The Wolf in the Whale

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  They say that from the moment I took my first breath, I have lived between many worlds—between Sun and Moon, man and woman, Inuk and animal. So perhaps it’s not surprising that I have seen worlds my family could never imagine.

  I have seen the painted men in their bark houses, and I have slept beneath trees as tall as a whale is long.

  I have spoken with the spirits and walked in their land.

  I have seen men who could harness the wind, men with hair the color of flame and eyes the color of ice. And when their own great spirits set foot on my shore, striking thunder from the stars and calling monsters from the deep, I have battled with their gods of war—and wept with their gods of love.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  I woke to the sound of Puja pushing the lamp wick into place with her small blackened poker. Bone striking stone, urging the light to rise in small mountain peaks of flame along the lamp’s crescent edge, then tamping down the burnt moss so it wouldn’t smoke.

  A sound I’d heard every morning of the eight winters and eight summers of my life. Usually the tapping brought me comfort. The woman who had nursed me at her breast would never let me waken to a cold tent or a dark iglu. Yet on this morning, I pulled the caribou sleeping robes over my face and hid from the light, afraid of what the new day might hold.

  “You don’t need to be scared,” she assured me. “Ataata will come back. Maybe even today.”

  But I couldn’t help it. I’d been scared for a long time. Hunger does that to a child.

  “Go on,” she urged, tugging the robe off my face. “Kiasik is already outside. Go play with him.”

  I pulled on my trousers and summer parka, slung my small bag of toys and tools over my shoulder, and crawled from the tent, looking for my older brother. He was out of sight, but the new puppies whimpering in their pen would make good playmates, too. Puja had warned me many times to stay away from the older dogs—a hungry pack could rip a child apart. But the puppies merely whined and licked my fingers, trying to sate their hunger with the salt from my skin. I picked up the white one with the black face—Black Mask, Ataata called her. Her ribs felt like the driftwood spars of a tiny kayak frame.

  “If I put you on the ground,” I whispered against her petal-soft ear, “would you float away on the tundra like a boat on the sea?” I imagined myself as a great hunter, sitting atop the dog and paddling with a tiny oar. “We would have such adventures together. I would hunt whales from your back, and you would snatch fish with your teeth, and we would never go hungry.”

  “A nice dream, Little Brother.” Kiasik strode through the camp to peer over my shoulder. “But just a dream. That dog will be mitten fur by tomorrow.”

  I frowned. “Don’t say that. She’ll hear you. Ataata warned us—animals can understand.” Black Mask swiveled her ears toward me.

  Hunger made Kiasik’s usually bright eyes as dull as dark slate in a dry riverbed. “If the dog is so smart, then it knows the truth already.” He was only a little older than I, but always eager to prove himself many winters my senior in wisdom. “There’s no food for it. Didn’t you notice? Its mother stopped nursing it days ago.”

  The dog’s thin frame suddenly seemed too fragile—not like a skin boat I might paddle, but like an eggshell I might crush. Many days had passed since Egg Gathering Moon, yet the humiliating memory of yellow ooze dripping down my parka still burned fresh; I’d cried over my failure. Kiasik had pointed and laughed, but when my slow tears turned to rough sobs, he’d helped me wash the yolk from my clothing. I’d whimpered, sure it would never come clean.

  “Baby birds like to drink tears,” he warned, urgently scraping the caribou fur. “So if we don’t get all the egg off, you’ll wake one morning with chicks hatching from your armpits.”

  I gasped in dismay.

  “Ia’a!” he cried, noticing a particularly thick glob at my parka’s hem. “Not just your armpits, but your navel, too.” He took me by the shoulders and said sternly, “You must be careful that when they start to flap their wings, they don’t lift you off the ground and carry you away forever. That won’t do—you and I have to be great hunters together, remember?”

  For another breath, I believed him. Then I caught the flaring of his nostrils, the twitch of his lips, and knew he teased me.

  Standing before the dog pen, I remembered the lesson beneath his joke: a great hunter does not cry. Even if the thought of killing such a perfect puppy made him want to weep. Very carefully I replaced the dog in the pile with her siblings. Little Black Mask buried herself in the warm press of her family, just as I snuggled between Puja and Ataata on cold winter nights. Even now, in the warmth of late summer, the wind that blew from the distant sea carried the promise of ice.

  “Come, Little Brother,” Kiasik said more gently. “If the elders kill her, she’ll just come back as another puppy, born in a better time. By then, maybe you’ll be a hunter grown, and she can pull your sled.”

  I knew he was right, but that didn’t make it any easier. From the small pouch looped around my shoulder, I withdrew a tiny scrap of dried fish.

  “Where did you get that?” he demanded, suddenly stern.

  “I saved it from yesterday, when Puja gave us the last of the fish cache.” I popped it into my mouth and chewed until the hard flesh melted into a gummy mass. It took all my will not to swallow it down and soothe the ache in my empty stomach. Instead, I spit it back into my palm.

  “What are you—”

  I slipped the soft morsel of fish between Black Mask’s lips. The dog gulped it down, licked her jaws, and panted up at me in obvious anticipation.

  “That’s all I have, little one,” I apologized.

  “Did you forget the elders’ teachings?” Kiasik huffed. “An Inuk survives. He doesn’t starve himself to feed a puppy!”

  The sight of a hunter approaching the camp spared me any more lectures.

  “Ataata!” I called, instantly recognizing the old man even at a distance by the white stripes of bear fur decorating his parka like walrus tusks. Puja had been right. He had returned.

  We ran to him, still holding out some hope that he carried meat, but his slow step told of his failure. A hunter burdened with game, no matter how heavy, would come swiftly into camp to share his bounty.

  As we walked back toward our tent, Ataata, the only father I had ever known, placed a hand on my cropped hair. Although my head barely reached his chest, he spoke to me with great gravity. “Have you been practicing with your bow, Little Son?”

  I smiled my assent. Over the long, dark winter, Ataata had carved a child-size bow and three matching arrows from a piece of caribou antler. Kiasik had received his own set the winter before. Now it was all Puja could do to stop us from shooting at her pot or lamp or drying hides. “Good.” He patted my head. “Soon you’ll see a great caribou hunt. If you watch closely, you’ll learn how to use your bow.”

  “So you found the herd?” begged Kiasik breathlessly. We had asked the same question of each empty-handed hunting party that returned, but so far only lemmings and ptarmigan tempered our hunger. We longed for the rich brown meat of a caribou. We wouldn’t survive much longer without it.

  “I found them.” Despite his words, Ataata did not smile.

  Kiasik’s face brightened. “Was the meat so heavy you had to leave it behind? Can we go and help you carry it?”

  By now the women and other children had emerged from their tents to listen. Ataata addressed them all. “I found the herd, or most of it—but they were all dead. The foxes and the ravens got there first. I saw nothing but bones.”

  Old Ujaguk’s voice rose in a mourning cry. The others in the crowd followed suit. I almost let out my own moan of dismay, but I noticed Kiasik clench his jaw against the impulse. I followed his lead. Let the women grieve. We hunters knew better.

  “Enough!” Puja said sternly. “Come, Ataata, let me take off your boots.” She believed firmly in the proper order of things: First Ataata must
be taken care of, his damp boots hung on the drying rack so his feet wouldn’t sicken. Then he could tell us his news.

  As our angakkuq and finest hunter, Ataata had the largest tent in our summer camp. Even with Puja, Ataata, Kiasik, and me seated on the sleeping furs, the others could join us inside. Not until Puja had removed Ataata’s boots and parka and made him comfortable on the pile of caribou robes did we finally hear his story.

  “Do you remember how this winter was so mild?” he began. “Omat and Kiasik, you played with your kicking ball outside even in the Moon of Great Darkness, when usually we’d be laughing over the cup and pin game inside our qarmaq, waiting for the wind to die down.”

  In a childhood defined by play, I did indeed remember the recent winter. After the Sun had risen for the last time, Kiasik told me scary stories of how long and boring the dark winter would be, with us trapped in our sod-and-whalebone home under Puja’s watchful eye. And yet, despite the darkness, the weather had stayed relatively mild, and by the time the Sun claimed half of every day, Kiasik and I could play outside wearing only our thin inner parkas.

  “The snow began to melt early,” Ataata continued. “We moved from our qarmait to tents long before the seal pups appeared on the ice. But then, do you remember the cold snap?”

  We murmured our agreement. One morning, just as we were sure winter had finally ended, the cold had come raging back, freezing the ground into a solid sheet of ice. Puja had grumbled as she slipped on her way to the meat caches, and no one liked digging through the ice on the drinking pond, but for the most part, I’d enjoyed sliding on the slick ground like a wobbly seal pup. Puja chided us for ruining the soles of our boots by skating on the ice—that didn’t stop Kiasik and me from racing our older cousins across the frozen ground, slipping and tumbling as we went. The ice sheet remained for nearly a moon, finally melting into muddy slush as spring arrived.

  “When the days warmed, the caribou thought winter over. They moved north to eat the lichen and the moss,” Ataata explained, “but when the cold returned, even their sharp hooves couldn’t break through so much ice. They starved. Those few that survived couldn’t fight off the wolves. I found the whole herd in a valley three days’ journey inland, all their bones picked clean.”

  “But Ataata…” It was not my place to speak before the adults did, but my father had always indulged me. “You just said that I’d see a great caribou hunt. How?”

  He smiled down at me. “When a caribou dies, its spirit is reborn somewhere else. No caribou disappears forever. They are somewhere—we just need to find them. I will speak to the Ice Bear Spirit. He will help us.”

  As a creature of both land and sea, the ice bear is the most powerful animal in our world, and an angakkuq with such a guide is mighty indeed.

  The elders said that as a child not much older than I was, Ataata had fallen through the ice on a winter sealing journey. Lungs filling with water and limbs freezing solid, he saw a bear swimming toward him, its broad paws stretched like paddles. Rather than attack, the bear pushed Ataata toward the surface with its black nose, right into his parents’ outstretched arms. He should have died—or at least lost his fingers to frostbite—but the Ice Bear Spirit protected the boy, and he survived his ordeal unscathed. Later, as a young angakkuq on his spirit journey, Ataata found a single black bear claw on the ice near the spot where he’d fallen so long before. He placed it around his neck on a sinew cord. Ever since, the Ice Bear with the missing claw had appeared to Ataata when called upon.

  I found it strange to imagine my father as a young boy like me, when now he seemed as ancient as the stones beneath my boots. Gray streaked his hair like the silver rivers that braided their way across the dark tundra. His thin mustache and the wisp of beard beneath his lips were pure white, and his heavy-lidded eyes were tinged red from long winters of blinding snow and short summers of unending sun. Yet despite his aged body, Ataata still held power beyond my understanding.

  The Sun, which had refused to surrender her place in the sky for most of the summer, now consented to set again, though I knew she hid just out of sight, impatient to return. Clouds brushed the sky with pastel blues and pinks, cupping us in the hollow of an iridescent mussel shell. As we gathered amid the tents to witness the summoning of the Ice Bear, the sky finally darkened to something resembling night. One by one, the stars flickered into view. The spirits had oil for their lamps in the sky, but this far from the ocean we hoarded what little seal fat we had left; we built a low fire of dwarf willow twigs and dry moss instead. I was unused to the flickering light, the erratic crackle, so different from the silent, steady glow of a lamp. In the gloaming, the fire transformed my father’s lined visage, usually so familiar, into a terrifying mask of shadow and flame.

  He held his black bear claw between the knuckles of his left fist. He became a bear.

  I huddled close to Puja, hiding my face in her parka. Never before had I witnessed a summoning; my heart fluttered like a bird’s. I much preferred that Ataata’s bear claw stay hidden beneath his parka, not pointed so menacingly at me.

  Puja stroked my head until I lifted my eyes. “Don’t look away. He journeys as a bear, but he’ll come back to us a man.”

  Her thin mouth tugged upward at the corners, not quite a smile. I pressed closer to her, seeking the comfort of her thickly muscled body beneath the thin hide of her summer parka. But despite the familiarity of her shape, the dancing willow fire made even Puja look strange. Tonight, the tattoos that decorated every woman’s face and hands were more threatening than beautiful. The thin black lines running from mouth to chin and across her forehead made her into a wrinkled old woman. Her black hair, usually bound in two tight braids, hung loose to her shoulders, flying in soft hanks in the light breeze.

  Kiasik peered at me from where he sat on Puja’s other side. “If you’re too scared,” he warned, with that half smile that meant he was only half teasing, “you can always hide in our mother’s hood.”

  I pushed myself away from Puja’s embrace and glared at him. “I’m not scared!” I squared my shoulders, wishing I were as tall as he was.

  “Hnnnn. Then why were you holding on to her like a little child?”

  Puja calmly warned us both to be quiet or she’d send us back to the tent. As much as I feared watching the summoning, I dreaded missing it far more.

  The rest of the gathered band watched us rather more indulgently, waiting patiently for us to settle down so Ataata might continue. Ipaq, Ataata’s older brother, smiled at me as he readied the round hand drum. Although he handled the instrument with ease, its hoop stretched nearly as wide as his own impressive stomach. He began to sway like a coursing fish, weight shifting from left foot to right as he spun the taut caribou-skin disk by its long handle, hitting one side of the rim and then the other with his mallet. Each sharp clack of antler against antler sent a low, resonant boom through the air, the thrumming barely fading away before another took its place. The drum hummed like an insect.

  The other adults nodded their heads to the rhythm. Dour Ququk, the camp’s other hunter, looked even more serious than usual, his face as lined and solemn as a carven mask. Ujaguk, his wife, circled her thumbs above clasped hands, as if they were the only part of her she could allow to dance. Their grown daughter, Saartok, struck her thighs lightly, always an awkward beat behind the drumming. Ipaq’s own family moved with more ease. His adopted son, my round-cheeked cousin Tapsi, bounced up and down, acting far younger than would be expected of a boy with the first black wisps of hair sprouting above his rosy lips. Ipaq’s adopted daughter, Millik, and his wife, Niquvana, moved their torsos in unison, graceful as a pair of long-necked cranes.

  I couldn’t lose myself in the music. Not with Ataata undertaking a journey more dangerous than any hunt.

  My father stalked around the circle, his bear claw still raised. Puja started the singing to help him on his way. Everyone took up the refrain, and I found some comfort in the simple chant: “Aiiya yaya, aiiya yaya
ya ya!” Sounds of joy and lamentation, supplication and command all at once.

  On all fours, my father continued hunting his imaginary prey. Like the bear’s, his hind legs were longer than those in front. One leg swung forward in a shallow arc. Then another, just like the stride of the lumbering animal. Faster and faster Ataata circled the fire. His head swayed from side to side as he looked for prey. Our song intensified. Sweat ran down Ipaq’s cheeks, and his gray hair lifted as the swinging drum fanned the air before him.

  Finally Ataata stopped. He stood as still as a stone, his front feet together, his back tensed, staring at prey only he could see, like a bear about to attack. Suddenly the light left his eyes, his face fell, and he collapsed to the ground, trembling. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he began to shout in the secret angakkuq tongue that none of us could understand.

  I leapt to my feet with a cry, but Puja held me back, warning me with a glare to be silent. Ipaq lowered his drum, and he and Ququk stole toward Ataata with lengths of walrus-hide rope in their hands. They bound my father’s wrists together and then looped the rope around his ankles to fold him in half. He still shook and struggled in his trance, the ropes rubbing his wrists raw like the limbs of a fox caught in a snare.

  Puja put her mouth to my ear, whispering, “They tie his body to one spot so his soul can find it when it returns from its journey.” I began to protest, but she continued quickly, in tones so low I could barely hear: “We must not make a sound while Ataata is traveling, lest we pull him back too quickly, and a part of his soul is left behind in the spirit world.”

  I was convinced it might already be too late, that at any moment my beloved Ataata would stop shaking, open soulless eyes, and stare accusingly at me—the child who’d lost his spirit by crying out. Then I’d be banished from the camp forever, left to wander alone through the tundra with no one to feed me.