by Sue Harrison
When she had filled her net gathering bag, she cracked open a sea urchin and used her thumbnail to scoop out the orange eggs. She popped her thumb in her mouth and smiled. The winter had been long; it was good to have fresh food again. But now it was time to return to the lodge. Her breasts, full of milk, ached with the need to nurse Shuku.
“You should have brought Shuku with you,” her inside voice told her. “He would have been no trouble strapped under your suk. Then you could have stayed away from the lodge and Lemming Tail even longer.”
“Shuku was asleep in his cradle,” Kiin answered.
Besides, now that he was a year old, he was more difficult to carry, bouncing against Kiin’s back, struggling to free his arms from Kiin’s suk, crying for more than his share of sea urchin eggs. But Kiin smiled. No mother had a better son, she thought, and ignored a sudden and painful remembrance of Takha.
As she walked back through the village, she began to hum a song, a lullaby sung by First Men mothers. In one moon the people would leave this winter village to make a salmon camp on the Walrus People’s river. Salmon camp was a good time of year, with songs and dancing, beach fires and much to eat. This year she and Lemming Tail might be there alone without the Raven, but that would not be terrible. They would have less work to do without his demands.
When she ducked into the lodge’s entrance tunnel, she heard Shuku crying, and she shook her head at Lemming Tail’s laziness. How many times in the two moons since Mouse had been born had Kiin cared for him while Lemming Tail visited other lodges? How many times had Kiin nursed both babies? Lemming Tail should do the same, especially since Kiin was gathering food.
She pulled aside the curtain that divided the lodge, and said, “You could not feed my son while I was gathering food for you?”
Lemming Tail sat on the sleeping platform, her legs thrust out flat before her, her back against the lodge wall. Standing beside the bed were three of Lemming Tail’s brothers. The men wore furred parkas and leggings. An ivory labret pierced the skin beneath the eldest brother’s lower lip, and its weight drew his face into a grimace. He held a feathered hunting lance, point up, as though it were a walking stick, but the other brothers carried no weapons and stood with their arms folded across their chests.
Lemming Tail smiled at Kiin and reached for the bag of sea urchins, but Kiin slung the bag over her arm and went to Shuku’s cradle. He hiccoughed and held his hands out to her, tears like clear beads on his cheeks. Kiin tucked him close, and he laid his head against her neck. “You could not feed him?” Kiin asked again, anger making her words rise into impoliteness. She pulled up her suk and cradled Shuku in both arms so he could suckle.
“I am first wife,” Lemming Tail said. “What more should I do than take care of my own son, my husband’s son?”
“I was gathering food for us, for you,” Kiin answered.
One of Lemming Tail’s brothers stepped toward Kiin, but Lemming Tail rose to her knees and reached out to grab his wrist.
“Let me tell her,” she said. She turned to Kiin and said, “I have decided you will not stay in this lodge. When my husband returns, you may come back. If he wants you. But remember, my baby is Raven’s son. Your baby belongs to a man Raven killed.”
Kiin ground her teeth to hold in her anger. “Who told you this?”
Lemming Tail shrugged. “Who does not know that Raven killed your first husband? And you told me yourself that Shuku was your husband’s son.” Lemming Tail licked her lips and laughed. “You think Raven will raise a son who might someday decide to kill him to avenge his own father’s death?”
Kiin looked at the baby in her arms. “My son would not kill the Raven,” she said, but even as she said the words, she heard her spirit voice whisper, “How can you answer for your son? You do not know what he will be when he is a man.”
Lemming Tail’s brothers laughed, and the eldest said, “We will let Raven decide what he wants when he comes back, but now we are here to see that our sister has no problems with you. Take your son and leave.”
Kiin shook her head. Lemming Tail must know that a woman alone, without ik or lodge, and with a baby to care for, would soon die. But then Kiin’s spirit whispered, “No, Kiin, you know you can go to the Grandmother and the Aunt.”
I cannot, Kiin thought, and fear grew hard and brittle in her chest. How could she go to the Grandmother and the Aunt? If she lived in their lodge, her thoughts would soon enter the Aunt’s dreams, and then she would know Takha was alive. How could Kiin take that chance?
“The Aunt already knows Takha is alive, Kiin,” her spirit said, “and she has done nothing.”
“She does not know,” Kiin said, and realized she had spoken aloud, that Lemming Tail and her brothers were staring at her. Kiin’s embarrassment and her fear suddenly changed to anger. She turned her eyes toward each brother.
They looked away, blinking.
“The Raven will punish you,” Kiin said.
The youngest of Lemming Tail’s brothers shuffled his feet and looked down, but Lemming Tail said, “What? My husband will punish me because I try to protect him? What more can a wife do than to protect her husband?”
“And if I do not go?” Kiin asked.
“That is why my brothers are here,” Lemming Tail said.
Two of the men moved toward Kiin, but she said, “Do not touch me or my son. I will go, but I will take what is mine.” She went to the basket corner and took the largest basket, one she had woven herself from split willow root.
“Nothing here is yours except your son,” Lemming Tail said.
But the oldest brother looked at his sister and said, “Let her take what is fair. Some of the food, the oil, sleeping furs. What if you are wrong and Raven is angry? Do you want him to know you made her leave with nothing?”
Lemming Tail spat out angry words at her brother, but Kiin turned her back on them. She found a strip of dried seal meat for Shuku to chew on and set him on her sleeping platform, then she filled her basket, taking furs and sealskins, dried fish and meat, needles and awls, carving tools and carvings, and a parka and leggings she had made for herself in the manner of the Walrus People. As she packed, she planned.
For a day or two, she could stay with Shale Thrower or perhaps Ice Hunter and his new wife, but it would not be comfortable. The women would be afraid Kiin was asking for a place in their husband’s lodge as second wife.
Then Kiin’s inside voice said: “It is time to return to the First Men, to your own people.” The thought pushed away all Kiin’s anger and even her fear. Return to her own people! The words danced like a song in her mind. But what if the Raven decided to follow her? She must not lead him back to Samiq or to Takha.
Kiin put a large roll of twisted sinew into the basket, closed her ears to Lemming Tail’s protests as she took a second roll. Then suddenly her thoughts cleared and she knew what she would do, something so simple that she almost smiled.
Yes, she thought, it is a good time of year for it, when low tide uncovers sea urchins and chitons, when birds will soon lay their eggs. Again joy came to her in a song, but she held back the words and instead strapped the basket to her back, bundled Shuku into his hooded parka and leggings, and adjusted his carrying strap so that he straddled her left hip.
“Our husband will be angry,” Kiin told Lemming Tail. Kiin stopped beside the food cache, reached inside to pull out a seal belly of oil and one of dried seal meat. Turning to Lemming Tail’s brothers, she said, “It is not a good thing to have a shaman angry with you.” Then she picked up her walking stick and left the ulaq.
It was not difficult to find Shale Thrower. Wherever a crowd of women gathered, Shale Thrower would be there, as loud as an auklet on its nest. Kiin did not even have to interrupt, only to walk by, pack on her back, tumpline across her forehead, bag of sea urchins hanging from her arm. Shale Thrower called out to her, asked where she was going.
“My sister wife says I am not welcome in our husband’s lodge,” Kiin an
swered, allowing anger to edge her words.
“Where will you stay?” Shale Thrower asked.
“Perhaps Aunt and Grandmother would have a place for you,” another woman said.
“I am second wife,” said Kiin, “but even a second wife has a place in her husband’s lodge. I will go to the River People and find my husband there. When he hears what Lemming Tail has done, she will be the one looking for a place to live, and I will be first wife.”
Kiin walked on, hiding a smile as she heard the women’s murmurings. “Tell Lemming Tail I take the ik,” she called back to them.
She took the ik from the boat racks and tied her oil, basket, and sea urchins inside, then she pushed the ik out into the Walrus People’s bay. She tucked Shuku under her suk, secure against her back so he could see out over her shoulder as she paddled. She would not take the ik far, but far enough.
She swung her paddle over the side of the ik, and her spirit whispered, “It will be a long walk.”
“It will seem like nothing,” Kiin said.
CHAPTER 29
The Whale Hunters
Yunaska Island, the Aleutian Chain
KUKUTUX HELD A THIN SLICE of halibut meat over the flame of the oil lamp. Her stomach rolled, and she cut a sliver from the end of the meat, sucked it into her mouth. She closed her eyes as she chewed. What was better than raw fish?
She had saved this slice of halibut meat to eat fresh, but had prepared the rest of the halibut for drying, cutting the meat in a slant against the grain and leaving each piece attached to the skin at one end. She had hung the skin on a rack made of driftwood and sat beside it all day, tending a small smoky fire. Usually she just let the fish dry in the air, without fire or smoke to flavor it, but what else did she have to do now with no husband or son to sew for, no basket grass to cut, no berries yet ripe? Besides, she had to be sure no one took her fish. There were too many hungry children in this village.
She tried not to remember when all the drying racks were full of fish or seal meat, when the children were fat and the women had enough oil, not only for food and fuel, but also to smooth over skin and hair.
Kukutux cut off another piece of fish and popped it into her mouth. Now only Many Babies had oiled hair, and even most of Hard Rock’s oil was from hunts long ago. Kukutux had not needed to sit close to Many Babies in her ik to smell the stink of old oil, moldy and rancid, stored too long. But at least they had oil. And Hard Rock had taken a seal only two days ago. Fresh oil, fresh meat.
But why think about Hard Rock? Kukutux asked herself. After today, what chance did she have of becoming his wife? Many Babies would tell Hard Rock about the halibut, and who could hope that there would be any truth in her words? Still, Kukutux told herself, there were other men besides Hard Rock. What about Dying Seal? He was a good man and, some people said, as good a hunter as Hard Rock.
But Dying Seal was in mourning for the woman he had taken as wife soon after the ash had fallen. What greater proof that their village was cursed than the death of White Feet, a young woman, large with Dying Seal’s unborn child? Who could explain why one moment she had been laughing, the next clutching hands to her chest? And before night came, she was dead.
Many Babies had cut open the woman’s belly, hoping to save the child within, but the baby, too, was dead. Dying Seal had a second wife, an older woman, one who could no longer give him sons, and they had taken all the village children who had been left without father and mother. So although Dying Seal now had only one wife, he had many to feed.
Dying Seal was a big man, with hands twice as large as most men’s hands and shoulders twice as wide, though he was not much taller than Kukutux. Yet there was a gentleness in his eyes that made Kukutux smile when she saw him with children. Still, Dying Seal was not a man to have many wives, and more than once she had heard him arguing with other men as they discussed who should take care of the too many women in the village.
Kukutux had heard the crying in Dying Seal’s voice as he asked, “How can a man bear to see his wives without good clothing, without oil to warm the hands and protect the face? How can he come back from hunting with enough only for one and see the wanting in his women’s eyes? How can a hunter eat his own share when he has three or four wives, all starving? But if a hunter does not eat, how can he hunt?”
Perhaps, Kukutux thought, when his mourning is over, he will look at me and see that I am thin and will not eat much. Perhaps he will again decide to take a second wife, someone to help with all the children. She took another bite of meat and heard the steps of someone at the top of her ulaq. She looked up at the strip of smoked halibut now hanging from a ulaq rafter and felt a shameful longing to hide the meat. Who in the village had less than she had? Was it right that she should have to share this small amount? But then she remembered the stories her grandmother had told her, of women selfish with food, of hunters who did not give shares of what they took, and how the spirits turned against them, allowing the strongest hunter to grow weak, the sleekest woman to become sickly. So she left the fish where it was and stood, waiting to see who would call down from her smokehole.
But though Kukutux waited, no voice came, until finally she herself called up, inviting the one at the top of the ulaq to come in. When she saw feet and legs, she knew it was Hard Rock. As the man climbed down into her ulaq, Kukutux pushed away frightened thoughts that spun themselves into her mind: that Many Babies had forced Hard Rock to come and ask Kukutux to leave the village, that Hard Rock would take away the portion of halibut she had kept.
Hard Rock stood before her, held hands palm up, so that Kukutux said, “I have meat.” She offered the strip of raw halibut she had been eating, but a sinking came into her stomach as she realized that a hunter like Hard Rock would eat that meat and still expect more, perhaps all the halibut she had taken as her share, something she hoped would last her for five, six days of eating.
“Water,” Hard Rock said, “only water.”
Kukutux, her relief like a song bubbling in her chest, reached up for a seal bladder water container and handed it to him. Hard Rock squatted down, lifted the water container to his lips and drank, then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and gave the seal bladder back to Kukutux.
He motioned for Kukutux to sit beside him, and she did so. He wore his birdskin suk, the black puffin skins joined with strips of sealskin. Beads cut from the insides of clamshells hung from the high stiff collar edge. Bits of seal esophagus, white from being frozen as it dried, were sewn as decoration in a long line down the front of the suk.
For a moment Kukutux let herself imagine being wife to such a man—a man whose name was known in villages on all the islands of the earth. But then she remembered Many Babies, the anger in the woman’s eyes, the lies that floated so easily from her tongue. Better to be alone, Kukutux told herself. Better to live in quietness.
Hard Rock cleared his throat. Kukutux, head bent, eyes on the woven floor mats, waited, and finally, when Hard Rock did not speak, she looked up at him. She did not allow herself to look into his eyes, to show the familiarity that should belong only to wives, but instead watched his mouth, waited for his words.
Finally he said, “You need a husband.” His voice was harsh.
“I understand that there are too many women for the men,” she said. “I understand that I have neither uncle nor father to speak for me. Even my brother is dead.”
Hard Rock stared straight ahead, as though he spoke to the oil lamp rather than Kukutux. “I had once thought to take you for myself as third wife,” he said. “But Speaks-like-fire asked me to take his sister and then Fish Eater begged me to take his niece.”
Kukutux nodded, but the fact that he had considered her for third or fourth wife made a warmth come into her chest, something that let her forget the stiffness of her left arm, that let her know men still saw her as desirable, not ugly, not lazy.
“All the men have too many wives now,” Hard Rock said. “No hunter can feed the women and
children he has.”
Kukutux looked away, into the corner where she kept her baskets. Why had Hard Rock come to her? To tell her why she was alone, without a husband? Who did not know that? He did not seem angry, and he had not mentioned the halibut, but who could say what Many Babies had told him?
“I caught the halibut today,” she said, her face still turned away from Hard Rock, her eyes still on the baskets she had woven before the ash had killed their basket grass.
When Hard Rock said nothing, Kukutux turned back and looked at him. “I caught the fish,” she said again. “I caught it, not Many Babies.”
Hard Rock shrugged.
“She claimed the fish,” Kukutux said. “She told the men on the beach that she caught it, that I was lying.”
“You used her ik?” Hard Rock finally asked.
“Yes. I have no ik. Not since … not since …”
“You are saving wood to build a frame?”
Kukutux dropped her head. “I was.”
“Now you do not?”
“No.”
“You are too lazy to do this?”
“Who will build it?” Kukutux asked, suddenly angry. “I have no husband. If I save wood for an ik frame, who will build it? Who will give me sea lion skins for the cover?” The anger of her loss, of Many Babies’ lies, and the ache of her belly, empty too long, pushed hard against her words until she spoke as loudly as a man arguing.
“It was Many Babies’ ik,” Hard Rock said. “She had right to the catcher’s share.”
Kukutux looked into the man’s face. “This is something new?” she asked. “The people of this village have decided that the owner of the ik gets the largest share? Perhaps they made this decision while Many Babies and I were out in the ik. Perhaps they forgot to tell me this when I came ashore with the halibut still on my hook.”
She waited, and when Hard Rock gave no answer, Kukutux said, “And does this decision say that the owner of the ik also lies about who caught the fish?”
