Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

She crawled back up the tunnel, glanced back at the firmly shut entrance door, then climbed up the steps to the katak and pushed the floor hatch open. Cold, frosty air rose up into the qaregi, into the warmth of the house, she a seal, perhaps, emerging from the sea. Claudia stepped up and out of the katak, and she dogged the hatch below her.

  Safe, she thought, safe. Claudia crawled into her sleeping bag, rolling next to Tammy spoon-to-spoon for warmth, and fell asleep. As the earth groaned below her, and she heard the echoes of the wind still sing in her ears, she hoped that there would be a morning to wake up to, a morning of hard cold and flat, endless ice.

  * * *

  In mid-November, two weeks after the final sharing, and a day after the storm, the people of Malgi’s house and a handful of others from some of the other houses gathered at the old village site to watch the sun set for the last time that year—“to watch the rising and setting suns embrace,” as Tammy referred to her game with Claudia and the two sticks. Claudia stood by with a final stick, and as the orange ball of the sun fell below the dark clouds, the low rays of the winter sun almost flat and barely warm, she stuck a thin stick in the sun, a few inches from the stick Tammy had set in the sun at sunrise. The sun seemed to balance on top of the stick, like a lollipop, and then it set behind it, the shadow of the stick stretching out and then disappearing.

  “Night,” Tuttu whispered. “The long night is here.”

  They filed down to the beach—because the timing seemed right and they had to know sooner or later—and walked down to a little rubber raft on wood skids loaded with sleeping bags and some food. Malgi picked up a long staff, an unaaq, and began to walk out onto the ice. Tuttu, Aluaq, and Amaguq slipped loops of rope over their shoulders, pulled on the raft, and dragged it out onto the ice after Malgi. The old man tapped every few feet, jabbing with the unaaq, jabbing, tapping, walking out onto the ice.

  Claudia watched them disappear over a small ridge. She should be out there, she knew, acquiring knowledge, learning how Malgi judged the ice to be hard enough to support weight, but she couldn’t, not just then. Every time Malgi tapped she heard the cracks like rifle shots, saw the ice break away behind her, saw Rob’s body cold and blue and seeming to sleep. No.

  Tuttu turned, waved at her, and she clicked her citizens band radio on. More precious batteries to use up. “Breaker, breaker, good buddy,” Tuttu said from the CB.

  Claudia smiled. Right, the Arctic Trucker. “Come on, Hat Head.”

  “Hat Head?” Tuttu asked, then he got the joke. Caribou, Tuttu, antlers for holding hats. “Right. Uh, keep monitoring, Claudia. We’ll call if we have trouble. Ten-four.”

  “Ten-four, good buddy,” she said, watching the little raft slide over a ridge and out of sight. “Ten-four.”

  They built a fire and kept warm, the squelch of the CB malevolent with its implications. Tammy sat next to Claudia on a log by the fire, their backs to the bluff, the wind behind them and blowing gently off the tundra. That worried Claudia, because it could push the ice out to sea if the tuvaq hadn’t formed, if the pans of ice hadn’t frozen together and become landfast. The ice was scrunched together in big piles against the bluff, then flat and white out from shore, and another jumble of low mountains against the horizon. The Big Dipper hovered over the ice to the west, pointing the way north.

  A shooting star rose up from the ice, bright red and then fading to white. Claudia stood up as the CB crackled in her hand. My God, they fell through, they fell through, she thought. And then against the glowing white she saw three figures walking toward shore, a dark shape behind them, and Tuttu’s voice came from the CB, three quick sentences.

  “We’re okay,” he said. “Shut the CB off. The tuvaq’s formed.”

  Claudia rushed out to meet them then, the ice firm under her feet now, not scary or tenuous. Tammy came with her, and they took the ropes from Aluaq and Amaguq, who would let them, and not from Tuttu, who wouldn’t. Claudia hugged the old man, and he patted her on the back, still tapping the ice lightly with the unaaq.

  “Good ice, good ice,” Malgi said. “That storm did it. The pressure ridges are almost a hundred feet high, and there’s hard ice maybe half a mile out from that. Good ice, the hardest ice I’ve seen in years.”

  Tuttu glanced over at her, and she stared into his eyes and he into hers, and she saw there something she hadn’t seen for a while, something warm and moist and not hard. Hope, she wanted to say, but no, not quite that. The possibility of hope. Too soon for hope, yet, but the possibility of hope, perhaps.

  “The tuvaq’s formed,” Tuttu said, and in case she didn’t understand what that really meant, he explained. “We can hunt seals.

  “Maybe we can survive.”

  Chapter 11

  WHITE ice, flat ice stretched from the edge of the beach to a jumbled mass against the horizon. The trail down from the qaregi to the beach had been trampled flat and smooth by the daily travels of those on honey bucket duty—whoever had to cart the day’s piss and poop to the barrels at the edge of the ice. Malgi led the seal hunting party down the beach to the smooth, hard ice of the tuvaq.

  Tuttu followed Malgi, of course, and then came Natchiq and Amaguq and the boy Puvak, and finally Claudia. The temperature had dropped ten degrees the night before, and Claudia had snuck a look at the thermometer, though instinct told her to remain ignorant: better not to know how cold, to not know the cold had dropped to thirty below.

  She’d put on polypropylene underwear next to her skin, a pile jacket over a sweater and pile pants over her long johns, insulated pants over that, and topped the synthetic clothes with the sheepskin atigi she had finally gotten the stench out of. Masu had made her a pair of boots—ugrulik they would be called, Claudia remembered—though they didn’t really have bearded seal, or ugruk, skin bottoms. Instead, the tops were of dog fur—the dog Claudia had shot—and the bottoms were rubber from old Air Force mukluks Masu had salvaged from the village dump. Claudia used half a tube of precious Shoe Goo to seal the holes and cracks in the rubber bottoms. The boots were insulated with felt liners from her shoe pacs, and stuffed with caribou fur scraps. With two pairs of wool socks and a polypro liner they were warm as hell.

  A compromise, Claudia thought, looking down at her boots, at her insulated pants patched with duct tape, at her sheepskin atigi. Malgi kept asking her what the old ways dictated, how hunters might have dressed before such things as Air Force mukluks appeared in dumps, and she’d dutifully dig through her books and show him. But what it came down to was that they didn’t have the materials, didn’t have ugruks to make soles with, and so had to use up the modern stuff first.

  The sled they pulled was a compromise, too, just like Tuttu pulling the sled instead of the dogs was a compromise. Malgi had wanted them to make a traditional toboggan sled, one of baleen, perhaps, but they didn’t have baleen, the hard keratin plates that hung from the mouths of bowhead whales, so what did Malgi expect? Tuttu didn’t want to use his dogs, not yet, not until he had a spring litter. Those dogs were precious and Puvak guarded them like his own children. One of the tanik schoolteachers, since deceased, had had a hard plastic sled called a pulkka, a real high-tech Norwegian thing with long fiberglass poles and a padded harness, something the schoolteacher had bought to drag his kid around town in winter. Tuttu had appropriated that from the village supplies, and piled their hunting gear into the neat little nylon bag of the pulkka.

  And the rubber boat was a compromise, too, Claudia thought. They’d strapped on the half-inflated rubber raft Malgi had taken with him that day he tested the tuvaq. One of her books had talked about small boats, umiaqluuraq, used to retrieve seals in open water. Well, the little skin boats would have been fine, but there wasn’t even one in the Barrow museum, just a large umiaq, and so they took the rubber raft.

  Malgi led the way, trodding slowly over the flat ice, stabbing occasionally with his unaaq to test the ice, though even to Claudia’s untutored eye the ice looked solid and firm. Good habits shouldn’t be b
roken, she thought; she found the steady pock-pock sound of Malgi’s staff reassuring. She copied his cadence with her own unaaq, walking next to Tuttu.

  The refracted rays of the hiding sun bounced up into the clouds behind them, giving them some light to steer by. A low line of fog rose above the horizon, the puyugruaq, a cloud of gray steam below the dark clouds of black that indicated an open lead. The puyugruaq gave them something to steer for, something to head to, and indeed it was why they went out on that morning: at the open lead would be seals.

  Each hunter carried a rifle strapped across their shoulders, wrapped in canvas or an old skin, the rifle resting at the small of their backs. Claudia felt the reassuring bounce of the rifle, a 30.06 she’d borrowed from the village armory, six rounds warm and wrapped in foam at the bottom of her parka pocket. Six rounds each, the day’s ration. They’d catch seals with that or not at all.

  Malgi stopped at something ahead, held out a hand to them to hold back. Tuttu undid the pulkka’s belt harness from his waist, stepped forward cautiously to Malgi. He turned back to them, smiled, motioned to the rest of them to join him and Malgi.

  The old man stood over a little dome of clear ice, a small iglu about a foot wide, a model of comic-strip Eskimo houses, a little iglu that most people thought western Eskimos really lived in. A crater of jagged ice surrounded the little dome, like the edges of a scrambled egg, and the center of the dome was black and wet.

  “The allu,” Malgi said, glancing up at Claudia.

  “Seal-breathing hole,” she said, and Tuttu smiled at that.

  “A seal will come up here?” Puvak asked the old man.

  Malgi shrugged, smiled back. “Not now. We have made too much noise and probably scared it off. But eventually. See how the ice is thin?” He tapped the dome lightly. “Natchiq”—he smiled at Tuttu’s hunting partner, recalling the cousin’s namesake—“comes here every hour or so, breaking the ice, keeping it open, taking his long breaths.”

  “We could hunt the seal here,” Natchiq said.

  Malgi nodded. “If we wanted . . . if we did not mind holding still, and waiting.” He laughed. “It may come to that, Grandson.” The old man stood, resumed walking, and they followed him.

  Lesson over, Claudia thought, but he was right. It might come to that. Without rifles, without firearms, the long wait at the allu was a more efficient way to hunt seals, if you did not mind the long wait. She shivered, chilled from the brief stop, and walked faster to warm up.

  * * *

  A minor mountain range of ice greeted them at the end of the thousand yards of flat ice. Claudia imagined a tin sheet jammed against a wall, and then pushing on the tin from the edge. That’s what the storms did to the new sea ice that froze and grounded against the narrow continental shelf. Malgi stopped at the beginning of the jumble of ice boulders and jagged slabs, then turned to the men. He smiled at Claudia, and she smiled back. Yes, age has its privileges.

  Tuttu sighed, rummaged in the pulkka, and pulled out three axes, handing one each to Natchiq and Amaguq. The three men began chopping away at the ice, making a path through the smallest of the ridges. Claudia relieved Amaguq for a spell, but he took over after he’d warmed his insides with a swig of hot tea from a thermos. As the path grew longer, Claudia dragged the sled forward. Puvak kicked the larger pieces of ice out of the trail. Chop, chip, scrape; but the work wouldn’t be wasted, as long as the pressure ridge held. It would be their escape to the lead. And the lead beckoned before them, a thickening cloud of steam just over the ice ridge.

  As she pulled the pulkka over the top of a ridge and down to a narrow stretch of ice, Claudia thought that this must have been what it was like for Balboa to discover the Pacific Ocean. A new world beckoned beyond the land floe, a world of gray, thinner ice, an open lead at the edge of the new ice, and another ice pack beyond. An uiniq. The Arctic coast had been extended a bit farther, a new bluff created, but the lead teemed with life the way the open water held life in the summer.

  Tuttu, Amaguq, and Natchiq set down their axes, stared at the open water steaming in the twilight. Malgi came up behind Claudia, unaaq tapping, and she and Puvak helped him down onto the flatter ice, pulkka dragging behind her.

  “Ai,” the old man said. “This is it.”

  A little gray head bobbed up perhaps five yards from them, at the edge of the new ice. Its deep brown eyes stared at them, its whiskers frosted with water that quickly froze. The seal sniffed, a quick deep breath, then ducked under the open water.

  Tuttu whipped his rifle around, unsheathing the firearm and jamming his shells in. The other two men followed him, the boy beating them in the race to get rifles ready, and Claudia unstrapped the pulkka harness from her waist. As she did so the plastic sled scraped the ice. Tuttu whirled at her, a scowl on his face.

  “Quiet!” he hissed.

  Malgi giggled, put an arm around Claudia, and began laughing louder. Tuttu glared at him, not wanting to admonish the old man, but his face got red, turning angrier and angrier. What was the old fool doing? he seemed to be thinking—trying to scare the seals away?

  The seal bobbed up again, its brown eyes looking at the men. No wonder, Claudia thought, no man had hunted seals from the ice edge, not even Natchiq, in a decade. Little natchiq must think us mad, she thought.

  She looked at the seal in the water, watching him as he took a deeper breath, his nostrils flaring quickly open as—whoof!—he sucked in air. Little natchiq, yes, she thought, the ringed seal, his gray and black coat spotted by doughnut-size rings. The sound of outboard motors might scare him, but this, this . . . The seal dove again.

  “He hears the sled scraping,” Malgi said between chuckles. “Grandson, the woman brings the seal to us.”

  “Good,” Tuttu snorted, still angry. “Then scrape again, so I may kill it.” He sighted down the rifle, watching the water. Puvak imitated him, his .22 rifle steady in his arms, cocked and ready.

  Malgi sighed, gave Claudia a look she recognized well now, a “these children are so stupid” look not unlike the exasperated sigh one of her grade school teachers used to wear. Malgi knelt by the pulkka, pulled out the half-inflated rubber raft and its two plastic oars, began connecting a hose to the raft and to a foot pump.

  “And how will you retrieve little natchiq?” Malgi asked. He pointed at the raft.

  Tuttu lowered his rifle, turned to look at Malgi. He grinned, reddening slightly, and nodded. “Ai, Grandfather.” The young hunter stepped on the foot pump, began pushing up and down, the air from the bellows hissing into the raft, and the raft growing larger like an inhaling lung. Puvak glanced at the older hunters, back at his father. Amaguq nodded, pointed with his chin at the water. The boy smiled.

  The two chambers of the raft swelled to almost bursting. While Tuttu kept pumping, Malgi jerked the hose out of the raft’s valve and screwed it tight. For a few strokes the hose blew air on the snow, hoosh, hoosh. Tuttu stopped, put the pump away, turned to the open lead.

  Claudia heard Puvak suck in his breath, a quick intake of air, and she thought for the moment what his name meant: lung. She thought of all the words that came from that root: puviq-, to inflate; puviun, air pumps; puviuraaq, balloon . . . Lung, inflate, pump, balloon, the raft and the boy and his name. Puvak, his father had explained once, because the child screamed so much as a baby they thought him all lung; he had had his Inupiaq name since infancy. The boy sucked in a quick breath, and as Claudia mulled on the sound and the meaning and what that might mean, the boy’s rifle kicked gently, and the dog of the sea went whoosh.

  Whoosh, the seal took in a long breath, and the bullet cracked through the chill air. A cloud of acrid gunsmoke rose from the tip of the barrel; the barrel steamed from the heat of the explosion. Tuttu turned at the sound. The seal had poked its head abovewater, taken a breath, and with the breath came the bullet, into its skull, smashing it. The seal sank.

  They rushed to the ice edge, a cloud of little bubbles rising up, and then a thicker cloud of red bl
ood. Puvak let out his breath at the blood, grinned at his father. Amaguq squeezed the boy’s shoulder, and Malgi calmly pulled out a long rope from the sled bag, unwrapped a piece of old denim from around something at the end of the rope.

  “Try to retrieve the seal,” he said to Puvak, handing him the grappling hook. The boy took the line and the hook, a big treble snagging hook jammed into a net float and wrapped with twine. “A manaq,” Malgi explained.

  The hunters moved back from the little hunter as he stepped toward the ice. Malgi handed him his unaaq, laid it down on the ice edge in front of Puvak, pointed at it, then his foot. Step on the unaaq to distribute the weight, he meant, Claudia thought. They watched the water, watched for the seal to rise.

  It had been a good shot, she knew, a head shot, a killing shot. If he’d timed it right, Puvak had killed the seal after it had taken a breath, and the seal should float to the surface. Lungs inflated, puvak puvinga, the fall fat and the full lungs should bring the seal to the surface. And it rose.

  Belly up, belly white, the seal came up, with a little clot of shit in its anus, and its penis stiff and erect—like walruses, the seal had a bone to keep it that way. The dead seal rose. Blood trailed from its broken skull, tongue out between its sharp white teeth, one eye flattened and pierced with bone chips.

  “Azah,” Amaguq’s father said.

  Claudia’s stomach growled as she looked at the seal, at the blood, at the violence of it. Growled and rolled, two emotions crashing in her gut. Pity, at the sight of the cute little animal, so much like a puppy dog; hunger, at the sight of the meat, at the recalled taste of seal oil, of fish and meat dipped in thick, rich, fat seal oil. The cold made her body hunger for fat, for grease and butter and such horrid stuff. For fuel.

  The manaq sang as Puvak whirled it through the air, the cord unreeling as the weight pulled the line loose from the boy’s hand. The line cut the clouds of steam rising from their breaths, and then Puvak let go. He let the treble hook fly through the air, ice creaking below him as he shifted his weight forward. Water squeezed out from under the ice, a wave rippling toward the seal’s body. The manaq fell beyond the seal, the line falling across the seal’s body. Puvak pulled the hook in slowly, drawing the cord across the seal’s chest. It turned with the movement, back and forth, the line moving up to the seal’s flippers, straight up like sails. The hooks hit the seal’s thick skin, and Puvak pulled.