by Ken Altabef
This one was sweet and bright and cheerful, like a little doll. She put her small pudgy hands to her mouth in surprise, then drew them away to reveal a wide round face. The face was nearly featureless except for a pair of small eyes, round and black as raisins set in the doughy surface, and a mouth which was a curved fold of skin, perpetually smiling. A few streaks of fine black hair trailed down from her high forehead.
The little creature stood up and began to walk toward the cliff of sandstone, with Tama close behind. The ava wore a piece of fur wrapped around her in imitation of a crude parka but it was neither sewn nor tailored and flopped awkwardly as she moved. She walked with a strange waddling gait, her feet twisted upward and balanced on her heels, and this caused her to fall over every few feet. In an odd sort of a game Tama set her upright again each time, making small purring sounds.
Alaana was amazed. Ordinary people could not see the ava, who existed mostly in the spirit world. This was the first time any of her three children had showed any sort of shamanistic ability. She hadn’t thought they would inherit it.
Alaana hadn’t been born with angakua, the spiritual light which empowers the shamans. Instead, she had acquired her mystical powers during a childhood illness that had nearly killed her. In the depths of the fever, the great spirit Sila, The Walker In The Wind, had taken pity on her and spared her life, showing her the wonders of the spirit world. Alaana learned how the souls of all things were connected, like innumerable glittering embers in a giant smoldering hearth. From the lowliest creature scrabbling beneath the snows to the loftiest falcon, even the great frosted mountain peaks and the giant floes of implacable ice, every stone and plant and drift possessed an individual and unique spirit. As her soul blew apart into countless fragments scattered on the wind, a process as thrilling as it was terrifying, she came to know them all. Sila had granted her two essential gifts – the spirit-vision, and the ability to step outside of her physical body and travel among the seven worlds. In this way she had become a shaman.
Unlike other shamans who had an intense and abiding link with their guardian spirits, Sila had come to Alaana only rarely since that first day. He appeared to her as a kindly old man with a face that was all faces and a voice as forceful as the wind.
Alaana had been tutored in the Way by the Anatatook’s only surviving shaman, Old Manatook. Tragically, the old man had died defending the band when she was only thirteen winters old and poorly trained, leaving her to find her own way. She had once been told, during a visit from the ghost of a friendly shaman, that her power came from the center of the earth and not from Sila at all. The answers to such questions were beyond reckoning, and she was left not knowing what to believe. And yet over the years she had tended to the Anatatook’s spiritual health as well as she was able, healing both their physical wounds and their heartaches, and defending them against malicious spirits and all other mystical threats.
But now, finding that the youngest of her three children possessed the sight! She didn’t know what to make of that. Her initial reaction was a sense of cautious joy. The world was full of wonders. And dangers. She would need to think on it.
They followed the little ava to a cliff of sandstone. Its house was a small nook in the rock formation, too tiny for an adult but just large enough to admit the child. Inside, Alaana glimpsed a miniature driftwood table, tiny cooking things fashioned from seashell and whalebone and a bed of straw grasses.
“Can I play?” asked Tama again.
“Yes you can play,” returned Alaana. She didn’t see any harm in it. “But only for a short while. I have shaman work to do.”
Tama wriggled into the cave and sat with the table between her open legs. The little ava rushed about the room replacing the various implements the clumsy child had knocked over. Then the two of them settled down to drink make-believe tea.
Alaana kicked three of the sealskin floats out of the line. “No good.”
“What’s wrong with them?” asked Avilik.
“We can’t use these for the agvisugruk,” Alaana replied. “He’ll become offended. Only the skins of the speckled seal are acceptable to a mature whale.” She gestured to the remaining harpoon floats, all of which had the characteristic brown markings of the speckled seal.
“We’ll need a few more, then,” said Avilik.
“Don’t worry. I have some in storage,” said Maguan. He clapped his cousin heartily on the shoulder.
“It was a stupid mistake,” muttered Avilik.
“That’s why we have Alaana,” said Maguan, with a chuckle. “She keeps us on the path.”
Alaana bent over the remainder of the whaling crew’s equipment, which was laid out on the snow in front of Maguan’s tent. The Anatatook spring camp had been set on the spar of mainland adjoining the Tongue, so as to not offend the whale with their noise and the smell of their cooking. A clutter of tents were spread haphazardly along the beach-head. Her brothers’ wies sat in front of Maguan’s tent, braiding strands of sinew for the lines.
Spring had come in earnest. Long grasses had already shot up among the gravel near the water. Alaana spotted several herbs and wildflowers she might harvest for her work —fireweed and saxifrage and a few red poppies peeking up between the stones. When she had finished with her brother’s equipment and delivered to Tugtutsiak a charmed belt she made out of seal teeth and baleen, she would find time to rummage along the shore.
Alaana knelt before the spearheads, all of which, except one, were made of slate and bone.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, indicating a thin copper blade that glinted in the sun.
Maguan shrugged. “I found it on the beach, like everything else.”
“Don’t use it,” said Alaana flatly.
“It’s very sharp…” said Maguan.
“This is made by the white men. When I look into it, I see nothing. It has no soul.”
“But it’s really sharp,” insisted Maguan.
“Then be careful not to cut yourself as you throw it away,” insisted Alaana.
Maguan grumbled softly, but he removed the offending object from the row. “As you say, little sister.”
Alaana spread her hand over the row of shale harpoon heads. She whispered to them, telling them that they must bite deep into the skin of the whale and hold on, and not to worry, that the whale had already agreed to it and would not be angry.
This done, she drew an amulet from the front pocket of her parka and hung it from the center boat rib. The upper half of a tern’s beak, meant to keep the boat on a straight course. The talisman was carved with the emblem of Sila and anointed with three drops of Alaana’s blood.
“Mother did a fine job on the skins,” commented Maguan. Alaana agreed. With her spirit-vision she could see the tiny remnants of the spirits of the bearded seal that still inhabited the skins. She saw also a little flicker of her mother’s soul-light which had been imparted to the work, so lovingly had she crafted the boat covers.
“Three layers, tight as a drum,” crowed Maguan.
“Wake up,” whispered Alaana to the spirits within the skins, “Wake up!” They had slept for most of the long year, but must make ready to fly on the water.
Maguan ran his hand along the side of the boat, touching it with the gentle caress of a lover. “We’ll ride the sea as boldly as any Anatatook before. It will float like a bird on the–”
A sudden commotion had broken out near the shore. Among the wild shouts Alaana thought she heard a cry of pain. A moment later, calls for the shaman rang out. “Angatkok! Angatkok!”
Alaana rushed to her feet. The other two members of Maguan’s whaling crew, her brother Itoriksak and their friend Iggy, had been clearing a path for their boat to launch on the shore.
Itoriksak lay sprawled in the bloody snow. Iggy stood over him, the shovel raised above his head. He was a giant among the Anatatook, as wide around as he was tall. Because of his gigantic size he was often referred to as Kingarjuaq, or ‘The Big Mountain’, but A
laana still called him by his childhood nickname Iggy. He held the broad whalebone shovel aloft, a wild look in his eyes. Something dark, wriggling in the snow, held his attention. He seemed afraid to look away.
“It bit me,” groaned Itoriksak.
“Alaana? What should I do?” asked Iggy, his arm trembling.
Alaana glimpsed the hideous thing Iggy was holding at bay.
“Strike off its head,” she said.
The shovel came down. The head rolled to the side.
“It’s still alive!” warned Iggy.
The headless carcass, slimy and black, continued twisting and squirming along the snow track in an attempt to get back into the sea.
Itoriksak cradled his bleeding leg. “It came up out of the water, Alaana. It bit me. What is it?”
Alaana stepped past him, saying, “I’m sorry, brother. This thing was sent here to kill me. It must have smelled your blood and mistaken you for its target.” She drew a thin blade of sharpened antler from the top of her mukluk, and planted a foot on the tupilaq’s broad, flat tailfin. Although the head had been taken off by the shovel, no blood ran from the stump.
Alaana cut open the carcass. The oily black hide was already half rotten and the sealskin parted under her knife to reveal a patchwork creature made of various odd scraps of skins and bones. The intestines of some small animal, clotted with dried blood, writhed out from the incision. The mismatched bones were knitted haphazardly together with twines of sinew, and among the many that didn’t belong was a human breastbone. Tied around this heart of bone was a thin braid of hair. Alaana yanked it free and held it up to the light of day. She could easily guess who it belonged to, but the spirit-vision left no doubt. It held a little bit of the soul of Klah Kritlaq, a rival shaman from one of the southern bands. As Alaana held it in her hand, the soul fragment fled from her grasp and shot into the air. The tupilaq expelled a last gasp of fetid breath and went limp.
Alaana kicked the carcass back into the sea.
She turned to inspect Itoriksak’s wounds. Her brother’s torn trouser leg revealed a long, thin cut which ran down the length of his calf. The wound was already festering.
“I have to take care of this at once,” she told the others. “Carry him to my tent.”
“It burns, it burns!” howled Itoriksak. His eyes tore into her with great fear.
Alaana nodded confidently at the stricken man. “All will be well, my brother. I’ll see to it.”
It was good that she was angry, for anger was excellent fuel for this task.
Alone in the karigi, the ceremonial sanctum of the shaman, Alaana laid out the various bits on a woven mat. She assembled a handful of bones, mostly from the wolf and the rat, and bundled the makeshift skeleton into a rotten sealskin body. At the heart of it she placed the copper harpoon head she’d taken from Maguan. She stuffed a few other talismans inside, packing them in a special mixture of saltwater clay that was stained red with a splash of her own blood.
All the while she thought of Itoriksak. Her brother’s leg oozed with black ichor and pus, and she had spent some time working on him, sucking out the poison and countering it with salves of butterbur and crushed horehound. It had been a close thing. In the end, she felt certain Itoriksak would recover. But the wound had left her brother tainted and unfit for the whale hunt.
Alaana felt tainted as well. Anger was dangerous for a shaman. It was a corrupting influence that must be controlled at all costs. She took great pains to direct her wrath into the effigy she was constructing. It was bad enough for Klah Kritlaq to attack her, but to harm her brother was an affront that could not go unanswered.
Klah Kritlaq was shaman for the Tanaina, one of the inland tribes that ranged slightly to the south. His dislike of Alaana was based on the fact that he seemed to be even more incompetent than she was. Like Alaana, he had fallen into the role at a young age and lacked a proper teacher. It seemed there were so few shamans in Nunatsiaq these days. As a result, his people often went without food. Feelings of resentment and jealousy grew in Kritlaq’s heart. The Anatatook had enough to eat, primarily due to Tugtutsiak’s excellent leadership rather than Alaana’s skills. But the Tanaina were nearly always hungry.
There were times when Alaana felt Klah Kritlaq’s enmity coming in a wave across the ether. Last year he had tried to destroy her by way of magical intrusion. Alaana had felt a heat in her belly and coughed up a roughly-hewn arrowhead. She bled from the throat for a few days, but was otherwise unharmed and had ignored the attempt, seeking no retaliation. Now with her brother lying in burning pain, Alaana vowed this attack would be the last. Kritlaq was not the only shaman who could build a tupilaq, a beast that had one drive and one drive alone. To kill its target.
After stitching up the front of the torso, Alaana attached the head. She was using the carcass of a black seal the dogs had been picking at for several days. The snout was gone and Alaana affixed a raven’s beak to the center of the forehead so that the creature might peck out Kritlaq’s eyes if it ever got the chance. The beak was lopsided, but it didn’t matter. The seal’s eyes had likewise been eaten away, and she placed two round chips of glittering black stone into the empty sockets. She pinned the braid of Kritlaq’s hair to the back of the tupilaq’s head so that it should know its target.
Alaana laid the monstrous creature in the center of the karigi. The bloody clay must harden for two days before she could animate the figure. And then she would send it against Klah Kritlaq.
CHAPTER 5
WHALE HUNT
In the depths of winter, the silence of the north is absolute. A great cover of snow lies over the land, blanketing the frozen lakes and tundra. It drapes protectively across the tops of the iglus. It muffles all sound. The stars beam down silently from a lifeless black sky. The hunters, poised out on the lonely ice awaiting the cautious passage of a seal, dare make no noise at all.
The hunt for the bowhead is entirely different. Springtime cannot be silenced, neither in the strident voices of the land nor the boisterous shouts of the men. On the gusty straits of the Tongue the wind comes whistling up from the south, circling the spit of land in angry murmurs only to scream away along the coastline. The immense glaciers groan and creak. Hungry gulls wheel and screech overhead. The sea has noisy tales to tell as it laps tirelessly against the icy shore.
And so the Anatatook men, huddled in three whaling boats along the beach-head would not keep still. They grumbled to each other. They fretted and shivered. Two days and two nights the crews waited in the cold, with no food except frozen slices of trout the young boys brought up from the village.
Even the shaman grew weary and restless. Alaana was tired of urging the men to silence, warning them not to offend the whale they had been promised.
A spectacular sunrise broke the horizon, as seen through sleepy eyelids. In this instance she need not cajole the men to be quiet; nature’s majesty did the job for her. Day burst across the sea, a line of liquid silver spreading upward like running water, chased by the warm orange glare of the sun.
“This will be the day,” she whispered. “This will be the day.”
Kneeling at the prow of Maguan’s whaling boat Alaana kept the watch. Her brother slept fitfully on his bench, his head propped on his hand, his elbow resting on the stern post. Avilik lay beside him. Iggy puttered with the equipment, halfheartedly rearranging the drag floats, lances and grapples strapped to the bottom of the boat.
After the wounding of Itoriksak, Alaana had reluctantly joined her brother’s whaling crew. “It’s time to launch,” Maguan had pleaded, “and we need a fourth.” He stood before Alaana, dressed and ready for the hunt. In accordance with tradition he wore a new set of clothes specially made by his wife Pilarqaq, a two-layer caribou-skin parka and trousers stitched in her usual lopsided fashion. Alaana had sewn a sliver of whale bone into the back of the hood for luck.
Alaana had sighed, shaking her head. “I’m the shaman for all the people.”
“I’m not
looking for advantage,” said Maguan. “There just isn’t anyone else.”
“That can’t be. What about Anaktuvik?” suggested Alaana, naming their uncle.
“He’s no different than father. He won’t go out on the umiak.”
Alaana grumbled thoughtfully. This particular dilemma had never come up before, as no one in their family had ever owned a whaling ship.
Kigiuna was determined to leave the sailing to younger men. As a boy he had lost his father to the sea. Ulruk had set out on a whale hunt one morning, on a day like any other, but had never returned. He had been swallowed by the sea. Kigiuna went nowhere near the ocean when it was wet. He wouldn’t even see them off on the hunt. Though Anaktuvik never spoke of it, Alaana realized that her uncle shared that same pain and loss.
“There must be someone else,” said Alaana. “I have a lot of things to do.”
“I know, sister,” said Maguan. His eyes held their impassioned plea. He looked so serious and torn, a rarity for a man who was almost always smiling. “But…”
He tossed his head in frustration. In truth there were plenty of other men, but none who actually believed Maguan’s boat seaworthy. They saw the strange shape of it, they noticed the slender ribs and the short prow, and they were made uneasy. They weren’t willing to risk their lives for Maguan’s dream.
Alaana ran her gaze along the exterior of the boat, noting the finely crafted cover, fashioned by the tireless work of their mother.
“I named the boat Ipalook,” said Maguan, recalling the name of their former friend, a young Anatatook man who had been killed in an enemy raid.
At last Alaana relented. “For Ipalook,” she sighed. For Maguan.
The men shoveled paths from the ice-bound shore to the open beach and hauled the skinboats to the water’s edge. In the scramble for position Tugtutsiak’s vessel had taken the most favorable place at the point of the Tongue. He had the most experienced crew and the sturdiest ship. Talliituk’s boat lay along the far side, just as large and flat-bottomed as his father’s.
