The Chukchi Bible (16 page)

Mlatangin knew that the hairmouths possessed special instruments that allowed them to see a great distance. That was exactly the kind of thing he needed now, so they would not have to row closer to the enormous ship that looked like a wooden island with great white wings, and its little whaleboats that skittered around the ship like babies around their mother.

The Tangitans hauled the dead animal to the ship's side. The first thing they did was prise out the tongue and rip out the baleen plates. Then they cut out the blubber in neat cubes, hooking their poles into each slab of flesh and hauling it up onto the deck.

The big ship had noticed the little skin boat: one of the whaleboats was headed straight for them. They might have raised sail and fled, but the speedy whaleboat would have caught up with the skin boat easily. Cursing his excessive curiosity, Mlatangin tried not to show his concern and fear to his comrades and even told them to put down their oars.

The whaleboat carried true hairmouths; some of them had so much facial hair that their features were indiscernible beneath it. From afar they had begun shouting and flapping their arms, but their voices and gestures did not seem hostile. Still, Mlatangin's nerves were taut with concentration. He guessed that they were being invited up onto the big ship and considered it wise to uphold the friendly atmosphere. He turned the skin boat to follow the white whaleboat.

Yet as they neared the ship Mlatangin and his companions all felt a burgeoning anxiety and fear. Who could tell what these strange people would do? They had clearly singled Mlatangin out from among his fellow Luoravetlan, and he now keenly felt both his likeness to his tribesmen and his otherness. This worried him, and he would have given much to resemble his kinsmen completely just now. He knew the true story of his parentage, but
considered Tynemlen his father in every way, and his own implied kinship with the Tangitans a kind of pretty fable.

The wooden ship's hull rose wall-like above the water. A rope ladder snaked down the side, falling precisely over the skin boat. The chief hairmouth, easily identifiable by his neat garments and the smoking pipe clenched between his teeth, was shouting loudly and motioning the hunters up on board.

Mlatangin and two of his companions went up the ladder. When he set foot on the hard surface Mlatangin felt as if he were standing on solid ground, and not a wooden deck. It was a strange, unusual feeling, quite unlike standing on the much softer, more pliant hide bottom of a hunting canoe, water visible underneath. Here you couldn't even feel the ship rock.

The chief hairmouth was smiling widely, revealing large, yellow teeth that brought to mind walrus tusks. He talked loudly, gesticulating, and slapped Mlatangin's back several times with a wide, shovel-like palm. None of these friendly gestures assured Mlatangin one bit. He even thought about how easy it would be for them to be kidnapped, taken as captives to a strange land and made into slaves. The legends of the Tangitan wars were rife with vivid episodes of tortures practiced on the Luoravetlan warriors. Wrists bound, they were hung from hooks, slowly branded with hot metal, their eyes gouged out, their balls and members crushed.

The visitors were escorted inside, into the captain's own cabin, a spacious wooden room with round windows. Strange faces and images hung framed upon the walls, and there was a huge round table with raised edges, which was set with large mugs full of steaming liquid.

“
Kofi! Kofi!
” The captain exclaimed this several times, as he motioned the guests to be seated on some high stools screwed into the deck.

Coffee turned out to be a marvelously tasty drink. Following the captain's example, the visitors were soon dipping hunks of rock-hard bread in their mugs. Afterward, they were shown the vessel's whale-hunting gear – gunpowder-charged harpoons and a round metal pipe with sharpened edges that was attached to a pump and used to inflate a dead whale – and then each man received a parting gift of some coffee, hardtack, and sugar.

In the meantime, the whale had been all but completely butchered, stripped of whalebone and blubber. The mutilated, blood red carcass was freed from the restraints clamping it to the ship's side, and in the blink of an eye it sank from view.

Mlatangin's boat raised sail and set course for its native shore of Uelen.

This was the Luoravetlan's first encounter with hairmouth whalers, though this encounter would later prove common in the Irvytgyr Strait.

 

By 1848, the once rare voyages of American whaling ships to the northern part of the Bering Sea, to the Sea of Chukotka and up the Arctic coast of Alaska became more commonplace. For the most part, the Tangitans now set out from the rapidly expanding, thriving port of San Francisco, sailing to make their fortunes, pushing through the mists and ice fields of the Arctic waters.

The commercial whaling industry materialized on a typically American scale. There was even a special coal refueling station for outbound ships set up in Port Clarence on the Alaskan coast.

The disappearance of John Franklin's expedition in 1827 set off an unusual flurry of activity from various would-be rescuers. American ships stopped at Chukchi villages to search for their lost comrades, often leaving the names of their vessels behind: Cape Plover, at the mouth of Providence
Bay, was named after one of the ships attached to T. Moore's Chukotka expedition of 1848.

In the years that followed, the Bering Strait teemed with Tangitan vessels – whalers, explorers, and merchant ships. The ships would anchor off even the smallest of villages, where they were sometimes forced to winter. Some sank without a trace; others, abandoning hope of escaping the mortal grip of the moving ice fields, would be abandoned by their crews to drift along encased in ice, appearing here and there like ghosts.

Meanwhile, the land swarmed with hordes of gold prospectors.

In their ambition to gird the planet with landlines of instantaneous electric communication – and, in a race against time and a rival company laying a submarine cable on the Arctic Ocean's floor – the planners and investors of the Russian-American Telegraph Line pushed into the most remote corners of northwest Asia and put up their telegraph poles, erecting metal masts in the heart of the tundra to match Mr. Eiffel's tower in Paris.

Within a few decades of the marauding whalers' arrival, the giant herds of Greenland and baleen whales that once roamed the northern waters of the Bering Sea were all but exterminated. In Uelen, killing a single Greenland whale in the course of a season was considered a great stroke of luck. Mostly these days they “hunted” whale carcasses, left afloat after the blubber and baleen had been stripped off. In time, when municipal gas lighting was introduced to city streets in the Tangitan lands, the demand for blubber-oil fell dramatically – yet whalebone continued to be a sought-after prize. Mutilated whale carcasses continued to wash up on the shingled beaches of Chukotka.

It would be another century before the descendants of the whalers who had destroyed the mighty creatures – and, with them, the lifeblood of the
peninsula's population – created the International Whaling Commission. Each year they would set miserly whaling quotas for the Chukchi and the Eskimos, citing their hypocritical “concern” for the livelihoods of the Arctic dwellers. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and the Tangitans are no exception to this rule.

 

Mlatangin went on hunting whales with his harpoon. He dreamed of obtaining a mechanized harpoon cannon and amassed a store of baleen plates to trade. During his lifetime the whale herds still seemed inexhaustible.

The hairmouths came into Uelen more and more frequently. They traded tea, sugar, rifles, cloth, and tobacco for furs, walrus tusk, and whalebone. But costliest of all was the bad fire-water; many of the natives of Uelen came to be willing to trade not only their last possessions, but their wives and daughters too. Some worried about this trend, yet were themselves eventually overcome by temptation.

There were, however, several sensible people left in the village who saw the danger of the addictive, mind-bending beverage; both the shaman Kalyantagrau and Mlatangin, who by now had cemented his place as one of the best whale hunters, were among them.

In the autumn, a season of damp, dark nights, Mlatangin took Kalyantagrau's daughter Korginau to wife and set up his yaranga next to his father's, plumb in the middle of Uelen village.

(From the New Legends)

As far as I have managed to ascertain by comparing various sources, my grandfather was born around 1868. His parents, as you may have guessed, were Mlatangin and Korginau, both natives of Uelen and inhabitants of the yaranga in the center of the village. This yaranga survived to my own childhood. In the beginning of the 1950s, when my tribesmen were being moved into new wooden housing, it was pulled down, along with the other ancient shacks not fit to shelter a Soviet citizen of those enlightened times. The last time I saw my family yaranga, or rather its likeness, was in the municipal museum of No me, Alaska, during my first visit to the United States in 1978. The photographer had shot a panoramic view of Uelen, with our family home at the forefront of the composition. I made a copy of the photograph and it is now stored in my archives.

This was the yaranga where my grandfather was born in the early spring of 1868. His birth was attended with all the ceremony and ritual befitting one of whom great things are expected. It is always thus: whenever a new person is born, especially a boy, his parents invest in him all the aspirations and dreams they had for themselves but for one reason or another were unable to fulfill.

The newborn's umbilical cord was severed with a blade of obsidian, which had been brought over from Koryak lands many years before. This shard of smoky stone had served my family for many generations and was kept in a special, ancient pouch of wizened nerpa skin.

They carried the newborn boy out into the open air, where, oblivious to his squalling, his paternal grandfather, Tynemlen, rubbed him thoroughly with snow. Only then was the infant swaddled in the soft fawn skins made ready in advance, and then laid on his mother's breast. The baby did not seek for long, clamping his tiny hands and lips to the object of his search.

“He's got a tenacious grip,” Tynemlen mused thoughtfully as he gazed upon his grandson.

He was considering the new person's future, and it seemed sure to be different from Tynemlen's own life.

Alien things were overrunning the Chukchi lands, encroaching on a steady, measured way of life that had been the work of centuries. The Tangitans, who had once been called hairmouths, had flooded into the tundra and its outlying waters. They were carving up its sandpits, scrabbling for the precious metals they used to mint their money, and exterminating the whales in a frenzy of killing. Most alarming of all, they insinuated themselves into the natives' lives with their evil, joy-making water. Greedy for furs, walrus tusk, and whalebone, the Tangitans held out the promise of fleeting bliss and forgetfulness implicit in each gulp of the perfidious drink. If a man had no furs, tusk, or baleen to trade, he would go so far as to lend the Tangitans his wives and daughters.

Worrying about the future had become the mainstay of Tynemlen's agonized thoughts. How could these people save themselves from the pernicious influence of the Tangitans? The deer-herding Chukchi could take
themselves and their herds into the deep reaches of the tundra, but the shore-dwelling Ankalin had nowhere to escape. Beyond Uelen's shingled spit, the Arctic Ocean stretched for an eternity, unfathomable and endless. Perhaps, somewhere in the measureless distance, there were the islands that drew the migrating birds – but how could they reach them? And how could they leave their homeland, the resting place of their ancestors' bones? So then, they must all learn to live in this new world, these new times.

They needed a new kind of person. A person who would, by example, show the rest both a path into the future and the danger of blindly accepting all that the Tangitans brought. The difficulty lay in the fact that the people of Uelen tended to live by their own wits, each tending to his own concerns. No one was set above the rest. No one commanded or ruled.

Naturally there were the rules of communal life, unwritten and unspoken laws passed down mouth to mouth, from generation to generation. These were composed of plain, seemingly obvious truths. It was wrong to kill or humiliate a person. Another man's wife was off limits. Freedom meant a readiness to waive that freedom in order to help a neighbor. Property was considered sacred and thieves were banished from the village; a thief caught red-handed would in fact want to flee as fast as he could. No one thought of taking another's spear, hunting gear, clothes, dogs, or sled without permission. People did not visit on another unless they had a specific errand. You did not stick your nose in another's affairs unless you were asked.