by Chi Zijian
Nidu the Shaman had been sitting silently by the open fire, but Dashi’s words brought him to his feet. ‘If you say one more word tonight,’ he said to Dashi, ‘your tongue will be as hard as stone tomorrow!’ Dashi knew about Nidu the Shaman’s powers so he didn’t dare continue his babbling.
Nidu the Shaman sighed. ‘There’s no use spilling your tears,’ he said to the women. ‘Linke and Hase will be back soon, and Lena is already together with the birds in the sky.’
His words made Mother faint. Yveline’s face was covered in tears, Maria stamped her feet in anguish, and Nadezhda’s hand – in the midst of crossing herself – froze over her chest.
Soon Father and Hase returned on their reindeer. But Lena didn’t return, she would never return. Father and Hase had found her long-since-frozen body and buried her on the spot.
I ran into Nidu the Shaman’s shirangju and shouted: ‘Egdi’ama, please save Lena! Go and retrieve her umai!’
‘Lena can’t come back,’ Nidu the Shaman said. ‘Don’t call for her!’
I kicked the water flask next to the hearth so hard it banged kwanglang kwanglang. I cursed and swore that I was going to burn his Spirit Robe, Spirit Headdress and Spirit Drum. ‘If Lena doesn’t stand up again, I’ll lie down beside her and never get up again either!’
But I didn’t lie down, and Lena didn’t stand up again.
Father said that when he found Lena, her eyes were closed tight and the corners of her mouth were creased in a smile, as if she were having a beautiful dream. She must have been fast asleep to fall from the reindeer. Drowsy, once she fell into the soft snow, she just kept on sleeping. She froze to death while dreaming.
And so Lena departed, taking with her the sound of Mother’s laugh. Tamara had lost two daughters in succession, and her face was ashen throughout the winter. One long night after another passed without Tamara and Linke making wind-sounds in our shirangju. How I missed hearing her call out ‘Linke! Linke!’ passionately in the midst of those wind-sounds.
Snowfall that winter was light, and squirrels were numerous and our hunting garnered an exceptionally bountiful yield, but Linke and Tamara didn’t cheer up.
In the spring, Rolinsky arrived in our camp on his horse. When he learned that Lena was no more, his face instantly darkened and he was struck dumb. He wanted to see the doe that had taken Lena into the valley of death, and Linke took him.
By this time that grey doe once again had milk, but for Tamara this was just a reminder of bad tidings. Every day she yanked at its teats with all her might, despising her inability to milk it dry on the spot. Day in and day out the grey doe withstood Tamara’s mistreatment, even though its legs trembled. But Rolinsky understood why Tamara’s milking was so crazed.
He patted the reindeer affectionately. ‘You know how much Lena cared for the reindeer,’ he said to Tamara. ‘If she saw you treating a doe like this, she’d feel bad.’ Tamara released her grip on the doe’s teat, and wept.
During that visit Rolinsky didn’t join in our Swan Dance or drink with us.
As he took leave of the camp with bundles of squirrel pelts, I spied him hanging something on a little pine tree. After he had mounted his horse and moved away from the sapling, I discovered the tree was twinkling. I ran over to take a look. It turned out to be a tiny round mirror.
It must have been a gift Rolinsky had brought for Lena! In the mirror were reflected the balmy sunshine, pure white clouds and green, green mountains. But it couldn’t contain all the abundance and moist freshness and brightness of springtime – it seemed as if the mirror were going to burst into pieces.
Although I felt horrible the night Lena disappeared, I just couldn’t cry. But the spring scenery condensed onto the surface of that tiny mirror set free the tears accumulated deep within my heart. I finally let loose with a wail and bawled, causing the birds perched on the trees to take flight in fear.
I took down the tiny mirror and hid it away. Nowadays it’s still in my possession, but the glass is hazy. I once gave it to my daughter Tatiana as part of her dowry. She gave birth to her daughter Irina, and noticing that she too liked the mirror, when Irina married she also included it in her dowry. Irina loved painting, and she often reflected her own paintings in it, for she said her paintings in the petite mirror were like a lake veiled in a thin layer of mist, hazy and delicately beautiful.
A few years back Irina departed from this world. Tatiana was putting her daughter’s things in order, and just when she intended to smash the mirror on a rock, I took it back. This mirror has witnessed our mountains, trees, white clouds, rivers and many women’s faces. It is an eye on our lives – how could I stand by and let Tatiana blind it?
I kept this eye, even though I know that because it has witnessed too much scenery and too many people, its eye, like mine, is no longer so limpid.
***
I discovered springtime is a medicine capable of healing.
In the winter following Lena’s departure, Mother languished in depression. But with the return of spring, a smile’s shadow appeared on her face. It was that spring when I discovered blood flowing from my body. Seeing Mother’s complexion was ruddy once again, I felt certain that blood from my body had flowed into hers.
‘I’m bleeding,’ I told Mother. ‘I’m going to die! But my blood isn’t flowing in vain – it’s gone to your face.’
Excited, Mother drew me into her bosom and yelled to Father: ‘Linke, our little unaaji has grown up!’
Mother brought some fine strands of dried willow bark and swathed my groin with them. Then I understood why she gathered willow bark on the riverbank each spring: to absorb our youthful spring waters.
Whenever the wind softened the willow trees on the riverbank, mother would strip off pieces of bark, fill long baskets on her back with them, and return to camp. She singed the bark to render it malleable. Then she tore the pieces into fine threads, kneading them on her legs to make them fluffy, dried them under the sun and stored them. Back then I had no idea of their use, and when I asked Mother she always smiled. ‘When you’re grown up you’ll understand.’
I think the fact that I used those strands of willow bark so early was related to my love for birch sap. In this I was definitely influenced by Mother, for she drank even more birch sap than us. The liquid we imbibed was white, but what flowed out was red.
White birch are the most brightly garbed trees in the forest. They’re draped in a white silken gown festooned with black blossom-shaped decorations. All you have to do is cut a shallow opening at the root with a hunting knife, stick a straw in it, position the birch-bark bucket, and the sap flows naturally through the straw into the bucket like spring water. The liquid is pure and transparent, fresh and sweet. Take a sip and your mouth feels clean and cool.
I used to tap birch sap with Lena, but after she departed, I went with Luni. He would kneel at a root, dangling a straw from his mouth. Luni drank his fill first and then let the sap flow into the bucket.
I never saw anyone who loved white birch trees as intensely as Tamara. She often stroked a fuzzy tree trunk and said admiringly: ‘Look at how she’s dressed, so pristine, just like snow! Look at her waist, so slender and straight!’
Whenever Luni and I brought back birch sap, Tamara wouldn’t touch reindeer milk. She’d ladle out a bowl of the sap and down it in one go. When she’d finished, she’d squint deliriously, like someone encountering the sunlight after a long spell in total darkness.
And when she stripped the bark from a birch tree, she liked to scrape the viscous liquid straight off the trunk and eat it. Her bark-stripping technique was even better than a man’s. Sharp hunting knife in hand, she selected a birch with a trunk of a consistent width and a top layer of lustrous bark. First she cut an opening down the thickest part of the trunk, then she made a horizontal cut around the top, circling the whole tree, repeated the circular motion at the bottom, and then she could neatly lift off a whole piece of birch bark.
Since the bark i
s removed from the tree trunk, during the first year it is essentially naked. The next year it turns grey-black as if it had slipped on a pair of dark trousers. One or two years after that, the stripped area grows a fresh layer of tender bark as if it has donned an eye-catching white gown. In my eyes, the birch tree is a fine tailor who cuts clothes to suit herself.
The bark stripped from a birch tree can be made into all sorts of things. Just warm it slightly over a fire until it becomes soft and pliable enough to make a bucket or a box. A birch-bark basket can be used to fetch water, and boxes of various shapes to store salt, tea, sugar or tobacco.
Birch-bark canoes are made from big pieces of bark. That sort of birch bark must be put in a large iron pot and cooked for a short while and then removed. Once the water is drained, it’s ready to make a boat.
We call our birch-bark canoes ‘jawi’. To fabricate a jawi you need to use pine for the frame and wrap the birch bark around it. We fasten the joints using thread made from red pine fibres. Then we seal the openings with glue made by simmering a mixture of pine and birch oils.
Jawi are very narrow, but very long too – the height of four or five people combined. Its ends are pointed and there is no head or tail, so whichever end you stand at, that is the bow. When you put it in the water it’s as nimble as a silver carp.
Every urireng possesses three or four jawi. Normally they’re kept in the camp, and they’re light so they can be easily transported when needed. If we stay at a campsite for a long time during the summer, we keep our jawi by the riverside for the sake of convenience.
My memories of birch-bark jawi are associated with the elk, the largest creature in the forest. A mature kandahang can weigh two hundred and fifty kilos! Its head is big and long, but its neck is short, and it has grey-brown fur, slender limbs and a small tail. Antlers grow on the head of the bull. The upper portion of the antlers are shaped like a shovel and look like a pair of square scarves hanging out to dry atop its head, one on the left and one on the right.
Kandahang love to eat the jungu grass that grows in marshes at bends in the river, so to kill one a hunter often must keep watch on the bank. During the daytime kandahang hide away in a shady place in the forest, emerging only at night to look for food, so our men hunt them after the stars come out.
Father was determined to shape Luni into an outstanding hunter, so when my brother was eight or nine, as long as the hunting ground wasn’t too far from the camp, Father took him along.
One cool summer night I was kneading thread from deer sinew with Mother by the fireside when Luni came running in. Bubbling over with enthusiasm, he told me Father was going to take him in a jawi to a cove for kandahang hunting.
I wasn’t so keen on kandahang, but I really wanted to ride in a jawi. I begged Mother to ask Father to bring me along. I knew that taking a girl on the hunt was a big taboo. But as long as Mother told Father to do something, I was confident he could only say ‘yes’. So when Mother walked out of the shirangju to look for Father, I jumped up from the fireside, knowing that I would go with them to the cove.
Rifle at his back, Linke took us through the forest to the riverside. On the way he instructed Luni and me: once in the jawi, we mustn’t speak loudly or spit in the water.
Back then the forest on the Right Bank of the Argun not only had big trees that blotted out the sun, it also had tributaries everywhere, so many of the small rivers were nameless. Like shooting stars that slide across the Heavens, most have now disappeared. So let me call that unnamed waterway Kandahang River, because it was there that I saw my first ever kandahang.
As if he were dragging a lazy child against his will, Linke pulled the canoe out from the underbrush where it was hidden, and pushed it into the river. He watched Luni and me get aboard and then he jumped in. The canoe didn’t displace much water. It was a dragonfly alighting on the water almost mutely, rocking slightly. As the craft moved languidly along, gusts of cool wind caressed my ears.
I watched the trees on the bank as we advanced and it seemed as if each one had sprouted legs and was in steady retreat. The river was a courageous warrior and the trees were vanquished soldiers.
There wasn’t the hint of a cloud around the moon. It was so luminous that I worried that the exposed moon might suddenly tumble down to the earth.
At first the river flowed straight as an arrow, and then it bent a wee bit and as the curvature increased, the flow accelerated and the river widened. At last we reached a big bend on the Kandahang River that overflowed into a small, oval lake to one side, while the main stream rushed single-mindedly ahead.
Linke swung the canoe into the lake, and we rowed towards a low-lying part of the mountain opposite us. Linke went ashore but didn’t allow Luni and me to debark.
As soon as Father left, Luni tried to scare me. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘There’s a wolf in front of us. You can see the light shining in his eyes!’
I was just about to scream when Father called back to Luni: ‘What did I tell you? A good hunter mustn’t talk nonsense!’
Luni immediately quietened down. He tapped his fingers lightly against the body of the canoe several times as if he were rapping his own head in self-criticism.
Linke returned to the canoe quickly. He whispered that he had discovered the faeces and hoof marks of a kandahang in the undergrowth on the bank. The faeces were very fresh, which meant the kandahang had been there a few hours previously. Based on its hoof marks, it was a mature and sizeable one.
Linke said we should go to the willow grove opposite to keep watch for it. We rowed towards the grove, and once the jawi was squeezed into the grove, it served as a piece of dry land. We concealed ourselves in the canoe, and Linke had Luni load the bullets into the rifle chamber. Then Linke held his finger up to his lips, signalling that we mustn’t make a sound.
We waited with bated breath. At the beginning I was very excited, expecting the kandahang to arrive at any second. But when even the moon had shifted its body in the water, I still hadn’t heard a single sound. I was drowsy and couldn’t help yawning. Luni put out his hand and tugged on my hair to keep me alert. But that hurt my scalp, and I was so annoyed that I hit him on the shoulder. He tilted his head and smiled at me. I can still recall Luni’s smiling face in the moonlight. Those two rows of neat teeth twinkled like silver, as if he had a treasure stashed away in his mouth.
To stay awake, I kept my head moving constantly. First I gazed at the moon in the sky, and then I lowered my head and gazed at the moon in the river. After I gazed at the moon in the water, I raised my head again and gazed at the moon in the sky. One moment I felt the moon above was bigger and brighter, and the next I felt the moon below was larger and more luminous.
A breeze began to blow. The moon-in-the-sky looked the same as ever, but now the moon-in-the-water had grown a wrinkle-covered mien, as if it had suddenly aged. It was then and there I realised that it is the things in the sky that are eternal; no matter how lovely the things reflected in the water, they are all short lived. I recalled Nidu the Shaman said Lena was together with the birds in the sky, so I felt she had gone to a nice place and I didn’t need to avoid thinking of her any more.
As I was remembering Lena, Father forced down a mouthful of spit. I heard a cha-cha, like someone chopping a tree with an axe. It wasn’t a sharp axe. It was a bit dull because that cha-cha wasn’t crisp.
But cha-cha quickly changed into pupu. Following the sound, I discovered a grey-black shadow moving on the other side of the lake! Evidently that ‘pupu’ was the sound of an animal’s hooves sinking into the lakeside marsh. Father was so excited that he couldn’t resist exclaiming ‘Uh!’, so I knew that shadow must be a kandahang! My heartbeat quickened, my palms sweated and my drowsiness vanished.
The kandahang advanced unperturbed in the night. Its huge body looked like a shifting sand dune. It walked towards the lake, lowered its head, and drank for a moment. When it lifted its head, Father took aim but missed his chance when the kandahang suddenly p
lunged into the water.
I had imagined it would be very clumsy, but the kandahang’s entry was unexpectedly graceful. It must have gone underwater to eat jungu grass, its head appearing now and again. Doubtless it deemed itself master of the lake and didn’t linger at any one spot; one moment it was on the southern side of the lake, the next it was swimming to the east, roaming freely throughout its kingdom. We could see its traces from the bubbles that broke the surface of the water.
As the kandahang approached the centre of the lake, it shattered the moon-in-the water. The golden fragments rippled and made my heart ache for the moon.
As the kandahang drew closer to us, I became very anxious because it certainly looked as though it had a big appetite. If Father didn’t shoot it spot on, it would pounce. Our jawi would be trampled to pieces and we’d have to flee. And if we ran slowly and it caught up to us, we’d be lucky to escape with our lives.
Linke was a genuinely fine hunter. When the kandahang submerged itself and the moon appeared perfectly round on the lake surface once more, he remained very composed and waited patiently. Only when the kandahang stood up, shook its head with satisfaction and made ready to go ashore did Linke fire his rifle. When the rifle sounded, my heart leapt out of my chest too. I saw the kandahang totter as if it were going to collapse in the water, but it quickly righted itself and charged in the direction of the rifle shot.
I screamed, ignoring Linke’s earlier instructions. Only after Linke fired another two bullets into the kandahang did it cease its charge. But it didn’t fall immediately. It staggered for a long moment like a drunkard, and finally collapsed – gudung! – in a gargantuan splash. In the silver moonlight, the spray glowed a dark greenish-blue.
Luni cried out with joy, and Linke let out a long sigh and lowered his gun. We waited two or three minutes to confirm that the kandahang wasn’t breathing, and then rowed the canoe through the willow grove and quickly swept over to the lake centre.
