by Sue Harrison
“I will fish,” she told Shuku. She pulled a kelp fishing line from the basket and tied it to a hook she had carved from a clamshell. She knotted the line, then, feeling her stomach rise into her throat, she closed her eyes.
After a moment of rest, she broke a small section of fish from one of the two remaining pieces on the basket and tied it to the hook with strands of her hair, then picked up Shuku, put him in the sling, and adjusted it so that he was against her back, his head peeking out from the neck of her parka.
Kiin wrapped her left hand with a strip of sealskin, then slowly rose to her feet. Her suk had been ruined in the fall, so she wore the parka and leggings she had brought from the Walrus village. She took off her boots and walked slowly toward the water, across the gravel beach, and down the slope of sand left by the tide. She waded out until the sand dropped off into deep water, then uncoiled her line, twisting it around her padded left hand. The cold water numbed the pain in her feet, but Shuku’s weight against Kiin’s back made it difficult to keep her balance in the waves. She stood, feet apart, knees bent, bracing herself, and she prayed to the grandmother spirits of sun, moon, and earth to send her a fish.
When the bite came, Kiin thought it was only another wave, pulling against her as it drew itself back into the sea. Then she realized that the pull was from the line, and she knew it was a fish. She raised her eyes to thank the spirits, but the gray of the sky made her head ache, and so she looked instead at the line, played it out carefully as Crooked Nose had taught her long ago. If it was a cod, she needed to jerk the line hard to set the hook in the fish’s mouth. If it was a pogy, she must be more careful and wait until she was sure the fish was not just nibbling the edges of the bait.
She felt the line move in a long, strong pull. Cod, she thought, and jerked hard, lifting her left hand up and back. She twisted the line once and then again around her hand, and, moving with the fish, she allowed it to tire in its fight against the line.
Almost, her feet stopped hurting, almost she forgot she was carrying Shuku. There was only Kiin and the fish. If the fish gave itself to her hook, then she would have enough for at least another day’s walking, perhaps two. She looked up at the sun, squinted against the brightness of the gray clouds that covered it.
She coiled the fishline around her hand, once, twice. The cod was finally tiring, swimming in smaller circles. Kiin continued to wind the line until finally in the clear water she could see the fish.
“Not cod, halibut,” she gasped, “halibut,” and laughed as Shuku raised his voice in a crowing yell.
She began to walk backward, bringing the fish into shallow water until at last it flopped on the sand. She had no club, so she picked up a rock and slammed it into the halibut’s head. The fish quivered and was still. Nearly the size of a sea otter, it lay flat and dark on the gravel. Food for six, seven days, Kiin thought. She hooked her hands into the fish’s gills and pulled it higher up on the beach.
The effort seemed to force the pain back into her feet and legs. She unwrapped the fishline from her left hand, then sat down beside the fish and loosened the sealskin strips around her feet. Above the wrappings her legs were swollen and red, and the sudden release brought more pain.
“We have food, Shuku,” Kiin told her son, but even as she spoke, her eyes closed, shutting away the too-bright sky. “We should rest, Shuku. It is nearly low tide. We should rest, and then I will gather sea urchins. We will make our camp up in the grass of the next hill, and for a day, we will stay, drying our fish and eating our sea urchins. And then we will go on to find your father.”
She let herself lie down on the beach. She pulled Shuku from her back to her chest so he could nurse, then curled on her side around the halibut. She would lie here for a little while, she would close her eyes just for a moment.
CHAPTER 63
The Whale Hunters
Yunaska Island, the Aleutian Chain
KUKUTUX PUSHED HERSELF UP from her knees, then reached down once more to lay her hands against the rocks that covered her husband’s grave. “White Stone,” she whispered, “I would be content to sit here forever beside you.”
She wiped tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands, then went to the small mound that was her son’s grave. “At least your bones will be a part of this island,” she said to him. She turned away, walked back through the hills to the beach where all the people of the village had gathered.
The men’s ikyan and three longer, wider women’s iks, filled with sealskin packs, lined the shore.
The people were gathered in families, and so Kukutux looked for her husband Waxtal. She saw that he was already in his ikyak, paddling away from the beach.
“Let him go; let him be gone,” some perverse spirit whispered within her. “Then you can stay behind. He will not know until everyone stops for the night. Then it will be too late to come back for you.”
The thought was like some sweetness in Kukutux’s mouth, but she reminded herself that she was Waxtal’s wife, and a wife went with her husband.
“If I stay here,” she whispered into the wind, “then perhaps Waxtal will not lead our men to Samiq’s beach, and Samiq will not die. What chance will there be for this village if Samiq lives and the curse remains?
She realized that Hard Rock had moved to his ikyak and was speaking to the two old men and seven old women who were to stay on the Whale Hunters’ island. “Take care of the children we leave with you,” he said. “We will be back next summer. Watch for us.”
You will be back, Kukutux thought. I will not.
Waxtal did not plan to return. He had told her he would stay at the First Men’s village after the battle at the Traders’ Beach. He would stay and take his place as chief.
Kukutux looked up at the Whale Hunters’ mountain Atal, then again toward the hills where her husband and son were buried. Now all she would have for a remembrance was the strip of fur from her son’s wrapping blanket and the strand of hair and the bear claw from her husband’s sleeping place. The ache in her chest was so great that each breath was like a knife, cutting.
She sighed to lift the weight of her sorrow, then asked herself, “Is my pain greater than Speckled Basket’s? She must leave a child two summers old with her grandmother. Is my sorrow more than what Old Goose Woman feels, seeing both son and daughter leave?”
Kukutux waited as Hard Rock continued to speak, listing the number of seal bellies of oil, the skins of meat and fish he was giving to the old ones and the children—enough for them to live through the winter and beyond.
We who are going with Waxtal, Kukutux thought, we are the ones who will be hungry. But as Waxtal had explained during the many evenings spent planning the journey, the women who were not paddling would use handlines to catch fish. The men in their ikyan would be ever watching for seals and sea lions.
Besides, there would be birds to catch, sea urchins, chitons, and clams to gather. Waxtal and the traders had come this way just the year before. He knew the good beaches, the places to find food.
At last Hard Rock finished speaking, and the men got in their ikyan, seven hunters in all. Kukutux was in an ik with Hard Rock’s second wife and her older children, and with Speckled Basket and She Cries and She Cries’ stepdaughter, Snow-in-her-hair. Unlike most of the women, She Cries would not leave her baby on the island, though She Cries’ mother could have cared for the child. Others chided the woman, but Kukutux would not. If Kukutux could hardly bear to leave her son’s grave, why criticize She Cries for not leaving her baby?
Though she did not fault She Cries for her choice, Kukutux noticed that as the people gathered on the beach, She Cries hardly glanced at her mother and gave the woman no words of farewell. Seeing the sadness in the old woman’s eyes, the tears on her cheeks, Kukutux went to her, put her arms around the thin, hard-boned shoulders, and wept her own tears of leaving into the old woman’s tangled white hair. Then Kukutux went back to the ik and helped the women push it into the sea.
B
ecause of her strong eyes and weak arm, Kukutux sat in the bow. One last time, she looked back at the Whale Hunters’ island, then set her eyes ahead to the flat blue expanse of the sea.
She wondered about Owl—whether he and his brother were also on this sea, traveling far to the east in their traders’ ik. Then her thoughts sped to the far shore of the Traders’ Beach, to Samiq and the battle that was coming to the First Men’s village.
CHAPTER 64
The Alaska Peninsula
KIIN FOUGHT HER WAY UP through dreams. She was a child in her father’s ulaq. She felt the bedding mats against her cheek, smelled the heavy scent of meat cooking, heard a man’s voice.
She shivered and tried to take herself back into sleep. But no, if her father was awake, she was sure to be beaten. She should have been up long before now. She should have taken out night wastes and brought water from the stream, trimmed the oil lamp wicks and been ready to help her mother with food for the new day. She cringed as she thought of her father’s walking stick cracking hard across her back.
She reached one arm out from her sleeping robes to find her suk, something that would offer protection for her skin, but her hand found nothing, not even the cool hard earth-and-stone walls of the ulaq.
She opened her eyes and tried to sit up, but all the muscles of her arms and legs burned with pain, and she felt the familiar throb of too-full breasts. “Shuku,” she whispered, and fear closed in around her throat.
No, she was not in her father’s ulaq, nor even in any lodge made by the Walrus People, and her arms and legs ached as though her father had used his walking stick against her.
Where am I? Where is Shuku? Then she remembered the halibut, the beach. How could she have been so foolish as to fall asleep with Shuku helpless against the tide?
Was she now in some spirit world? If so, she must find Shuku so they could make their way together to the Dancing Lights. She sat up, clamped her teeth against the pain, and spoke to the fear that hampered her thoughts: If I am dead, then why do I hurt? If I am dead, why am I inside a lodge and not outside with wind and sea?
She thought of death ulas, of dead ones bound legs to chest and wrapped in grass mats. Her fear returned. Perhaps she was now in a death ulaq, some lodge used by another village, a strange people, with traditions unlike the First Men’s.
She forced herself to hands and knees and crawled in darkness, reaching out to touch the walls as she moved, until her hands found a woven grass curtain. Pulling the curtain aside, she peered into a large room, saw thin flickering light in the far corner, and near the light a man and woman talking. The woman nursed a baby.
“Shuku?” Kiin said, but her throat was raw and the words were only a harsh whisper.
The woman looked up and stood, the baby still nursing. “Baby?” she said in the Walrus tongue and held the child toward Kiin.
Kiin pushed herself to her knees, then to her feet, and took several stumbling steps. The woman hurried to her side, holding the baby in one arm.
Kiin grabbed the woman’s shoulder and, with breath held tightly behind her teeth, looked down at the baby. In one joyous cry she called out, “Shuku!”
Shuku, nursing with eyes closed, jerked and turned, then let loose of the woman’s breast and held out his arms toward his mother. Kiin, her legs too weak to hold her, dropped down to the floor, sitting in the manner of the Walrus People, legs folded. The woman said something to the man and he left the ulaq, then she laid Shuku in Kiin’s lap. Shuku reached up to wrap his arms around his mother’s neck, pulled himself to his feet, and held tightly, humming a small tune of baby words between quick breaths.
Kiin looked up at the woman, pressed her lips together to hold in her tears. “Thank you,” she said in the Walrus language.
The woman smiled and, pointing at Shuku, said, “He … he …” She paused and traced fingers down her cheeks, to show a line of tears. “I … mmm … I.” Her face wrinkled in concentration, and she finally pointed to her breast, the nipple still pink and elongated from Shuku’s sucking. “I, me did,” she finished and smiled.
“Thank you,” Kiin said again, then for the first time noticed the weave of the woman’s grass apron. Kiin smiled and changed her words from Walrus to those of the First Men, asking, “You are First Men?”
The woman raised her eyebrows and began to laugh. “I am named Small Plant Woman. You are not Walrus?” she asked, speaking clearly in the First Men’s language and pointing at Kiin’s clothing—the Walrus People parka, the caribou skin leggings.
“No, First Men,” Kiin said. “I am Kiin, from the Seal Hunter People.”
The woman tried to answer but could not force her words out through her giggles, and Kiin, with Shuku warm and well in her arms, felt giggles rise in her own throat, so that for a time neither woman spoke, but let laughter weave its net between them, catching them together in joy.
They are Ugyuun, Kiin told herself, as she sat with Small Plant Woman and the six other women who had come to the ulaq. Each woman had the snarled and dirty hair of the Ugyuun. Even the smell of their skin was like something sour and old.
With the knowledge came a heaviness in Kiin’s chest, but then she rolled up her leggings, looked at the cuts and scrapes on her shins and feet. They were well healed, with no red lines running up from her wounds to spread their poison to her heart.
“So,” her spirit voice whispered, “they are Ugyuun. You see the caring in their eyes; you hear their laughter as they speak to one another about the small things of life. Why should you care what village they call their own? They are good people.”
And Kiin nodded. What mattered the most? The cleanliness of a woman’s suk or what she carried in her heart?
“Six days you slept,” an old woman said. “Six days my daughter here, she watched over you and fed your baby when she could not get you to feed him.”
Kiin looked at Small Plant Woman. “I slept for six days?” she asked.
Small Plant Woman’s soft smile told Kiin she held no resentment over the time Kiin had claimed from her.
“Six days,” the old woman said again and nodded her head quickly many times, something all the Ugyuun women seemed to do when they wanted to impress Kiin with the truth of their words.
“Sometimes, though, you seemed awake,” said Small Plant Woman. “You spoke in Walrus words and often called your son. He is named Shuku?”
“Yes,” Kiin said.
“What happened to your legs and feet?” Small Plant Woman asked.
Kiin crossed her arms over Shuku, the baby sitting in the circle of her legs. He watched the Ugyuun women, sometimes looking back over his shoulder at Kiin, his dark eyes as serious as those of an old man. “I fell down a cliff,” Kiin explained. “I was gathering eggs.”
“Yes,” Small Plant Woman said. “My husband Eagle found you on the bird beach. You and your son.”
“You did not know to put salmonberry leaves on your legs?” an old woman asked. She shook her head at Kiin and clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “There are salmonberries in the mountains.”
“Yes,” Kiin said, meeting the old woman’s eyes. “But my thoughts were on other things.”
“You were on that beach alone?” another woman asked, and then the other women, the four that sat on the floor with Small Plant Woman, and the two that stood behind them with arms crossed, all began to speak, their words flowing together in many questions, their voices rising until finally one of the women standing in the back shouted out, “Be quiet! We are worse than murres on their eggs.”
Kiin thought she recognized the woman—her sharp-edged nose—from long ago when Kiin and her brother Qakan had come to this Ugyuun village before Qakan sold Kiin to the Raven. A chill of uneasiness passed over her, but her spirit whispered, “She will not remember you. You are strong now, inside. Then you were only beginning to be strong. You do not look the same. You are not the same.”
So Kiin lifted her head, let her eyes shine with the strength
she had won through prayers and songs and living. She laughed as the Ugyuun women laughed, and waited for the next question.
Again the old woman spoke: “Small Plant Woman says you are named Kiin. Was the name something you chose yourself or was it given to you by another?”
“By my father,” Kiin said.
“Why would a father call his daughter such a name?” another woman asked.
Kiin pressed her lips together, felt her face grow hot. Yes, what father would name his daughter Kiin—“Who,” a denial of her existence?
Kiin looked at the woman. “He wanted a son,” she said, explaining nothing more—not the beatings nor the years she had lived believing she had no soul, the years when she could not speak without stuttering.
Several of the women nodded their heads, then one asked, “Where is your husband?”
“Not far from here,” Kiin said. “The Traders’ Beach.”
Several of the women nodded.
“Why do you wear Walrus clothing?” Small Plant Woman asked. Another woman, young and looking so much like Small Plant Woman, with thin face and round black eyes, that Kiin knew they must be sisters, nodded her agreement with Small Plant Woman’s question. “Why do you call your baby by a Walrus name?”
Kiin looked into the Ugyuun women’s faces. Each woman was thin; each woman’s skin too pale, each woman’s lips dry and peeling. Kiin thought of what the Raven would give for her return, and she was afraid.
“My father is a trader,” Kiin said slowly, beginning with words that were true, hoping the Ugyuun women would see that truth in her eyes, in the straightness of her words. “My brother also, until he died. These clothes were made by my own hands after the manner of the Walrus People. When other women see them, they want them for use in winter, and so my father can trade these things and bring in knives, oil, and meat to the Seal Hunters because of what I made.”
Some of the Ugyuun women, including Small Plant Woman, smiled their understanding; but others, like the large woman with the loud voice, narrowed their eyes as though they wanted to see through Kiin’s skin to the secrets she hid in her heart.
