The Chukchi Bible Read online

  Worrying about the future had become the mainstay of Tynemlen’s agonized thoughts. How could these people save themselves from the pernicious influence of the Tangitans? The deer-herding Chukchi could take themselves and their herds into the deep reaches of the tundra, but the shore-dwelling Ankalin had nowhere to escape. Beyond Uelen’s shingled spit, the Arctic Ocean stretched for an eternity, unfathomable and endless. Perhaps, somewhere in the measureless distance, there were the islands that drew the migrating birds – but how could they reach them? And how could they leave their homeland, the resting place of their ancestors’ bones? So then, they must all learn to live in this new world, these new times.

  They needed a new kind of person. A person who would, by example, show the rest both a path into the future and the danger of blindly accepting all that the Tangitans brought. The difficulty lay in the fact that the people of Uelen tended to live by their own wits, each tending to his own concerns. No one was set above the rest. No one commanded or ruled.

  Naturally there were the rules of communal life, unwritten and unspoken laws passed down mouth to mouth, from generation to generation. These were composed of plain, seemingly obvious truths. It was wrong to kill or humiliate a person. Another man’s wife was off limits. Freedom meant a readiness to waive that freedom in order to help a neighbor. Property was considered sacred and thieves were banished from the village; a thief caught red-handed would in fact want to flee as fast as he could. No one thought of taking another’s spear, hunting gear, clothes, dogs, or sled without permission. People did not visit on another unless they had a specific errand. You did not stick your nose in another’s affairs unless you were asked.

  Of course there were also matters that required communal debate and decision. These were decided by the most respected men of the Uelen society, those who owned their own boats, the most skillful and lucky hunters, and of course the shaman.

  Uelen’s shaman looked no different from ordinary men. He worked as the others did, hunting, rowing the boat, throwing the harpoon, repairing the klegran. But he also healed people and animals, foretold the weather, accompanied dead men into the Realm of the Departed and greeted newborns, usually casting the deciding vote in choosing the infant’s name. Yes, on the outside Kalyantagrau was just like the rest. Yet everyone knew that no man in Uelen could rival him for experience and wisdom. The shaman knew all that was relevant to life. And if he was ever in doubt, he had the right to address the Outer Forces, the multitudinous spirits who knew all the tangled paths a human life might take. He was possessed of phenomenal physical strength and endurance. Plus, he was also an excellent singer, and composed songs and dances, many of which were sharp and satirical, aimed at persons whose vices required remedy.

  Such was the force of his moral authority that Kalyantagrau was the unspoken leader of Uelen. And yet he was not a man of wealth. He didn’t even own a boat, and in summer had to join Tynemlen’s boat crew as a workaday hunter.

  On the newborn’s naming day Kalyantagrau dressed in a ceremonial, rarely worn longshirt of chamois deerskin. In light of the celebration, the dogs were evicted from the chottagin and its cold fire was laid fresh with dried pieces of bark. Outstretched Wings – the sacred amulet – hung suspended by a thin leather strap from the conical inside tip of the tent.

  Korginau was feeding the infant, who lay in her lap.

  The happy father sat on a whale vertebra, smoking a pipe.

  The baby’s grandmother, Tynemlen’s wife, Tynavana, was busy preparing the celebratory feast; she mashed fresh seal blubber in a stone mortar while her husband hacked at some frozen seal liver.

  “Have you chosen a name?” Kalyantagrau asked Tynemlen.

  “I’d like the meaning of our family names to be passed on in the child’s name,” answered Tynemlen.

  Kalyantagrau turned to Mlatangin and Korginau.

  “Do the parents agree?”

  “We’re agreed,” answered the child’s father.

  Kalyantagrau closed his eyes. For some time he sat motionless, withdrawn into his inner world. His long, thinning gray hair hung down to his shoulders, mingling with wolverine fur.

  Everyone else kept a respectful silence. There was only the crackling of the fire and the baby’s gurgling.

  “Each of us, the people of Uelen, shares a common ancestor – the whale Reu, whose descendant Ermen led our people here to the shingled spit,” Kalyantagrau began.

  “Then came Mlemekym, who broke the arrow of enmity between our people and the Aivanalin of Nuvuken. Because of him we are now distant kinsmen of the Nuvuken Aivanalin . . . Then there was Mlerynnyn, who became known as Mlakoran. He brought us deer and taught us to herd them. There were times when the link was broken. No one can tell now why that came to be. Until, that is, the birth of the person who took his ancestor Mlemekym’s name. His lifetime saw the first contact with the hairmouths, whom today we call Tangitans. Our heroic tribesman Kunleliu, whose deeds are preserved in legend, was sometimes called Mekym, which suggests blood kinship with our line. He bravely fought against the Tangitans and won our right to honor our own gods and traditions . . . Later came Mlerintyn, whom we all honor – yes, your own father, Tynemlen – the first man of our village to visit the Tangitan trading market on the Anui River. Now your own son Mlatangin, who was named after your Russian friend Gavriil Sarychev, has become the father of this newborn child . . .”

  The shaman fell silent. He held up his grandson, who wrinkled his face peevishly, wiggled his lips in search of the abruptly disappearing source of sweet warm milk, and bawled.

  “I like the sound of your voice,” Kalyantagrau smiled.

  Plucking an ember from the fire, he drew a thick black line on the wailing infant’s forehead and intoned:

  “I name you Mletkin. I hope that you will acquit the deep meaning of your name with honor as you bring it with you into the future, and that you will serve your people well . . . Mletkin!”

  “The crux of time” – that was the meaning of my grandfather’s name.

  Outstretched Wings visibly dipped in the infant’s direction.

  The child abruptly fell silent, as though listening carefully for the echoes of his name. He was not crying now. Kalyantagrau handed him back to the young mother and the baby once again focused on suckling.

  And that was the end of the naming ceremony. It was simple and did not require many words to be spoken, yet it was fraught with meaning.

  Tynavana set a long wooden dish called a kemeny, which had been in the family for a long time, on a low table. She then carefully filled it with chunks of boiled deer meat, which had been traded for seal and lakhtak hides, whale and nerpa blubber, hide straps and whale itgil’gyn the previous autumn, and stored away for special occasions. It was often used for sacrifices, especially the bits of fat, which were smooth and easy to spread over the narrow slits of the wooden idols’ mouths.

  Mlatangin was lost in thought. He wondered dreamily what kind of man his son, Mletkin, was going to become. Of course, above all he would be a great hunter – not just lucky but strong and enduring, for luck comes only to those who rise with the dawn, never lingering on their soft warm deer-hide pallets, resisting the temptation to weigh down their stomachs with fat, rich food.

  As he gazed upon Kalyantagrau and his own father, remembering the ancestors whom the shaman had just named, he was thinking about the immense reach of life, from the point marked by the arrival of Mletkin, the newest addition to their line, all the way back through the ancient mists of the past, to where the shadows of those who had gone before carried on their mysterious existence. The men whom Kalyantagrau had named had not ceased to be; no, they continued to exist and to act in that other world for which everyone must depart one day. From there, they continued to influence the lives of those whose turn it was to live on the earth, and only those of Kalyantagrau’s ken were allowed a glimpse into this other world, the world that belonged to those who had gone beyond the clouds. And how wonderful it would
be if Mletkin grew up to be not only a strong, courageous, lucky hunter, but also one of the Inspired from Above, as the shamans were sometimes called. But why has Kalyantagrau given the child this particular name, Mletkin? What was its mysterious meaning? Only life itself and the future could answer those questions.

  Though Mlatangin had no way of knowing it, at that very moment Tynemlen too was assailed by the same doubts and questions: he was musing on his grandson’s future. Perhaps the child would be the first of their line to lead their people onto the true path, would be a man of wisdom, strength and justice. Or maybe it would be to him that the mysteries of the runes of the Sacred Book of the Russians, those footprints of words left on the book’s pages, would be revealed. After all, Tangitan blood mingled with Luoravetlan in Mletkin’s veins, just as it did in Mlatangin’s.

  “They say the Russians are leaving Rochgyn,” Kalyantagrau said as he sat down to his tea. The drink had quickly become popular among the Luoravetlan, and now was considered an indispensable part of every meal.

  Rochgyn – literally, the “land beyond the strait” – was the Chukchi name for Alaska and for the North American continent generally. It was a long time now since the Russian Tangitans had become entrenched there, plying large ships back and forth to and from Kamchatka. They would cross the Bering Strait and were always surprised, on reaching Chukotka, that the natives were not only excused from paying tribute to Tirkerym, beyond a voluntary gift, but also did not accept the Tangitan God, were not baptized and did not follow Christian customs.

  “They’ve got somewhere to go,” Tynemlen drawled thoughtfully. “They’ve got a very big land.”

  “But the Tangitans are not leaving our lands, neither the Russians nor the others,” Kalyantagrau went on. “I worry they’ll just go on trading and killing the whales.”

  “They’re everywhere already. There’s no place left to get away from them,” sighed Tynemlen.

  “Which means we’ll have to learn to live beside them,” Kalyantagrau said. “We can hardly war with them, as in the old days.”

  “Yes, that age has passed,” Tynemlen conceded, not without a note of regret.

  Mlatangin did not break in on his elders’ conversation, even though from the time of his first whale kill he had been entitled not only to voice his own opinions but also to take part in making decisions affecting the tribe.

  In his own mind, he saw the truth of needing to learn to live in these new times and conditions, in close proximity to the Tangitans.

  For the first eighteen months of his life, little Mletkin knew nothing but love and tenderness. Within the well-heated polog, which was brightly lit by three stone blubber-oil lamps, the little boy went from one pair of doting arms to the next. The adults especially delighted in caressing his tiny man’s parts and sniffing them noisily, a sign of special attention and love.

  Yet as soon as the boy began to walk, a gradual change took place in how he was reared. Instead of the breast, his mother increasingly gave him a chunk of hardened walrus or seal blubber, and his bed was made in the corner, from a rather thin pallet of worn deerskin. Most importantly, the adults ceased to pay any attention when he tried to obtain something by crying.

  At first he played with small animal bones and with little walrus-tusk figurines: birds, foxes, white bears, seals, people, and dogs. He would build yarangas of multicolored stones and fill them with toy people, enacting scenes between the inhabitants.

  Grandfather Tynemlen first made him a child’s sled with runners of split walrus tusk, and then a real dogsled, though again child-sized.

  Gradually, as time went on, the child’s games became reality. In the winter, little Mletkin didn’t just ride his sled for fun, but was expected to bring ice from the frozen stream; after a blizzard he would dig snow from the yaranga’s side walls with his small shovel, and clear the entrance to his grandfather’s yaranga.

  In the evenings, Tynemlen or Kalyantagrau himself would regale the little boy with ancient myths and legends, though these were all of a serious historical bent, beginning with the Raven’s creation of the earth, water, animals, and people; magical tales of shape-changing creatures, moral fables, and the adventures of birds and animals and human travelers were mostly the provenance of the elder women in the family.

  Little Mletkin often let his imagination run wild, flying far into the sky above with the birds, or changing into a giant whale or lakhtak and sinking into the depths of the sea, where the Mistress of the Ocean Deep lived in an enormous yaranga shaped like a gigantic jellyfish. The Mistress sometimes appeared to people in the guise of an astonishingly beautiful woman. She would beckon to them, and those who gave in to her enchantment would find themselves tangled in yellow threads, which turned out to be searing, poisoned tentacles; they either died or else turned into some marine creature. And this made a kind of sense: from a distance a lakhtak lying prone on the ice could be mistaken for a man.

  Turning into a bird was the best. You could see a great deal from a bird’s vantage point. The sea stretched out immensely beyond the southern hills, beyond Mletkin’s native lagoon, and the shoreline beckoned onward to the south, where the Uelen Luoravetlan’s tribesmen lived in other villages. In this way, the boy gained his first knowledge of local geography, and also of the flora and fauna native to his land.

  Spirits called kel’eht inhabited all living beings, including rivers and streams, lakes and bays. They often considered themselves the masters of key features of the landscape, the crags and streams.

  The world turned out to be much more complex and comprehensive than the plain landscape visible to the average human eye. It swarmed with invisible beings that noticeably affected human lives and affairs. The masters of winds and weather made their presence felt daily, with a storm or a fresh breeze, a gentle caress on your face, a crisp day of sunshine, or a day of sleet and darkness. Friendly relations had to be maintained with these powerful forces; they had to be remembered in the sacrifices, appeased and respected.

  Even insects had human characteristics. Once, as he walked in the tundra with his grandmother Tynavana, the boy saw a spiderweb glinting between two rocks. Unthinking, he tore it with a flick of his torbass-shod foot.

  “What have you done!” his grandmother wailed. “You’ve offended Wise Spider!”

  Meanwhile, Wise Spider had emerged from a narrow crack carpeted by moss and skittered to his torn web across the soft gray fuzz.

  “Quick now, say after me: I didn’t mean to tear your web, Wise Spider! It wasn’t on purpose! Don’t take offense!”

  The frightened boy repeated his grandmother’s words. Tynavana reached into a small bark container where she kept her chewing tobacco, pulled out a piece of deer-gut string, and laid it on the edge of the rock, near the torn web.

  “Say after me: I’m giving you a strong thread, Wise Spider, so you can fix your web!”

  Obediently, the boy repeated his grandmother’s words. From now on he would look twice before setting his little feet on the ground.

  Later still, they began to limit Mletkin’s water ration, to teach him to withstand thirst, and to give him the plainest of foods. Only very rarely was he allowed a taste of that choicest of delicacies, a nerpa’s eye.

  His deer-hide bed was now totally worn out, yet his bedding remained unchanged. And if he happened to wet his pallet during the night, in the morning he was made to run around the yaranga with his bedding on his back until it dried. Two or three of these runs cured Mletkin’s bed-wetting for good.

  Early each morning he had to dash outside naked to relieve himself and, in the meantime, peer carefully around so as to report to his father the condition of the sky and the direction of the wind. This was not so bad in summer, but winter made it hardly bearable, especially in the hardest frost, when his feet burned with cold and went numb, only to thaw agonizingly within the warm polog. Only during the worst blizzards, when the storm shook the yaranga and the day’s weather was thus made very obvious indeed, only
then was the boy allowed to remain indoors.

  One day Mletkin discovered that his portion of tea, drunk from a little shallow dish, did not have its usual delicious sweetness. When he questioned his mother, it was his father who replied. Mlatangin explained:

  “From now on you will not be drinking sweetened tea anymore. This taste is bad for your training for endurance and strength.”

  Other trials were gradually added. When the weather was clear, Mletkin spent the entire day outdoors, and was not allowed to enter the warm polog until nightfall. The most he was allowed was to spend a few minutes in the chottagin, among the dogs.

  Most of Uelen’s boys underwent a similar upbringing. It was the only way to raise a true hunter – tough, indomitable, able to withstand any ordeal.

  By the time he was eight Mletkin was put in charge of a small pack of sled dogs, and was responsible for several household tasks, including feeding all of the dogs, his own and the others’. He also accompanied his father on trips to the open sea in their skin boat, during which it was his responsibility to see that the boat did not get swamped by seawater, but to send it back overboard with the help of a primitive pump.

  Early in the spring of 1878, Mletkin’s father shook him awake. Pulling himself into alertness with great difficulty, the boy rose from his poor bed and darted outside, stepping across the lounging dogs as he passed through the chottagin.

  Outside it was still and clear. The sun was already up above the Great Crag, the icebergs’ many facets sparkled blue, and the night-frost crust that laced the snow glimmered under the rays of daylight, casting another blue light as the clear sky was reflected off the white snow. As he urinated, standing on the sharp, cold snow, and sending the warm stream down his bare legs, Mletkin felt uplifted, wonderfully in awe of the glorious beauty of nature. This awe seemed to flow into him from above, filling his heart with a ringing, celestial music.

  When he returned to the yaranga he gave his father a quick report on the weather, and joined him for the morning meal.