by Sue Harrison
So in wisdom the decision was made, that both man and child would live, accepted as gifts. K’os hid her joy in her heart, and from that day began to teach Daughter the many ways of River medicine.
Chapter Seventeen
Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula
602 B.C.
THE STORY WAS SHORT, but after Kuy’aa’s long stories about Chakliux and Aqamdax, Yikaas could understand the reason behind Qumalix’s brevity. The people began leaving the ulax, most pausing to speak to Qumalix.
Yikaas pushed through to the back of the crowd. What better way to understand these Sea Hunters than to spend time alone here once everyone had left? Then he could try to see the world as they did, bound by the earthen walls of one of their lodges.
He settled himself in the darkness behind the climbing log, pressed a hand against that log. Stripped of bark during its long sea journey to this island, the log must have its own tales to tell. Perhaps it longed to do so, listening as it must each day to stories from other mouths. But since a tree kept its voice within its leaves, maybe as a log it was content to be silent, preferring to listen rather than tell.
He turned his thoughts to the Sea Hunters, and he wondered what it would be like to live so close to the sea, water that was both boundary and passage.
He considered Qumalix’s stories. They were good, but not as fine as Kuy’aa’s. Yikaas closed his eyes and tried to imagine the old woman as a girl, how she must have looked and sounded. He wondered if she had been as good a storyteller then as Qumalix was now. Better, he told himself. She must have been better. How else could she be so good today, old as she was? Her skin seemed to be as thin as sea lion gut that had been softened by a woman’s knuckles into wrinkles beyond count, and her voice was as scored by age as her face.
“Would you like some water?”
The voice startled Yikaas, and he opened his eyes to see Qumalix standing before him, no longer storyteller, but only a woman, offering an ivory-stoppered seal bladder.
He took it, pulled out the stopper, and drank. The water was good, so fresh that it barely carried the taste of the bladder. He handed it back, and she, too, drank, then sealed the bladder and hung it from a peg. She sat down on her haunches beside him, waved a hand before her face to clear away the oil lamp smoke that was sliding up the climbing log to the square hole in the ulax roof.
“You are leaving now?” she asked, though he had not risen from his place behind the log.
He had the advantage over her, since she sat in the light of the entrance hole while he was in darkness.
“No,” he said, and asked, “are you leaving?”
She focused her eyes on the climbing log, as if she had spoken to it rather than to him, as if it were a storyteller worthy of respect. “It is good, sometimes, to sit in this ulax alone,” she said. “In my village we do not have an ulax set aside for storytelling. I suppose here at the Traders’ Beach they have need of such a place with so many people visiting in spring and summer.”
She paused as though she expected him to reply, but since she was talking to the log, he did not. Let the log say something, storyteller that it was.
“The quietness gives me ideas,” she said. “Sometimes when the ulax is so crowded with people, it seems I hear their clamoring thoughts in my head, so that I forget what I had planned to say.”
Her words surprised him. They so nearly echoed his own thoughts. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “To better understand your people. I had hoped to catch some of the thoughts and ideas they left behind.”
Again Qumalix waved a hand before her face, coughed, and moved back out of the flow of smoke. “The lamp should be filled with whale oil,” she said. “It burns more cleanly, especially the oil of toothed whales.”
Yikaas raised his eyebrows at her. He knew nothing about whales or whale oil lamps, and the realization of the many differences between them suddenly made him uncomfortable. “Wood fires smell better,” he said.
“Sometimes we have beach fires,” she told him. “They do smell good, but usually we save the driftwood to build our ulas and for the men’s iqyax frames.”
“You have no trees on your island?” he asked. Kuy’aa had told him that, but he could not imagine such a thing. How did people live without trees?
“Only willow, and they are not like the willow here.” She held a hand close to the floor. “They grow only this high and along the ground, but we use the bark for medicines, and the old women say that long ago the people sometimes split the roots to make gathering baskets. Grass baskets are better.”
He merely grunted a reply. Why should a man think about baskets?
Qumalix stood and said, “If you want to be alone here, I will go …”
But Yikaas clasped her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “In the next storytelling will you speak about Daughter and how K’os raised her?” he asked.
“No one wants to hear about that,” Qumalix said.
“I do,” he told her.
“The First Men have heard it before, and it is not very exciting. The best stories about Daughter and K’os happen later, when Daughter has become a woman, and K’os is so old that only the evil in her heart keeps her spirit tied to her body.”
“If I hear a story about K’os raising Daughter, then perhaps I will better understand the enmity between K’os and Chakliux.”
Qumalix tipped back her head as though she were studying the ulax rafters. She was pleasant to look at, once a man was used to Sea Hunter women with their round faces and small noses, their tattooed cheeks.
“What can I tell you?” she asked, the question more to herself than to Yikaas. “Water Gourd, though he was not a man given to new and wise thoughts, was good at remembering the wisdom of others. Once he learned the First Men’s language—and he was more than a year in the learning—he shared the stories and wisdom that he had heard in the Boat People’s village. To the First Men, this was new wisdom, so Water Gourd earned a place with the elders, and though he had but one arm, he began to see himself as being more whole than he ever was as a young man.
“K’os gave Daughter a new name—Uutuk, which means sea urchin, for K’os had found her washed up on the beach, a gift of the tides. K’os taught Uutuk plant medicine and how to set bones and pull broken teeth and ease fevers. Daughter grew in her own beauty, but K’os planned and worked to bend her into evil ways.”
“So Daughter became evil, like K’os.”
“Oh, I did not say that,” Qumalix replied. She sucked at her bottom lip as though considering something and finally said, “Perhaps there is a story about Daughter you should hear. I could tell you now, if you like, here in this ulax, or we could go to a place where we can see the beach and the water and the sky.”
Yikaas looked into the dark corners of the ulax, at the earthen walls that rose warm and thick against the wind, but suddenly he wanted to be outside. He slipped on his caribou hide parka and waited as Qumalix pulled on her sax. The sax was made from many cormorant skins, the feathers shining black and sleek. Qumalix was unmarried, and so wore her hair long and loose rather than bound at the back of her head, but when she put on the sax, she tucked her hair into the collar rim.
She led him to a sheltered place in a valley between two hills, a walk that took them beyond sight of the village. They sat down behind a hummock of grass, and the blades of that grass cut the wind so it came to them in tatters, too weak to pull away their words.
When Qumalix began to speak, it was still light; clouds stretched across the sky in strips like storyteller strings ready for quick fingers to twist them into animals, people, and birds. Yikaas watched as the wind pulled the cloud strings into pictures, and when the day dimmed into night, even the stars seemed to hover close.
Yunaska Island, the Aleutian Chain
6440 B.C.
DAUGHTER’S STORY
“You cannot expect them to like you, Uutuk,” K’os said. “Look at you. You’re still a girl, but you know more than
most women. Even their grandmothers do not know how to use plants like you do. Your fingers are quick with a needle, and your voice is the voice of a storyteller. When the young women are with you, they feel like children. Can you blame them for leaving you out of their games?”
K’os’s words fell soft on Daughter’s ears, and again gave her a place in the world. K’os handed Daughter a cup of yellow root tea and said, “Give this to your grandfather. It will lend him a little strength.”
Over the winter Water Gourd had grown weak. Many days he was not strong enough to climb into the wind and sit at the top of the ulax to visit with the elders. They missed his wisdom, they told Daughter. What other man knew so much about life yet gave his advice with such a gentle spirit?
He took the cup from Daughter’s hands, and she held her breath until he managed to raise the tea to his lips. When he had finished, she leaned close to take the cup, and he whispered into her ear, speaking the language that they alone shared.
“I have had a good life, Daughter, but I am old and soon will leave you to go back to our people. Do not cry for me. I have been honored as an elder. Seal and K’os have been generous to me, and you have been a wonderful daughter. I have nothing more to ask for.”
“You could ask for another summer,” Daughter said to him, her thoughts suddenly selfish, wanting the grandfather to live, though he was ready to die.
They whispered as they spoke together so K’os would not hear. She had tried to learn the Boat People’s tongue, but never managed to remember more than a handful of words. During the past few years, each time she heard Daughter and Water Gourd speak that language, K’os grew angry, so now they used it only when they were alone. But K’os had her own small ways of revenge. When Water Gourd did something to displease her, she spoke to Daughter in the River language, which he did not understand. Sometimes K’os went for days without using the First Men’s tongue. But Water Gourd only shrugged off her obstinacy, and ignored her anger.
Usually they lived together happily. Seal had recently made another ulax for Eye-Taker. She was a strong woman, blessed with many children, a new baby almost every two years, so now there were eight, too many for the small ulax where Daughter and K’os and the grandfather lived. But K’os was still Seal’s wife, and with his trading and hunting there was always enough food.
Though Daughter was thankful to have K’os and the grandfather, there were times when she wished she were more like the other girls in the village, with uncles and aunts and cousins living close. Of course, they had Seal’s family and Eye-Taker and her children, but Daughter had come to realize that that was not the same as having blood ties. K’os had honored the grandfather with a River name—Taadzi, which, she explained, referred to the deadfall trap River men used to capture an animal called the lynx. Lynx were known to hold great spirit powers.
Daughter had never seen a lynx, but K’os owned the brown-and-yellow-speckled hide of one, given to her by Seal after one of his trading trips. Daughter had studied that hide, stroked its long, soft fur, and she tried to set an image in her mind of what a lynx looked like. Finally she decided it must be a kind of boar—an animal she remembered from her childhood with the Boat People—though with a softer, more beautiful pelt.
It seemed to Daughter that K’os was a generous woman. She made clothing for the elders, and shared the abundance of meat that was given to the grandfather in appreciation for his wisdom. During the days when the grandfather was outside speaking to the elders and Seal was away hunting or trading, K’os even shared her bed, for she was willing to give what a man needed, even if he was not her husband.
“Someday you’ll give the same joy yourself, Uutuk,” K’os often told her, and then went on to explain how men liked to be touched and how a woman could get what she wanted, trading pleasure for many things.
When Daughter was with the other girls of the village, they sometimes spoke of the ways of men with women. None of the girls had yet come into their moon-blood times, and none had bedded a man, so they knew only what they had managed to glimpse or hear. During this giggling and foolishness, Daughter pretended to be one of them, to know little and wonder much, and she did not tell them anything K’os had said to her, for she had learned as a child that the ways of the village were not K’os’s ways, nor were K’os’s ways always accepted. It was better to be quiet; it was better to hold what she knew within herself, because once words left her mouth she could never hide them again under her tongue.
One night when the grandfather was asleep and Daughter was sewing by the light from the whale oil lamp, K’os came and sat down beside her.
“I’m worried about your grandfather,” K’os said. “I have a small amount of caribou leaf, a plant I brought with me when I came here from the River People years ago. It’s a strong plant, with many powers for good, and I have saved it for someone special. Now is the time to use it. Otherwise I think he will die before summer.”
She crouched beside Daughter on her haunches and opened the River otter medicine bag. She pulled out the familiar packets of plant medicines, each tied with colored sinew. Finally she brought out one so old that the hide packet had become brittle. K’os cut the knots and dumped the contents of the packet into her hand. The caribou leaves were merely dust, so light that a breath would take them away. She divided the powder between three wooden cups, handed one to Daughter and told her to mix it with oil and smooth it over Water Gourd’s face.
They kept a sealskin of fat in a storage niche in the ulax wall. The sealskin was turned hair side in, and the summer before, Daughter had stuffed it full of seal fat cut in strips, all meat removed. Over time, the heat from the fat rendered out the oil.
Daughter got the sealskin, opened the neckflap, and tipped the skin to pour out some oil. She used her fingers to blend in the caribou leaf powder, then went to the grandfather, to his sleeping place at the back of the ulax, pulled aside his curtain, and began to smooth the oil into his face. He snorted a little, but did not awaken, and after a moment, he even smiled.
His body had grown gaunt over the years, his face pinched and lined, and his eyes had sunk deep into his face. He had never agreed to have his skin tattooed, nor did he pierce his lips for labrets. Instead, he wore long, thin mustaches that hung down over his mouth, the custom of the Boat People, whose faces came to Daughter like ghosts in a dream, scarcely remembered.
K’os had had her own cheeks tattooed, and even the tops of her thighs. Often she and the grandfather argued about the tattoos that Daughter should receive, the lines across the cheeks, the circles and triangles to beautify her legs. Daughter wished for those tattoos, so she could be like the other girls in the village, but the grandfather said they would only make her ugly, and when she became old the lines would blur under her skin, become a darkness that would never wash clean.
“He is an old man and will not live forever, Uutuk,” K’os had said when Daughter complained. “When he dies and his mourning has passed, then we will begin your tattoos.”
Daughter thought of K’os’s promise as she smoothed the oil into the grandfather’s skin. Gladly she would stay like a child, skin unmarked, if the grandfather would have more years of good health. She lifted small prayers of hope, and reminded herself that the other girls said the tattooing hurt, and that sometimes a woman was left with scars, ridges that marred the smoothness of her face and legs.
When Daughter had finished, she brought the rest of the oil back to K’os. “There is some left,” she said. “Should I do his neck or hand?”
“Did he wake up?” she asked, ignoring Daughter’s question.
“No,” Daughter told her, but remembering the old man’s smile, she also smiled and wondered what he dreamed about. Did he turn young again in his sleep, enjoy women and have success in hunts?
“Well, you will have to wake him. He must drink this tea. One cup now, and the other tomorrow.”
Daughter set down the oil and took the tea. “Let him sleep until it cools,” K
’os told her, “then wake him and make him drink it all. I will leave you to do this, for I must go to Eye-Taker’s ulax. Seal has a sax he wants me to repair. It is his best, and he does not trust Eye-Taker’s needle.”
Daughter turned so her back was warmed by the oil lamp, but the cup was shielded from its heat. She was glad she had reason to wake the grandfather. Their best times together were when K’os was away, but since last summer, he slept so much that those times did not come often.
He told wondrous stories of the island where he and Daughter had once lived, and on occasion, he would even speak about Daughter’s true parents, her beautiful mother and her strong young father. Daughter had given them First Men names so she could pretend they were a part of this village, that she had others here besides the grandfather. When the village girls were mean to her, the names helped, as did the grandfather’s stories.
She dipped a finger into the tea. It had cooled, so she carried it carefully to the grandfather’s sleeping place. She opened the grass curtain and knelt beside him, called to him in a whisper until slowly his eyes opened. He stared at her as if he were seeing someone else, but then he smiled.
“I dreamed that we were in our village, Daughter,” he said in a voice clouded with phlegm. “Your mother was there and your father and that lazy woman, my niece. We were having the feast of moon promises, and one of the women was pledging herself to a young hunter as wife. There were chestnut cakes, Daughter, and I had lifted one to my mouth. You woke me just as I was going to take a bite. Do you know how long it has been since I tasted chestnut cake?”
“I’m sorry, Grandfather,” Daughter said.
