The Chukchi Bible (14 page)

“Friendship, that's the main thing,” Imlyret answered evasively.

“According to our empress's orders,” Gavriil Sarychev went on, “above all we must respect the customs of the local people, and to allow you to live as you like in your own lands. But if anyone ever comes with unfriendly designs, Russia would come to your aid.”

“That is good,” uttered Imlyret. He liked the Russian's words. And also the empress's wisdom, in knowing that the Luoravetlan would never forsake their beliefs and their way of life . . . Meanwhile, friendship with a mighty ruler like the Russian Tirkerym, even if it was a woman – well, that they could agree to.

When the guests began to bed down for the night, Imlyret offered Gavriil Sarychev a place within his own polog.

The Russian hesitated, only to be encouraged by the interpreter, Tangitan-Daurkin:

“It's a great honor to be offered a place in the camp master's own family polog.”

Sarychev had experienced plenty of nights in the locals' dwellings on his journey from the Kamchatka, and he was pleasantly surprised by the relative cleanliness and order in Imlyret's sleeping quarters.

It was customary to enter the sleeping polog half-undressed, and finish taking your clothes off inside the warmer space, which resembled a capacious fur-lined sack. To preserve the guest's modesty, Imlyret tossed him a scrap of fawn skin, which Gavriil Sarychev placed between his legs. The host, trim and sinewy despite his advanced age, and the young man
Tynemlen who sat silently in the corner, were similarly attired. The women, nude but for narrow chamois loincloths, dashed to and fro, spreading out soft deerskin bedding. As they worked, their bare breasts, hips, and hands brushed against the men, including their guest.

The guest was told to bed down in the polog's right corner. Tynavana lay down beside him, then Imlyret. One of his wives lay on the other side of him, and finally Tynemlen, in the farthest corner.

Imlyret had already told his daughter's suitor that tonight Tynavana would lie with the honored guest, and Tynemlen, though he had felt a pinprick of jealousy, could not object as he had no claims over the girl as yet.

For a time, he sat by the guttering brazier. When he fell asleep he slept like the dead, and was awakened by the bright chatter of the early-rising women, already making breakfast for their many guests.

That morning Imlyret declared that he would accompany the expedition in the capacity of guide. His daughter Tynavana, her betrothed Tynemlen, and four more deer herders would be coming as well. Two men would drive the deer sleds, and the others would herd the deer they would be taking along as food and as replacements for the sled team.

Tynavana continued to sleep beside Gavriil Sarychev and seemed content. Once she whispered happily, “Perhaps we will have a Tangitan baby,” to her moping betrothed.

Tynemlen took the Sacred Book he had been given at the Anui market from its sack and showed it to Tangitan-Daurkin.

“You can read Russian?” The Tangitan was surprised.

“No,” answered Tynemlen, and sighed. “But I was hoping to learn that magic.”

“It is not a simple matter,” Tangitan-Daurkin explained soberly. “Before
you can learn to interpret the signs of human speech on these white sheets, you must first learn the Russians' language.”

“Maybe you can help me?” Tynemlen asked with hope in his voice.

“Are you baptized?”

“No, not yet.”

Daurkin took up the Sacred Book, gingerly leafed the first page open, and read out in Russian, in a voice that carried:

“In the beginning, God created heaven and earth . . . The earth was dark and empty, and there was darkness over the abyss, and the Holy Spirit flew above the waters. And God said: let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that it was good, and he divided light from darkness. And He called the light Day and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning; that was the first day. And God said: let there be a firmament in the waters, and let it part the waters one from another . . .”

Having ended in a mournful monotone, Tangitan-Daurkin then translated.

Tynemlen did not know how to feel or what to think. Naturally these sacred words were not those of human memories or the storytellers' tales of the world's beginnings. Maybe that was precisely how the Tangitan world was created, while that of the Luoravetlan came about the way the ancient tales told it – with a Raven flying over a void, where there was neither light nor darkness, and defecating as he flew. When his stomach voided solid matter, the droppings made land and mountains; when he urinated, the liquid made rivers and lakes, whereas his effluvia made for tundra bogs and marshes. And then a little snow bunting pecked a hole in the hard sky to let in sunlight. The Creator God, Enantomgyn, did not participate directly, letting the Sacred Raven do all the work.

Tynemlen had not expected the Russian explanation of how the world began to echo what he had known from childhood. But then, what had the world been like at the very beginning? Before the Raven took flight, before the God from the Sacred Book made heaven and earth? Maybe the Holy Spirit that flew over the waters, before it all began, was just another way of describing the Sacred Raven?

 

Imlyret's sled followed that of Captain Billings, with Tynemlen and Tangitan-Daurkin close behind. Whenever they stopped to rest and eat, usually in river valleys that sheltered the fires from the wind and had a supply of gorse for burning, Tynemlen stuck close to Tangitan-Daurkin. The other had been explaining to his inquisitive countryman the way that letters were connected to sounds made by speech. It was true, the Sacred Book was written in Russian, a language whose sound was as meaningless to Tynemlen as the burbling of a brook. Only rarely did he catch a familiar word – bread, tea, water – in the monotonous flow of sound. God, deer . . . Every day there were more of them, as though the brook was getting shallower, crossing stony rapids. Out of all the Russians, Gavriil Sarychev turned out to be the most curious. With the help of Tangitan-Daurkin he asked lots of questions, writing each word that was spoken in a notebook. He attempted Luoravetlan speech himself, sometimes mangling the words so hideously that the listeners burst into fits of laughter. Tynavana, who had grown very fond of Gavriil, spoke up for him. Learning from her, the young Russian often pronounced words the feminine way, which added to the herdsmen's hilarity. It was strange, but by then Tynemlen had stopped feeling jealous of the young Russian. Perhaps this was because Gavriil was assiduous in teaching the young Luoravetlan Russian speech and Russian
writing, spending hours with him by the fireside instead of resting. Bent over the Russians' Sacred Book, the two of them seemed to forget the world. When the last twig of the fire had smoldered, Tynavana would slide over a stone moss lamp and gaze tenderly at the two men she loved, sitting side by side.

 

At the start of 1794 Tynemlen returned to Uelen with his wife Tynavana and their infant son. The golden-haired baby had been named Mlatangin, in honor of his kinship not just with the Luoravetlan but with the Russians too.

Meanwhile, the Russians' explorations continued.

In 1810 Gedenshtorm made it up the mouth of the Kolyma and into the Northeast, in search of new lands and isles.

Ten or so years after him, Lieutenant F. P. Wrangel and F. F. Matyushkin, a school friend of Pushkin's, explored the northeast shores of Siberia. For four years they lived among the Chukchi and were the first Europeans to learn of the existence of a large island in the Arctic Ocean, across from the Yakan promontory. The evidence was so compelling that F. P. Wrangel could report the island's existence with all certainty. In time, it was to bear his name – Wrangel Island.

The discovery of a route to North America via Siberia and a chain of islands in the northern waters of the Pacific Ocean, which were rich in beaver and other valuable furs, made Chukotka a staging point on the journey to that promised land. The seafarer Chirikov brought six hundred beaver pelts from his voyage to America. This inspired the Russian merchants to organize a series of commercial expeditions to the Aleutian and Commodore Islands.

More than forty such expeditions set off between 1743 and 1764.

The riches of the American continent continued to lure Russian merchants. The Rylsk merchant Grigory Shelikhov created a mighty trading concern, with the support of the Golikovs, a merchant family from Irkutsk. The years 1783 to 84 saw the creation of the Northeast Trading and Manufacturing Concern; it was followed by the Predtechenskaya Company of the Pribylov Islands, the Unalashkinskaya Company of the Aleutians, and the North American Company, which was based in the Bering Strait.

After Shelikhov's death, the Russian government created a single Russian-American Company, and four years later it was headed up by Aleksandr Andreyevich Baranov.

Many books have been written about the Russian-American Company, most of which depict its activities as progressive, even altruistic. But that all depends on one's point of view. The Russians have always argued, and continue to argue today, that the influence of the Russian-American Company was beneficial to the local population. The merchants brought progress and organized religion to the aboriginal peoples of the isles in the northern Pacific Ocean, as well as to the natives of Alaska and Chukotka. Yet even Russian historians sometimes admit that not all was well in the doings of the enormous trade concern. First and foremost, the opportunistic extermination of the rich fauna of the Aleutian and Commodore Islands forever weakened the independent economic base of the native peoples. Encounters between Russian merchants and the Aleutians and Eskimos did not always end in brotherly embraces. The Russian historian S. Shashkov admits that the slaughter of natives reached such proportions that at times the sea current brought thousands of corpses to the shores of Kamchatka. To this we might add the forced conversion of the Aleuts and Eskimos to Russian
Orthodoxy. As a result of the Russian-American Company's depredations, the native population of the islands became so sparse that they remain barely inhabited even today, while the people's traditional customs have been replaced by the “more progressive Christianity.”

 

In mid-June 1819, when the fast ice was all but melted from the shoreline, a ship arrived in Uelen. Mlatangin, peering from the beach, could see letters on the side of the vessel – and he could see, too, that the letters were not Russian.

This was an American ship.

With the coming of the dawn, the Watcher would ascend the Crag overhanging Uelen and sit facing the sea. A long whalebone cap-peak, strapped to his head with nerpa-skin thongs, protected his eyes from the glare dancing over the ocean that stretched wide before him.

They were waiting for the whale schools that migrated from the southern seas and through the neck of the Irvytgyr, headed for the plankton-rich shallows of the Arctic Ocean. Tidings from the southerly villages – Liuren, Uny yin, and Imtyk – announced the first kills of these marine giants.

The light, sail-equipped skin boats had been dragged close to the shoreline, so they could be launched at a moment's notice. The sharply honed spearheads of the enormous harpoons rested in their thick leather quivers; leather straps lay rolled up in neat, ready coils; garlands of taut
pyh-pyhs
, air-filled leather bags, carpeted the bottom of the boats.

The hunters arose early, and their first glance was invariably at the Crag, atop which perched the day's Watcher. The watchers were chosen from among the most experienced sea hunters, those who had the sharpest, farthest range of vision as well as a calm temperament.

Mlatangin, a tall young man who was noticeably lighter skinned and
lighter haired than his clansmen, seemed most anxious of all. It was to be his first time standing at the prow of his father's boat, a long, heavy whale harpoon in his hand.

He kept running out of the yaranga to peep at the top of the Crag and the motionless little figure of the Watcher. Bagging a whale was considered a special feat of valor, the mark of the best sea hunter. A supply of blubber oil might last a good few years,which meant that life-giving fire that brought heat and light during the worst of the frosty winter nights would not be extinguished inside the yaranga's fur-lined polog. Blubber was also highly prized by the deer people, and could be traded for furs that would then be used to build a polog, or for winter clothing. Strips of whale skin with a layer of blubber still attached underneath –
itgil'gyn
– were considered a choice treat.

For a youth such as Mlatangin, participation in a whale hunt was a rite of passage, which marked the beginning of his adult life as a full member of Uelen society, after which he would be given a vote in important decisions.