by Sue Harrison
While she waited for the water to boil, she poured some of the powdered caribou leaves into one of the wooden cups and mixed them with fat, working the mixture with her fingers until the leaves were evenly distributed. Then she bent over Shuganan and began to smooth the medicine over his bruises, but Man-who-kills pushed himself between Shuganan and Chagak and gestured toward the mixture.
Chagak was angry. What were Man-who-kills’ wounds compared to Shuganan’s? But she smoothed the paste over Man-who-kills’ cheek and clamped her teeth shut to keep her anger from creeping up to show itself in her face.
When she had finished with him, she turned back to Shuganan, and Man-who-kills did not try to stop her. She washed away the blood that matted Shuganan’s white hair then covered each cut with salve.
There were no cuts on his face that needed stitches, and though the cut on his skull was long, it was not deep, and Chagak decided not to stitch it. Her mother once told her that scalps were difficult to stitch. The skin stretched so tightly over the skull that it was difficult to pull the edges of the wound together, and hair was apt to get caught in the stitches. And so Chagak only washed and salved the cut.
When she finished, the water was boiling. Chagak emptied the rest of the packet of caribou leaves into the water. It must boil for the time it took Chagak to count the number of her fingers and toes ten times.
When it was ready, she dipped out a cupful and set it down to cool. Man-who-kills watched but said nothing. Carefully, Chagak raised Shuganan’s head and pressed the cup against his lips. At first much of the liquid spilled, but then he began to drink.
“Good,” Chagak murmured to him. “Good. Drink this. It will make you strong again. It will make you well.”
When the cup was empty, Chagak pointed to the robe and said to Man-who-kills, “I need another robe, something to keep him warm. I must remove his chigadax and parka.”
For a time Man-who-kills did nothing, his eyes hard and dark, but finally he nodded and Chagak again went into the ulaq and this time she brought back the heavy fur seal robe from Shuganan’s sleeping place. She laid it over his legs and began to pull up his chigadax. Each time she moved the garment, Shuganan cried out. Man-who-kills began to laugh, and Chagak felt her hatred harden and grow, spreading from her chest to fill her body.
“I need your knife,” she said, teeth clenched. She looked up at Man-who-kills and said again, “Knife.”
“Knife?” he repeated, saying the word in Chagak’s tongue. He drew his hunting knife from its scabbard on his left forearm.
“Knife?” He held it out to her, but when Chagak reached for it, he drew the weapon away. Chagak stood up and held out her hands, waiting as a mother waits for a child, until finally Man-who-kills gave her the knife.
Chagak slit open the chigadax and parka, one long cut down the front from hem to collar, slashes down each sleeve. She gave the knife back to Man-who-kills, then carefully pulled the garments from Shuganan’s body. A wound extended from the center of his chest to his neck, and purple bruises outlined his rib cage.
“Some of his ribs are broken,” Chagak said aloud, speaking not to Man-who-kills but to any spirit that might hear—perhaps helping spirits of old women who might know something of healing.
Chagak’s grandmother had once told her that broken ribs must be bound tightly, but if a rib had punctured a lung, there was little chance a person would survive. What were the signs? Foaming blood at the mouth, coughing. And though Shuganan had been bleeding at the mouth when Chagak first saw him, she was sure it was from broken teeth that cut his tongue and cheeks.
Using strips of sealskin, Chagak wrapped Shuganan’s chest. He cried out several times, and each time he did, Man-who-kills laughed, but Chagak still worked and pretended she did not hear the laughter.
When she had finished, she stitched the cut on his chest, then smoothed caribou leaf salve over the rest of his cuts and bruises.
Chagak sat back on her heels, but Man-who-kills leaned forward and prodded Shuganan’s left arm with his toe. Shuganan’s eyelids fluttered.
Man-who-kills spat on the ground, then spoke in his own language, pointing often to Shuganan’s arm.
“Yes, it is broken,” Chagak said, no longer trying to hold back her anger. “You are such a brave hunter. You are so strong, hurting an old man. The spirits tremble.” And she, too, spat on the ground.
Man-who-kills grabbed the top of her head, his fingers digging into her skull. He pushed her face close to Shuganan’s arm, then said slowly in her language, “Fix arm. He must carve. Fix arm.”
Chagak shuddered. Man-who-kills had lived with them too long. He had begun to learn her language, a language too sacred to be spoken by one who destroyed villages.
“I will fix his arm,” she answered.
Man-who-kills released her and Chagak began slowly moving her hands down Shuganan’s broken arm.
She had never set an arm before. Once she had seen her village’s shaman do it. But he was a man with great spirit powers.
I wear his amulet, Chagak thought, and clasped the leather pouch with both hands. She began a chant. Not a shaman’s song, but a woman’s chant, something to bring healing spirits to children and babies. It was the best she knew.
The shaman had used a long stick, something that spoke to the bone within the arm, something that told of strength and straight-ness.
There was only one thing Chagak knew to be that strong, something that at most times she would not think to touch: Shuga-nan’s whalebone walking stick. For a long time she only chanted, looking at the arm, purple with bruises and bent where there should be no bend.
While she chanted, she tore Shuganan’s chigadax into strips, long enough to wrap around the arm. Shuganan’s stick was in his sleeping place and again Chagak told Man-who-kills she was going inside. This time he merely grunted, so she left quickly and returned with the walking stick.
She laid the stick along the arm and began to wrap the first strip above the point of the break.
But Man-who-kills knelt beside her and motioned for her to hold Shuganan’s arm at the elbow, then he grasped the wrist and said something to her. And though Chagak did not understand what he said, she gripped tightly, remembering something she had forgotten in the shaman’s ceremony, the straightening of the bone.
With steady pressure, Man-who-kills pulled.
Shuganan screamed, and for a moment his eyes opened, but Man-who-kills did not stop pulling. He motioned for Chagak to wrap the arm.
She worked quickly, wrapping the strips around both the arm and the stick.
When she had finished, Man-who-kills picked up Shuganan, holding him as if he were child, not man, and carried him into the ulaq.
TWENTY
FOR TWO DAYS CHAGAK stayed in the ulaq with Shuganan. She left only in early morning to empty the baskets of night wastes and to fill the water skin from the spring near the south cliff.
By the second day Shuganan opened his eyes more often, though he did not speak to Chagak. He began taking broth in slow, careful sips, and he seemed to be breathing more easily.
They were usually alone in the ulaq. Man-who-kills stayed outside, and Chagak, glad to have him out of the ulaq, did not spend time wondering what he was doing.
The third morning, while Man-who-kills ate and Chagak washed Shuganan’s wounds, Man-who-kills began to speak to Chagak. He spoke for a long time, sometimes gesturing toward Shuganan, sometimes toward her. Once he stopped to pull the two fresh sealskins from their storage place at the front of the ulaq.
After he had spoken, he waited, watching Chagak, until Chagak, uneasy, finally said, “When Shuganan is well, I will scrape and cure the sealskins. I will make you robes for your sleeping place.”
But Man-who-kills cut off her words with an impatient gesture and pointed to the roof hole.
“Do you want something more to eat?” Chagak asked and started toward the storage cache. But Man-who-kills grabbed her arm and pushed her toward the climbing l
og.
He slipped on his chigadax and picked up two harpoons. A sudden fear clutched at Chagak’s throat. Where was he taking her?
“Shuganan …” she said as Man-who-kills pushed her up the climbing log.
“Shuganan,” Man-who-kills repeated and laughed. “Shuganan,” he said again as they climbed from the ulaq. And Chagak heard the taunting in his voice so said nothing more.
I have fed Shuganan and cleaned his wounds, Chagak thought. He will be all right alone. He needs to sleep.
She squinted against the brightness of the day. The sky was blue. Cloudless days were rare, and most of them were shrouded through the morning with fog. When was the last time she had seen cloudless blue sky? Before Man-who-kills had come. Before she had found Shuganan.
Then she remembered. The gift day her mother had given her had been cloudless and hot. The day had been beautiful until the fire, until …
Man-who-kills grabbed the sleeve of Chagak’s suk and pulled her toward the beach. She saw that his ikyak was near the stream and that he had tied gathering bags to the craft.
“Wait,” he said to her as he set the ikyak into the water and climbed in. Chagak was surprised that he knew the word in her language. But she waited, noticing for the first time that the ikyak was different, now with a larger opening, the hatch no longer round but oval.
“Come,” he said, again using Chagak’s word.
Chagak hesitated. Did he want her in the ikyak with him?
“Come?” she asked and pointed to the ikyak.
Man-who-kills nodded.
Chagak could see that Man-who-kills sat in his ikyak like the hunters from her village, with legs flat. To fit in the ikyak, she would have to sit between his legs. She did not want to be so close to him.
“No,” Chagak said and backed away. “I must stay with Shuganan.”
“He strong enough. We not be gone long.”
Chagak’s chest was suddenly tight and hard with dread and she opened her mouth to speak but could not. How long had the man known her language? Had he always understood what she and Shuganan said?
“You surprised I speak your words,” Man-who-kills said and laughed. “You think I know nothing. That you make plans and I know nothing.”
“I have other women from your tribe. You think I not learn talking from them? Sometime best way to be enemy is be friend first.”
Chagak felt a sickness within, as though the spirit of the man were darkening all things around her.
“I talk now so you can learn my words. You wife must talk my words.”
He grinned, showing his wide, square teeth, then motioned for Chagak to get into the ikyak. When Chagak did not, Man-who-kills grabbed her arm and twisted it.
“Get in,” he said.
Chagak slid into the craft, moving as far forward as possible. Man-who-kills climbed in after, grabbed her at the waist and scooted her closer to him, tight between his legs, then he drew up the hatch skirting and fastened it around both of them.
He pushed the ikyak into the center of the stream, and Chagak felt the jerk as the current caught them and thrust them into the sea. She had never been in an ikyak before, had never realized how close the water would feel under her legs, how cold.
For a time Man-who-kills only paddled, but then he began to speak, pointing to his weapons, the ikyak, the sea, cliffs and kelp, saying each word in Chagak’s language, then another word that many times was similar but that Chagak had not heard before.
Something angry and hard rose up in Chagak’s chest and she said, nothing would not repeat his words. She did not want to be so close to him. The smell of his sweat and the fish smell of his chigadax blotted out the good smells of wind and sea.
“Talk!” he finally yelled at her, slapping the side of her head. “Say words. You are stupid woman.”
Chagak braced herself for another slap. But he only dipped his paddle more deeply into the water and the ikyak sped toward the kelp beds that spread out from the east cliff.
The tide was low and the kelp lay over exposed rocks and at the top of the water like long twisted ropes of dark babiche.
“Take limpets,” Man-who-kills said and handed her a woman’s knife, one she had seen in the ulaq, one that perhaps had belonged to Shuganan’s wife.
Man-who-kills moved the ikyak close to a large boulder and Chagak leaned over, using the flat of the blade to pry limpets from the rock. It was hard work but something Chagak was used to.
Man-who-kills moved the ikyak slowly among the rocks, checking the water’s depth often with the butt end of his harpoon.
When they had first come into the kelp, the sea otters disappeared, but as the ikyak moved slowly, making little noise, they began to surface, some following the ikyak and watching Chagak as she worked, others swimming in the kelp. Chagak threw limpets to them and more otters began to follow. Several wrapped themselves in the long strands and lay on their backs, anchored in the waves, and closed their eyes. Storytellers said the otters had their own villages under the kelp.
Chagak tried to watch the animals without moving too abruptly. Mothers cradled their babies in their arms while swimming on their backs. Others played, their sleek dark heads dipping and reappearing through the strands of kelp. Some caught fish, one brought mussels from the sea bottom and, laying a stone on his belly as he floated on his back, cracked the shells open against the stone just as hunters crack shells against stones and eat.
Chagak had claimed the sea otters as brothers and sisters when she was in the time of her first bleeding, a girl newly woman.
Then, in the custom of her people, her mother had helped her make a shelter of driftwood, mud and grass. Chagak had stayed there thirty days, eating little, using her dreams as ideas for designs. Hunters knew a woman in first bleeding had special powers, and any man who brought Chagak’s father sealskins had the right to ask Chagak to make a belt for him, something to give him good fortune in his hunting.
And so Chagak had worked during those thirty days, seeing only her mother or grandmother. She had been lonely and afraid of the spirits she knew had come to her, drawn by her blood.
Once after a long night when Chagak was kept awake by a cold rain that had seeped through the walls of her shelter, soaking her bedding and her small supply of food, Chagak began to sing, the song a comfort in the rain, the words coming to her from bits of remembered songs and chants. And as she sang, Chagak began to see images in her mind, a village of sea otters living beside the village of her parents, and she began to understand why her father called the otter brother, why he was so careful not to kill otters or disturb them when they fished among the kelp.
And then the otters had seemed to speak to her, telling her the stories her grandmother told, keeping Chagak’s mind busy as her fingers wove a hunter’s belt.
Now, as Chagak worked in Man-who-kills’ ikyak, the otters again seemed to bring comfort, to speak to her of the joyful things of life.
Chagak dropped another limpet into the gathering bag at the side of the ikyak. The bag was nearly full.
She stretched out to reach the last shell on the rock and Man-who-kills said to her, “Be still.”
She looked up at him, saw that he had untied both his harpoons. And before Chagak could move, before she understood what he was planning to do, he threw both weapons, one after the other.
“No!” Chagak screeched as the first hit a mother otter, baby clinging to her belly. The second hit an otter sleeping in the kelp. But as quickly as Chagak screamed, Man-who-kills clamped his hand over her mouth.
“Be still. Then I kill them all,” he said to her as he drew in his harpoons, coiling the ropes that attached them to his ikyak.
He moved his hand from Chagak’s mouth and she said, “Please, they are sacred to my family. Please do not kill them. They are my brothers.”
But Man-who-kills threw back his head and began to laugh. He laughed as he cut the dead otter from the kelp, laughed as he brought in the mother otter, the small one
following, laughed as he wrung the small one’s neck.
Chagak thought she heard a quiet voice, the voice of the dead mother telling her, “Be still. Do not try to fight him.” But Chagak’s anger pushed her to move, and she turned on Man-who-kills, the woman’s knife in her hands. She slashed the ikyak and the ropes that bound the harpoons to the craft, and finally slashed at Man-who-kills’ arms.
“You be dead if I not need your grandfather’s power,” he said as he caught her arms, forced her to drop the knife into the sea. Then, with both of her wrists in one of his hands, he picked up his paddle and slammed Chagak on the side of the head.
The sound of the paddle against her skull made an echo in Chagak’s head, a sound that drowned out Man-who-kills’ laughter, that drowned out the fear callings of the otters as they tried to help those who had been killed by the spear.
Escape, you can do nothing for your dead, Chagak wanted to call out, but her mouth would not form the words.
Like the people of my village, Chagak thought, and the pain in her head became the red flames that had engulfed her people’s ulakidaq, and she heard their cries as Man-who-kills brought otter after otter, young and old, to the ikyak. He killed some with his spear, some with the paddle blade, caught some in nets as they swam among the dead ones hanging from stringers beside the ikyak.
And Chagak, caught in the darkness, could not move, could do nothing but watch and listen and weep. Watch and listen and weep.
TWENTY-ONE
CHAGAK DID NOT WANT TO skin the otters. She wished she could build them a death ulaq, give them burials as she had for her own people.
Man-who-kills would not eat the meat and did not expect Chagak to prepare it. “Meat no good,” he had told her. “Taste like mud.” And Chagak had agreed, though she had never tasted otter meat. It was difficult enough to remove the sleek, heavily furred skins, to stretch and scrape them. At least she could fling the bodies back into the sea and hope the animals’ spirits found them.
