Ivory and Paper
Page 1
IVORY AND PAPER
ADVENTURES IN AND OUT OF TIME
RAY HUDSON
University of Alaska Press
FAIRBANKS
Text © 2018 University of Alaska Press
Published by
University of Alaska Press
P.O. Box 756240
Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240
Cover artwork: “Mothership” by Carolyn Reed, 1987. Reed has been a resident of Unalaska Island since 1983. Her artwork as an Aleutian artist has been exhibited in over 250 group and solo exhibitions throughout the state of Alaska, nationally, and internationally.
Cover and interior design by UA Press
Author illustration by Cavan Drake
Map drawn by Ray Hudson
“The Sententious Man,” copyright © 1956 by Theodore Roethke; from Collected Poems by Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Nicholai Galaktionoff, in Lost Villages of the Eastern Aleutians: Biorka, Kashega, Makushin, Ray Hudson/Rachel Mason, National Park Service, Alaska Affiliated Areas, 2014, page 13.
Sergie Sovoroff, in Unugulux Tunusangin: Oldtime Stories, Ray Hudson, editor, Unalaska City School District, Unalaska, Alaska, 1992, page 163.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hudson, Ray, 1942– author.
Title: Ivory and paper : adventures in and out of time / Ray Hudson.
Description: Fairbanks, Alaska : University of Alaska Press, 2018. | Summary: Booker and his new friend Anna, a Unanga girl, use a magic bookmark to travel via books and stop a twenty-first century pirate who is taking artifacts from the Aleutian Islands . |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026670 (print) | LCCN 2017039455 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602233478 (e-book) | ISBN 9781602233461 (pbk.)
Subjects: | CYAC: Time travel--Fiction. | Magic--Fiction. | Bookmarks--Fiction. | Books--Fiction. | Aleuts--Fiction. | Eskimos--Fiction. | Antiquities--Fiction. | Alaska--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H792 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.H792 Ivo 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026670
I stay alive, both in and out of time,
By listening to the spirit’s smallest cry.
— Theodore Roethke
CONTENTS
Prologue: In That Time Before
One: The Bookmark and the Ivory Fox
Two: Blueberries and the Pagan Raven
Three: To the Beginning of the World
Four: Fed up with History
Five: Mark of the Raven
Six: Syllables of Memory
Seven: Gravity
Eight: Strength and Endurance
Words in Unangam Tunuu
Word Meanings and Pronunciations
Postscript and Acknowledgments
Nick joked that when people asked him where Aleuts came from, he would tell them, “Tomorrow I come from Makushin!” By “tomorrow” he meant “yesterday” or “that time before.”
“I was right,” he laughed, “’cause I was born there.”
— Nicholai Galaktionoff (1925–2012)
from Lost Villages of the Eastern Aleutians
Unalaska, Alaska
I am seventy-four years old now . . . Someone could write . . . the old stories I have told. Even though I am gone, they could mention my name concerning the old stories.
— Sergie Sovoroff (1902–1989)
Nikolski, Alaska
PROLOGUE
IN THAT TIME BEFORE
The boy stepped into the sea. He lifted cold water over his head, and his breath leapt from his chest. Like the men from the village who stood around him, he greeted each morning with a jolt of discomfort. He was called Lalu—“Yellow Cedar”—the most valuable gift that storms and tides hurled onto these treeless shores. He was crippled, mischievous, and eight. He was smart, and he knew it. He had broken his leg and after it healed, he had limped. His older sister, “Periwinkle”—Tutuqu—the diminutive shell, called him Pitch when he squirmed out of work by complaining that his leg hurt, that he needed rest. He could really limp when he wanted to.
Boys were trained by their uncles more than their fathers in those days. When Lalu’s mother visited her brother and complained about her son, he should have listened. But he was poor and grouchy, and he only growled, “Get him away from me. Trouble surrounds him. Before him and after him. He is surrounded by trouble.”
Cedar’s mother obeyed—her brother, after all, was a shaman—but she left her sister-in-law a gift of red salmon. He would have preferred being a hunter, a builder of skin boats, or a master of crafting bentwood hats. Being a shaman doomed him to poverty. But the spirits had chosen him. From the day his sister visited, he watched his nephew and saw how sparrows and wrens came to him, how he learned what the sky said, how he grew stronger month by month.
Cedar’s tenth summer was like all others he had known. He explored the hills and played along the shore. He teased his sister and did his best to annoy her.
“You’re not a woman,” he said as she picked up her needle and thread. “You should be playing with me.”
Her embroidery showed a skill beyond her years. The fine appliqué on the hems and collars of bird-skin parkas was deft, exceptional. But Cedar hid her needles and her sinew thread. And when her latest boyfriend brought fresh salmon to her family, Cedar stood behind him and pretended to fart.
But when he fell, it was Peri who helped; and when his leg ached for real, it was she who split the thick root of bitter celery, heated it, and bound it from his ankle to his knee, protecting his skin with a layer of dried grass.
All summer, while men hunted sea lions and seals on the wide sea and in the pass between islands, women and old men went to fish camp where they lived for the summer. They caught, split, and dried salmon for winter. Cedar scared away the ravens and gulls. He helped old men drag sea lion stomachs, cleaned, cured, and stuffed with two hundred fish, back to the village.
Children were never scolded, but one day his mother said, “Boys are becoming men. They are learning to hunt.”
He began to play the games that stretched his muscles. He learned the rules of water, to fit his body to the light skin boat, its swift design arcing the waves. He crafted spears and a throwing board, a beginner’s bentwood visor to protect his eyes from the glare of the sun. In the kayak, his crippled leg vanished.
“You are getting skilled with that boat, little brother,” Peri said as he brought it to shore. “Soon you will take your first sea lion.”
He smiled.
“Come,” she said. “I have something for you.”
He sprinted to the top of their home, set deep in the ground and constructed from driftwood and sod. He stood at the peak of the roof near the framed entrance hole and waited while his sister descended the notched pole with grace. Then Cedar cascaded into a room that was spacious and warm. A deity carved from white bone hung in one corner.
Peri went behind a grass mat that sectioned off part of the room and returned with a small bundle. Cedar unfolded it and saw a raincoat of sea lion gut, supple, transparent, incredibly strong.
“You made it?” he asked.
“For you,” she said.
Drifting like smoke from every spiraling seam were thin white feathers from the heads of double-crested cormorants. Each end of the cord that gathered the hood held a carefully fashioned stone bead.
“Your uncle carved them from amber,” she said. “One is for strength; the other is for endurance.”
He knew her life as his sister would eventually end. She was indeed becoming a woman. A man would arrive with a stone lamp. He would light it and with
as much indifference as she might pretend, she would keep the flame burning and become his wife, a mother, the custodian of her own home. But for now, he was glad when she let those lamps sputter and go out.
Fall storms swept the white-capped bay. Ferns turned yellow and brown. The fireweed raged in full glory, darkened, and went out. Sweet berries lingered on their bare stems. In the evenings, Cedar and his friends listened for hours to stories about wars and marauders. How no warrior ever surrendered. How the skin of a captive was never kept whole. Held down to the ground, he had his forehead slashed open with knives. The stories were even more exciting because rumors had circulated about brief attacks on their neighbors, attacks that had been easily repelled.
The days became the Long Month and then the Month of Young Cormorants, the harsh winter months of early and later famine. Cedar and Peri gazed into the night sky and saw Bundles of Codfish: the Pleiades; Three Men Standing in a Row: Orion; Three Men Standing Apart like Caribou: Ursa Major. Peri extended her hand and traced where the Sister-of-the-Moon had traveled to visit her brother. Across the horizon, at dawn, someone emptied a bowl of blood.
Eventually, pale shoots pierced the crushed winter grass. Light came earlier, the geese returned, and people began digging sweet roots. Cedar and Peri took their cousin’s boat to gather seagull eggs. She tucked herself inside while Cedar rowed beyond the village. Their mother would be pleased when they came home, the boat heavy with eggs. The air around the islet was washed with gulls and terns as they pulled the boat above the high-water line on a black sandy beach. Peri had just removed two grass baskets and handed them to Cedar when armed strangers surrounded them.
They were bound, led to an open boat, and ordered into it. The men pulled away from the shore, and before long the islet hovered on the horizon, like a gull in flight, and then it disappeared. Island after island, hour after hour, surrounded by a language filled with unfamiliar words and coarse gestures, Cedar and Peri sat, cramped, afraid, their courage seeping from them. At last they came to Kagamil, among the Islands of Four Mountains, where Little Wren was chief.
Cedar fell on the rocks as he was pushed up the beach, and then he fell again, slicing open his knee. His fine parka was yanked over his head. He was kicked. Wind bit into his flesh.
When they asked him his name, he said, “Lalu, Yellow Cedar.”
“You’re nothing but ashes, boy,” they said. “You’re nothing but Ash.”
He was forced into jobs even old women wouldn’t do. He carried filth from the houses into the hills. He scraped decay from damp corners. He lay beside a dying man to keep that bundle of old bones warm. They fed him fish tails. He licked discarded blue mussels for juice and rummaged in the garbage for scraps. He slept without matting, his good leg bound to a post. He was passed from house to house, a worthless cripple nobody wanted to feed.
He did not see Peri for three days, and by then she was married to a slave who made spear points for whaling. There were bruises on her arms and face, shadows around her eyes. She spoke in whispers.
Once she slipped him a sliver of dried fish. Then she, too, went hungry.
All through autumn, the whales stayed away. These people were whalers and needed whales. Not having any, they would starve. Men sat beside a shaman as he entered a trance. “The whales will return,” they heard him say, “after two deaths.”
First, an old woman who had been ill for weeks died.
From inside another trance, the shaman declared, “The spear-point maker, the whaling slave. He is the one.”
They bound him with thongs that tightened when they dried. They opened his throat with an obsidian blade he had fashioned himself. Peri dragged her husband from where he had died. She dragged him above the high water line and buried him without matting or grief.
All winter Ash suffered from the cold until the chief’s daughter gave him a coat. The hem was rotted and it blossomed with holes, but it kept off some of the wind.
“It is a disgrace,” she said to her father, “to treat anyone this way.”
Ash accepted whatever she gave him.
That long winter, there were masked dances and celebrations: drumming, actors, and straw puppets, the dry rattle of festive parkas hung with puffin beaks, and puffin beaks whispering on circular tambourines. Ash watched from the shadows. The best he could hope for was a quick death by strangling if Little Wren or one of his relatives died. He had heard how a chief, after the death of his nephew, had hurled a slave’s children over a cliff, hoping to find in his slave’s grief some consolation for his own sorrow. Here, on Kagamil Island, Ash was no one’s nephew.
Peri’s needles kept her alive. She sewed for a woman who had six adult sons. She lived on scraps and handouts. In the hard winter, she grew thinner and began to cough. When spring arrived, she was sent to dig roots. And then, when gulls began laying their eggs on small islands, the sons took her out. Ash saw them depart and come home without her.
Summer came slowly until an avalanche of green overran the hills. Blossoms turned into berries, and one morning a crew of old women went to Chuginadak, the island where the sweetest berries grew. Ash was sent along. As the boats came near the mountainous island, a peak towered above them. He stared up until he was prodded in the ribs and told, “That peak is called The Beginning of the World.” Further west, the green slopes of the island’s great volcano flowed into the sea like a ceremonial robe. They rowed into a cove and carried their boats from the water. The old women, cackling like ravens, sent him after berries.
“Don’t you miss any, Ash! You pick them all!” and then they turned to gossip and sleep.
He picked for hours, berry after berry. These were the low-growing moss berries, as dark as night and with a hard-earned sweetness shrouded in seeds and pulp. Raven’s berries. He worked his way up the slope, higher and higher, until he looked down into the cove from a high ridge. He saw an old woman rummaging around inside the boats before fog brushed the valley like a shirt of gauze.
He climbed higher and stepped across bare rock into a bank of clouds. The damp air closed around him as solid as water. He stopped and stared. He listened. He tried to see through the murk toward something darker, a shape that smoldered along its edges. He stepped forward as the haze cleared. A woman stood before him holding out a bowl of berries.
“Take this, Lalu,” she said, using his name.
He saw the glint of iridescence in her eyes. She was a spirit of fire who coated green valleys with ash. She befriended eagles and hawks, kept owls for company. She lived among flames and sulfur. Fire surrounded her with healing.
“Take this,” she said.
He extended his hands.
“If you stay here, you will be safe.”
That night he slept where the Kagamil men could not find him. He wrapped himself in a blanket of sea otter fur. By the light of a stone lamp, by the light of the moon, he remembered how his sister had looked at him for the last time. And when dawn broke across the sea, the body of a whale rose like a dark tongue.
“This old woman,” said Volcano Woman, “is Winterberry’s Daughter. She will teach you what you need to know. She was imperfect until I made her whole.”
He had seen the old woman reach inside the skin boats and rummage around. She had been taking the Kagamil charms, the carvings that brought luck and protection. She looked at the boy and then dropped into his hands two amber beads: One is for strength, the other—endurance.
Winterberry’s Daughter taught him to hunt geese with a bola, how to groove the small round stones and bind them three in a bundle, how to whirl them into a flock with all his strength. He learned to chip obsidian into spear points and how to grind pigments from iron and jasper: red from ochre and a lustrous black from the dried ink bag of the octopus; how to fix colors with heat and the blood of a raven. He became familiar with fire. This and more he understood—not in one year or two, but year after year, until Winterberry’s Daughter, bent double and deaf, had gone out digging roots for the
last time. No longer a boy, he had become a man.
Living around fire, his hair had turned white and his complexion was as gray as the name he insisted on keeping.
ONE
THE BOOKMARK AND THE IVORY FOX
1. Anna
I’m not saying this didn’t happen or that it couldn’t happen again or that I’m sorry it did happen. Only, I should have run when the cupboard door opened and Gram’s voice rolled through the air like pebbles into the sea.
“Ayaqaa! I thought I had some canned milk.”
She stepped off the footstool—she must have gone to the cupboard above the fridge where she stored tidal-wave supplies—and now she stood in the doorway looking into the living room where I was sunk into her couch, my hands immobilized by a snarl of raffia.
“Old Lady,” her eyes widened a fraction, “would you go to the Merc for me?”
“Sure, Tutuqu,” I said, using her nickname, a periwinkle, a small snail. I once asked her how she got that name. “I don’t know,” she said in that musical way she has of speaking, pulling out the second word: “I donnnn’t know.” But then she added, “It was my aunty’s name. We both like stinky oil.” That’s seal oil that has been sitting around for a long time. Family connections among people in the village can be confusing on their own, but nicknames are even more complicated.
I held out the tangled fibers that fought back even after I had given up trying to wrestle them into the circular bottom of a basket. “This is hopeless.”
“I told your dad to come tonight for pumpkin pie.” She took the weaving. “Looking good.”
“Gram, it’s a rat’s nest.”
She handed it back with a five-dollar bill.
“He’ll want more than dessert, Gram.” I slipped on my windbreaker.
She nodded toward the Formica table where a happy silver salmon dampened sheets of newspaper.
“He brought it. But I need canned milk for that pumpkin pie.”
Dad’s not a bad cook, but Gram is better. I have a room at her place and one at home. During the school year, Dad often works late at the cannery and sleeps in long after I should be at school, so I frequently stay with Gram. It was summer now so I slept at home, but I ate most dinners with Gram.