The Eskimo Invasion (4 page)

 

 

"How many winters ago," Dr. West asked her deviously, "was Marthalik born?"

 

 

Beside his shoulder, Marthalik giggled. Her so-called mother looked
confused, studying her fingers as if she had lost count.

 

 

"A hungry winter," Edwardluk said loudly, "when Marthalik was born.
No caribou. But," he laughed, "we did not leave her on the ice."

 

 

"Grandfather Bear would not permit it," Marthalik retorted spunkily.
"No one leaves a baby on the ice."

 

 

"Peterluk still says babies should be left on the ice," Edwardluk sighed.
"But we could not do that even when our other children were starving.
Babies must live even if there are no more caribou for parkas."

 

 

"There are no more caribou?"

 

 

"No more for three winters," Edwardluk sighed, but then he smiled:
"This person is a killer of many seals." Proudly he waved his arm toward
Dr. West. "Give this big man more meat!"

 

 

Dr. West felt Marthalik moving beside him. Her hand pressed a juicy chunk
of meat into his. "You eat so much because you are stronger than Peterluk,"
she said. "That fierce old man, he fled from you with such speed because
you are stronger."

 

 

Dr. West laughed and chewed his meat; it felt good to impress a pretty
woman, even better than when he was Director of Oriental Population Problems
Research, which had impressed certain women, but his satisfaction now was
more --

 

 

"Even though he is an
angakok
, with powerful magic," Marthalik said
emphatically, "Peterluk fled from you because you are stronger."

 

 

"Eh!" Dr. West agreed. "Even though he has a rifle -- "

 

 

Children were wandering in and sagging down against him in sleep. He tried
to count them but they kept moving around and he was too full of meat,
too sleepy.

 

 

It was a pleasure to be an -- Eskimo again. Lying back against Marthalik's
supporting knees, he watched Edwardluk's wife spreading out the caribou
skins.
No more caribou?
Dr. West supposed the Director had not tried to
teach his first Eskimos conservation because it was not an authentically
primitive concept. Obviously Hans Suxbey's staff of instructors had not
taught his Eskimos birth control. Such a large proportion of children
indicated the population in the Sanctuary now must be increasing rapidly.

 

 

"Where are the old people?" Dr. West muttered. "Everyone in this camp
seems -- young."

 

 

"Eh?" Edwardluk pondered the question while sleepily scratching himself;
without his parka he was revealed as a rather wolf-ribbed young man,
still lacking that good belly from years of successful hunting and eating
which was a primitive Eskimo's pride. "Peterluk says the other old people
ran away -- out of this land before we remember them. Sometimes Peterluk
says the star frightened them away from the Burned Place. Is it the Navel
of the World? Peterluk says the reason he camps there is to find more
power. But his only power is his rifle. Peterluk tells so many lies,
even a whale vomiting a man -- alive! All of this happened long before
this person was born."

 

 

Patiently Edwardluk played with the drowsy children, urging them naked
under the caribou skins. They slept side by side in a long row on the
sleeping platform. Watching, Dr. West smiled, feeling peace and inner
warmth as if he were part of the family. Her plump skin glowing, Edwardluk's
wife slid under the worn old caribou skins. "If this person may speak,
that old Peterluk never should be believed. He never has good dreams,
so how can he understand? He does not even believe in Grandfather Bear's
love for us."

 

 

Blinking with drowsiness, Dr. West undressed into his sleeping bag.
Leaning on one elbow, he tried to count the children, now that they were
motionless under the caribou skins. Fourteen? He recounted and got seventeen.
Impossible. Maybe some of them are twins -- , or triplets or --
He glimpsed Marthalik rising sleekly from the caribou skins. His pounding
heart startling him, he looked away. He heard a crunching sound,
and he watched her. Firm-stomached, she was kneeling beside the seal
carcass, tearing loose a rib. The sinuous light from the lamp moved on
her smooth skin. Her jaws crunched through gristle as she chewed her
night snack. And he smiled to himself. All her darkly shimmering hair
was drawn back, coiled up on her head as beautifully as if she were
a modern city woman. Dr. West felt he had seen her hairstyle before:
Phyliss proudly wearing a dark wig to that last performance of the
San Francisco Opera Company, Phyliss striding ahead remote.
Loudly chewing, Marthalik was moving. Squatting down, her thighs and
buttocks swelling, she bent over the seal's rib cage, her breasts moving
forward in the soft light from the lamp.
Dr. West closed his eyes, breathing too hard. Apparently she was at least
eighteen, he thought.
None of my business.
Keeping his eyes closed,
he tried to count, not seeing sheep. His heart was so quick; even this
tired he couldn't relax.
Go to sleep. In two different years you lived
with Eskimos as a detached observer.
Day and night, the Alaskan Eskimo hunting camp had exploded with crude
merriment, but he'd had his own pup tent and all those University of
California graduate students to look after and set an example for --
for some reason, although he'd been only twenty-four himself.
When he was twenty-six, in the Canadian Eskimo town on Baffin Island,
it already was such a wealthy Co-Op that behavior seemed dominated by
middle-class strivers with what they prudishly imagined were middle-class
morals. The wife-trading took place in middle-class Berkeley, not on
middle-class Baffin Island. Never, he thought, had he seriously experienced
any serious desire for any Eskimo woman, and he smiled sleepily.
Hardly ever --
With his eyes closed, restlessly turning inside his soft sleeping bag,
he could hear Marthalik walking back across the rattling floor stones.
Now she was sliding under the caribou skins. In his warm sleeping bag he
buried his face.
Forget it. Sleep, dammit
, he thought. Among primitive
Eskimos the main cause of violence, he thought with self-cooling realism,
always has been passion. So stay away from their women and keep a harpoon
out of your heart.
Fighting his excitement, he couldn't sleep. Restlessly twisting in his
sleepless bag, he turned his back.
My god, how did I end up in here?
Trying to cool his excitement, he deliberately circled his thoughts back
into his old grief, his distant guilt. Deliberately he remembered his
father's robust face gasping in breathless agony.
His father had been one of the "Flying Doctors of the Sierras." In his
memory, his guilt revolved like the blades of the copter descending
toward the mountain lake. His father was smiling at the controls, and he
was nerving himself to disappoint his father. He remembered his father's
raised eyebrows as the copter sideslipped, unable to hover in this alpine
altitude. Cheerfully out of the smash his father climbed. "You're all right,
Joe. Let's find the patient." The trout fisherman had suffered a coronary.
Because the copter was inoperative, they tried to pack him out. Down the
trail, Joe still was nerving himself to tell his father. Unhappy as a premed
student at the University of California where his father had graduated,
Joe had wanted to change his major to anthropology or demography,
population statistics, anything instead of medicine, and he told his
father this further down the trail. The patient lived. In the airtel in
Bishop that night his father died of a massive coronary while Joe bent
over him unable to do anything against death.
After that Joe West studied premed so desperately he was offered medical
scholarships to three top schools. He chose Harvard Graduate School of
Medicine because it was a continent away from Berkeley and his mother,
who had remarried so soon -- so terribly soon. Against death Dr.Joe West
suffered from intern to hospital resident, still corresponding with Phyliss.
From a sprightly graduate student in demography, Phyliss was becoming
Dr. Phyliss Byars, Assistant Professor on the Berkeley Campus, still
single.
In Massachusetts, Dr. Joe West was being reassured by his hospital chief
that he might be happier in research. Dr. West's research paper on
Endocrinology of Hibernation in the Arctic Ground Squirrel as a Guide
to Hibernation in Space Flight led to his first research grant from
the Defense Department. Now he didn't have to peer down at the faces of
dying patients and see his father.

 

 

Continuously he wrote Phyliss. She wrote she couldn't marry, "this summer
because I've been invited on the Ethnology Department's little study of
the Alaskan Eskimos. What we need, and a live one is required by the
Regent's because there'll be grad students along, is our own doctor
to pass out the aspirin and chaperone the grad students. But who will
chaperone us chaperones? Volunteer?"

 

 

Before the expedition left Berkeley, Dr. West gave the required physical
examinations to the members. Phyliss failed. At this irony she laughed:
"You've already signed your contract. You go without me." And he had.
Since then their relationship had been strained.

 

 

Far from Phyliss, he had been fascinated by the sharp balance of life
on the Alaskan tundra. The closeness of death was less disguised than
in cities. The expedition's demographer was a pessimist. Population was
pressing against starvation all over the world in spite of cheaper birth
control devices.

 

 

Dr. West thought he was making a second start in his life when the
expedition returned to Berkeley and he enrolled in Phyliss's lecture
class in demography, population distribution. Earnestly he attended
graduate seminars in human ecology. Ecology not-so-simply was the branch
of biology concerned with the interrelationship of living things with
their environment and each other. By the time he earned his Ph.D. in
human ecology he knew how he intended to fight death. He had bargaining
power in the military-industrial-academic power complex because he was
a rare
interdisciplinary
man. He had an M.D. research background in
human glandular processes plus a significant Ph.D. thesis:
Socio-Medical
Political Approaches to World Population Control.

 

 

Within three years, his proposal to the Defense Department drew to the
University of California the largest federal research grant outside the
"weapons" field. The men he recruited for this broad spectrum study had
such a bizarre range of talents he was reduced to being another embattled
administrator. "Joe, even when you're with me all you talk about is -- "

 

 

"Dammit, Phyliss, you're the one who's cold." So they'd never quite married.
As Director of Oriental Population Problems Research, the day came when
he was human enough, guilty enough, to try to suppress the most terrible
aspect of their research.

 

 

Now his only escape from what had happened was sleep --

 

 

He was startled awake by a child scrambling over his sleeping bag.
Blearily, he saw that the caribou skin roof resembled a star map, hundreds
of little round holes glowing with the morning outside. Each hole, his
thoughts squirmed sleepily, marked an exit from the living caribou of
a wriggling fly-larva as big as this child's finger which was poking him.

 

 

"Hi." Dr. West sat up in his sleeping bag, and the surrounding children
giggled. "So you know a better purpose in life," he laughed in English
at them as he struggled into his pants, "than making children laugh?"

 

 

Outside the tent, the sun's reflection from the gleaming wet gravel and
glaring snow patches blurred his vision as he looked for Edwardluk.
From the corner of his eye, he watched Marthalik scraping a pegged-out
sealskin, her head lowered. She should have made some Eskimo kid a
valuable wife, he thought and grinned. She was smiling up at him.

 

 

"You sleep so long," she said, "this person thought perhaps your spirit
had risen to Grandfather Bear."

 

 

"You mean died?" he laughed; was she teasing him?

 

 

"No-no! Some day you will understand -- when he comes." She rose,
smiling again. "This person will boil your meat."

 

 

While he ate, he teased her a little.

 

 

"This person may be small," she laughed back at him, "but stronger than
certain men who need wings to fly."

 

 

"You mean me?"

 

 

"How could that be?" She feigned innocence. "Wave your arms and you will
fly like an
angakok
because you are so big and strong."

 

 

Dr. West laughed at himself, wondering if Marthalik was considered too
quick-witted and outspoken, insufficiently self-abasing to be an Eskimo
boy's ideal of a wife.

 

 

"Will you help me?" He drafted Marthalik to be his introductory emissary
to the women in the other tents. It would be dizzying to attempt a direct
age-sex census of so many children running back and forth outside. From
the thawing tundra pranced little boys holding up lemmings they had caught
to be boiled and eaten. Little girls squatted among boulders scraping off
gray-green lichen the missing caribou also used for food. As the hillside
emerged from the thawing snow, swarms of children were gathering everything
edible. To begin his census, Dr. West visited the mothers in their tents.

 

 

As if he were King Charles on a royal visit, the excitedly jabbering women
in the tent were rearranging old seal bones, sticks and other important
furnishings. Finally, he asked this giggling mother how many of the twenty
names she had given him really were her children. The mother hung her head
in silent embarrassment.