The Chukchi Bible (38 page)

Yanko began another attack. He aimed for Mletkin's naked breast, with the clear intent of finishing off his enemy once and for all. He managed to land a few sharp pricks under Mletkin's left nipple, and blood dripped onto the older man's torbasses.

Mletkin was in no hurry. He knew that he was capable of landing a deadly blow whenever he chose. Taking a step back, he said:

“You can still save your life, if you renounce Givivneu.”

“I never will. Givivneu is my wife and the mother of Kmol', my son,” Yanko grunted hoarsely as he lunged. In the same moment Mletkin's knife slid easily between his opponent's ribs, as it might have into a deer, and pierced the fluttering heart within. Yanko looked at Mletkin, his expression one of surprise more than anything else, and slowly sank to the ground. He
pitched forward onto his face, twitched several times, and then was still, his eyes wide open.

Mletkin withdrew his knife and wiped it thoroughly with a clump of bluish deer moss.

 

Givivneu awaited him in the yaranga. Her belongings lay beside her in a chamois sack.

“Are you ready?” Mletkin asked her.

“I've been ready for a long time,” she answered.

“Then let us go.”

The three of them walked out into the tundra and headed for the shore.

Mletkin spent the summer and fall of 1901 in ceaseless activity as he went about making his yaranga into a home again, fixing what was broken, acquiring what was missing. Everything seemed to be going well: despite her youthfulness and her chauchu background, Givivneu quickly grew accustomed to Ankalin ways, made friends among Uelen's women and accompanied them when they went to pick berries or collect roots or seaweed. Every now and then Mletkin would take his family to the other lagoon, where the land was overgrown with cloudberries, and where you could cast for fat, tender-fleshed loach.

Yes, everything seemed to be going well. Uelen was slowly recovering from the terrible plague. The people were not accustomed to visiting the graves of their relations, and if they did speak of their dead, it was in prayers and offerings to the gods. The hunting was also good. Mletkin's boat rarely returned without a kill and once he even managed to harpoon a small gray whale. The uverans gradually filled with
kymgyts
, frozen rolls of walrus meat, the barrels with blubber and pickled seaweed. Givivneu worked a new fur polog for the coming winter and insulated it with bundles of dried grass.

There was one thing that lay like a dark shadow on Mletkin's happiness:
the killing of Kmol”s father, the Kurupkan man Yanko. He knew that his guilty feelings toward the boy would not easily be assuaged, and resolved to care for him with special tenderness. He gave the child a puppy from Lilikey's litter, made him toys, spent evenings in playing and talking to him. Yet, each night as he drifted off to sleep, Mletkin saw Yanko's startled, wide-open eyes as he fell onto the deep moss.

Meanwhile, the villagers' daily lives had come to include all manner of new things and devices, new kinds of weapons and clothing, new delicacies like sweetened tea, molasses, griddle cakes called
kavkapat
, made with white flour and fried in nerpa blubber. It was rare for Uelen's lagoon to be empty; there was usually at least one ship anchored near shore. The sailors traded briskly, mostly offering contraband spirits, and seduced maidens and young wives. Some of the villagers, especially those belonging to the poorer families of the lazy and the unlucky, made their living by procuring women for the sailors in exchange for drink and merchandise, and a few of Mletkin's compatriots did very well off this kind of trade. Chotgytky, father of four daughters, roofed his ill-made yaranga with canvas and gadded about the village showing off his captain's peaked cap, a black pipe with an amber bowl clenched between his teeth. He was drunk all summer long and boasted that soon he would be the owner of a real schooner.

Tynesken's family did not boast or trade in women, but nonetheless managed to acquire a wooden whaleboat. This did not come cheap. Whalebone was still in demand, but more and more frequently the Tangitans asked after the yellow money-metal, gold. Prospectors had streamed in from Alaska, pumping the locals for any information about gold veins among the shingled coastline beaches and the shallows of tundra rivers. They were eager to share the (allegedly Chukchi) ancient legend of the Golden Giant who had lived in
these parts, and who, in dying, had fallen into Irvytgyr, which the Tangitans called the Bering Strait – in such a way that while his feet landed on Alaska, his head and body dispersed over the Chukotka Peninsula. Though the story was most probably made up by some unlucky prospector, it did echo the authentic tale of an epochal flood which had destroyed forever the land bridge over Irvytgyr.

Mletkin visited the family shrine atop the high Crag, beyond the place called Eppyn, where the Watcher would have scanned the sea during whale and walrus hunting season.

There was a small niche just below the lip of the crag, which held a shallow stone cup, not unlike a grease lamp. You would only see it if you were looking carefully. From this spot you could see the entire watery expanse from the Eastern Cape to Inchoun Cape in the west. You might see the blowhole jets of whales, walrus, and seals. Flocks of birds hung low over the still waters, heading south – winter beckoned, touching the traverse of Cape Enurmin with the first of the ice fields.

A raven perched nearby cawed loudly.

Even as he walked up the Crag, Mletkin found himself assailed by self-doubt: in all his travels, might he not have lost the ability to feel that he was an inextricable part of all this space and matter, the ability to sense it, and above all to hear with his inner ear the magical music and the Voice from Above, when words fall into ringing lines, and resolve into Holy Songs:

Mletkin's vision blurred with emotional, exultant tears as he was overcome by oneness with nature, the mysterious power which allowed him to range across vast tracts of his homeland in his mind's eye entered him once more.

The walrus breeding ground at Inchoun teemed that fall and by another stroke of luck, the autumnal storms had flung an enormous shoal of
saika
, a small but nicely fatty fish, up and down Uelen's shingled beach. The shining rows of the sea's bountiful gift stretched out like a silvery ribbon from the foot of the Crag to Pil'khyn Bay itself. They scooped the fish up with buckets, hide sacks, whatever was at hand.

Each morning, before dawn, Mletkin would go to the beach in the hopes of finding a good washed-up log, or a piece of calcified, blackened walrus tusk for carving. Occasionally what he found instead were headless walrus corpses – the Americans tossed these overboard, having killed the animals purely for their tusks, teeth, and whiskers, the last of these used to make toothpicks for fine restaurants. The waterlogged, rotting remains were not fit for human consumption, so Mletkin had hauled several skinned carcasses into the tundra, to teach his winter prey to come and feed at the sites of his traps.

He managed to put together a small team of sled dogs. Lilikey's puppies were growing fast, too. Little Kmol' received a sumptuous sled of his own, with runners carved from split walrus tusks. Givivneu had painted the polished bone surfaces with scenes from the legend of Pichvuchin, the
benevolent fairy-tale giant. To everyone's surprise, she turned out to be a talented artist. She colored the cartoons with ochre and a suspension of soot and grease, the play of light and shadow becoming vivid, three-dimensional.

When the shipping season was nearing its end and the Tangitan ships had left the shores of Chukotka, drunkenness in Uelen lessened considerably. Yet from time to time a drunken man would be seen crawling from a yaranga on unsteady legs and making his way falteringly through the village.

A few people learned to make an alcoholic brew from flour and sugar. Ope erected a homemade distillation device inside his yaranga, covered with old, tattered deer hides. Underneath, a stone brazier always glowed with a steady heat. The thick, beveled barrel of a Winchester rifle protruded from the clump of rags atop the contraption, while its owner perched by the gun's foresight, licking his lips in anticipation as the transparent liquid slowly dripped into the mug he held in his outstretched hand.

“If you have enough patience, you can make very strong
ekimyl
,” said Ope. For proof, he dipped his index finger in the mug and reached out toward the fire. A blue flame danced toward him. He wiped his finger and explained:

“If you had enough flour and sugar you could make as much of that evil, joy-making water as you pleased. Want to try?”

“I don't drink.”

“After so many years in the lands of the Tangitans, you might have learned,” Ope mused.

But Mletkin had not, indeed, learned to like the evil, joy-making drink, a fact that aroused not only the curiosity of his tribesmen, but the suspicion
of the Tangitans, who saw his disinclination to drink as sinister and deliberate.

The Tapkaralin had made out the best from the recent flush of commerce. They were lucky in whale hunting, and their bone carvers quick in gearing up the manufacture of handmade artifacts which the hairmouths were keen to buy: pipes and pipe bowls, hairpins, napkin rings, inkstands, pens and letter openers in ornately painted bone sheaths, powder-puff cases, and even miniature models of sailboats. A medium-sized model of a ship could fetch a Winchester. Gal'mo's wife was the first in the village to own a sewing machine and made cloth kamleikas to sell – white for men and patterned calico for women. Tynesken bargained with Swenson for a schooner with an outboard motor, and even approached Mletkin to captain it, given his experience on American whaleboats. But Mletkin intended to purchase a wooden whaleboat of his own.

John Carpenter paid special respects to Uelen's shaman and, each time he visited from Keniskun, would stop and visit with Mletkin, always bringing gifts for Givivneu and little Kmol'. He must have missed being able to speak his own tongue, and drew Mletkin into long conversations, usually on religious topics. From time to time he even mentioned converting to the shaman's faith.

“You can't just leave one faith for another,” Mletkin cautioned him, “like leaving a yaranga for a wooden house. When a man changes his faith he becomes another man. When the old faith departs the world, so does the old man who once belonged to it.”

Carpenter seemed keen to glean Chukchi ideas about the makeup of the universe and the meaning of life. But as Mletkin later realized, what he was
really after was to recruit Mletkin as a sales agent, and eventually open a branch of his trading concern in Uelen. As a permanent trading post, Keniskun was far from ideal: only five yarangas year-round, and poor ones at that. It had been chosen as a base simply because, in the face of ceaseless northerly winds, Keniskun Bay was a haven of calm waters. Beside the general store itself they had built two voluminous storage sheds of corrugated iron.

Mletkin tactfully declined the offer.

“I wouldn't make a good merchant,” he told Carpenter. “I'm a shaman, and shamans don't live by trade. Even your Bible talks about Jesus Christ driving the merchants from the temple.”

Mletkin foretold the weather, performed the rituals associated with important occasions, made sacrifices, spoke incantations, buried the dead and healed the sick, making full use of the knowledge he had picked up working in the hospitals in Nome and in San Francisco, stitched up wounds, and consoled the grieving. He also acted as the chief officiant of the Whale Festival, when they managed to harpoon a lygireu – a true Greenland whale – and tow it to Uelen's beach. He used his barometer to help forecast the weather and extracted teeth with a pair of shiny forceps.

That fall, the seas took a long time to grow calm. No sooner did a ribbon of encroaching ice appear on the horizon than a southerly wind would drive all signs of winter from sight with swathes of heavy, slanting rain. Then a northerly wind would blow, monstrous waves crashing onto the shingled beach and threatening to wash the nearest yarangas into the sea. The barometer needle spun wildly across the instrument's face and Mletkin's own body thrummed with the atmospheric changes.

He would make his way up to the sacred place, sacrifice to the gods who
made weather, chant incantations. Finally, raging nature stilled in anticipation of the first frosts.

Now Rentyrgin and his fellow deer people drove their reindeer herds to the opposite side of Uelen's lagoon and began the autumn market. The chauchu had come to trade their deer carcasses, kamusses, hides, and sinews for Tangitan-made items, but more often for walrus, nerpa, and lakhtak skins, blubber and whalebone for sled runners. Carpenter too appeared, with his own goods to trade. He was after soft fawn skins and ready-made fur clothing, highly prized on the American side of the Bering Strait.