The Eskimo Invasion (11 page)

 

 

"Here is the seal's liver." Edwardluk must have carried it under his parka.
"Eat. Do not be afraid. This person left a little blubber by the water for
the bear. Eat. Grandfather Bear will see how we helped this bear. Eat.
Soon this person will shoot a bigger seal. You eat. Around us there are
many wide cracks and soon another seal. Then this person also will eat."

 

 

From the distance rose a long-drawn howling roar like a giant, insane.

 

 

"My god! Was that the bear?"

 

 

"This person don't know. The bear, it was the bear. A little taste of blubber
wake up bear's stomach. Eh-eh," Edwardluk laughed nervously. "Bear want to
eat world."

 

 

"Give me my rifle."

 

 

"Eh-eh, he is only a bear." Edwardluk clicked the rifle's safety on or off;
there was no way for Dr. West's ears to tell which. Edwardluk's voice
diminished as he moved away. "Bear don't like man's smell. Once Peterluk's
rifle don't work. He said he lie still and bear sniff him and go away."

 

 

The snarling was the dogs.

 

 

"What are you doing?" Dr. West meant:
don't leave me alone.

 

 

"This person sees a seal far off. Dogs not fed enough to sleep only fight
each other. This person must shoot this other seal." Edwardluk added with
practicality: "Your smell will keep the bear away from eating the dogs.
Soon this person come back -- "

 

 

Dr. West groped on the sled for the harpoon shaft, clutching it.

 

 

"Best thing is sleep," Edwardluk's voice said, softer, but closer. Instead
of leaving, Edwardluk squatted down so close Dr. West could feel his radiated
warmth, hear his excited breathing.

 

 

"The important thing, will the whitemen like us?" Edwardluk blurted.
"We don't harm anybody. We helped you. We want to help everybody because
-- we know. You don't know what's happening, but we know. We sleep happy
all with the same dream because we are here, we are there, we know why."

 

 

Edwardluk's voice hoarsened with emotion, with joy, and his hand
gently closed on Dr. West's wrist. "We sleep happy because we know that
Grandfather Bear will come. He will come down when there are enough of
us and -- "

 

 

Dr. West had stiffened involuntarily, and Edwardluk stopped, as if
sensing rejection. Again, Dr. West knew what Edwardluk was thinking:
you don't like us. For over a month Dr. West had been bombarded by the
confusing love and mythology of these people.

 

 

If these strange Eskimos escaped from their cage, from their Sanctuary,
Dr. West wondered wryly, would they be scurrying door to door, knocking
and disturbing housewives with their joyfully apocalyptic message?

 

 

"He will come," Edwardluk's voice insisted, "when we have covered the world
for him." Edwardluk's grip tightened on Dr. West's wrist. "Our bodies
will reward him for our birth." Edwardluk's voice rose in confidence and
joy. "His great hunger is for us, for us. To this world and all worlds,
he comes."

 

 

Abruptly, Edwardluk released his grip, standing up. His footsteps
shuffled away over the ice. The dogs whined with hunger, with hope of
more seal meat.

 

 

Through the wind drifted loud then softer, grunting as if the bear were
circling. The wind hissed across the sled. Under the stiffening caribou
skins, Dr. West lay shivering and trying not to sleep or perhaps to sleep,
to escape.
Eskimos say dream life is real life, beginning while sleeping
cold, dreaming cold, awakening into sleep like a wolf inhaling the scents,
like a caribou hearing the most distant sounds, like a hand feeling --
Smoothly he dreamed Marthalik, warmly moving in love, and he were
gasping together. In his arms was Marthalik loving him, and he knew
she was more wonderful than any woman he had ever known. Relaxing,
awakening, she became cute and dimpled. Rising, she became determined
and efficient. Proudly she was nursing his son. Then she was flowing
back into his arms, and he dreamed they were moving together stronger
and stronger, rising again toward that distant sun. Coupled with her
he was dreaming toward the green planet he could never quite see. With
indescribable horror he saw the green planet was brown.
Writhing from smoothness, he was falling from the ape forest of his
ancestors. He was running, lost from Marthalik. In his dream he was
trying to run away from the grunting sounds of the polar bear. The
terrified whining of the dogs awakened him. He sat up blindly on the
anchored sled. The grunting sound was the bear approaching.
With his finger and thumb, Dr. West peeled one eyelid open and gasped
with pain, stabbed by the blinding white light. His eyes flooded with
tears. He couldn't see. Along the sled he groped for the two harpoons.
"Edwardluk!" he shouted, and the vast emptiness of sea ice swallowed
his voice and returned like a false echo the grunting of the bear.
His hand gripped the harpoon shaft, best weapon for a blindman? To his own
surprise he laughed. A bit shrilly, but he laughed. Turning his head to
follow the piglike noises of the bear, he extended the harpoon. "Come on,
you invisible spook! I'm a man, not a seal."
His pounding heart, his surging adrenalin, had given him back his warmth,
his liveness. He laughed with surprise that he was not afraid. He felt
beyond fear. Much closer than before, the bear growled.
The dogs yelped, violently thrashing the anchored sled, concealing any
moving sounds of the bear.
In this uncertain moment as Dr. West continued to awaken, he reevaluated.
These dogs are straining to escape. Escape is so simple!
With this
intelligent realization, his atavistic flow of courage froze. With the
frightened gasps of a civilized man, Dr. West dropped the harpoon and
unsheathed his short-bladed skinning knife.

 

 

Of course the dogs will run, he thought.
They'll drag the sled away,
carrying me.

 

 

The bear growled.

 

 

Tight-muscled with fright, Dr. West lurched along the straining sled,
fumbled back along the rail until his hand found the taut anchor strap.
His knife slashed.

 

 

The strap broke, the lunging dogs yanking the sled from under him.
He fell on his elbow on the ice, momentarily stunned by his stupidity,
as the clamor of the fleeing dog team faded into the distance.

 

 

So he couldn't escape, he thought, almost laughing with shock. Was he
predestined never to escape from the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary?

 

 

"Edwardluk!" Dr. West started to rise and was warned by a cavernous growl.

 

 

He remained in a crouching posture, turning his head in the direction
from which the sound had emerged. He was facing upwind, and an odor like
rotten meat became noticeable, but now he couldn't hear the bear. The bear
must be motionless, staring at him.

 

 

Gradually, Dr. West sank down on the ice, his knife hand under his shoulder
as he flattened out on the ice, his vulnerable stomach pressed against
the ice, his legs pressed together, his shoulders hunched protectively
about his neck. His chest pressed against the ice, his heart thudding
against the ice. He could hear the hiss-hiss of its breathing, the bear's
shuffling advance.

 

 

Dr. West made no new attempts to open his eyes. He tried to see backward
into the fortress of his bachelor apartment in Berkeley. In stunned
amusement he thought:
I can't die here with six months rent pre paid
there.
To the right of its fieldstone fireplace, behind the multi-colored
medical books on the top shelf, he could almost see his .44 caliber magnum
Ruger Blackhawk revolver, a heavy hog leg single-action revolver with
gleaming thick cylinder stuffed with six bullets looking fat as thumbs.
Almost as if it were reality, his hand closed around -- emptiness.

 

 

The bear snorted. Motionless on the ice, Dr. West suppressed his breathing.
He remembered Alaskan Eskimo hunters laughing how they had behaved in such
situations. Prostrate before their bears, they had lived to joke.
"Don't breathe," those wizened Alaskan Eskimos advised; "bear never kills
dead man."

 

 

This polar bear's stench engulfed him. Above him poised the hiss-hiss
of its breathing. There was a gurgling sound, the ravenous contractions
of its digestive system.

 

 

As forcibly as the blunt end of a baseball bat, the polar bear nosed his
thigh, trying to turn him over.

 

 

Desperately, he wanted to lunge away, but he sagged limply because the
bear's quick paw would smash him like a seal if he moved.

 

 

He wanted to leap away with a nightmare shriek as the bear's nose
clubbed his thigh, his hip, shoving to turn him over, to expose his
vital belly. Stiffening, resisting, Dr. West tried to hold his belly
pressed against the ice.

 

 

With an eager grunt and a series of hisses, the bear's nose burrowed
under him, pushing up his hip. He twisted and was clamped --

 

 

A shriek with an agonizing muscular spasm ballooned through his
consciousness. His thigh, the bear's crushing jaws. With the squawling
vitality of any animal being devoured alive, the former Dr. West writhed,
striking the knife blade across the hard muzzle of the polar bear.

 

 

With a startled woof, the bear's jaws opened. Dr. West's body rolled away
slashing the air and screaming defiance like a cornered animal. Backing
away, gasping, he hacked the air with the knife while the shuffling sounds
of the bear softened.

 

 

He became aware of the throbbing of his thigh. Gummed eyelids torn open,
he faced blindly into the whiteness and listened through his own harsh
breathing for the silent bear, and remembered who he was.

 

 

Dr. West's fingers explored the slippery twitching remnants of his thigh
muscle. Hard-jawed, he tourniqueted his belt around his thigh against the
groin, and gasped.

 

 

"Edwardluk," he gurgled. "Edwardluk, Edwardluk!" he yelled.

 

 

There was no Edwardluk. "Edwardluk! Edwardluk!"

 

 

His voice thickened. His head seemed to sail away, and he muttered and
twisted, resisting. If he fell into shock, he thought, in this cold he
would be dead.

 

 

Dead, dead, irretrievably dead. All gone. Finished. Nothing.

 

 

From hissing wind emerged a scraping sound approaching, as if something
were dragging the sled back to him.

 

 

"Dogs turn away," Edwardluk's voice wheezed, "from water too late. Sled
float. Curlytail drown. Loafer drown." All Edwardluk could talk about
was the dogs. "Hump drown." Edwardluk's strong hands were turning him
over on his back on the sled. "Wind Runner drown."

 

 

Darkness and warmth slid down over Dr. West's head and shoulders, and he
realized Edwardluk was giving him his outer parka.

 

 

"White Eye drown." Edwardluk was prodding his coldly numbing leg,
wrapping his leg in something jellylike within wet fur. "Fished out
drowned dogs. Cut up. Eh-eh," Edwardluk laughed feebly, "much good dog
meat for everyone. This person cut open Wild Runner for the bear."

 

 

With crunching sounds, Edwardluk began breaking apart the sled. Edwardluk
murmured he was rebuilding it into a man-sled. Gently, Edwardluk's hands
tied Dr. West on a sled so small his heels dragged.

 

 

Blind, Dr. West knew they were microscopic specks moving across the enormity
of sea ice, icebergs, shore ice and distant ice-scraped islands.

 

 

"Ha!" As if encouraging the drowned dogs to pull, shouting Edwardluk
strained at the harness, and the jolting hours moved Dr. West through
chills and sleep and fever, becoming days of blind agony without end.

 

 

Edwardluk's soft voice tried to soothe. "Eat-eat." He was pressing chewed
dog meat into Dr. West's mouth.

 

 

Edwardluk would shout: "Ha! Forward, dogs!" and Edwardluk's stubby legs
would tramp forward, endlessly dragging the man-sled with its raving
burden, Dr. West.

 

 

"The bear," Dr. West would gasp. "Got to warn them." The Canadian Parliament
became twelve pairs of eyes surrealistically floating in a jury box.
"Please believe me."
All our growing population pressure is forcing
nation against nation in amoebalike growing struggles of the population
masses of the world
, his thought writhed.
Believe me, these Eskimos
are multiplying so much faster. Like a Bomb!
-- "These people cannot
be Eskimos! What are they?"
In his delirium, Marthalik's face rose smiling. He clung to her body. The
droning of the airplane transformed snowflakes into parachutes drifting
down with swaying food packages. As absurdly as Pop Art, these were
decorated in red calligraphy: FAMILY ALLOWANCES, and swaying back and
forth, massive jaws crunching.
"Too many Eskimos."
For these happy people what does the bear symbolize?
"Don't feed the bear!" he shrieked.
The giggling Eskimo women slyly were stuffing the birth control pills
into their ears. Their bellies inflated. Scurrying children massed. The
Earth tipped. From the darkness of space opened the jaws. "The bear!" he
shrieked.
In more lucid moments, Dr. West clutched his swollen thigh and thought
what a good man Edwardluk was. Laughing, straining, uncomplaining,
that was the Eskimo image. Eskimos were cheerful people who fought no
wars. It was true. So true. Men of goodwill all over the world would
not let the Eskimos starve no matter how many Eskimos --
The headwind carried the smell of coal smoke, the barking of dogs.
Loud voices were threatening. The sled had stopped. A harsh voice wheezed:
"This bastard has a beard! He's a whiteman."
"At his eyes, look," the younger voice murmured on with an accent as
if he might have been one of the political refugees from West Germany
who'd flocked to Canada since 1984. "Such sore eyes -- "
"Lift the dirty smuggler." They were carrying him into darkness and dumped
him. "Don't let the Eskimo get away," the harsh voice wheezed. "Kerosene
eyedrops for snowblin -- "
"No, wait!" Dr. West gasped. "Leave my eyes alone. I'm a doctor. I must be
flown to a hospital with -- with Edwardluk."
"If you're a doctor, where's your kit?" the Guard's harsh voice challenged.
"You smuggling bastards won't even leave the world's best people alone.
Twenty years I've been waiting to catch you." His voice subsided in a
succession of wheezes as if he had chronic emphysema.
"In his pack are no trade items," the younger voice soothed, and Dr. West
felt the caribou skin being pulled off the lower part of his body.
"His leg -- " the young voice thickened in a retching sound, and Dr. West
became aware of the stench.
"Gangrene," the old Guard wheezed. "Hope the bastard dies."
Edwardluk, Edwardluk