The Chukchi Bible (39 page)

Mletkin's yaranga was redolent with the scents of reindeer meat and uncured hides. After a plentiful supper, they would spend the evenings stretched out by a smoldering fire, stripping the meat off boiled deer legs to get to the pink marrow inside. Old Rentyrgin, his father-in-law, mellowed from a mug of fire-water he'd traded from Ope, would launch into a disquisition on this new life of the Luoravetlan.

“All these new things have appeared, and our people have changed. What will become of our grandchildren?”

Mletkin strummed old Negro spirituals on his banjo. The old man listened for a time, then went on:

“What songs will they be singing?”

The old man had good reason to be concerned: he was reputed to be the foremost poet, maker of songs and dances, on the peninsula. At the end of summer, when marine hunting was suspended for a short while, Uelen hosted celebrations of song and dance, which were often attended by guests from as far as the American side of Irvytgyr. These festivals were a showcase of newly created works. No prizes were awarded, but audience appreciation
could be measured by how quickly the new songs and dances became integrated into daily life and known in every yaranga. The people of Uelen tended to prefer Rentyrgin's songs and dances above others.

That autumn Rentyrgin was especially generous. In Uelen, a close kinship with the deer-herding chauchu was considered very prestigious. It promised plenty of reindeer hides, kamusses, and sinews, and boded well for Mletkin's family's supply of winter clothes.

Givivneu was a skilled seamstress, and the clothing she made for her husband was neatly and handily made. Her dream was to own a sewing machine. Carpenter promised to bring one when the next season's freight ships came in.

Mletkin spent time with Kmol' and rejoiced to see the boy growing up strong and hale.

In the quiet winter days Mletkin would usually rise just as the dawn alighted over Irvytgyr. While Givivneu heated up his morning tea and set out a meagre breakfast (it was considered bad form to go hunting on a full stomach, or take any food along), Mletkin would check his barometer, poke his head outside to scan the horizon and note the direction of the wind, then begin to put on his hunting gear.

As he left for the day he would see lights dance into life all over the village, as the other men got ready for a day of winter hunting.

 

Mletkin walked down the beach to the sea and turned in the direction of the Senlun crag, still black against a paling sky. Dawn had broken and half the sky was afire with crimson light, a vivid reminder of the heroic little snow bunting who had broken through the shell of the sky with her beak, to bring sunlight to the people of the earth.

Clean, bracing air poured into his lungs, and Mletkin coughed involuntarily. He loved these morning hours. They gave him space for uninterrupted thought.

While the people of Chukotka came into contact mainly with the Americans, or even the narrow-eyed, fragile Chinese and Japanese, bought Amercian-made goods, and learned English, Chukotka was officially part of the Russian Empire – whose chieftain was not a president, like that of the Americans, but Tirkerym, the Sun Sovereign.

On occasion Uelen had been visited by the tsar's representative, whose permanent station was at Mariinsky Post, by the mouth of the great Chukotka river, V'yen. Though the people of Uelen listened to the man's speeches as if they were fairy tales, there were things in them with which Mletkin was inclined to agree. Especially with the Russian government's efforts to curtail the importation of fire-water to Chukotka.

At the face of the Senlun crag, Mletkin swerved sharply to the left and, donning his snow skis, set his course toward the sea, leaving behind the darkly rearing mass of Imeklin and Inetlin Islands. He came across several meltwater holes, or
polynyas
, but he was looking for a particular kind – one that could be used by nerpa surfacing for a gulp of air. He knew he would sense the right place with a kind of innate, inexplicable instinct, and he was grateful to the Outer Forces and those Spirits that governed the animal world. The main thing about hunting nerpa was to prepare a hide as camouflage, so that the animal would not see the hunter on the ice. Mletkin located a flat, upright plug of ice, hacked it down and positioned it as a hiding place. He had just made it in time to meet the start of the short bright stretch of winter daylight. Now all he had to do was lie patiently in wait.

As always, the nerpa appeared soundlessly and without warning. Her
smooth round head shone like a coquette's slicked-back hairdo, as did a pair of enormous, bulging black eyes. Mletkin took aim. The icy oceanic silence was rent by a gunshot, the melthole roiled with bright fresh blood, and Mletkin's akyn flew through the air. A moment later the nerpa lay on the ice at the hunter's feet. It was still warm, though her large black eyes had already filmed with the mist of death.

Mletkin bagged only the one nerpa that day, but it was by evening light that he made his way back home, a fiery sunset blazing over Inchoun Cape, and bright winter stars in the sky. It looked like the gods would be igniting the Northern Lights that very night; Mletkin's heart was sure of many of these multihued celestial fires on the approach, and then nature's usual way of settling into a long, quiet frost.

Mletkin took a shortcut by the Crag. He could see Uelen's lights from afar, as on such evenings, stone bowls with blubber-soaked, burning moss would be put out to guide the hunters home. The little dancing flames could be seen from a great distance and helped the hunters set a true course.

Givivneu, who could always unerringly sense his approach, met him just outside the yaranga with a ladle full of fresh water, the requisite ice chip floating inside it, to give her husband's kill the ritual “drink.” Only when she had finished did Givivneu inform him that they had guests from Nuvuken. After a momentary silence she added, “They have trouble.”

Mletkin had felt anxious as he approached. Now he strode into the chottagin, where he saw a huddle of his distant relations by a low table laden with mugs of tea.

Akosek rose to greet him. Simply, he said:

“It's our Galgayein.”

“What's happened to him?”

“His leg is black. He had frostbite on his heel. We thought it would take care of itself with time, but the black flesh crawled up his leg . . . The boy is suffering, he's begun to black out.”

Galgayein, a young man of fourteen, lay inside the polog with his eyes closed, moaning softly.

Mletkin drew aside the fawn-skin wrappings around his legs to reveal the blackened limb beneath. It had become one massive swelling that looked like a charred log. The foot was completely dead, its toenails fallen off. The young man was unconscious, and mumbled in his fevered dreams.

“How could you let it get this bad?” Mletkin reproached them. “If the boy is to be saved, he'll have to lose his leg up to the knee.”

“Take the whole leg off,” said Akosek, “just as long as he lives. The most important thing is his hands!”

“Legs are important, too,” said Mletkin, and sent for as much fire-water as Ope could furnish.

Then he ordered that they borrow three more braziers from the neighbors. He took out his surgical instruments and submerged them in the big kettle that hung over the blubber lamp. He told Givivneu to be sure the water boiled. He might have used the ancient remedy of puppy blood as an antiseptic, but fire-water would be better still, if Ope hadn't drunk most of it already.

“He'd raised it to his mouth already,” said Akosek, handing Mletkin a full mug of fire-water. “I barely managed to wrestle it away from him.”

There was nowhere near enough light to see by, and the patient's curious kinsmen had clustered around him, eager to see what exactly Uelen's shaman was going to do. Mletkin ordered everyone outside, saving Akosek and his brother, who would need to hold the boy down, and Givivneu. He levered
the patient's clenched teeth open with a metal spoon and poured the greater part of the fire-water down his throat. After a pause to make sure the drink had reached its destination, Mletkin applied a tourniquet of hide thongs above the boy's knee, took up his sterilized surgical instruments, and set to work. He knew well that the key challenge was not to let the patient wake and to prevent the loss of too much blood. So he sent to Ope for another portion of fire-water.

After examining the leg once more, Mletkin decided to cut it off at the knee, rather than saw through living bone. Leaving enough skin to wrap around the stump, he cut through the tendons and blood vessels. Like a seasoned nurse in an operating room, Givivneu swabbed the blood with wads of long-haired deer hide, filling a large metal basin with the bloody clumps.

Just as Mletkin was setting the severed leg aside, Galgayein suddenly wrenched himself up and gave a heart-stopping scream.

“Pour the fire-water down his throat!” Mletkin ordered.

Choking and sputtering, the young man swallowed down the moonshine, screaming and shaking to fight free.

“Be silent and wait!” Mletkin shouted at the top of his voice. With his own innate power of bending another to his will, he managed to make Galgayein subside back into his swoon. Now Mletkin had a grip on his patient's mental state and could order him to sleep and feel no pain. He had done this to himself often, in the times he was being tested by Kalyantagrau. No one could have guessed that the burn marks on his hands, the many welts on his body, were reminders of agonies borne and pain suppressed by sheer force of will. He had learned to control and overcome pain. Now he was channeling that ability to the young man, who would live forever more without one of his legs. As he stitched up the stump with reindeer
sinews, Mletkin gazed on the boy's fine-featured, glowing face and long lashes sparkling with tears, and he wished for a son just like him. Kmol' was still very small, uncomprehending, and it would take much time before the shape of the man-to-be could be seen in the child. For now he was still a child, still only a little boy.

The name Galgayein meant “bird legs.” The Nuvuken Eskimos often gave their children Chukchi names to confuse and drive away malevolent spirits.

Galgayein opened his eyes and met Mletkin's gaze.

“I've cut off your leg,” the shaman told him. “If I hadn't, in a few days' time you'd have been dead.”

Now the tears that had nestled in the young man's eyelashes rolled freely down his cheek. Struggling to stifle a sob, he said:

“How am I to hunt now?”

“In America, I saw a young man walking faster on crutches than a man with two legs,” Mletkin said encouragingly.

There was of course the danger that the black blood might come back for another attack. Yet Mletkin felt certain that he had done exactly what was needed, and all that was left was for the young man to wait patiently for his wound, stitched up with reindeer tendons, to heal.

Three days later, Akosek and his kin laid their son out on their sled and went home to Nuvuken. Tales of the Uelen shaman Mletkin's miraculous ability to simply cut off broken body parts and throw them away spread across the Chukchi peninsula and into the farthest reaches of the tundra faster than the fleetest sled dogs or riding deer.

Walrus hunting was on again in the spring and Mletkin took his skin boat to Nuvuken, where there was no ice shelf clamped to the beach and walrus
were easier to kill and haul in from the moving ice floes offshore. There he met Galgayein once more. The young man dashed about on his crutches, heedless of his infirmity, and held the place of harpoon-man, with all the honor and responsibility that entailed, at the prow of a hunting boat. Later on, Galgayein became famous as a skilled bone carver; serious collectors considered it a great piece of luck to own one of his pieces – animal figurines, tableaux of the hunt, walrus tusks painted with scenes from ancient legends and magical tales.

Life, meanwhile, went on. Tynesken bought his schooner and berthed it in the lagoon for the winter, Mletkin purchased a wooden whaleboat of his own and dreamed of getting a gasoline motor for it.

He often thought of his years in America. He liked to strum his banjo in the evening, murmuring songs he'd heard from his friend Nelson, or he'd wind up the Victrola and point its mouth outside, to the great delight of Uelen's small fry.

But he still had no children of his own.

In the summer of 1910, Givivneu gave birth to a son. Mletkin was away, at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, where he was charged with accompanying an unusual cargo – a school – back to Uelen. The building had been delivered to Kamchatka by steamship the previous year, but ice conditions prevented the ship from reaching Uelen; the school was disassembled into carefully numbered logs and joints, packed up, and offloaded in Avacha Bay until the next navigable season.