When the Whales Leave Read online

  But Nau, of course, put people off. On and on she went, with prosaic details that could only weaken her listeners’ faith in their whale beginnings: for example, how Reu, their progenitor, used to snore at night. She insisted that the most ludicrous part of her stories—like giving birth to whale babies, meaning every nearby whale was also her direct descendant—was literally true. Why talk this way, when it only irritated people?

  Perhaps the kinship of humans and whales had a kind of mythical truth. But myths were meant to be majestic, noble, inaccessible to the common man: a mysterious origin story that shone from a distance, like the snowcapped faraway mountains, not one debased by mundane details.

  And what to do about Nau herself? She looked as though she wouldn’t last much longer. She was terribly old, though, surprisingly, she never complained of anything, never coughed and wheezed like the other elderly women. Could she really be immortal?

  Enu stopped and looked back down the beach.

  He saw a small, bent figure, easily recognisable as Nau, standing near the shore. Just beyond the foamy swells of the surf, two whales greeted her, heads high above the water, sending up fizzing, iridescent jets.

  2

  The hunters, in their boat, were heading far out to sea. A sprightly wind rang like a bell through their sail, fashioned from thin nerpa hides, expertly tanned and well bleached in sharp human piss. The men scanned the sea intently, looking for the round heads of bobbing lakhtak and nerpa, or the whiskery faces of walruses.

  Two harpooners sat ready at the stern, balancing their long spears, sharply tipped with obsidian, across their laps. These tips were cleverly designed: they came away when the spear lodged in an animal’s hide, twisting sideways and becoming harder to shake off, while still linked to the spear by a hide thong, like a leash.

  Enu occupied the bow, clad in a waterproof coat of walrus intestines—a yellowish, rustling material that guarded against the salty sea damp, protecting his inner garments of soft, fuzzy skins taken from the young deer of early spring. With one hand on the tiller and the other holding the end of the line, he was able to pilot the boat and maintain a good speed even when counter to the wind.

  This was a busy season for the birds that lived on the sea; the flocks, having fattened up and raised a new generation of young, were gathering to begin their autumn migration to parts unknown.

  Enu supposed that the birds would go to a place where the summer never ended, where there were no winter frosts and the sea, in all likelihood, did not freeze either. If you watched the birds in flight, and studied the path of the whales, it was obvious that they all went toward the noonday sun, exactly the spot where the red skies of deep winter betokened an invisible dawn. Only a few remained behind to wait out the long cold season.

  What kind of place, wondered Enu, has seas that don’t freeze in winter? And then it came to him with a jolt: when the sun came back to his home, it must leave the other places behind, and then it would be their turn for winter!

  He was about to share his revelation with his boatmates, when he thought better of it and held his peace. Why tell them? They wouldn’t understand it, not really. They wouldn’t understand that if you followed the sun, forward and back again, you could live in an endless summer, just as the whales did…. Enu was sweating with excitement. So this was the secret to happiness, this unending journey toward warmth. In these parts, a person’s main concern was evading the lethal breath of the cold. As soon as summer arrived, the women would drag their winter pologs outside to begin the annual mending, patching worn-out places with new pieces of polar bear fur. And toward autumn, they’d gather up dried grass to pack around the polog, to help keep warmth indoors. Most important, though, was the fire that lived in the stone blubber lamps, which had to be constantly looked after. Warmth was life itself; anyone who could find a way to perpetual warmth would be a genuine savior of his people.

  Deep in rumination, Enu had lost all interest in the progress of the hunt. How marvelous was the working of reason: no sooner had you come onto one interesting thought than another, and then another, unspooled in its wake. If you considered the very long winter season and short summer hereabouts, then you realized the sun must spend a much longer time elsewhere … which meant that in the land of the noonday sun, summers were long and winters short. If only they could find the way there, the land of the long warmth!

  Enu startled and came to, clutching the tiller in a perspiring grip. It took him a moment to understand what the harpooners were shouting: they’d spotted a herd of walruses and were asking Enu to steer the hide boat closer. Enu made a sharp turn, nearly taking on water over one dipping side.

  The whales would show them the way to the long summer. If they were truly his people’s brothers, they would not deny the humans help.

  What if old Nau knew the way? Maybe that was where she had come from…. She couldn’t really have been born out of the rocks, or from the wolves and wolverines…. Maybe she was a lost traveler, who had wandered far from the warm lands? And the whales had helped her survive?

  Enu’s thoughts sped and tumbled, flocked together and burst apart like birds. It was exhilarating.

  The walrus herd, meanwhile, was now quite near, and the water frothed like the boiling contents of a giant cauldron. The hunters lowered the sail. The long oars rose creakingly in their wooden oarlocks, and obediently the hide boat hurtled toward the walruses.

  Now they were very close. The animals, faces bristling with huge yellow tusks, had spotted them and were watching the men with hatred. Suddenly, the dominant male—an old bull with a broken left tusk, his rough hide knotty with parasites and riven with scars—changed tack and, at great speed, rammed the boat.

  On another day, Enu might have reacted quickly enough to deflect the blow by turning the boat. But slow to surface from his own thoughts, he lost a critical moment; he saw the broken tusk rear up inside the belly of the boat, between the legs of the chief harpooner. Water poured in, and they began to sink.

  The hunters were terror struck. Not one could swim. Their only hope was to hold on to the pyh’pyh; by a stroke of luck, these buoys, made from blown-up walrus intestines, and used for hauling a kill behind the boats, had already been prepared.

  The walrus, in his rage, stabbed the boat again and again. It shuddered helplessly, sinking farther into the icy water with each thrust. And how far they were from land!

  There were five men in the boat. There were four pyh’pyh. And two men had their hands on the same buoy: Enu, and the youth named Kliau, his eyes deadened by fear. For Kliau knew well what the head man of the boat must do in a situation like theirs. When there was no hope of survival, when the hunters’ native shore was only a stripe of land far in the distance, the helmsman must draw his hunting knife and kill his companions, and then himself, to spare them all needless suffering.

  Now he found himself looking into the face of the man who would slay him, who had by chance been the nearest person in the boat. Kliau had reached for the closest pyh’pyh, this being no time to waste a moment choosing …

  How beautiful life seemed! Even these scant few moments that were left before eternal oblivion. It shouldn’t have made any difference, being slain now or moments later, but even so Kliau wished he had grabbed a different pyh’pyh. Would Enu falter, he who was regarded as the wisest among the people of the Shingled Spit, the font of old lore and half-forgotten custom? Enu knew the way to greet a newborn, and the rites of passage for the dying. Surely he would strike quick and true.

  Enu, meanwhile, stalled for time. He knew that he must perform his sad duty, that they would never make it home … and yet he was unable to move. Here it was, so unexpected and so simple, the end of life. Another man, and not he, would find the way to the never-freezing seas, to the lands of long summer, where the sun shone from on high, where the whales and other warmth-loving creatures wintered.

  Enu’s companions, each longing to delay his impending doom, avoided his eyes as they bobbed g
ently but deliberately away from him.

  Let the older ones be the first to say goodbye to this world, Enu decided. Take Ope, his face turned to the shore, his eyes brimming with grief and fear of certain death. He is leaving behind a wife and six children, all so young that the village will have to take care of them. Here is Rermyn, also leaving children, and a beautiful wife. She’ll be looked after by his older brother. And here is Komo…. Fine hunters all, and strong men, jolly and skilled in loud singing and joyful dancing.

  Enu shouted, “Hey, come over to me now!”

  They were good people, the men from the boat. All heeded his call, and even those few who had at first tried to float away from him now accepted their fate and made for Enu, who was feeling for his sharp, long-bladed hunting knife in its sodden leather sheath.

  Komo was the first to reach the headman. Enu decided not to kill him until the rest drew closer, rightly fearing that the sight of first blood would weaken the men’s resolve. But as soon as they had all drawn next to the half-submerged boat, Kliau cried, “The whales are coming! A whole pod of whales, coming for us!”

  Everyone turned to see where the young man was pointing. A cloud of fog, dappled with many colors, was speeding toward the survivors. Noisily the whale pod cut through the cold and viscous autumn waters.

  “They are coming to help us!” shouted Kliau. “Our brothers are coming to help us! Old Nau spoke the truth—they are our blood brothers!”

  Enu raised himself above his pyh’pyh and saw the whales approaching. Like a flotilla of magical ships out of legend they came—this race of giants—like a vast song rising from the depths of the sea. Hope and fear warred within Enu’s breast. Disdaining the ancient custom could lead to unknown punishment. But who was there to punish the hunters? Who were the true arbiters of the fate of the coastal people?

  As they came close, the whales slowed and quieted, careful not to hurt the men. They ringed around the hunters and herded them, each on his float, toward the beach. And the hunters, in their turn, did their best to stay together, to make it easier for the whales to protect them. Soon the men could make out yarangas and thin plumes of smoke rising to the sky.

  The whales halted just beyond the line of the surf. There were people on the beach, watching in astonishment as their kinsmen approached, exhausted but overjoyed by their miraculous escape. Someone thought of throwing a strong hide thong into the water, and Enu grabbed on to the end.

  Soon the hunters stood in a line before old Nau, streaming with seawater. The old woman looked at them solemnly, and then at the whale pod slowly retreating from the shore.

  “Brothers always help one another,” she told them quietly, before making her way back to the yarangas.

  Within the largest yaranga, where the folk of the Shingled Spit usually gathered together, a whale-stomach drum was ringing. Enu, naked to the waist and accompanied by Kliau, was performing a new dance. He had named it the Dance of the Whale.

  The other rescued men danced and sang, too, slightly hoarsely, in praise of their seagoing brothers. The brand-new sacred song floated up through the smoke hole and wended to the beach, where, at the horizon, all but invisible in the night’s darkness, the whales held their rumbling breath and listened.

  Following Enu’s lead, the dancing men hoisted their painted oars aloft, toward the ceiling, where among last year’s deer carcasses, curing in the fragrant smoke, in a sea of warm fug and flickering firelight, floated a whale, expertly carved from dark driftwood.

  A human is only human

  When he has a brother, and his soul

  Longs to repay his brother’s kindness.

  Death turned away from us,

  Though it had touched us with a dark wing tip.

  Whales saved us.

  We give them praise

  And thanks.

  In the dimly lit yaranga, the song beat its wings against dry walrus hides, like giant drums. The people of the shore, listening, felt their hearts fill with gratitude and their spirits rise and rise. Not a few of them now remembered how they’d mocked old Nau’s tales of whale kinship, taking her stories for the last gasps of a guttering mind, and felt ashamed.

  The Sacred Dance of the Whale heralded the birth of a new custom and strengthened the people’s faith in their unusual ancestry. As he sang, Enu was aware that the words of this new song kindled inside him without any thinking, and he wondered at his state, which was as if someone else was singing through him.

  A brother is not just

  One who resembles you.

  A brother is one who feels your sorrows

  And comes to your aid …

  3

  Whenever Ainau brought a piece of blue ice inside the yaranga, she carried with it a cold cloud that smelled sharply of frost and tickled the nose. In the warmth, the ice crackled like a thing alive. The children would surreptitiously touch a licked finger to its surface, to feel it “bite,” leaving behind a thin film of pale skin stuck to the ice.

  This was the season where everything outside was turned a deep blue by frost and twilight, and bright winter stars ventured tremulously across the dark sky, shivering and flickering in the all-consuming cold.

  The only thing to occasionally break up the blue stillness of deep freeze were the yellow stains of firelight that fell through the thresholds of dwellings whenever hunters were expected to return from the winter ice. They would approach from the hummock-riven shore, skirting the tallest of the ice pileups and trailing behind them a rapidly freezing track of tamped snow and scattered red drops of blood.

  They kept their sights on the yellow lights of home, glowing from stone lamps packed with moss and blubber, as they walked through the all-encompassing silence that hung over the Shingled Spit and its scattering of yarangas, half-buried in snow and very small indeed in the great wide world.

  Kliau, looking up, could see the stars beginning their dance above—far away, the gods were about to feast, the gleam of their multihued fires mirrored in the sky. The world that seemed so empty at first was in fact densely populated. The wide, spacious sky; the far-off mountain ranges; even the dour, bare crags: they were all full of life, unknown creatures, and magical powers.

  With a deep sigh, Kliau hurried onward, to the home where his wife and three children—two boys and a girl—would be waiting. Though he was tired and cold, it warmed him to the core to picture the expectant looks of their little faces; the especially keen and penetrating eye of his eldest son, Armanto; and his wife’s loving solicitude.

  At the yaranga, Ainau picked up a slim wooden ladle, scooped up some water—not forgetting the floating bit of ice—and went outside. She waited by the threshold, watching Kliau weave among the hummocks. She could pick him out from a dozen hunters, simply by his walk, from any distance.

  Her heart glowed with warm tenderness to think of him—her husband, her Kliau—who even now was returning home with a kill. The Great Love that had breathed the coastal people into existence and turned a whale human lit up her joyful face.

  Unhurriedly Kliau approached, shrugging off the harness he had used to drag the dead nerpa without a word. Ainau poured water over the dead seal’s face, giving it drink, and passed the ladle to her husband, while she herself dragged the animal inside and laid it on a piece of walrus hide.

  The children ringed around the nerpa, chattering excitedly. They would have to wait for it to thaw before their mother could begin to butcher it.

  Kliau set to painstakingly knocking snow from his torbasses and hanging up his cleaned hunting gear, while Ainau busied herself mashing frozen meat from the storage pit in a large stone mortar, mixing it up with blubber and seasoning it with fermented greens. This was not the main dish, however—the star attraction would be the fresh nerpa meat, soon to be boiled up. As soon as the seal had thawed enough, Ainau cut it apart, reserving the skin and blubber.

  The children licked their lips and waited. Finally, their mother plucked the eyes from the whiskery nerpa head, punc
tured them with her knife, and handed one to each of the boys, who sucked on the delicacy with moans and groans of delight, and gave their little sister a taste as well.

  Kliau divested himself of all his clothing, naked apart from a small fawnskin loincloth. While Ainau butchered the seal, several visitors arrived from neighboring yarangas, and each wife left with a piece of meat. This made the family happy, for sharing good fortune, goodwill, and food was the first duty of the whale people, and a pleasant one at that.

  It was often hard to imagine at the high peak of winter that summer would ever come—and that the pebbled beach would lie free of snow, the deeply blanketed tundra hills show grass green again, wide streams of free-flowing water run down the mountainsides, and the great silence of the polar night give way to bright birdsong. The sea would one day break free of ice, and the whales would come once more …

  The family finished their repast with an uncomfortable but nevertheless pleasant feeling of satiety. Once everyone had settled back on the soft deerskins, the head of the household began to tell a tale, as was customary in every yaranga after a feast. Children must be taught about their past, so that they need never feel alone in the great wide world. Kliau’s low voice cut through the warm air of the yaranga, thick with the smells of fresh blood, cooked meat, and the acrid nerpa blubber guttering in the stone lamp.

  “Once, long ago, coldness and darkness covered all that was, and there was no telling earth from water or sky. Everything was dark and indistinct, as in a blizzard.”

  Kliau’s small children lay beside him, listening with bated breath to the story of their people’s ancient past.

  “Not a single ray of sunlight shone through the thick clouds, heavy with moisture. But then a woman appeared. She walked over the cold, bare earth, and green grass grew from her warm footsteps. She turned to look around—she smiled—and the sun, breaking through the dank, low clouds, answered with a blazing burst of light that dispersed the gloom and spread warmth over the world. Now the woman saw that there was land and water, sky and cliffs, a shingled spit to divide the lagoon from the sea. There were gophers living in their burrows, sables wandering about the hills, birds flying over the sea … and the sea itself was replete with life, teeming with swimmers and divers. The woman went about the shore, living on berries and seaweed. She did not know she was human, for she had no one that she might speak with.