Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Claudia imagined the bomb, and the nearest analogy she could think of was model rockets. As a young girl she and her father had made and fired model rockets for a joyous few years before she realized teenagers did not do nerdy things like that. You could buy the engines from some place in Colorado, and the engines were like big firecrackers, like the bomb charge in the darting gun. One charge burned out a ceramic nozzle in the back of the rocket engine. A thin sliver of powder burned through the engine after the initial propellant had exhausted itself. Waiting at the head of the engine was another charge, a brief burst of powder to explode the rocket’s nose cone loose, to pop out the parachute and bring the rocket safely back to earth. Waiting at the head of the darting bomb was the second charge, the killing charge.

  It was like gun and grenade together, she thought. One charge shot the bomb into the whale, and seconds later a larger charge, the grenade charge, went off.

  Tuttu counted off the seconds still. “Eight,” he said, “nine, ten—”

  A section of snow in the target flew out in chunks of ice and steam. The villagers fell to their knees as the ice flew overhead. Then a puff of foam pellets roared out of the open hole, plastic melting and singeing and smoking as the foam tacked to the plywood flew out. The plywood followed, slivers of flaming toothpicks. Claudia relaxed, smiled to herself.

  It had worked. It had gone off just as it should and—

  Out from the plywood came the darting iron, three feet of steel rolling end over end. The villagers hit the snow. “Twelve,” Tuttu continued, as if this was perfectly normal, “thirteen, fourteen—”

  Thunk, the harpoon hit the side of the weather tower, tip imbedding in the steel door, then hitting something hard and solid—finally—behind. The iron thrummed in the air, whipping side to side as fast as the wire whipped. When the iron quieted and the bomb quieted and the smoke and steam and blazing foam had settled, the observers rose. They dusted off their pants and parkas and stood. Their voices were like the chittering of ravens. Claudia met her fellow hunters at the harpoon.

  The point of the harpoon had been buried up to but not beyond the first barb. Tuttu easily pulled it out and turned it over and over in his hands. Sleek and almost aerodynamic, the head of the harpoon was a wedge of curved steel, with one barb inches back from the head, a second barb even farther back. The head swiveled on a shaft on the iron, in theory toggling open. If it had toggled open, it would have stuck in the plywood and foam “skin” of the fake whale.

  “It didn’t open,” Tuttu said.

  Malgi came down the stairs, and walked up to them with Natchiq and Grigor. Tuttu held out the iron for the old man’s inspection. Just behind the swivel of the head was a small hole drilled through head and shaft. Claudia could see a wood peg stuck in the hole. Malgi took the harpoon from Tuttu and pointed at the peg.

  “I thought that might happen,” he said, grinning. “I couldn’t remember what kind of wood to use. I know you’re not supposed to use oak or stuff, because it won’t break.” Malgi worked the head of the harpoon, showing how the wood kept it from toggling back. “My old man used wooden matches.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a wooden match. With thumb and forefinger he tried to snap the match, but it would barely bend. “Good matches, huh?”

  “Got to use crummy matches, Malgi,” Tuttu said.

  “Yai. Crummy matches.”

  Grigor had gone over to the mound of snow and dug for the exploded harpoon bomb. He came back with a shredded and twisted half-cylinder of steel. “It works,” the submariner said. He grinned. “Real well.”

  Claudia thought of the bomb driven deep into the whale, thought of the damage a big “bullet” like that would cause, then imagined the bullet exploding. Azah, as Tuttu might say. The right shot—into the brain, into the heart and lungs—it could kill a whale instantly. And then she thought of how big the whale could be, and how even a bomb like that would be no worse than a pellet gun on a grizzly bear. Still . . .

  “Yah, it worked real whale, Russkie,” Malgi said. And the women and men and children broke up laughing at his joke, the poor Soviet standing dumbfounded.

  It worked real whale, Claudia thought. Holy Mother Mary: we might just be able to pull this off.

  * * *

  A boat. Well, yes, Claudia thought, We’re going to need a boat. Some days after the test of the darting gun harpoon, she stood in the lobby of the Utqiagvik museum staring up at Malgi’s umiaq, hung from the second floor railing. The skin boat had been displayed top side up, paddles and sealskin floats lashed to the gunwales. Natchiq and Amaguq leaned out over the umiaq, tying new ropes to the seats and unscrewing the boat from the bolts that held it to the railing. When they had the boat undone, Aluaq and some other men helped lower the boat to the floor.

  Ten years of hanging from the ceiling of a museum had not been kind to the umiaq. As it came down to the ground, Malgi reached out with his tough old hands and guided it down. He ran his hands over the smooth wood gunwales, over the rough walrus hide covering, over the tight stitches. What he saw Claudia guessed had been diluted by memory, but what she saw was a boat in sorry shape.

  Malgi had told her that he’d given the boat to the museum when the government had ordered the Inupiaq to stop whaling. “I could not stand to see my boat rot away by my house,” he had said. “Better it should rot away in a museum, so my grandchildren can learn what I once had done.”

  While Malgi’s umiaq hadn’t gone the way of the other boats in the village—bleached wooden frames hardly worth firewood—it clearly could not touch water without major repairs. The thick hide skin had cracked and broken in several places. Where old women had long ago pieced together the skins to make the covering, the stitching had stretched and expanded. Claudia knew that a new covering should be made; in the old days, the skins would be good for at the most two years. But where would they get walruses, or ugruk, the bearded seal?

  Malgi walked around his umiaq, touching it and inspecting it and probably remembering it, she thought. His eyes seemed to cloud a little, maybe even mist a little, and the old man’s face had the childish laxness she’d seen in people that meant they had gone somewhere else and were not rooted to the reality of the moment. He shook his head, breathed a long sigh, then bit his lip.

  “We should make some new skins,” Malgi said. He glanced at Claudia. “Would that not please agviq?”

  Ah, she thought. There it is: the new standard. It should please agviq. Claudia nodded, hesitant.

  “Is that not true, anthropologist?” The old man looked around at the other men, and they all turned to Claudia for her learned opinion.

  Shit, she thought. This is what they wanted me for all along. This is the deal I made with Malgi when I first came to the village. This is my part of the bargain, the reason why they have taken me in. I must tell them how to be Inupiaq. They do not know! They do not think they know! And what do I know? she asked herself. What can I tell them? I never whaled, as Malgi did. I never went out on the ice and watched the steaming leads. I never pulled on the lines and dragged the great beasts out of the water. I never flensed and butchered the whale, never decided shares and portions and rewards for this or that. I only tasted the briny maktak. I know nothing! Who am I to tell this man, this umialik?

  All I know is what I have read in books, she thought. Murdoch, Rainey, Nelson. Van stone. Reinhardt, Cassell, Dekin, Hughes and all that. All whites, all taniks, visitors to this culture who tried to report the facts objectively. And what could they know?

  “Well, Claudia?” Malgi asked, breaking her thoughts. “Is that not correct? Would it not please the whale to put on a new skin?”

  “Yes, Malgi,” she said. “Agviq chooses who may take him, who may have his ‘parka.’ He looks at the covering of the boat, sees the bottom of the skin, and the crew with the cleanest hides, the crew that has thought properly of agviq, who has made the right preparations—that is the crew agviq will honor.”

  “If we are so worthy,”
Tuttu said. “But how can this honor the whale?” He waved a hand at the tattered hide, the holes gaping in the old boat.

  “Ah”—Malgi smiled, put an arm around Tuttu—“we can fix this. We can make this boat worthy of agviq. Perhaps we cannot do this in the old way”—he glanced at Claudia, and she nodded, yes, yes, help me out, old man— “but maybe we can do it in such a way to please the whale. Perhaps agviq will understand, and forgive us.”

  “I think . . . I think that would be okay,” Claudia said. Go ahead, she thought. Go ahead, Grandfather, send me out on a thin limb with a roaring chainsaw.

  Tuttu smiled. “If all we need to do is fix the boat, and make it look good for agviq . . . I think we can do that.” He motioned to Natchiq and Amaguq, and Aluaq and the rest. They picked the boat up and took it out the double doors of the museum, back into the world.

  * * *

  A preponderance of garages was available for the taking in Utqiagvik, but Tuttu settled on the old Public Safety Office Building, across the street from Pepe’s. The fire trucks and rescue vans had been driven out during the chaos right after the war, and the burnt hulks of the trucks lay in the parking lot by the Mexican restaurant and the Top of the World Hotel. Aluaq took a perverse pleasure in stoking a stove they’d set up in one garage of the building. He’d fueled the stove, he said, with criminal records from the PSO office—starting with his own “and working right through the alphabet.”

  They dragged the umiaq up Kiogak Street to the garage on a kamotiq, or Greenland-style sled. Originally used by dog teams, the heavy wooden sled proved equally adaptable for being pulled behind iron dogs—snowmachines. As she leaned into a band of canvas webbing sewn into a loop of rope, Claudia wished they had come up with a lighter version. The eight-foot runners—two-by-six lumber curved at the ends—and three-foot one-by-fours nailed crosswise could stand up to sea ice, she knew, but she wasn’t sure they could stand up to it.

  Natchiq had said he would generously allot some precious fuel for a four-wheeler to drag the sledge. Tuttu—the self-righteous jerk, Claudia thought—had said, no, let his crew pull. “Good for their muscles,” he’d said. We’ll pull soon enough, she thought, so I guess we should start now.

  Inside the PSO garage they set the umiaq on old pallets, keel side up. Aluaq threw a fresh bundle of records on the fire—“We’re up to the Rs,” he said pointedly to Natchiq. Four rusty pots of marine fiberglass and paint sat by the fire, condensation steaming away from them. Masu stood as they came in. She smiled at Malgi and he smiled back. The old crone held up an ice pick and a clean white spool of heavy fisherman’s twine. Yes, thought Claudia, the old seamstress. Agviq would approve of that. There was none better in the village.

  Malgi followed his wife into the garage, a roll of something dark brown and rank-smelling in his arms. He set the roll down on the cold concrete floor, untied it, and spread it out. The thing was a circular blanket of four thick skins stitched together. A thick rope had been threaded around the edge. Shallow cracks marred the surface of the hide, but unlike the umiaq skin it was in good condition.

  “The mapkuq,” Malgi said. “For the blanket toss. When we had the whaling festival years ago twenty of us would grab the edge and toss young men and women high in the air.”

  “Grandfather,” Tuttu said. “Not the blanket skin . . . Surely there is something else to use?”

  Malgi shook his head. “I could find no other skins.” He shrugged. “It is a sacrifice. It is necessary.” He nodded to Masu, who took out her sharp ulu, sizing up the mapkuq. The old man smiled. “There are not so many of us now, so we do not need as big a skin.” Masu squatted over the edge of the blanket, began cutting around the rim of the four hides, cutting the rope and the handholds away. “We just need a little hide for the boat. If we have something to celebrate, the small skin will do.”

  Tuttu stared at Masu as she cut. He looks like someone just cut off his arm, Claudia thought. Had he jumped on the skin as a boy? she wondered. He managed a smile, then sat down next to the old woman to help, holding the hide up as she cut.

  Masu cut the piece of hide into six-inch strips, wide enough to cover the gaps between shrunken skins on the boat. Her gnarled fingers flashed, the awl whisking in and out the tough hide, and she repaired the holes. Small holes got patches inside and out, seams were reinforced, tears repaired. The skin covering of the boat did not look new, but it looked like the umiaq could float. Masu tied off the last stitch, looked up from her work.

  She shook her head. “It’s the best I can do.”

  Tuttu helped the woman up, put an arm around her. He ran his hands over the patches, over the new seams. Malgi smiled at his wife, moving to her and hugging her from the other side. “It is fine, you have done a good job.” Husband and grandson squeezed the woman, and she beamed.

  Natchiq brought over an open can of fiberglass paint, the piercing smell of toluene or whatever stinging Claudia’s eyes. He stirred the paint, mixing clear liquid with white powder. The powder dissolved into a milky yellow, the paint seeming to loosen up. Natchiq dipped a ratty paintbrush into the can, pointed with his chin at the umiaq. “Well?” he asked.

  The rest of them turned the umiaq over and grabbed more paintbrushes. Each hunter chose a section of the covering—the bow for Natchiq, the stern for Tuttu, the middle for Claudia and Malgi and Amaguq—and they splashed wide strokes of clean paint on the covering. As the paint went on it covered the aged surface of the old skins. It looked like new wood coming out from under a weatherbeaten surface, Claudia thought, the way the wood of their paddles had emerged when they had scraped them clean earlier. Clean wood and new paint: it should please agviq, she hoped. It should please the whale.

  Chapter 17

  AND then in early May, just as the hunters had made the last preparations of their gear, Puvak went out to the end of the tuvaq in search of piqaluyak ice. The young boy had gone to the ice ridge “to get a drink,” he said, because he had tired of the cloudy water they got from Freshwater Lake. It had been a sunny day, just barely under freezing despite the warmth of the long day beating down on the ice. Even before he got to the ridge he said he had seen steam rising to the north.

  “The polynya?” Grigor had asked him when he told the story later.

  “The puyugruaq,” Puvak had said proudly, using the Inupiaq word for open water.

  Puvak had climbed the ridge of jumbled new and old ice, looking for the telltale blue of pure ice. He had worked a little ice chunk loose and sat for a moment to rest, staring out to sea. The morning sun warmed his back, casting the ice ridge’s shadows across the new ice at the flaw edge. The boy squinted at the calm, flat water.

  He said he saw the little white whales first, the belugas, leaping in a narrow lead of freshly broken new ice. “My blood stirred at the sight,” he said, “but it roared at what I saw next.” Ahead of the belugas, in a small pod, two great black whales broke up through the thin ice, cracking it to bits, “and rising up with their heads, battering the ice with the thick knots on their foreheads.”

  “Agviq!” Puvak had yelled from the ice edge, but at the great distance from the village, even with his strong young voice, no one heard him. He said he yelled all the way back to the village. When he got where he could “smell the woodsmoke,” Puvak said, Masu heard him.

  Claudia had been in the qaregi adding a sawn chunk of two-by-six lumber to the stove when Masu came up the katak and into the house. The old woman was half out of breath and panting, but her eyes blazed with wonder and she had a smile that threatened to eat her ears.

  “Puvak,” Masu said, panting. “Puvak saw . . . saw—”

  “Sit, catch your breath,” Malgi said from a bench by the stove. He laid down a length of rope he had been braiding onto a beachball-size orange float. “The boy? Is he okay? What did he see?”

  “Agviq,” Puvak announced, coming up behind her. He stepped through the katak and lowered the trapdoor behind him. He caught his breath, smiled, and handed a white bu
cket with a small chunk of blue ice in it to Claudia. “Two whales, and sisuaq, the little white whale.”

  Malgi grabbed Puvak by his shoulders, held him very still. “Agviq? You saw the whale?” The boy nodded. “Describe it.”

  “It had a large head, with a big bump on the top, and white at the tip of the head and under the jaw.” Puvak caught his breath, continued. “The two whales broke through the ice, and the white whales followed them.”

  “Agviq,” Malgi said. “It is the whale. The gray whale could not break through the ice—besides, it is too early for them.” He grinned. “The whale! He has come back!”

  Come back! Claudia thought. She had not known. How could anyone know? They could only guess. What had the war done to the oceans? What had the long night done to the seas? Would it have killed the plankton that fed the krill that fed the little fish, all of which agviq ate? Would the radiation have destroyed them as it must have destroyed other animals? No one could know. They could only hope, and guess.

  Agviq, the boy said, had returned.

  Malgi pulled on his kamiks and atigi, and grabbed the fishing float and line. “We must go,” he said. “We must tell the others, the crew.” The old man raised the katak door and went down. Claudia put on her own boots and parka, and followed him.

  A crowd of people had come from the other houses. They clustered around Malgi as he came out, shouted questions at him, at the boy. Malgi yelled something, waving them away. “Get your own crews,” she thought she heard him say.

  It had been a matter of pride with Malgi. While others in the villages had at first been excited by the idea of whaling, no one really believed that the whales would come back. Sometimes not even she believed the whales would come back, Claudia thought. At first, other villagers had been excited by the idea of hunting whales. But as they saw the work involved, many had begun to tease Malgi and his whalers. As Malgi’s crew continued their preparations, the other houses, the other hunting groups, began to pressure Malgi into giving up his plans. He had not; he had stubbornly believed. He had thought that if he believed, the whale would come; it would come because he believed it would come. It had to do with faith, and trust. Who was to say he was wrong? she asked herself—not the last time she would ask that question of herself.