“Take us home, Megan,” you say.
And she does. You follow the silver virtual tether across all the fractured time left between 1948 and your own time. You leave Marian in 1948, with its unacted good locked in people’s hearts where it never mattered. The radio comes to life. You turn Mission Control over to Paulo while Megan depressurizes the bubble. You download your reports. Then you follow your team up the ladder.
| Go to Contents |
INUIT
My sister Thule was frightened. She had said nothing all morning, and she had been awake before Mother lit the whale oil in the stone lamp and sang us out of our furs. I tried to joke with Thule — she was nine, and I was twelve and her brother who had gone to school before — but she would not laugh.
Without a word, she dressed in the new trousers and parka Mother had sewn for her. Mother knew the teachers would take our clothes and dress us in things that would let the cold kill us if we went outside, yet she made Father trade two good harpoons for the parka’s white seal pelts. Father traded them without complaint, even took the pelts to Unalakleet, the shaman, who pulled the mask from his face and touched the mask to the pelts. When the parka was sewn, Father sang his magic songs over it as if it were a kayak, harpoon, or lance, as if my sister were going on a whale hunt, not to school.
Mother gave Thule and me a handful of dried berries she had saved through the winter. Thule ate hers quickly and would not look up. I thought, then, that she would try not to go, that she would cry, and when she looked up her eyes had water in them, but she did not cry. She followed me outside.
I held Thule’s hand as we walked along the seashore to the school. The sea was gray, and still, and free of ice. The bowl of the world sloped up from us, and we could see Atka, just above our heads, the island where we had spent the spring, where Nulato, our cousin, had died hunting caribou.
Thule said nothing as we left the beach and walked up into the valley of the school, following the twistings of a sluggish stream, low now after the rush of spring melt. Rabbit and lemming tracks notched mud at the stream’s edge. Thule would not look back or at the tracks or at me. I held her hand till we saw the stone buildings, and then I made her walk behind me and follow me inside, and I would not look at her.
A teacher took Thule to the rooms for first-year students. I did not see her again for three months. She learned to read and write — things she could forget quickly — but my schooling was different, that year.
My class had two teachers. One was an old Inuit woman, angry, wearing furs though the school was hot. She folded her arms and sat frowning by the door. No one dared speak to her. The other looked Inuit, at first, but he wore a student’s white shirt and blue pants, and when he spoke I knew he was not Inuit, not part of the people. I stared at him; we all stared at him, tried to understand him when he talked, laughed when he mispronounced words — and he laughed with us.
I had seen, six years before, men not Inuit. I was sitting in the prow of my family’s umiak while we rowed from Atka to the mainland, and whales were in the sea. We meant the whales no harm — we had plenty of dried meat — and Father had sung his songs over our umiak, so he and Anvik, my older brother, rowed with confidence through the whales. The whales were spouting and taking fresh air, but suddenly the ones farthest out began to sound.
We saw, then, the men not Inuit. They came in a great umiak larger than ten the size of my family’s, and they were hunting; they held harpoons ready to throw.
“The fools!” Mother said. She sat Thule down, threw me a paddle, took one herself, and helped row us away from the whales. I wondered who could be stupid enough to start a hunt when among the whales was an umiak loaded with tents, dogs, and people. Thule was little, and she cried. The dogs barked. I rowed hard.
But the men not Inuit held their harpoons. They stopped near us, among whales larger than even their umiak. The men not Inuit looked at us and at the whales, and we looked at the men. They shouted words to us I could not understand, and we rowed away quickly without answering.
“Where are you from?” I asked the teacher not Inuit.
He smiled. “Before I answer that, you need to know what to call me. My name is Joseph.”
We laughed — who had heard anything like his name? Nenana could not even say Joseph, at first.
“Where I come from, people use names stranger than Joseph,” he said. “Jane and Elizabeth for girls; Michael and Carlos for boys.”
“But where do they use such names?” I asked.
“You do not forget your questions,” he said. He paused and looked at Kwiguk, the Inuit teacher. “I am from the world,” he said, finally. “They use names like Joseph there.”
We stared at him. Of course he was from the world — we all were.
“I am not from this world,” he said.
When he said that, Kwiguk stood up and stopped the class. She made us go to the cafeteria for supper though it was not time for supper, and we sat at tables for an hour till food came.
“What is the world?” Joseph asked us the next day. He asked many questions and said silly things: that men had made the world; that a building behind the school had a room called elevator that moved down into the rock; that the world had two levels — the one where I lived, and one below mine where men like Joseph lived. “Sanak-of-the-persistent-questions,” Joseph said, smiling at me, “can you tell us what the world is?”
I stood up and cleared my throat. Nenana and Talkeetna giggled. I would have pulled their hair if we had not been in school. “The world is two stone bowls spit out from the Raven’s craw,” I said, looking straight ahead at Joseph, not looking at Nenana or Talkeetna. “The Raven placed the bowls one on top of the other, and we live on the inside surface. The seas are the Raven’s spit.”
“Or his piss,” Kendi whispered, and we laughed.
“Wrong,” the teacher said.
We looked at him.
“I will show you the world,” he said.
He called the world “satellite” and showed us a picture of it: narrow, white, tubed like a marsh reed but tapered at the ends. “We live on the inside surface, like in Sanak’s story,” he said. “But what is on the other side?”
“The Raven?” Nenana asked.
Joseph laughed. “The true world is on the other side, the Earth.”
He showed us a picture of Earth: round, covered with white clouds, blue where we could see through the clouds to the sea. Joseph put the two pictures side by side. “Our satellite circles the Earth like a mosquito circles your face, waiting for you to go to sleep,” he said.
“It’s moving?” Kendi asked.
“In different ways,” Joseph told us: circling the Earth; rotating fast enough to make fake gravity to give our bodies weight. Weight fooled our bodies, made them think weight was gravity so they would stay healthy. At the ends of the satellite, north and south, we felt less weight, which made jumping easier.
Joseph took us onto the roof of the school to look through a telescope at the side of the world above us. We laughed to see Inuit walking around upside down. “Which way is up?” Joseph asked.
I looked away and thought of Anvik, my brother, and his scrimshaw. He could carve anything from the ivory tooth of a sperm whale or the tusk of a walrus. Father would give Anvik the best ivory, and on long winter nights when we could do nothing but stay in our igloo and laugh at each other’s stories I would sit in front of Anvik and watch him carve. Anvik never minded. “I will teach you to carve when your hands can hold the knives,” he would say, and he did, though I could never carve like him — we never traded my scrimshaw for good harpoons or even a dog. Anvik once traded a set of ivory combs for two whale ribs we used as poles in our spring tent.
One night, Anvik handed me a mask he had carved and put together from different pieces of ivory. “Which way is up?” he asked. I held the mask in front of me and saw the face of an angry man with narrow eyes and a thin nose, but when I turned the mask upside down it became
the face of a happy man. I helped Anvik rub charcoal in the lines of the mask and then scared Thule with the angry face, but Anvik took it, turned it, put on the happy face and made us all laugh. I wished that Anvik were with me, that he would ask which way was up and make me laugh when I did not know.
Before morning, in the dark, Joseph gave us our parkas and took us to a room in another building. “This is the room that moves,” Joseph said. “It will carry us to the rim of our satellite.”
But I did not want to go. I stepped back by Kendi.
“Don’t be afraid,” Kwiguk said. “You will not fall off the world. You will see what few of your parents and none of your brothers and sisters have seen. New — realities — make us show you these things.”
Her tone of voice and her stiff posture told us to remember that we were Inuit, the people, that Joseph was not.
“Believe what you will see,” Joseph said. “Even Kwiguk knows you will see the truth.”
He looked at Kwiguk, and, finally, she nodded. “Believe it,” she said.
I remembered Joseph’s stories I had not believed: that the Earth was larger than my world; that men traveled between the worlds in umiaks larger than whales; that on Earth men talked to whales and never hunted them. I was afraid, afraid to believe such stories, afraid to find out if the stories were true, but the door closed and the room dropped.
Nenana threw up. When the room stopped moving, Kwiguk cleaned the floor and Nenana’s hands. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Joseph asked. He led us to a room filled with silver chairs that tilted back. The ceiling there was a telescope that let us see past the rim. The ceiling disappeared. We could see more lights in the sky than I had ever seen at night. “The lights are stars, not campfires,” Joseph said.
And then the lights moved, and we saw the Earth.
The Earth shone: blue, white, green. The blue was water, Joseph said, the seas. The white not clouds was snow on lands the Inuit had come from. Joseph said more Inuit lived there still than lived on both levels of our satellite. He pointed to an island he called Ellesmere, said it was not quite as large as the world we had made.
And Ellesmere was small on the Earth.
I could only think that there was no Raven, that the Raven had made no world.
When the doors opened that night, it smelled like spring. Joseph led us down a gravel path among trees taller than the willows on Atka. The flowers there smelled so good Kendi and I ate a red one, but it did not taste good.
Rock hung above our heads. The air was hot. Joseph and Kwiguk took us into another building, helped pull off our parkas, and gave us cooler clothes to wear. It was still hot. I never thought I liked the cold, but I learned the Inuit were made for it. Joseph and Kwiguk talked to us while we changed.
“The legends got mixed up when the people flew to this satellite,” Kwiguk said. “That’s all. And the Inuit came here for good reasons. On Earth, the old ways were dying. Men not as Inuit as Joseph came to teach us new ways of believing and living; when we did not accept them they tried to force us, and they took our good lands. But our bad lands were rich with treasures under the rock that made us strong with money, which is what men trade on Earth, what men not Inuit want most, and we traded them money for this world.”
“Your ancestors chose to come to this satellite, take the inner level, make it a place where they could keep the old ways,” Joseph said. “Mine left the old ways; kept our bad lands on Earth; were called Eskimo, not Inuit; took the outer level of this satellite where we make things and do things our ancestors never imagined. But my ancestors were Inuit; I am Inuit.”
Kendi yawned, and Nenana and Talkeetna. Joseph and Kwiguk stopped talking, stopped trying to explain, and sent us to the same room to separate beds. None of us could sleep. I kept expecting our beds to slide away since we were next to the rim past which there was no gravity. So I lay awake holding the sides of my bed and thinking about what Joseph and Kwiguk had said, about what I had seen, and, finally, about home. Mother had told me the Raven made the world for a joke, that that was why the Inuit were a happy people: we were made to laugh. I thought the Raven would have laughed to hear the things Joseph and Kwiguk said. I did not think my mother would laugh.
Kendi fell and cut his hand when he and I went running through the halls before breakfast. Joseph and Kwiguk took him to a doctor. I followed to watch. The doctor had hung a shaman’s mask in each of his rooms. I kept expecting him to pull down a mask and touch it to Kendi’s hand; instead, he smeared white cream over the cut and bandaged it. “All of you will soon have to use medicine: take your children to doctors, give your old people to us rather than leave them in the snow to die,” Joseph said.
Kendi’s hand healed overnight. A thin, red line marked where the cut had been, but no scab. I thought of cuts I got carving scrimshaw with Anvik, cuts that took weeks to heal. “Doctors can mend broken bones in days,” Joseph said. “Grow back arms and legs. Medicine is not evil.”
Kwiguk would not look at Kendi’s hand. “Why extend life when the reasons for living have been taken away and your world destroyed?” she asked. But a quick healing did not seem bad to me — a man could not hunt when he was hurt; a woman could not cure hides or put up tents when she was in pain. I wanted to ask Kwiguk why it was good to live without medicine, but I did not dare.
“Have you seen anyone die?” Joseph asked. “Someone who, if taken to a warm place or given more help than a shaman’s chants, might have lived? Would saving him have destroyed your world?”
A doctor might have saved Nulato, my cousin, who died hunting caribou on Atka. During the winter, herds of caribou walked across the frozen channel between Atka and the mainland to eat in the willows along the rivers and streams, to eat grass below the snow and lichens on the rocks by the seashore. When the channel ice melted, the caribou stayed on Atka for a time, confused, looking at the mainland. After the grass was gone, most swam across the channel and scattered in small herds in the hills. We always went to Atka in the spring to hunt caribou, and our camps were smoky with fires that dried meat and kept away wolves.
The hunting was easy. The hard part no one liked was dragging carcasses to camp. One day Anvik and Nulato came to me, smiling. “Come hunting with us,” Anvik said, and he handed me a spear and my knives. We jogged up the riverbank and lost sight of camp. After we waded through six streams that fed the river, Nulato jumped down the bank and uncovered his and Anvik’s kayaks hidden under willow branches. Nulato climbed in his kayak, tucked his spear at his side, rowed upstream across the river, and hid in the willows. Anvik took me around a riverbend to a watering place where caribou had worn down the bank. “You and I will drive the caribou into the water here,” Anvik said. “Nulato will spear the stragglers as they swim across the river, and he and I will simply float the carcasses to camp. No more dragging them up hills.”
He smiled. I thought of everyone’s surprise — men often speared seals from kayaks, but I seldom heard of anyone spearing swimming caribou. A game trail led up from the watering hole to the grassy hills above the willows. Anvik and I ran upwind from the trail, circled back, and came out through the hills above one of the largest caribou herds either of us had seen. Eight or nine hundred caribou were grazing in the valley. At sight of us, they bunched together nervously. Anvik smiled. “We should have had all the men here,” he said. “We could have finished our hunt with this herd.” He tousled my hair, jumped up, and ran shouting down the hill. I ran, shouting, after him. The caribou bolted up the trail and plunged in the river. Hundreds of caribou were in the river.
But Nulato did not wait for the stragglers. He rowed out in front of the caribou. I thought the caribou would try to swim around him, but they swam straight on, too afraid of Anvik and me, in too much of a hurry to get out of the cold water to notice what lay ahead. Nulato started spearing caribou, and those in front saw him, then, but could not stop or turn — the caribou behind pushed them ahead. Nulato shouted and stabbed at the caribou, but the cari
bou kept coming, knocked over his kayak, dragged him underwater.
Anvik and I could only watch as the herd swam across the river, as the last stragglers stumbled up the bank, shook water from their hides, ran off into the willows. The caribou had pushed Nulato’s kayak onto the riverbank and trampled it to pieces. Eight dead caribou dotted the river.
And Nulato surfaced facedown in the water and did not move.
Anvik shoved his kayak out on the river, rowed quickly to Nulato, and pulled him to shore. Nulato would not move or breathe. I held Nulato’s wrist and felt his slow heartbeat till it stopped. Anvik tied Nulato across his kayak and rowed to camp. I ran along the shore, trying to keep them in sight.
The ground was still too frozen to dig a grave for Nulato, so the women washed and clothed the body; the men took kayaks out on the river, found the eight caribou carcasses, pulled them to camp, and dressed the meat. It was dark when they finished. In firelight the shaman beat his drum and danced around Nulato’s body, singing songs that would let Nulato sleep. When he stopped, it was quiet. Wood on the fire popped and spat sparks into the air, and the shaman took off his mask and touched it to Nulato’s face.
Anvik, Father, and three other men took torches and carried Nulato into the tundra behind camp. Wolves began howling before the men came back.
For three days Joseph and Kwiguk showed us new things: great farms where Inuit grew foods that gave us diarrhea; plankton induction tanks where men bred plankton in warm water to release in our shallow seas for the whales and fish; crowds of Inuit living in white, stone igloos among trees and streams where it snowed only on holidays.
Joseph showed us lights like stars that were satellites, worlds men had made. “Hundreds of such worlds circle the Earth,” he said. “Some are very small, compared to this one. Men bring chunks of rock and ice called asteroids close to the Earth, dig into the rock for the things they trade for money, and melt the ice for water. When the miners finish, other people go and live in the rocks or break them apart to make worlds like ours.”
How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories Page 6
