The Eskimo Invasion (3 page)

 

 

Dr. West noticed no kayaks or umiaks, and he suspected boatbuilding was one
part of traditional Eskimo culture Hans Suxbey had not encouraged them
to re-create.

 

 

As Dr. West walked across the thawing gravel shore, up in the camp dogs
yelped. The Eskimo behind the largest tent was whipping his dogs. Yelping,
they dragged the loaded sled across the slope in front of the cliffs,
surging north along the ice foot, that dangerous ledge of ice clinging
to the foot of the cliffs. One shapeless Eskimo lay on the sled. As the
man ran alongside, Dr. West saw the long glint of metal in his hand. And
Dr. West smiled, imagining Hans Suxbey's outrage because this departing
Eskimo was carrying a rifle.

 

 

In the camp, Dr. West realized the actual number of sagging caribou
skin tents was only about fifteen. At five Eskimos per family, that
would be seventy-five Eskimos. But so many children were running back
and forth, there seemed more like 175, he thought, smiling down at the
brash little boy who kept grabbing at the stock of his rifle and being
dragged along. The boy stopped. Smiling, he looked back at the sky.

 

 

A distant whining sound in Dr. West's ears grew to a screech as the F-111B
appeared from the west. With its swing-wings spread, the obsolete fighter
flew relatively slowly over the sea ice from Franklin Strait on over
the Boothia Peninsula, heading east. Presumably it was returning to
the main Cultural Sanctuary Guard Station on the east coast of the
peninsula. Dr. West was not pleased to see the jet fighter returning
from the direction in which his English pilot's Turbo-Beaver had gone.

 

 

"Whiteman's skua bird," Edwardluk remarked, evidently unimpressed as he
stared after the vanishing jet fighter.

 

 

This comparison further disturbed Dr. West. "Why do you call it a skua bird?"

 

 

"Chases other whitemen's birds," Edwardluk answered as Dr. West was afraid
he would. "Old Peterluk says its beak has many rifles. Old Peterluk says
there are two white men inside. Is this another lie?"

 

 

Dr. West looked around, expecting to see an old man in the camp.
"Where is Peterluk?"

 

 

Edwardluk's smile widened as if in embarrassment. "Peterluk has gone
hunting." Edwardluk glanced north along the ice foot where the sled had
disappeared around the point. "This person thinks Peterluk has gone to
pray for more power. This person thinks Peterluk is afraid of you. Eh-eh,
Peterluk even took his old wife. He said you would be a whiteman and we
would not be able to understand you, but he lied."

 

 

"Have you ever seen a whiteman?" Dr. West supposed Edwardluk must have been
a baby twenty years ago when the Cultural Sanctuary was established.

 

 

"Peterluk said you would be a whiteman," Edwardluk side-stepped the question,
his smile more embarrassed, and he murmured: "You are so much taller.
Are you going to -- You are a whiteman?"

 

 

Dr. West answered softly. "My name is West." Trying to explain the meaning
of his name, Dr. West pointed with his own boldly un-Eskimo nose in the
direction the afternoon sun was sinking. "West is a good man's name
and Edwardluk is a good man's name and we speak the same language,"
Dr. West's voice rose hopefully. "We are friends forever."

 

 

Edwardluk's smile gleamed like the morning sun. "We are brothers, all of us."
His hand trembling on Dr. West's arm as if with excitement, Edwardluk guided
him into the low-straddling tent of ancient caribou skins.

 

 

Children scrambled on an unsteady pavement of flat beach stones. Dr. West
stumbled over the bloody carcass of a seal. In the dimness of the tent,
another young woman smiled from behind the cooking lamp. "Cut meat!"
Edwardluk shouted proudly, and she giggled but obediently snatched up
a crude saw-toothed stone and chopped at the bared ribs of the seal.

 

 

The other girl finally staggered into the tent carrying Dr. West's
ninety-pound pack. With a gasp she tried to lower his heavy pack to the
stones without dropping it. Dr. West stepped forward, almost reaching
out to help her, but this might be a social error which would offend
her pride. So he simply watched her. As she straightened up again,
breathing hard in her tattered caribou-skin parka, she looked him
straight in the eye, which startled him, and he grinned. To his surprise,
she grinned back, not at all shyly, her white teeth gleaming, her dark
eyes sparkling. Her gaze was unflinching. Not exactly the traditional
self-abasing Eskimo woman, he thought, beginning to suspect these isolated
Eskimos might be rather different from the traditional Eskimo ideal Hans
Suxbey had in mind.

 

 

"Cut meat!" the other woman said loudly to her, and both women crouched
beside the seal carcass. They giggled in traditional female fashion,
and the other woman returned to the lamp, which was the female command
center of the tent.

 

 

Dr. West stared at the cooking lamp because it was not the traditional
shallowly hollowed soapstone slab. Dr. West thought it might have been
smashed out of a whiteman's white porcelain bathroom fixture. But it had
such a shallow curve it couldn't have been broken from an ordinary toilet
or urinal. Nearly two inches thick, two feet long and nearly as wide,
its whiteness was disguised by gummed seal oil and soot. Its shape was a
jagged oval so shallow he thought it could have been a fragment of -- even
a gigantic hollow ceramic ball. He gave up speculating for the moment. His
main desire was that these people should like him. He didn't want to start
asking questions like a nosy ethnologist, which he was not. He grinned,
thinking Suxbey wouldn't approve of this un-Eskimo seal oil lamp.

 

 

In the framework of sticks above the cooking lamp hung a square
soot-blackened artifact. Boiling inside this ancient five-gallon gasoline
can, the chunks of seal meat began to bubble their rich aroma, whetting
Dr. West's gustatory memory. While Edwardluk courteously made small talk
about the early summer, so early the open leads surely would freeze again,
Dr. West equally courteously asked no questions of his host. He watched
the woman behind the strange ceramic lamp using a bone splinter to press
down the long floating wick of cotton grass into the seal oil, shortening
the smoky line of flame. He realized these Eskimos had added a wall of
clay inside the mysterious concave ceramic object to separately contain
the chunks of seal fat. Warmly melting, the fat seeped oil replenishing
the lamp.

 

 

Since the lamp was the female power center of the household, Dr. West
thought the woman tending it must be Edwardluk's wife. With a forked stick
she prodded from the can a steaming chunk of meat. Smiling, she dropped
it on a floor stone to cool. The other young woman, who had carried his
pack, promptly picked up this hot chunk. Smiling down at it instead of up
at him, she handed Dr. West the fat-dripping meat. "Best piece for you."

 

 

Having lived in Alaskan Eskimo hunting camps, Dr. West unhesitatingly
sank his teeth into the juicy meat. Slicing in front of his nose with his
stainless steel hunting knife, he chewed heroically, gulped and swallowed,
his eyes squeezing shut with delight. "Good!"

 

 

With savage joy he filled his stomach with more meat than he'd eaten
for five years. To his surprise, he realized he was even outeating
Edwardluk.
This is impossible. An Eskimo can outeat any whiteman. Perhaps
he's just being polite, allowing me to seem the more impressive eater.

 

 

With unrestrained Eskimo pleasure, Dr. West belched cavernously.
Delightedly, the housewife urged more meat upon him until he leaned
back on the sleeping platform. The other young woman's folded knees had
provided his backrest. "This person will chew your boots," her voice
said against the back of his neck.

 

 

Dr. West laughed the way Edwardluk laughed. "This person is so pleased
that you think of him. But the skin of my boots is always dry and does
not need to be chewed. It is called
silicone rub-ber
. It breathes out
air from the foot. But it does not breathe in water."

 

 

Now the boys were being fed, six of them. The two largest were teen-agers,
apparently too old to be the children of the young woman behind the lamp.
Then both the young women and five little girls like stairsteps ate,
but amazingly little, Dr. West thought.

 

 

Smiling like any matron at the end of a successful dinner, the woman
withdrew her arm inside the wide sleeve and reaching around inside her
parka brought the baby to the front. Its fuzzy head nursed vigorously.

 

 

"So many children," Dr. West began so that it sounded like a compliment
rather than a question.

 

 

"Eh-eh, many sons," Edwardluk agreed with pride.

 

 

"Eleven children, more than the fingers of my two hands," Dr. West
outwardly marveled, inwardly doubting. "You are both so young."

 

 

"More than my fingers and my toes," the woman behind the lamp added shyly.

 

 

"You are the mother of more?"

 

 

"Three are older than Marthalik," she said, smiling past Dr. West at
the young woman whose knees supported him, "and two who are younger
but already have babies of their own. Grandfather Bear is pleased with
-- them."

 

 

The knees behind him hardened, and Dr. West turned his head thinking
surely Marthalik and the woman nursing the baby had to be sisters. Their
smiling faces seemed equally young. Were they lying? This young mother
obviously couldn't have produced twenty children, some already older
than Marthalik. "You are her sister."

 

 

Marthalik's small hand rose to cover her startled giggle. "This person
is only the daughter of my mother, and Edwardluk is my father."

 

 

Dr. West blinked at Edwardluk, whose smoothly unweathered face indicated
he still was in his twenties. By their thirties, the faces of Eskimo hunters
were seamed by wind and frostbite. Edwardluk's wife, smiling behind the
lamp, still had the fresh face of a teen-ager. Dr. West wondered why
Edwardluk had adopted so many older children. Had their parents died?

 

 

"This person wonders what it is like Outside," Marthalik said boldly
behind him, her breath close to his ear.

 

 

"Marthalik is a bad one who frightens away the boys," Edwardluk laughed.
"They are afraid she will ask them to take her
Outside
again."

 

 

"This person walked on the winter ice," Marthalik's soft voice added
without laughter. "Where the lightning fence does not go, where Peterluk
said our grandfathers fled, this person walked because -- "

 

 

"The mosquito chased her back," Edwardluk laughed, and Dr. West imagined
the Guard's mirror-windowed helicopter swooping down.

 

 

"What is out there?" Marthalik said anxiously. "This person knows you
are a whiteman."

 

 

"Outside are many whitemen," Dr. West sighed. "White whitemen, black
whitemen, yellow whitemen, more whitemen than all the birds nesting on
all the cliffs." He grinned at Edwardluk. "None serve so much good seal
meat as you, nor are their tents as warm with happiness."

 

 

Edwardluk laughed with pleasure and pride, but Marthalik's hand tightened
on Dr. West's arm. "Old Peterluk, he says in the old days hunters traveled
far to get good things to eat from the whitemen. No one was hungry. Before
Grandfather Bear came down from the sky, all hunters owned loud rifles.
Peterluk says -- "

 

 

"Peterluk is an old man," Edwardluk interrupted, and a hint of unhappiness
appeared in his smiling conversation. "Peterluk is a bad old man who lies.
Sometimes he boasts he has the only rifle in the world; there was never
another rifle."

 

 

"Then Peterluk is," Dr. West guessed aloud, "the man with the big sled
and many dogs who -- "

 

 

"Peterluk ran away from you," Marthalik said firmly, her knees against
his back, "because you are more powerful."

 

 

Dr. West couldn't help smiling at this. He was no warrior but he liked
her compliment. From his parka he took out the notebook and looked through
the list of names the McGill crowd had given him from their census of
twenty years ago. There were two Peterluks listed. One was described as
about sixty years old then, so he would not be this living Peterluk. The
other's age was listed as twenty-three based on Family Allowance records.
The McGill census taker had not seen this Peterluk but counted him anyway
because: "Peterluk, years ago, fled with the wife of -- another man? Her
name was Eevvaalik," Dr. West added.

 

 

"Eh-eh, even then Peterluk must have been a bad man," Edwardluk laughed.
"Now he flees from you again with Eevvaalik, but she is only an old woman
now, a woman who talks too much," Edwardluk added, smiling past Dr. West
at Marthalik.

 

 

Smiling, Dr. West watched Edwardluk's wife oiling the baby.

 

 

"Do you remember when the whitemen took away the rifles?" Dr. West asked
her bluntly; if she'd lived long enough to produce twenty children she
should remember what happened twenty years ago.

 

 

She hung her head. "This person can remember the last caribou."

 

 

"That was four winters ago," Edwardluk said loudly, making a spearing
motion with his arm, grinning and trying to redirect the conversation
to himself, the hunter. "This person speared so many caribou his arm
died!" A right-hander, he reared back and threw an imaginary spear past
Dr. West, who glanced at Edwardluk's wife.