Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  He shook his head, smiled to reassure her. “No. Something else—it’s easier to show you. Let’s go.”

  Amaguq stopped his ATV behind Tuttu, smiled at Claudia. Tammy ignored the two men and had begun pulling water out of the ice hole with a hand pump and filling two five-gallon jugs. Claudia jerked her head at Tammy, turned to help her.

  “Got to get some water, Tuttu,” she said. “Since you came out all this way . . . ?” She pointed at the pulkka sled, two ropes attached to the sled and tied to waist belts.

  “Tammy can bring the water back,” Tuttu said. “We got to go.”

  Tammy looked up at her name, glared at Tuttu and his suggestion. Tuttu sighed, killed the ATV’s engine, and took the pump from her. He pushed the pump handle up and down in swift, firm strokes, quickly filling both jugs. The hunter lifted both jugs onto the pulkka, threw the pump and auger in with them, strapped everything together and tied the drag lines to the back bumper of his ATV.

  “Okay,” he said, kicking the machine back on. “Now can we go?”

  She nodded, and Claudia climbed behind Tuttu, groping for the foot pedals with her mukluks. Tammy got on behind Amaguq, and the two ATVs roared up the road, toward town. It was the same road Claudia had walked on when she first came into Utqiagvik, the same road that went by where Kanayuq’s remains had been laid out.

  Claudia hugged Tuttu’s stomach, leaned her head against his shoulder to get her face out of the wind. Coarse brown hairs from Tuttu’s wolverine ruff tickled her cheek; it felt warm against her face, his body felt warm against her chest. The wind whipped his thick brown hair into her wavy blond hair, and mixed the two together, brown and blond swirling around in the chill breeze.

  Turning her face out of the wind, Claudia glanced over at Tammy. Tammy gripped the seat of Amaguq’s ATV with her thighs, clung with her hands to the black luggage rack. She leaned back from Amaguq, head raised up. Her hood had slipped back and the stiff hair on her crown ruffled in the wind, like the hairs on Tuttu’s wolverine trim. Qavvik, Claudia thought, the wolverine. Tammy said they should call her that, but no one had; Tuttu still called her Nuna, if he spoke to her at all. But, yeah, the wolverine would be right, Claudia thought: fierce and independent.

  The ATVs came into town, zoomed by the qaregi, passed by the ruins of Stuaqpak, past the ashes of the Presbyterian church, and around on a road that paralleled the lagoon. Tuttu steered the ATV into a street across the road from the older school, the junior high school, and stopped at a two-story building with gray steel siding; a sign read BARROW CABLE COMPANY on the front of the building, and various microwave relay towers and antennae poked out from the roof. Across from the cable building Claudia glimpsed the burnt hulk of the old KBRW station, its plate-glass window through which the deejay had watched the world pocked with bullet holes. Still standing, though, was the Barrow National Forest, a small sign proclaiming the fact; the “forest” was a frayed piece of baleen stuck on the end of a stick, probably the most widely photographed piece of baleen on the North Slope.

  As they got off the four-wheelers, Natchiq came running out of the building, his shouts drowned out by the noise of a diesel generator rattling in an insulated box by the arctic entryway. More fuel wasting? Claudia thought. He motioned them inside and up a set of stairs just inside the door.

  “The broadcast’s starting again,” Natchiq said. They came into a room crammed with video monitors and electronic equipment. Natchiq waved at a bank of television screens, the same image repeated on ten 19-inch screens and one large 32-inch screen. “See?”

  Claudia froze at the image, the video monitors lighting the room. Big boxes of esoteric electronics hummed and blipped. She pushed her bangs back from out of her eyes, watching the screens in awe. Television. She had thought she would never see television again.

  On the screens flickered a head-and-shoulders shot of a man in his mid-forties, image after image repeated. The man wore a royal blue suit with narrow lapels, a thin red tie, and a white shirt that seemed to glow on the monitor. He had gentle blue eyes, a kindly face, like the face of one’s favorite uncle or grandfather, and a neat, graying mustache. His hair had been swept back from his face in smooth brown waves, with a touch of gray at the temples and sideburns. As he spoke a smaller image flashed on the screen behind him: a map of a country shaped like a curved sword.

  “It didn’t play this far before,” Natchiq said.

  The face . . . Claudia had seen that face before. Some kind of newscaster, that was obvious, but who? Natchiq turned a knob on a control panel, raising the sound. The camera cut from the talking head to brief scenes of archaic-looking helicopters flying over tropical jungle, then to a shot of the jungle turning into flames, and another shot of two soldiers carrying a man on a litter to a waiting helicopter. The medics hunched low in the kind of walk that people who worked around whirling blades soon developed. The grandfatherly man’s face came back on the screen.

  “Who’s that?” Tuttu asked. “You know, Claudia?”

  She listened to the man, tried to put a tag on his voice. The voice sounded familiar, a soothing, slightly bass voice, with a slight accent—Midwestern? Northeastern?—she couldn’t quite place. Vietnam—he was saying something about Vietnam. My God, she thought, did the world survive only to get in that mess again?

  “. . . and that’s the way it is,” said the newscaster, “for January twenty-third, nineteen sixty-seven. This is—”

  “Walter Cronkite,” she said.

  “Walter Cronkite for CBS News. Good night,” he said.

  “Walter Cronkite?” Natchiq asked. “Didn’t he retire in . . . I don’t know, I was a kid then.”

  “Nineteen eighty, eighty-two, something like that,” Claudia said. “He used to do specials, though. Walter Cronkite. I remember him from some old science programs I saw in high school. But he didn’t look that young.”

  “You heard the date: one twenty-three, sixty-seven,” said Natchiq. “It’s a tape. Right day, wrong year.”

  “How’d you pick it up?” Claudia asked.

  “Tuttu, Amaguq, and I have been monitoring for the last week. Shortwave, AM-FM, VHF, UHF, anything we could get working. We just reconnected the satellite dishes today. I think it’s a feed off one of the RCA satellites.”

  Electronics, Claudia thought. The electronics worked. That wasn’t supposed to be, though. “What about the EMP?” she asked.

  Natchiq shook his head. “’Lectromagnetic pulse didn’t get us. It’s a high-altitude effect,” he explained. “Got to blow a nuke at least sixty miles up to create it. The Soviets would try to blanket the lower-48 states, but that wouldn’t get the Arctic. We’d have tried to hit Central Siberia, but might miss their east. Anyway, the EMP didn’t get us, I guess. ”

  As Natchiq explained, Claudia remembered he’d worked for Barrow Cable before he’d gone back to hunting—he’d learned electronics in the Army. “And the other guy,” she said, pointing at the screen. “Where’s the feed come from?” She tried to remember what she could about satellite broadcasting. Someone had to broadcast from the ground and shoot up to the satellite. Satellites just didn’t broadcast on their own.

  Natchiq shrugged. “Anywhere; it’s hard to calculate.”

  Anywhere, Claudia thought. Anywhere. Somewhere out there someone had gotten hold of a satellite transmitter and a bunch of old CBS news tapes and was broadcasting to the world. “So we’re not alone,” she said.

  Tuttu nodded. “We’re not alone.”

  Natchiq had taped the broadcast and was rewinding it. He started it again, and Claudia stared at the screen as the news for January 23, 1967 played once again.

  “Why wouldn’t he—she—just broadcast live?” Tammy asked. “Why wouldn’t they let us know where they are, what’s going on there?” Natchiq shrugged.

  Claudia listened to Cronkite, watched the images—commercials and all—of a time before she was even born. Why just broadcast old Cronkite tapes? she asked herself. Why—because of Cro
nkite, that was why. She remembered her mother talking about those times, about that awful war, and how the stability of Walter Cronkite—that gentle newscaster breaking yet another tragedy to them—had helped America get through. Why? That was why, she thought.

  “Cronkite,” she said aloud. “Whoever’s alive wants to send us hope—not the hope of today, but the hope of a time past. Anyway, they’ve already sent the most important message they can.”

  “Someone else made it,” Tuttu said, grinning slyly.

  “Yeah, someone else made it,” Claudia repeated.

  “So maybe we can, too,” Tammy said.

  Claudia smiled. “Right. Maybe we can, too.”

  * * *

  And maybe we can’t make it, Claudia thought. She wanted to say it, too, but dared not. Thinking could make it so, but saying would make it so. So she kept quiet as they sat in the high school gym.

  Natchiq had rigged up a video monitor to show the Walter Cronkite broadcasts to the villagers. There had been five transmissions since January, five over the last two months. That night’s had been particularly gruesome: a plane crash, a segment on the Biafra war, and more Vietnam footage. The gloom of the old news matched their gloom. Tuttu had done a new calculation of their supplies, and announced it after Natchiq turned the monitor off and the glow of the tube had faded.

  “Doesn’t look good,” he said. “We’re running short of store food—and we haven’t gotten any seals.”

  At first, all the houses feasted well, once the hunters had learned the hard secret of sitting in the cold and waiting for the seal to come to the allu. The seals they had caught so easily had been divided and shared—a piece to some elders, a share to cousins, another share to the Honkey House, as everyone called the group of whites who’d banded together. It had all gone quickly. But on subsequent trips they got fewer seals. On the latest trip—a long wait made endurable only by the blessing of the lengthening sun—of fifteen hunters spread up and down the ice, not one had even seen a seal.

  “The ice has frozen too hard,” Malgi explained. “Though there are leads open here, they must be closed further down, between us and the seals.”

  “We could go further down then,” Aluaq, Paula’s husband, said. “Hike to where the seals are. Find them.”

  Malgi shook his head. “What if they are not there? You will have hiked for nothing. And how long would you hike? And how much energy would you waste getting there? We should wait for the seals—or the leads to open.”

  “We may not be able to wait, Grandfather,” Tuttu said.

  He read off his figures, based on a new inventory—and another round of scavenging—of all the houses’ stores: rations enough to last the whole village perhaps one more month. At the words, Claudia felt the old hunger roar in her stomach again. Was this what life would be from now on? Continuous hunger?

  But Tuttu had some good news. He said that Natchiq had figured out how to recharge a bank of big 12-volt car batteries off a wind-powered generator, like he’d done with Masu’s reading lamp in the qaregi; as long as the Cronkite broadcasts kept coming, they could watch them.

  “We have some fuel left,” Tuttu said. “Some gas, some diesel oil. We’d have more if Edward hadn’t blown the barge.” He frowned, and Claudia recalled the barge blazing, Edward’s body ripped with bullets. “Maybe we could use some of it to go down the coast in boats when the leads clear. Or out on the tundra on sno-gos.” He shrugged, then smiled. “But the best news . . . Puvak?” He waved at the young hunter.

  Puvak rose up from the back of the gym, holding up two squirming pups barely bigger than his hands, one jet black, one almost blond. “Two litters of pups,” he said. “Out of Libby and Susan. Libby had the first litter, but Susan had more. Both out of Rick. We should have teams by fall!” He beamed as the little dogs wiggled in his hands.

  The villagers laughed as one pup yipped, and Puvak was surrounded by kids and elders who wanted to hold and stroke the puppies. He handed one pup to Masu, Malgi’s wife, another to Masik Umiaqpak’s aunt. The two crones held them gingerly, smiling at fluffy balls of fur, the way they seemed to want to crawl everywhere to forever. Masik’s son, Kutchuq, petted the black pup, and it reached to suck on his finger. Claudia grinned. Soon, with more litters, every child in the village would raise her own team, every child would learn to build sleds and weave traces and run dogs.

  “The pups are more mouths to feed,” Malgi said. “And how are we to feed our own mouths?”

  “The dogs can share my ration,” Puvak said, a slight edge of anger in his voice. “Grandfather,” he added out of respect.

  Malgi nodded at the boy, smiled. “You are a good enough hunter that you will feed us all.” The Angatkok sighed.

  “Malgi,” Amaguq said. “Tuttu said we have some fuel. If the leads open enough, we could drag the boat out to the edge of the tuvaq, and run down the coast.”

  “Ai,” he said. Malgi smiled. “‘If the leads open.’ They will not do that soon enough. But even if they did . . . why waste our precious gas? And roam around chasing little seals?”

  “Better that than starving,” Tuttu said.

  Claudia stared at Malgi, at Tuttu, listening to the exchange. The old man was right, of course, so often right. The seals had gone elsewhere, and they couldn’t hunt them from the breathing holes, or even the local ice edge. They would have to go find them in boats. But why not hunt them from boats? she thought. Why should he object to that?

  They had the boats. They had some gas they had carefully rationed. There was even a tattered skin boat in the museum they could use—Malgi’s old boat, in fact. If they had to paddle, they could do that. What was the old man getting at? He looked up at her, caught her gaze, and nodded, tapping his chest. She looked down between her breasts, at the whale amulet dangling on a cord from her neck. Absently, she had been stroking the carving, the carving she had found the day her world had ended, and Malgi had noticed the gesture.

  Agviq, she thought. Yes. The thought crept through her. Of course. Dare she say it? She frowned at Malgi, furrowed her eyebrows. He pointed a finger at her, opened his mouth, moving his lips in silent supplication. Speak, he seemed to say. You speak.

  “We could hunt . . . something bigger,” she said.

  “Bigger?” Tuttu asked, whirling to face her. “Like the ugruk? Like the walrus? Ai, that’s an idea. But they have not come yet.”

  “Bigger,” she said. “Something worth our time, worth the gas, that could feed an entire house—our entire village.”

  Malgi stood, and everyone in the gym turned to him. “Agviq,” he said. “We could hunt agviq.”

  There! she thought. There! He has said it. The whale.

  “The whale?” Natchiq asked. “You want us to hunt the whale?” He shook his head. “With what? Thirty-ought-six rifles?”

  “No, not rifles,” the old man said. Malgi reached under a bleacher seat and pulled out a six-foot-long roll of green canvas. He unrolled the cloth, and held up a long lance, a staff with a barbed head like a missile. A thin rod poked out from the tip of the staff. “With this,” Malgi said, holding it above his head. “With my father’s old darting harpoon.”

  “That?” Tuttu scoffed. “That is a museum piece. It would not work. Do you have the bombs for it? Do you know how to work it?”

  “I killed two whales with this!” Malgi shouted, “Before the government told us we could not whale anymore, I killed two whales. I have used it. As for bombs . . .” He shrugged.

  “I could make bombs,” Grigor said from Claudia’s left, down at the end of a bench. The Soviet stood. “May I see it? I knew of Siberian whalers who used something similar. You have gunpowder?”

  Tuttu punched a few keys on his laptop computer, and nodded. “Twenty pounds, at least.”

  “I could make a bomb then,” Grigor said. “In . . . in the Spetsnaz”—he blushed at the mention of his duty in the Soviet special forces—“I . . . I learned to make such things.”

  Tuttu s
tood, took the darting harpoon from Malgi, held it out to Grigor. “Could you, Russian? If you could”—he smiled—“we could forget who you were and call you Inupiaq. Hah! If we could kill a whale, if the whale would honor us, we could call all of us Inupiaq!” He smiled, a smirk of a smile that Claudia had seen often—the smile he made when he thought something absurd and stupid. “But Grandfather, indulge this stupid boy. Is it not too early to hunt whales?”

  Malgi nodded. “In the old days, it would be too early, but things have changed so much, who can tell?”

  “Can we last until the whales come, though?” Claudia asked.

  Tuttu sighed, tapped some figures into his little computer. “If it’s six weeks—barely,” he said. “We’d do better if we could get even one seal. Perhaps a polar bear—anything.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Malgi said. “We can prepare to hunt whales while we wait.”

  Tuttu shook his head. “Kill a whale? I doubt it. But if we could . . . Ai, what the hell. We have no choice, do we?” Tuttu patted his stomach, and Claudia understood. To really survive, to endure, they would have to catch whales. It was the essence, the true test of being Inupiaq. “Let us try, then,” he added. “Let us try.” He took the darting harpoon from Malgi, and raised it with one arm raised high. The villagers cheered. A whale. They would whale!

  Tuttu stared down at the ground then, and Claudia caught his gesture. Try, she thought, try.

  Or die.

  Chapter 15

  CLAUDIA climbed the steps of the weather tower at the edge of town, and looked west to Utqiagvik. The sun had risen at a respectable five in the morning, and now cast Claudia’s shadow and the tower’s shadow across the softball field toward town. High noon. Her steps echoed on the cold steel treads winding up one side of the tall building, and then she came to the top.

  The weather tower reminded her of Tyco Brahe’s observatory in Copenhagen, a place she’d visited when she was sixteen. Brahe’s tower had a ramp winding inside, wide enough to drive a carriage up, should the King want to drop by and gaze at the stars. On top of Brahe’s tower was a little room, with a railing ringing the roof. On top of the weather tower was a white dome, and a railing around the dome. Both towers were the same height, the same general dimensions, though the weather tower really wasn’t an observatory, but a high shed for inflating and launching weather balloons. Still, she climbed the weather tower for much the same purpose as the Danish astronomer: he, to peer into the past of stars’ ancient light; she, to look into the past of Barrow’s recent ruins.