stretching out along the bank were several fish racks and a skinning horse – basically a plank of timber turned into its narrow end and held up at either end by timber supports. Over this, the skin of a seal was stretched. As it dried, the excess fatty membranes could be scraped off with an ulu, that famous half-moon-shaped cutting edge that native peoples in this region use for every task that requires a sharp edge. About 150 yards back from the river, perched on a high bluff that overlooked the river and the endless tundra plane, Charlie and Lena's wooden cabin sat low and squat. A welcome windbreak of trees and bushes sheltered it, though its summer smoke belched out of the short pipe chimney.

We hauled our bags across a stepping-stone path made in the marshy tundra and climbed up the thirty-foot incline to our new home. Apart from the cabin, there were three outhouses. One was the toilet, a replica of many all over Alaska. Two wooden planks had had a semi-circle cut from the centre of them and had been placed side by side across two large drum containers at either side of a large, deep hole in the ground. The other small outhouses consisted of a workshop full of tools and parts of snow machines, and a tanning shed for hides. Flung across a long cargo sled was the hide of a brown bear. Later, I discovered the body parts of animals in very advanced stages of decomposition hanging from
the branches of trees at the perimeter of the camp. Only one tree had been left to grow in the centre of Charlie's enclosed camp; all the others had been cut and cleared to let the wind blow through.

It was a bright day, and the Arctic sun was heating up the place. Lena was overjoyed to see Debra and made a great fuss of her. When I was introduced she looked me up and down intently, then whispered something to Debra. Both women giggled as they regarded me again. Charlie, the old shaman healer, unlike his wife, made no fuss over our presence. Instead he sat on an old tubular-framed chair like a Buddha under his bodi tree. I knew Charlie was an old man, somewhere in his nineties, but his lean frame and drawn face were not purely the results of ageing. His narrow, angular face looked as if the skin had been stretched across his skull and left to dry there like the seal skin on the skinning horse. He walked with a stick, and it was obvious he was suffering some discomfort, but his hands still looked strong and his forearms displayed long strands of muscle under his skin. When we shook hands, his grasp confirmed what I suspected. As I looked from Charlie to Lena, I decided that you could only discern the classic Eskimo features in Charlie at a second glance. Charlie may have been living in this Arctic coast when few white men ever thought of coming here, but I was sure there was some white Russian or Scandinavian blood in his ancestry, maybe from the whaling ships or the fur traders who came here in the 1800s. But then, when I looked at him again, I thought he looked like a little old Japanese fisherman. There was an impassive stillness in his face that did not let you penetrate behind his exterior presence.

Lena, on the other hand, was ethnically beautiful. She had the tiny round face of the true Inupiat. Her small, dark eyes glowed out from the Asian slant in which they were set. Though she was in her mid-sixties, her long black hair shone in the sun and the first traces of silver were only just beginning to show. Her face was full of life, spirit and fun, the way her husband's was not. The lines on her face could have suggested that she was much older, but even her lack of teeth did not detract from the femininity that radiated from her. She laughed coyly behind her hands like a
geisha, yet had no fear of the camera and posed effortlessly. I was mesmerized by her gorgeous, warm, womanly face, and by her infectious sense of girlish fun.

Charlie hobbled inside his cabin on his aluminium hospital-issue walking stick. It was one of the few concessions to modernity I could see in this wilderness homestead. The curious irony struck me: here was this reputed shaman healer who had worked attested and medically inexplicable ‘healing' on thousands of people supporting himself on this medically designed crutch. But the thought left me as soon as I entertained it. The people who live in these extreme regions are the ultimate pragmatists. They have survived for untold centuries by utilizing anything and everything. Charlie's metal stick was light and adaptable to his height, and it would not rot, nor snap, forcing him to go and cut another piece of wood. It served him well.

We entered the cabin through the kitchen area. There was no running water or cosy modern appliances; a small cooker running on bottled gas was the only concession to modern living. Pots and pans, bowls, plates, knives and forks were littered everywhere. The open shelves held an assortment of tins and dried foods. Underneath, the worktop revealed a plethora of containers, buckets and basins. Opposite the kitchen was a small storage area that was even more littered with too many things for me to decipher what exactly they were. The rest of the cabin comprised one large living-room area with two smaller rooms sectioned off as sleeping quarters, I assumed. Charlie's big, handmade bed was set off to one side of the living area opposite a huge wood-burning stove. The heat it was throwing into the room was suffocating. It was high summer, but Charlie insisted on burning his woodstove.

For an instant I imagined snow drifts engulfing the tiny cabin, Arctic windstorms howling across the tundra, the moon lighting up a wintery white-out landscape that would make you feel that you were the only person alive on the earth. The constant darkness, and the below-freezing temperatures so severe that to go even a few feet outside for firewood could mean risking your life,
and to expose your hands for a few minutes longer than you should would certainly mean frostbite of such severity that you might have to amputate your own fingers to stop gangrene killing you. Even as I was thinking this I saw the huge CB radio system that was Charlie and Lena's only connection to the outside world. In the worst of the winter months they might be able to contact someone in an emergency, but there was no guarantee that anyone could reach them.

There was a big old sofa a few feet from the bedside. It looked as if it had been around a long time. There were also a couple of armchairs of different design, one by the radio and the other near the stove. These two seemed the worse for wear, but as Charlie and Lena had had thirteen children and God knows how many grandchildren who would have visited them over many summers, I could understand their dishevelled, rickety appearance. In any case, it was a long way to go to the nearest furniture store! I noticed little in the way of decoration on the walls. I was sure neither of my hosts put much thought into the appearance of things.

Behind one of the easy chairs was an old TV set. Piled in columns behind that were dozens of video cassette boxes and dozens more books. A bank of heavy-duty car batteries on the floor beside the radio confirmed the power source. Neither the titles of the books nor the films told me much about these people, except that they would read or watch whatever came their way. Years of living and raising a family in the wilderness had not allowed Charlie or his wife to develop any discerning tastes in literature or film. But then, that was my world, and it had no application here.

Charlie had taken to his bed as soon as we had come into the room; he sat propped up with pillows and was explaining to Debra that he had had a bad fall from his snow machine last winter and had broken and fractured a few ribs and bones in his wrist and arm. He had been unable to get back to his cabin as the machine was too damaged and injuries to his foot and leg meant that he couldn't walk. He had had to spend several days and
nights out on the frozen wilderness waiting until his son picked up his trail and brought him back. I thought that anyone else would have given up and died out there. I stood at the window beside his bed and looked down on the river we had travelled along and out over the vast tundra beyond. I could imagine how this panorama changed with the seasons and even how the huge sky enfolding the horizon line could change daily. I could even imagine Charlie and Lena sitting at this window looking out over plains of snow with the aurora fusing and unfolding above them.

As if she was reading my thinking, Debra informed me how during early autumn you could watch small herds of caribou and their young crossing the river and heading south. They sometimes stayed for days out on the tundra, filling up on the last long shoots of winter grass. I had noticed several racks of antlers piled up between the cabin and the fish camp. I asked Charlie about these, wondering if he had acquired his injury while out hunting caribou. He explained he never needed to travel after the animal; they came to him. He always shot the caribou in the water, where it was easier to retrieve; a wounded animal was also easier to finish off in the water, rather than having to run across the tundra. Charlie said he didn't eat much caribou meat anyway during the autumn migration. The bull flesh was still strong from the rut, but their hides were at their best. Caribou hide was unequalled for warmth and made the finest winter clothing and sled blankets. Charlie declared that the caribou was a nomad like himself, and now that he was too old to travel much he had less reason to take a caribou.

I left Charlie and Debra to talk and went outside again. The land rose up from the site of the cabin in a long, slow incline. There were lots of spruce trees with good-sized girths, which obviously fed Charlie's stove. I kicked around the buildings taking perspectives from different positions that its elevated site had thrown up. But whatever spectacular vista was set before me, I was not taking it in. I had travelled this far ostensibly to learn and attempt to understand the spirit world of these people through this old shaman. Their profound belief in the ‘spirit' of the land,
or ‘inua' (a Gaelic and native Alaskan word for spirit), is why they survive here. But now, having come so far, I suddenly didn't feel so determined to enquire into this world. There was some kind of futility in walking into people's homes and lives in pursuit of old stories, as if in coming to this extreme place the door of the spirit world would blow open. And what if it did? Would I be able to look into it and understand its reality? If I was hardly taking in the landscape in front of me, how could I hope to see into the other world that lay both in it and on the other side of it?

That evening and for the rest of my stay all of us except Lena slept in the big living room with Charlie. Even two of Charlie's grown sons, who stayed most of the day in the fish-camp tent or went off in a small boat returning late in the evening, occasionally joined us in our communal slumbers. They never spoke and were gone again in the morning. Sometimes one of them would come up to the cabin during the day, make himself something to eat, then leave again without much more than a nod of acknowledgement, and only then if I had initiated the exchange. At first I thought it was embarrassment, or even surliness, but I later learned it was neither. The silence of the Arctic is overwhelming, but it is neither unsettling nor disturbing. It certainly blew away the cobwebs in your senses and could be deeply rewarding. I was beginning to understand its sonic qualities, about which the composer John Luther Adams had spoken to me. The great empty silence that blew around the cabin was, to me, comforting, and sometimes, I thought, idyllic; Charlie's sons had simply subsumed this silence into themselves. They had both spent nearly forty years living within it, and the clutter of words or banal though well-intentioned exchanges were alien inconveniences.

Charlie was also uncommunicative. His injury and severe lack of mobility had tied him to the cabin and his bed. I found it difficult to speak with him. Sometimes I thought he was cranky. He seemed to want a lot of attention from Lena and Debra. But I suppose that's true of any older person who finds him- or herself so debilitated that they no longer have any function in life. I gathered from his conversations with Debra that his own reputed
healing powers had diminished, prolonging his own self-administered recuperation. Debra spent many hours working with him, massaging and exercising his withered muscles. In the evening she would perform a shamanistic healing ceremony, calling up the spirits to the ritual of drum and chant as she whisked incense about him with a feather-and-bone rattle. Charlie seemed to enjoy this attention, and my own attention was drawn constantly to learn whatever power Charlie and Debra were attuned to. Lena radiated something else. I could sit in silence with her with no awkwardness or discomfort, but I didn't have to. Lena conversed with easy grace, occasional seriousness and much mischief. She made me laugh at the devilment in her small black eyes, dazzling like polished onyx.

Lena grew up travelling from camp to camp with her family in the Kobuk Lake area, and every summer, when she was thirteen or fourteen, ‘there was this young man out there', as she put it. Her mother told her about him. He kept coming round. Then she and her two sisters were in Kotzebue (which was an extremely small place at the time) and Charlie showed up again, looking for pups for his dog team. The girls took him to someone who had pups for sale. He gave them each a puppy, which made them very happy. Then he started showing up in the winter, which was unusual because it was more difficult to travel in the winter, especially just for a social visit. At some point that winter, when she was seventeen, she went home with him by dog team for two or three months. They went back to her parents for three months after that and her mother asked why they weren't married. They eventually married when Lena was eighteen and Charlie said he was twenty-eight. She laughed, saying she did not believe him. Charlie told me basically the same story but from his viewpoint, which was that he too was moving around from camp to camp and would visit Lena's family. He said he noticed that she did real good work, and he thought she would make a good wife so he decided to marry her.