The Chukchi Bible

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

(Genesis)

 

(Mletkin, the last shaman of Uelen)

It is customary to depict one's genealogy as a tall, branchy tree.

The place where I was born has no forests, and no tall trees grow there. That does not mean it is lacking in vegetation, for there are certain kinds of trees: rowan, cedar, alder, and willow . . . But the tallest of these “trees” will reach no more than a few centimeters above the earth.

My genealogy, like the tundra root we call
yuneu
, the golden root, is enmeshed with its native soil. It does not spread very far below ground, as the permafrost is too near. And yet no hurricane could tear it from its native soil, no frost could wither it . . .

This is how I think of my family line, the root of my own life story, which I shall endeavor to trace from its first beginnings.

Much that is known about my ancestors, especially the more ancient ones, is not based on the kind of documented, eyewitness accounts customary for people of historical importance. Instead, it has been saved in human memory, like all of our distant past, passing from one generation to the next as part of an oral tradition. Naturally, we have a more or less clear idea of the events of the recent past. The further back we go, the more the lives of those who came before me recede into a haze. In order to re-create it, I – like the storytellers of Ancient Times that came before me – must marshal not just memory but imagination.

It's possible that what I know about Ancient Times will not tally with so-called historical facts. And in this I am happy to disagree with the scholars. First of all, how can they be so certain of their version of events if they have never heard the lengthy evening-time stories of the famed tellers of tales, such as the tusk carver Nonno or my own grandmother Givivneu? Why do they give more credit to the garbled version of some Cossack, who could not tell a Chukcha or an Eskimo from a tundra beast, than to the tidings carried to us through the ages by the native people of the Chukotka Peninsula?

The mist of those ancient legends, which have brought us knowledge of thespiritual adornment of a long-gone way of life, shall dissipate little by little, and the faces and deeds of my ancestors shall come vividly to life – my ancestors, of whom I am as proud as the scions of aristocratic European families are of theirs. Ermen is the first of my ancestors to be mentioned in the ancient tales, the man whose son Akmol' married the Eskimo maiden Ulessik, whom he carried off from neighboring Nuvuken. Their son was Mlemekym, whose youngest brother Goigoi was carried off on an ice floe and turned into a
tery'ky
, a changeling. Mlemekym's descendant Mlerynnyn raided an Evven camp for a herd of reindeer and brought deer husbandry to the Chukotka Peninsula, earning himself a new name – Mlakoran. He took the Evven woman Tul'ma for his second wife, and she gave birth to his daughter Koranau. Mlakoran died by his own daughter's hand, for – according to the shaman father and son Keu and Keleu – only this sacrifice could save the people of Uelen from a deadly plague. In the old tales, Mlakoran's eldest son, Tynemlen, appears side by side with the warrior Kunleliu, famed for his victories over Russian Cossacks. The shamans gave the next famed scion of our line the name of Mlemekym, to remind the new generations of their ancestors. This is how names sometimes come again. Just so, the
name of Tynemlen reappears in my family tree: this later Tynemlen took to wife the daughter of a deer herder, Tynavana. Their eldest son married Korginau, the daughter of the shaman Kalyantagrau, and so mingled his bloodline with that of Uelen's family of hereditary shamans. This coupling produced my own grandfather Mletkin, who married Givivneu, the daughter of the deer herder Rentyrgin, and who became the last shaman of Uelen . . . In the Chukchi tongue, the word for shaman is
enenyl'yn
: he who has the gift of Enen, the Healer. And the word Enen, “god,” has the same root as the word Ener, which means “star.”

 

This book is not just the story of my lineage, and not just the story of our clan, but also the genealogy and the root of all my books. Before I began work on this book, my grandfather Mletkin had been the inspiration for the character of Kagot in the novel
The Magic Numbers
and Rinto in
Anna Odintsova
. The attentive reader will find my ancestors in the pages of many of my works.

And yet the heart of this book is the true story of the last shaman of Uelen.

 

(From the Ancient Legends)

A Raven, flying over an expanse. From time to time he slowed his flight and scattered his droppings. Wherever solid matter fell, a land mass appeared; wherever liquid fell became rivers and lakes, puddles and rivulets. Sometimes First Bird's excrements mingled together, and this created the tundra marshes. The hardest of the Raven's droppings served as the building blocks for scree slopes, mountains, and craggy cliffs.

Yet the world created from the stomach and bladder of the First Bird was still immersed in utter darkness.

It was then that the Raven called upon his helper-birds and sent them to the east, to peck an opening for the sun's rays in the hard, dark vault of the sky. The eagle was the first to go. The heavy swoosh of his wings echoed long in the distance. He returned, exhausted, with drooping wings and a beak crooked from pecking, but he had failed. Next the Raven sent a puffin – though he is small, his beak is sturdy and sharp. But the puffin too returned beaten. The seagulls, cormorants, sandpipers, guillemots, geese, and sluggish eider ducks all tried, but in vain.

And then a little snow bunting volunteered. The Raven was doubtful, but there was nothing for it; no one else would now attempt the tough vault of the sky.

Off she went, the little snow bunting, and for a long time there was no word of her.

The Raven grew convinced that the little bird had also failed. But one day he noticed a red speck in the west. It grew larger and larger, like blood spilling across the dark vault of the sky.

And soon everything, the tundra, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the hills, the mountains, and the rocky crags the Raven had created, glowed crimson. As though someone were painting the western edge of the sky with his blood. And in that bloody swathe, there came a sudden, glinting sunbeam that lit up the Raven-made Earth.

The little snow bunting had returned on the tip of the sunbeam, and at first the birds did not know her: the feathers on the little bird's breast were stained with her own blood, and her beak had been ground almost to nothing.

This is how the little snow bunting brought the Sun to the Earth. But she was left forever with a tiny beak and red breast feathers.

 

The rest of the animals were made partly from inanimate things and partly from the larger animals. But those first representatives of the natural world were all necessarily created in pairs, so that in the future they could live by their own strength and produce offspring.

The first woman was called Nau.

She did not yet think of herself as a creature apart from the animals that surrounded her, from the short tundra flowers breaking through the earth
toward the light, from the seedlings of the
yuneu
, or even from the clouds in the sky that rushed toward the open sea. The mosses and the soft grass tickled and caressed her bare feet, and she laughed. Her laughter twined with the hiss of the quiet incoming tide, with the wind's rustling, the whistling of the tundra gophers.

Something irresistible drew her to the shore, the tide line, and the many-hued beach shingle that pealed under the waves. Whenever she approached the shore, the sea animals would swim close – walrus, sea lions, ringed seals known as
nerpas
, and bearded seals known as
lakhtak
.

But it was when the whale came, loudly exhaling water and air with a whistle –
R-r-r-r-h-e-u!
– that Nau felt the greatest agitation and delight. And she would call back to him, laughing, naming the whale Reu.

Then one day, this whale, Reu, came to her at sunset, as a trail of light swept from the sun to the shingled beach. No sooner had he touched the wet shingle than he turned into a comely young man who took Nau by the hand, and led her into the tundra, to the green moss beds and the soft grassy hills. There he loved Nau, caressed her – but always, just as soon as the sun sank halfway into the sea, he would hurry back to the shore, walk into the water, and turn back into a whale with the last fading beam of sunlight. Then he would swim away, sending a fountain of water high into the sky –
R-r-r-r-h-e-u!