The Chukchi Bible (24 page)

Kalyantagrau lay in the polog, but his head, with a much-depleted mane of hair, was poking through the curtain into the chottagin. Like Mletkin's father and other grandfather, he did not express any particular emotions at his grandson's return. Yet his voice was thick with joy.

“I'm so glad you've come back,” the old man croaked. “Just in time. My life is ending. Now I can go beyond the clouds in peace. And you are going to help me.”

Kalyantagrau did not wish to die the traditional way, by being strangled with a hide thong. He said he'd rather Mletkin killed him with a spear.

When a person who is voluntarily leaving life is strangled, those who perform the ritual do not see him or her; they pull the straps wrapped around the dying person's neck from the outside, opposite ends of the yaranga. This gave the ritual killing a certain anonymity, and was considered the traditional way. Dying by the spear was a different story. He whose blood had been spilled could count on a place in the Constellation of Sadness in the celestial regions of the Polar Star.

Preparation for this sad ritual took two days. Mletkin was consciously dragging his feet, vainly hoping that the old shaman would change his mind and decide to live a bit more, and then see what happened . . . But Kalyantagrau, once decided, always saw things through to the end. He did not hurry his grandson but asked what had been done each time he saw the young man.

Mletkin spent this time trying to escape his terrible thoughts, striving to lose himself in the repetitive, mechanical process of sharpening the spear. All the while, he muttered verses that came of their own strange accord:

Early in the morning, before the sun had had a chance to soften the nighttime crust of ice over the snow, Mletkin entered his grandfather's yaranga. He carried a sheathed spear.

Kalyantagrau was sitting upright at the far end of the fur-lined polog, whose front wall was raised high and propped up with a pole. The yaranga's other inhabitants had left the night before, leaving the shaman in solitude. The stone lamps were cold, but even in the gloom the old man, dressed in white funerary garments, was clearly visible. He appeared to be asleep. Without opening his eyes he asked:

“Is that you, Mletkin?”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“Are you ready?”

“I am ready.”

“Unsheath the spear.”

The old man's voice was firm and clear, nothing at all like the voice of a dying man. Mletkin even thought fleetingly about trying to talk his grandfather out of it once more, but immediately knew it would be a waste of time.

Kalyantagrau raised the hem of his white kamleika, baring a thin torso covered in skin as dark as a walrus's. His ribs were clearly visible. With his right hand Mletkin's grandfather touched the left side of his chest and spread his index and middle fingers, showing the young man where the spearhead ought to be aimed.

Mletkin, marshaling all his strength of purpose and will, prayed to all the gods he knew for his hand to hold steady, for the strength to reach all the way to the heart that was even now counting its final beats. The hand that held the spear shaft was suddenly slick with sweat; perspiration rolled down into his eyes. He pressed his entire strength forward into the spear, driving it deep. He heard the metal point pierce the skin with a soft, muffled sound, tearing into the flesh. He thought he could feel the old man's heart flutter and dart about before it gave its last beat. Kalyantagrau swayed back and toppled onto his left side.

With a powerful movement Mletkin jerked the spear from the old man's body and closed the wound with a specially prepared bit of fawn skin. As he lowered the white fur kukhlianka over the lifeless body, he noted the absence of blood with a strange sense of satisfaction.

Kalyantagrau was buried the following morning with all the attendant ceremonies. Placing one end of the divining stick under the dead man's head, Mletkin ascertained his final wishes. The dead man held no grudge against anyone, willing his hunting gear to his son and his shaman's tambourine to his grandson Mletkin.

The body was carried to the Hill of Hearts' Peace on a light sled. Before they went back into the yaranga, the bearers shook themselves off over a small fire at its entrance, so as not to bring in any contagion, and ate a bit of dried deer meat – a bitter funeral feast.

Swallowing his portion with difficulty, Grandfather Tynemlen turned to Mletkin and said, slowly and clearly:

“And so you've become the chief shaman of Uelen.”

The season of marine storms was upon them. The waves beat against the walls of yarangas built on the seaward side of the shingled spit. In the lowland immediately before the face of the crag the seawater was already spilling into the lagoon, forming a new strait. Tynemlen had started to think about relocating to the eastern end of the lagoon and weathering the season there. He conferred with his grandson. Mletkin's advice was confident:

“Not worth it. The ice is very near now, it will tame the sea.”

That morning brought a white stripe at the horizon beyond the Inchoun promontory. The seawater grew sluggish, as though thickened with frost, and the waves abated. By the end of the day the drift ice had pushed all the way up to Uelen's beach. The shingle along the shoreline froze under a slippery crust and became impossible to traverse.

There were no outward changes to Mletkin's life. Only, perhaps, that he came to prefer solitude and noted a clear change in his aging grandfather's opinion of him.

Tynemlen had been astonished by the calm, unshakeable confidence with which Mletkin had spoken about, and even accurately predicted, the
imminent arrival of the first ice. The ability to foresee the movements of weather was seen as perhaps a shaman's most important skill, because the invisible, barely perceptible shifts in the quality of the air, the changes in the winds, in the patterns and density of clouds were accessible only to a man who possessed uniquely sharp senses. Tynemlen remembered how the late Kalyantagrau had confided to him, his friend and relative, that for him this was the most difficult thing. “Healing a person isn't so complicated,” the old shaman had said frankly, “especially if the person is young and strong. But telling the weather . . . There aren't many shamans in our parts who can do that with certainty.”

And Mletkin had not even had to think about it, had not wavered in his opinion. It was as though he had simply known all along. His grandfather spent a few days uneasily deliberating whether to ask him about it or keep quiet and just accept it. Finally he made up his mind to ask.

The question did not surprise Mletkin. The shadow of a smile flitted across his face and he answered plainly:

“I knew it would happen.”

He himself had noticed this newfound ability to foresee events. No, he no longer heard mysterious voices or saw celestial visions and signs. The only vision graven in his memory was that of the Face that had momentarily appeared to him in the sky over the Tehyuve'em stream valley, when, weak from hunger and grief, Mletkin had awakened from his delirium. He had had no more visions. Yet more and more, he sensed a burgeoning acuteness of hearing and sight, as though his entire body were becoming an exposed nerve primed to respond to the minutest changes in nature. Acknowledged by all as the shaman of Uelen, he was approached by the sick and infirm, many of whom he healed, some with plain advice, others with medicinal
brews of tundra plants, still others with shamanic intervention. But Mletkin used this last rarely. When the sick person could not walk unaided, his relations would carry him, or Mletkin himself would visit the stricken yaranga. He brought nothing with him aside from his tambourine, and did not wear the ritual garments that had passed to him from Kalyantagrau. He disliked putting on the ancient robes, which reeked of old grease, and made an exception only for the most ceremonial of the public sacrifices, during the springtime feast day of Lowering the Boats, the Autumn Kilvey, and the Day of the Whale. Sometimes people died despite all his efforts. Mletkin could feel it when the person was doomed from the start; in such cases he was honest with the sick person and his or her relatives about their sad fate, his only advice to accept death courageously and to send the dead one into the next life with dignity. For himself, he was certain of the existence of another life into which the dead must pass. There they would forever remain the age at which they left this life: children as children, old people as old people . . . He believed that dreams offered the best proof of an afterlife, for it was in dreams that the dead came to commune with the living – and no one, upon waking, considered this out of the ordinary.

In all else his life resembled that of any other young man of Uelen. He went hunting out on the sea and set tundra traps for pelts, which grew ever more valuable to the Tangitan merchants who came in their ships.

That fall the sea ice was unpredictable: the solid sheets might fasten to the shore only to be blown back out to sea by a sudden southerly wind. Instead of snow, the low clouds disgorged rain that soaked the ice-encrusted shingled beach. Mletkin hunted nerpa out on the fast ice at the risk of being blown out to sea.

One day two hunters were torn away from shore together with the sheet
of ice they were hunting on. They had tried to reach the shore using their akyns as hooks, but in vain. The expanse of water between their ice floe and the shore grew ever wider, erasing all hope of rescue. According to ancient custom, those who found themselves in such straits could not count on any help. If they did not drown they might become changelings – tery'ky. As such, the fur-covered creatures would not be considered human and were to be exterminated. Yet suddenly, the onlookers sighted Mletkin, running for the beach with his lightweight skin boat. Once afloat, the young shaman paddled furiously toward the outgoing ice floe, picked up the two hunters, who, doomed, had already said their goodbyes to life, and ferried them back to the fast ice still clamped to the shoreline. Those who witnessed this unprecedented breaking of an ancient rule stood frozen in their tracks. Yet there was no immediate punishment from the marine spirits, the
k'ele
. The hunters returned to their families and no trouble followed.

Deep inside, Mletkin knew that he had done the right thing, and did not ascribe the event any deep meaning. It was only later that he recalled Goigoi, one of his own ancestors, who had been blown out to sea, who had turned into a tery'ky and was killed by his brothers. And yet neither Opeh nor Kymyt had turned into a changeling.

When the weather kept him indoors, Mletkin would sit inside the chottagin under the light that fell from the smokehole, carving animal figurines from walrus tusk, or else reading the Bible, trying to make sense of the divine utterances of the Tangitans' God.

Tynemlen, peering out from inside the fur-lined polog, would look at his grandson and feel strangely anxious. Sometimes he was overcome by regret that his grandson was so obviously a man apart, a man who had been marked by the higher powers and made a stranger among his own people. Perhaps
it would have been better if he had been just the same as the other young men of the village, most of whom had already started families and treated their parents to grandchildren. There were times Tynemlen was conscious of his grandson's superiority, as if Mletkin were the elder.

Both parents attempted to interest Mletkin in young women. When the snows came and the sled path to Nuvuken, along the fast ice under the crags, was stable enough, Tynemlen fetched their distant relation Anku, daughter of the bear hunter Sikayuk. The cheerful, chatty, handsome young woman bedded down next to Mletkin for the night.

As soon as the last tongue of flame flickered and died atop the stone lamp, Mletkin pressed closer to the young woman and laid a hand on her feverishly hot thigh. Exhaling deeply, Anku was about to turn around and face him, but Mletkin made her stay in the same position, with her back to him, and quietly took her from behind, well aware that his parents, pretend as they might to be asleep, were keenly listening to every move inside the fur-lined polog. It was only after she'd felt the surprisingly cool, thick seed flow into her that Anku turned her face to Mletkin and pressed the full length of her young, warm body against his.

And then Mletkin suddenly remembered a young girl from a deer-herding camp, her fragile child's body, a pair of eyes as black as deer spoor, and a smile like pale winter dawn. Bitterness and longing rose up in him and did not leave him all night. He had not wanted to offend his Nuvuken guest, but she perceived the young shaman's sudden change of mood and turned away from him.