The Chukchi Bible (22 page)

Mletkin felt the words pouring in from somewhere outside himself, and his body rang with the melody like a taut string. Joy and energy flowed into him like a rushing stream. An astonished thought beat inside his head: “This is it, this is inspiration from above!”

His song at an end, Mletkin pressed his palm against the girl's hot forehead and said, quietly but fimly:

“You will get well!”

He told Cheivyneh to lift the polog's fur-lined front curtain.

The necesssary herbs had to be hacked out of the all-but-frozen ground. He dug the most important item – yunev, the golden root, possessed of great healing powers – out from beneath the snow.

Mletkin brewed the remedy and, when the girl had drunk it all, told her:

“Now sleep.”

“I feel so good,” Givivneu smiled. “Just don't go far away from me.”

“I'll be right here,” Mletkin promised her.

In the evening Rentyrgin and his elder son, Rento, returned from the herds. Glancing sideways at the raised polog as he ate his evening meal, he asked his wife:

“How is she?”

“She's sleeping . . . It seems we have a shaman for our guest.”

Rentyrgin looked at Mletkin. He knew that the famed shaman of Uelen, Kalyantagrau, was the young man's grandfather.

“I've got a tambourine,” Rentyrgin told him.

“I managed without.” Mletkin smiled.

Having slept through the night, Givivneu awoke late in the morning of the day that followed and said she was hungry. But Mletkin allowed her only a bowl of thick deer-meat broth and a cup of tundra-root tea.

Wandering around the camp's environs, he came across a column of wooden poles staked into the ground and marching off over the hills to the southwest, deeper into the mainland.

He walked up to one, removed his mitten, and ran a hand down the stripped, smooth surface of the wood. The poles had clearly come from abroad and had been worked with a quality instrument, likely one made of metal. Mletkin couldn't begin to guess their purpose.

In the evening, Rentyrgin explained:

“It was the Tangitans who erected the poles. They were also supposed to string them together with metal ropes, but the work seems to have stopped for some reason. They were going to use the metal ropes to send talk between the main Russian camp where Tirkerym lives and the American big chief. And they also said, those Tangitans, that the earth is round like a ball . . .”

This was one of the major undertakings of the end of the nineteenth century, that pivotal century of technological progress. The telegraph line was to reach from Asia to Europe, crossing the enormous expanse of the Russian empire, the northeastern Arctic desert, and the Bering Strait, reaching the North American continent at Cape Prince of Wales. This plan was the brainchild of Perry Collins, an American commercial agent who traded in the Amur River basin in the far East. He had gathered massive financial investment from both sides of the globe and equipped a series of major expeditions. The Russian side of the project included George Kennan, a young American topographer and the uncle of a future U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, as well as the founder of the renowned Kennan Institute.

A great deal had been achieved in a short while, from both the Asian and the American sides. The base camp for the American builders of the telegraph line was in Port Clarence, Alaska, where American whaling vessels often wintered. Two seventy-meter metal masts were erected at Anadyr.

At the same time, another company was laying cable across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. This was a vicious race – and it was won by the cable men.

The work to raise a terrestrial telegraph line to America through northeast Asia came to a halt. Eventually, all that remained were scattered clumps of telegraph poles and the two metal masts.

 

Vague rumors of people roaming the tundra and erecting poles had reached Uelen, but Mletkin had paid them little attention and certainly never imagined he would come across evidence of the strangers' activities.

“The Tangitans bring many wonders to our land,” he remarked.

Far more curious was this casual mention of a round earth. Mletkin's puzzlement grew as he wondered how the lakes and the sea itself did not overflow their rims.

“I also don't think it is possible to talk to Tirkerym across such a distance. How loud a voice would you need! Even a wolf's growling dies out if you walk away far enough,” Rentyrgin said.

So as not to be a burden on his hosts, Mletkin volunteered to watch the herds alongside another of Rentyrgin's sons, a strapping boy named Rinto.

Each time he left the yaranga in bright, clear weather, Mletkin would stand for a while on the nearest hillock and watch the horizon intently, slowly turning so as to scan all around. One morning he had a revelation: in order to look around him, he had to draw a circle with his eyes, and this could only be possible if he were standing atop a giant ball. Otherwise, he would keep coming up against corners.

The deer were eating up the last of the moss and grass in their summering meadows, and the camp was making ready to move to its winter grounds on the shores of Lake Ioni, far beyond the Kytryn Strait, in the far reaches of the Chukchi Peninsula.

The girl was coming back to life before his very eyes.

One morning, on waking, Mletkin poked his head inside the chottagin to find Givivneu beside the burgeoning fire. She was not a woman yet, for sure, just a girl on the cusp of her teens, but she was already learning how to be a woman and knew it well. She smiled warmly at her savior and, each time, her eyes held so much tenderness and love that Mletkin's heart brimmed with warmth and a tenderness that echoed hers.

That morning, treading gingerly on the new ice, Mletkin walked across a little tundra lake which, even yesterday, he'd had to walk around.

Winter pastures differed from summer ones in that the deer would quickly trample the fields of deer moss, and had to be constantly on the move. Yet their migration routes were centuries old, and the herds with their accompanying humans made the same journey year to year – careful, however, to avoid the exact same pastures of the year before.

Before they set off, Rentyrgin performed the navigation ritual that would determine their path by placing the cleanly picked shoulder blade of a deer in the fire.

Immediately, the bone darkened and fractured into a network of tiny cracks.

The master of the camp fished it out of the fire with a little stick and left it to cool beside his feet. Meanwhile, the women were already stripping the
retem
, the deer-hide chamois used to cover the yaranga roof, from the tent poles and rolling up the polog, after beating it thoroughly with batons of deer horn in the snow.

“We'll head for the south bank of Lake Ioni,” Rentyrgin announced after a thorough examination of the cracks, and tossed the shoulder blade back into the fire.

Some of their belongings would be left in the summer camping place, but the greater part was carefully loaded onto a long caravan of freight sleds. Mletkin helped Rentyrgin's sons chase down the harness deer and get them into their straps, then took up a place in the middle of the caravan, driving a pair of the most docile, so-called women's deer.

“These are my deer,” Givivneu told him proudly, pointing out their branded ears. “When we marry, they'll belong to us both . . .”

Mletkin smiled and said:

“You've got to grow up first.”

“I'll grow fast from now on,” Givivneu promised.

Gradually, Mletkin became accustomed to the nomadic lifestyle. He lived in Rentyrgin's yaranga as though he were a full member of the family; no one ever asked him how long his visit was to last, how long he expected to stay with the camp. He tended the animals alongside the deer herders. Returning from a long sojourn in the cold, windy tundra, he'd enter the clean, snow-beaten, fur-lined polog, divest himself of clothes and stretch out atop the deer skins in the anticipation of dinner, blissfully naked but for a scrap of chamois between his legs. Before sleep came, while the last tongue of flame in the stone lamp still flickered, he'd listen to Rentyrgin's tales from history, noting that many of them – despite being well-known to him from his father and especially his grandfather Kalyantagrau – had some unfamiliar aspects in Rentyrgin's telling.

The onset of winter in the Chukchi tundra is rife with blizzards. This is a time when few dare to travel; so everyone was surprised to encounter a large caravan of deer sleds slowly moving up the hillock that housed the camp's yarangas.

There were four sleds in all, and one carried a Tangitan who sat swaddled
in furs, his wolverine-trimmed hood pulled forward over his head. He leaped nimbly from the sled and, unlike his tribesmen – who insisted on thrusting forward their bare hands on meeting – merely replied to the traditional Chukchi greeting of “
Yettyk
,” with:

“
Ee-ee, myt'yenmyk. Gymnin nynny Veyip
.”
¹⁸

Mletkin had never before heard his native speech trip off the lips of a Tangitan.

Once inside the yaranga, Veyip continued to behave like a genuine chauchu, using his hands to pick up meat from the wooden dish and then cutting it up with his own knife, handily smashing up deer leg bones in order to extract the sweet, tender marrow, and to top it all, comfortably conversing in the Chukchi tongue.

Noticing Mletkin's unabashed curiosity, he asked:

“So then, you've never seen a Tangitan who could speak the true language ?”

“This is the first time,” Mletkin confessed. “I'd come to think our tongue was totally inaccessible to the Tangitans.”

“Even a Tangitan can speak Luoravetlan, as you can see.” And Veyip smiled.

“How I'd love to learn to speak Russian!” This was Mletkin's old secret hope.

“But with whom will you speak Russian here in the tundra?” Veyip was skeptical.

“I'm not a tundra person,” said Mletkin. “I'm from Uelen.”

“So what are you doing here?” It was Veyip's turn to be curious. “Working off the price of a bride?”

“No, I haven't come here of my own free will, so to say,” Mletkin demurred.

“What brought you here, then?” Veyip persisted. His sharp, deeply set eyes had a penetrating quality. His demeanor, his whole being, gave off the impression that he was an inquisitive person. Mletkin realized that the man would not leave him alone until he had ferreted out the whole story.

“I've got to stay away from Uelen and my family for a while.”

“I hope you haven't committed a crime? Haven't killed anybody?”

Who knew how many in Uelen would starve to death this winter because of him? Then he would really be a murderer, though an unwilling one.

But he still answered:

“I haven't killed anyone.”

Veyip spent the entire evening by the fire, hunched over his notebook, marking the tracks of the words he'd heard onto the white paper with quick, jerky movements, like the tracks of a mouse on white snow. He was very interested in the names of the various components of a tundra sled, the ways of securing its smallest parts. He was keen to learn about every little detail, as though he were planning to build a sled from scratch. He already knew a great deal about Luoravetlan life and you had to talk to him as an equal, as an experienced chauchu.

The next day Veyip made an unexpected proposition: “One of my porter-guides has to go back home to the Kurupkan tundra. Would you like to come along with me? Until the spring thaw. There won't be many long treks, we'll be spending most of our time in deer-herding camps and coastal villages. I'm collecting Luoravetlan speech, their tales, legends, all manner of sayings. It's true I can't pay you much, but I won't stint you, either.”

The flash-fire of Mletkin's next thought made him tremble inwardly.

“You wouldn't have to pay me at all,” he said – slowly, careful not to drive off his luck. Who knew if the Tangitans were even willing to share this knowledge with those not of their own tribe? “What if you could teach me how to make out the tracks of speech on paper?”

Veyip was slow to answer. Perhaps the young Luoravetlan's request was something of a shock.

“It's not that simple,” he said at last. “Provided I could teach you anything at all, it would only be to read and write Russian. And to learn those things, you'd first have to learn Russian speech.”

“I'm willing!” Mletkin's answer had the ring of a challenge.

“You would need much hard work and patience,” Veyip went on dubiously. “Do you have what it takes?”

“I do!” came Mletkin's firm reply.