When the Whales Leave Page 7

  In the quiet yaranga, these words rang out like the wings of a magical bird bearing tidings.

  “That is exactly as I thought,” Nau told them. “Beauty lies in that which is beside you. And so the whales always return when the ice retreats, because these shores are their home, just as they are ours.”

  Enu had grown old and infirm and Komo was only good for making sketches of what he could remember, so it fell to Kliau to compose and perform the Dance of the Journeyer.

  No one knew how many years they had spent on their travels. But though his hair was gray, Kliau had held on to his strength. He outlived his companions, dying in extreme old age and mourned by all his relations.

  Old Nau was the one who dressed him for the end. Her hair silvery-gray, her face nearly black, like tanned walrus skin, but overall unbent, she made her way to the yaranga where grief and sadness now reigned, and asked everyone to leave. Kliau lay clad in white kamuss pants and white kukhlianka, ready to make his final journey.

  Without a word, Nau went inside the polog and lifted the piece of bearskin from the dead man’s face. In death, Kliau looked tranquil and serene.

  Old Nau asked for a vykvepoigyn to be brought to her, and they brought in the polished, slightly crooked stick, dented in the middle where the stone knife used for scraping hides would be placed. The crone placed one end of the stick beneath the dead man’s head and began to talk to him, her voice never above a whisper. She asked him detailed questions and awaited answers. These were short but unambiguous. The deceased wished to take along a pair of sturdy torbasses and his hunting spear.

  Quietly the old woman relayed his wishes, and a little pile of objects grew by the dead man’s head. He would be taking these things with him as he went through the clouds.

  The men carried him to Funerary Hill. And life went on. A new spring was coming, the sun rising high over the snows to light up the tundra and icebound sea.

  5

  Enu’s grandson Givu was a fragile and thoughtful young man. One day he came to Nau, asking, “What is the secret of your eternal life?”

  The old lady looked up sharply at his boldness. This was a sacrilegious thing to ask, and unexpected. “There’s no secret, and there’s no eternal life either,” she told him.

  “But you go on living,” the youth persisted. “So there is both eternal life and a mystery.”

  “I go on living …” mused Nau. The answer came to her even as she spoke, from some strange place. “I go on living because Great Love is alive in the world.”

  “Then, if it died, you too would die?”

  “Great Love is eternal,” said Nau.

  Givu fell silent, thinking.

  Nau watched him and wondered what made him this way. Was he afflicted by his own name? It must be hard living with a name like “All-Knowing,” though the giving of names was deliberate, parents trying to mark out a path for their children. In fact, Nau had named Givu herself, for he was the blood descendant of Enu, who had first dreamed of following the paths of whales to learn about the world.

  “I have many doubts,” Givu sighed. “They eat at me.”

  In parting, Nau gave him this advice: “Try not to ask so many questions. Think things through for yourself.”

  Autumn came, and with it the walrus herd arrived to take up their breeding grounds beneath the cliffs. For several days Givu watched them mating and felt as if he, too, was in heat. It was all he could do not to throw himself at the first available woman—and as bad luck would have it, the women were all nearby, picking berries and rummaging through animal burrows in search of edible roots. But Givu fought the feeling. He had a vague but strong sense that the answers to his questions lay elsewhere.

  He went to the tundra. There, he wandered about in the silence of the cooling days. He peered into clear streams where fish swam stately by, slowly waggling their fins. The water-dwellers’ gray-blue bodies looked like the images that had been carved into the cliffs by Komo, come to life.

  Givu slaked his thirst in the water, bending down to study his own reflection. A long, drawn, wide-eyed face looked back at him. He had been told that he resembled his celebrated grandfather, Enu. But that was as far as the resemblance went; Enu, of course, had found an outlet for his insatiable curiosity and had gone on a journey that lasted most of his lifetime. Were Givu to follow in his footsteps, all he would find was what Enu, Komo, and Kliau had already seen.

  So where to go?

  And where did it all begin—the very endlessness of the world, the clouds over the tundra and the green grass that turned yellow each and every autumn?

  Where did the flowers, blue like shards of sky, come from? The red berries and the water currents that carried silent, tranquil fish? The animals and birds, the beasts of the sea? Could the origins of human beings really be as simple as old Nau would have him believe?

  And, worst of all, why did these questions burn inside him so, waking him at night and driving sleep away, whispering things that made no sense, filling his mind with the crazy idea of killing old Nau?

  A stiff and steady wind pulsed over the tundra, raising waves across the yellow grass, just like a sea.

  Givu strode across the land, hopping over springy tufts of moss and leaping across rivulets and streams. He never tired; the wind seemed to him a pair of wings that carried him over the earth. He waited for the feeling that Nau had spoken of, back when she was young and didn’t know the whale Reu, that feeling of oneness with the natural world. Givu wanted to be the wind and the stream and the sleepy fish in that stream, as Nau had been; to be the grass and the hillock, the molting old sable fox, the slim crane patrolling his raspberry-strewn bog, the gopher and the mouse dragging a sweet pelkumren root back to its nest …

  But nothing of the kind happened. He did stub his toes painfully a few times on rocks concealed in the lush grass, and his foot ached, distracting him and breaking the flow of his thoughts.

  What if Nau had also felt nothing?

  What if she was just making it all up?

  Maybe even the epic voyage into the distant warm lands, where the sun roamed tirelessly above the earth and people raised food from the ground, eating grasses just like the tundra deer do—maybe that never really happened either? There had always been those who doubted. Didn’t Enu set off on that very journey because he, too, had always doubted?

  Givu sat down on a hillock. The scent of dry autumn herbs was making him a little light-headed. Soon this smell would fill the yaranga, carried indoors with the heaps of dead grass the women would gather in preparation for winter, reminding them all of the green world of summer, warm and beautiful with flowers.

  Most people lived perfectly well without prying into the causes of things, without puzzling over the mysteries of the natural world. Why did he, Givu, have to be the one to struggle with it all?

  His thoughts turned once more to women. They were strange creatures. Why had they been made different from men? Was it really just so the human race might continue, and to give men pleasure? Why was it that the purest happiness one could experience was linked to the expectation of new life? And did it follow, then, that taking life, killing someone … would the taker of life experience the opposite? Yet life was brighter and more joyful than death, so the feeling it brought must be the stronger …

  Givu looked around afresh, eyes blazing with discovery. One of the mysteries was unraveling to him and lay tantalizingly close, almost within his grasp …

  Flushed with excitement, he sprang up and ran back toward the village, yarangas just visible on the sea side of the lagoon, mere specks on the beach.

  He couldn’t wait to test his theory.

  The woman was crouching by the stream, filling a hide pouch with kukunet leaves; strange, how those leaves had the same name as a woman’s own hidden parts. Givu stopped a way off, and as he drank in her every move, a torrid heat began to overtake him. In his mind’s eye, he was already running his hot palms over her body, tearing off her fur-lined ker
k’her.

  Losing all control, he came at her like a wakened brown tundra bear. The bag dropped from her hand and rolled down the hill.

  “You frightened me,” said the woman, after. Givu had let her go with a moan of disappointment, for there was no sign of the happiness that would herald the beginning of his new life.

  “Tell me, what did you feel when I took you?” Givu asked.

  “I’ve just told you,” the woman said. “Only fright. You didn’t give me a chance to feel anything else.”

  “It’s my own fault, then,” Givu mused regretfully, rising from the cold, hard earth.

  What had happened? He’d wanted the woman so badly. He would have gone through fire and water for her, in that moment of wanting—and yet as soon as his blazing desire was satisfied, he felt let down, like a man who tries to quench his thirst with freshly fallen snow.

  He walked away from the woman. She dusted herself off and started down the slope, to gather up her spilled and crumpled kukunet leaves.

  6

  They had hunted walrus on their breeding-ground beaches, prepared the kopal’khen and stashed it in meat pits on the shadowed side of the lagoon, and traded blubber-filled skin bags with the deer people in return for meat and hides. Now it was time to prepare for the Whale Festival.

  Time to stretch tanned walrus stomachs over round wooden tambourine frames, shaped over steam and furnished with walrustusk handles. Time to paint designs onto ceremonial oars, illustrating the old tale of how whales saved the hunters at sea. Time to make up new songs and dances, to fashion festive clothing and dye deerskins with red ochre from the foot of the Far-off Crags.

  On the appointed day, the people of the Shingled Spit were awakened by the long-familiar tumult of an approaching whale pod. The sound of their coming filled the air all the way from the crust of ice encroaching from the sea to the crags pounded endlessly by ocean waves, the water now sluggish and thick with the cold.

  At dawn, everyone, including the elderly and the children, went down to the beach. They carried dishes piled with red shrimp, broken-up starfish, seashell shards and bits of crab claw, dried-out mollusks, and shreds of seaweed. Everything was liberally dressed in nerpa fat.

  The white-haired old men creakily belted the songs from the beginnings of their tribe—the time of the legendary Father Whale, Reu—and the women and youths sang along. The ocean fairly boiled with whale spouts, and a sparkling mist hung in the air above them.

  At the oldest man’s sign, the people threw their offerings into the water. As though they, too, followed a signal, the whales thanked their land brothers as one with a watery cascade high into the air, then made their stately annual procession toward the shores where the water never froze in winter, following the path known to them since time immemorial.

  Givu joined the others in throwing in the sacramental food, which no one would ever think of eating themselves. But as he sang, he wondered, privately, as he often did now, what gave his people their unshakable faith in these nonsensical proceedings.

  At sunset, the largest yaranga rang with the sound of tambourines. Each man performed the Dance of the Whale, hoping to outdo the others in the art of expressing feeling and mood.

  Givu slowly pulled on a pair of special dance gloves. Silhouettes of baby whales decorated the black nerpa skin, and when the dancer wiggled his fingers or twitched his hand, the whales seemed to be swimming in dark water.

  Whenever he danced, moving in time with the drumbeats, Givu experienced an astonishing sense of expansion. It was as though he was growing taller, wider—stretching to fill the entire yaranga, then whooshing out through the smoke hole to spill across the whole of the Shingled Spit, ranging over the bay and the lagoon and the cliffside grottoes, still full of last year’s snow, now turned to dark ice. His heart grew with him, and his lungs. There was not air enough for them inside the yaranga. He danced in the thrall of his own feelings, unaware of the men around him as drumbeats and singers’ voices reverberated through him.

  Now he suddenly saw, clear as day, the eyes of the woman he had taken by the stream, the one he had thought to start his new life with. He didn’t know what had come over him then, or how—his desire had made him blank to everything else, the sky and the earth, even the hard, stony ground.

  An unfamiliar warmth kindled inside him, like someone patiently, lovingly stoking a fire in his breast, fanning it with careful breath.

  Givu’s hands danced before his face, and through his moving fingers, through the baby whales swimming in a dark sea, he saw the eyes of that woman. With a mounting sense of joy, he strained to absorb this growing tenderness and warmth. It was a new kind of feeling—not the blazing, furious flame of desire, but more like a quiet song, like flickering firelight over a sweep of snow.

  When the first snows came, Givu set up his own yaranga, separate from his parents’, and installed the woman in it. From then on, she was his wife.

  In the heat of their passionate nights, Givu looked for that highest joy that signified the start of new life, but no matter how hard he tried, it didn’t happen.

  Frustrated and disappointed, he would wander into the tundra and rove among the hills, sometimes going so far that he only made it back home toward morning. He spent much time alone with his thoughts, which buzzed about his head like mosquitoes, appearing and vanishing with no regard to his own wishes. These thoughts—these questions—were strange and insistent, and there was no brushing them aside anymore. They had to be answered.

  Old Nau came to them late one evening and made herself comfortable in a corner of the yaranga. As was her custom, she lived like a nomad, moving from one yaranga to the next.

  She counseled Givu’s wife about tanning hides and making clothes, about the kind of sinews that made for the best thread, about smoking nerpa flippers so you could pull the skin off as easily as a glove. But Givu heard the crone’s voice as if in a stupor, a single thought beating about his head like a caged bird: Could she really be immortal?

  Givu woke in the night, in a cold sweat. He felt for his sharply honed knife in the darkness, imagining the blade cutting into her wiry neck, almost crunchy with moving parts. He imagined her black blood staining the white deerskin bedcovers. He could even hear the old woman’s death rattle as she let out her last breath, as her endless life flew up and away into the blue sky, through the winter clouds, glinting with moonshine and the polar lights.

  Desperate to evade these grim imaginings, Givu looked for distraction. He pressed himself close to his wife, whose soft skin radiated heat. Obediently she moved closer to him, opening to meet him, like a spring tundra flower.

  Now—now, at last—Givu felt it. The secret and long-awaited thing he had yearned for … the vast, slowly dissipating feeling of tenderness, a lingering, sweet pain deep inside him. And as the pain left him, he was suffused with a strange contentment that lifted him bodily and then rushed him down again, the wind whistling in his ears, just like when he was a boy sledging down one of the foothills to the edge of the snow-covered lagoon.

  This time Givu was certain of kindling new life. His thoughts of old Nau and immortality seemed silly and trivial now. With a rueful smile, he left the yaranga for the bracing, fresh air of the winter night.

  He went into the tundra once more, light on the wings of a new joy and a new song bursting from his breast, out of the great tenderness that had filled him to the brim. What if this was the Great Love that Nau always talked about? What if he was now part of it, the Great Love that had revealed itself to him, rewarding him for his patience and determination?

  The thick blue haze that lay before Givu slowly transmuted into a glittering, star-bright sky. To the north, polar flares—a sign that the whales were feasting in their underground palaces—danced above the slumbering humans.

  Givu crossed the lagoon and wound his way through the gently sloping hills toward sunrise. Soon he was at the foot of the Far-off Crags. He had walked far and would have walked farther still. B
ut a voice stopped him in his tracks: “Stand and look around you!”

  Givu obeyed.

  Everything was as it had been, and he couldn’t discern anything new or different. The same stars hung in the sky, only they were a bit dimmer, now that sunrise was close at hand. And the polar lights had ceased.

  “And now? How do you see things now?”

  The voice was immensely strange, coming from everywhere at once. It filled the world around, above, and below, no matter where Givu turned to look. But Givu was somehow unsurprised by the voice. It was as though he had expected it all along.

  Once more he cast his gaze about, as the voice commanded. He realized that his vision was indeed somehow clearer, as though a fog had lifted from his eyes. All things stood out in sharp relief: each fold of wind-polished snow and the subtle changes of color wrought upon them by the lightening sky; each pebble and blade of grass poking out of the snowdrifts. He could smell the river ice, both near and far, and the scent of the frozen earth, aching unbearably under its thick coat of snow.

  “From now on you will hear and see far more than an ordinary man!”

  Thus spoke the unseen voice, and Givu’s newly keen ear marked how it diminished like a mountain echo, evaporating into thin air.

  An urgent question beat in Givu’s breast: “Who are you? Why did you choose me and no one else? Why did you say nothing of old Nau’s mystery?” But he went back to the village. At his yaranga, his wife looked up at him with quiet wonderment; never before had she seen him so calm and serene, so at peace with his unruly thoughts.

  From then on, Givu always returned home with a kill. It was as if his feet knew just where to be when the cautious nerpa surfaced onto the ice. His luck was noted among the villagers, and soon people were coming to him for his views on hunting. To his own surprise, Givu was always sure of his answers and spoke good sense.