Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 03 - Dead In The Water

by Dead In The Water(lit)

  The road topped a little rise between two small hills and the rooftops of the village came into view. It wasn't much more than a string of buildings lined up along the water, enclosed by one gravel road that ran down the beach and a second that ran down the side of the truncated river that drained Unalaska Lake into Iliuliuk Bay.

  The buildings were a colorful jumble of frame houses, trailers and World War 11-vintage cottages and cabanas, one and two stories high, some old and weathered gray by wind and salt spray, some new with the unmistakable mark of Outside prefabrication stamped firmly upon them. It reminded Kate of Niniltna, both in location and construction. She saw orange fluorescent buoys offshore, probably mooring buoys for the villagers' boats. There was an old clapboard church with two cupolas, each with onion domes surmounted by the distinctive Russian Orthodox crosses with the slanted foot bar that Christ was supposed to have twisted in his agony during the Crucifixion.

  The beach was a narrow strip of gray sand, and Kate, always a sucker for beaches, walked around the end of the village, through the tall grass poking up through the crusted snow, and down to the wet sand separating sod and tide. The fog swirled overhead and offshore, and although she could hear Dutch Harbor going energetically about its business less than half a mile away across the water, the noise seemed muted. The beach stretched out before her, and she began to walk. A big New England dory loomed up out of the fog and grated against the gravel. Kate caught the bow and tugged it farther up the beach. The dory's owner hopped out and nodded his thanks. Kate walked on and the fog swallowed him up again. Farther down the beach two more figures resolved from shadow to solid shape, a father instructing his young, solemn son in the art of mending nets. The needle in his gnarled hands stilled and they looked at her without speaking until she moved on.

  Wavelets from the wakes of passing boats lapped at the shore. The fog felt coot and misty on her cheeks.

  Because it obscured her vision, her ears worked overtime and she heard them long before she saw them. A group of girls squatted in a circle at the edge of the water, where the sand was wettest. Soft-footed, Kate came up behind them and paused to look over their shoulders.

  One of the girls' legs was twisted beneath her at an awkward angle. Her body was bulky, her head too small for it. Her nose seemed to have no bridge, only nostrils, and she wheezed a little when she breathed through it.

  She was speaking, and at first Kate thought she must be speaking in Aleut, and then realized that the girl must have a cleft palate. She wasn't the only one who couldn't understand her because the girl next to her translated.

  "Gakgak," said the girl with the twisted leg. "Kayak," the girl next to her repeated. "Kayak. Thunderbird.

  Men. Do the men come in the kayak or the thunderbird, Sasha?"

  "Kayak," Sasha replied. "Men. Thunderbird. Men."

  "What's this?" another girl asked.

  "It looks like 'home,' " another girl said, puzzled.

  "I guess I'm dumb, Sasha," the first girl said apologetically.

  "I don't get it. Is this a new story?"

  The girls' heads remained bent, and Kate, curious, stood on tiptoe and peered over them to see what held so much of their attention.

  Sasha was drawing in the sand. "Kayak," she said firmly, and a single line, curved up at both ends, appeared over three wavy, parallel lines. "Thunderbird." A few swift strokes and there was a pair of wings attached to a fierce hooked beak next to the kayak. "Men." A series of kinetic Y's with legs marched from kayak to thunderbird, three in all, where two other male figures waited. With a single sweep of her hand, all the drawings were enclosed in a perfect circle, almost encompassing the girls' toes.

  Another circle was drawn inside the first, perhaps two inches from the first one and perfectly concentric. There was grace and assurance in every stroke.

  Sasha wasn't drawing with her finger, as Kate had thought at first. She bent forward to see more clearly and realized that the misshapen hand clutched a knife carved from ivory. It looked like a small scimitar, and the thing gleamed up at her in the dull light of the afternoon, smooth and shining from years of use. "Oh!" she exclaimed involuntarily. "How beautiful!"

  There was a muffled communal shriek of surprise and the circle of girls exploded in every direction. Sasha would have run, too, but her bad leg folded beneath her and she lay panting in the sand. She had dropped the ivory knife and Kate reached for it.

  "No!" Sasha cried.

  "It's all right," Kate said quickly, kneeling next to her.

  "Here." She held the knife out and Sasha snatched it out of her hands, clutching it to her breast. "It's all right,"

  Kate said again in a soothing voice. "I'm not going to hurt you. My name is Kate. What's yours?"

  Sasha's eyes flickered beneath heavy lids. She was whimpering a little, and lay half in, half out of the water, which was rapidly soaking into her clothes.

  Kate couldn't leave her like that. "Come on," she said, holding out her hand. "Let me help you up."

  The girl cringed away from her, but Kate, moving slowly, letting the girl see her every movement as it was made, put her hands under Sasha's arms and raised her to her feet. She cradled the girl's arm in a comforting hand and matched her steps to the girl's lurching ones.

  She was wet through, Kate noted with dismay. "Where do you live?" she asked, pitching her rough voice to be as nonthreatening as possible.

  A small voice next to her made her jump. "She should go to Auntie's house. It's about six houses down. I'll show you."

  Kate looked around to see the translator, a tiny, slender girl with long, tangled brown hair and a round face looking at her soberly.

  "Hello," Kate said. "I'm Kate."

  "I'm Becky," the girl replied. "You're not Anglo."

  "No," Kate said. "Or at least not much." Becky's smile was shy, but it was a smile. Encouraged, Kate said, "I'm sorry I scared you. I was walking down the beach and I heard you guys and I walked over to take a look. What was that Sasha was doing with the knife?"

  "Story-knifing," Becky said.

  "Story-knifing? What's that?"

  Becky looked up at Kate, her amazement written large on her face. "Didn't you storyknife when you were little?"

  Kate shook her head. "No. I've never seen anything like it. I've seen art for sale in Anchorage, hell, I've seen art hung in the museum there that was drawn a lot worse than what I saw Sasha drawing down on the beach." At Becky's inquiring look, she said, "I heard you call her by name while I was watching her draw."

  "Oh."

  "So tell me about story-knifing,"

  Becky's brown eyes examined Kate in a way that made her feel as if she were being dissected in preparation for study beneath a microscope. "It's just a game," she said at last. "A girl's game. Auntie showed us how.

  She said her mom showed her, and her mom showed her.

  We draw pictures in the sand, sometimes in the snow, and tell stories to each other. Up here."

  Becky climbed the stoop and opened the door without knocking. "Auntie! Sasha fell down and got all wet!"

  "Oh, that girl!" A tiny woman with a face whose features were almost swallowed up by the wrinkles on it shot out of the kitchen and buzzed around them like an infuriated bee. "Sasha," she said, her voice scolding but affectionate, "you naughty girl! What a mess! And you're shivering! Get out of those wet things this instant!

  Becky, take her down to the bathroom and run her a bath. There are clean towels in the linen closet. Scoot, Scoot!"

  Over her shoulder Becky said, "This is Kate, Auntie.

  She helped Sasha."

  The bee turned to Kate. "Well, don't just stand there, you must be chilled through, come into the kitchen and have some tea."

  "No, really," Kate said feebly, at the same time being swept into the old woman's irresistible wake. They went down a hallway and through a door into a large kitchen that took up half the square feet of the house and whose floor was covered in what looked like white straw. Kate sto
od still, ankle-deep in the stuff. "You look like you're busy, maybe I should go."

  "Nonsense," the other woman said firmly, "come in this instant and sit down next to the stove. How did you find Sasha?"

  Kate subsided meekly into the chair next to the oil stove. It gave out a warming, radiant heat and Kate realized how chilled she was. "Don't just sit there, take your jacket off," the older woman said. "I'm Olga Shapsnikoff, by the way."

  "Kate," Kate said. "Kate Shugak."

  Olga stopped short in mid-career. "Shugak? Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?"

  Kate was tempted to lie. "Yes," she said. "Ekaterina Shugak is my grandmother."

  "Really." Olga busied herself with the teakettle, and her back looked somehow less than enthusiastic. Kate warmed to her.

  "I attended a meeting chaired by Ekaterina at the last Raven convention," Olga said. "She certainly is a-" She hesitated, and looked over her shoulder. "She certainly is a strong, woman."

  The word you're looking for is "dictatorial," Kate thought. Also tyrannical, imperial and just plain pushy.

  She said nothing. Ekaterina might be all those things, but Ekaterina was her grandmother and this woman was a stranger. "Tell me about story-knifing," she said. "I've never seen a storyknife before. Is it an Aleut custom?"

  After a long, thoughtful look that gave Kate the distinct impression that she had been tested and, thankfully, not found wanting, Olga smiled. "It's more of an Eskimo custom," she replied, turning back to the stove. "My grandmother was from Alakanuk."

  As Olga boiled water and made tea, the rest of the girls from the circle on the beach drifted into the house one at a time, taking a seat around the large, scarred kitchen table, warming their hands around mugs of hot tea and casting shy, surreptitious glances at Kate. After a while Sasha lumbered in, dressed in clean, dry clothes, her skin flushed with the heat of her bath and her wet hair slicked back like a seal's. She sat down on the floor close to Olga's knees and took up a handful of the white straw.

  "What is all this?" Kate asked, gesturing at the haystack with her mug.

  "The girls and I are weaving baskets." Olga whipped a length of damp sheeting from the back of the table and displayed the beginnings of a dozen baskets that at first glance seemed to be made of cloth.

  "Oh," Kate said, on a long note of discovery. "You're an Attuan basket weaver."

  "Unalaskan, now," Olga said, her lips curling ever so slightly. One of the girls gave a giggle, quickly smothered.

  Kate touched one of the tiny things. It was soft, even silken to the touch. The weaving was very fine, the stitches minute. None of the baskets were more than three inches in diameter. Each one had the same intricate pattern woven around its base in a different color of grass.

  " 'Baskets of grass which are both strong and beautiful,'

  " she said softly. She looked up at Olga. "Captain Cook wrote that in his log, when he visited Unalaska in ."

  Becky sniffed, disdain sitting oddly on her young face.

  "The Unalaska baskets were very coarse."

  "So I've read," Kate agreed. "The ones on Attu were supposed to be the best, weren't they?"

  This time Olga sniffed, and being older and more experienced carried it off better than Becky had. It was a sound of profound disdain. "If you say so."

  "I don't know anything about it really," Kate admitted, except for what I've read about it. And I've seen the baskets in the museum in Anchorage, of course. How long does it take you to make one of these?"

  "Six months," Olga said. "Maybe six years."

  Kate looked at her incredulously. "It's true," Olga insisted. "It depends on how big the basket is. A basket two and a half inches high takes about forty hours. But when the old ones made shrouds, it could take years to finish just one. Would you like to try?"

  "Making a shroud?"

  Olga laughed. "We'll start you on a basket."

  There was a shuffling around the table as each girl found her own basket. Half a dozen dark heads bent forward, identical intent expressions on each small face.

  Evidently this was serious business, and Kate said as much.

  "One of these little baskets can bring as much as two hundred and fifty," Olga told her.

  "Dollars?"

  "Dollars," Olga confirmed with a twinkle in her eye.

  Kate looked at the baskets the girls were working on with a new and growing respect. "This how you girls make your spending money?" Six heads nodded without looking up, six pairs of fingers worked steadily without missing a beat. Kate turned back to Olga and found a handful of the bleached grass under her nose.

  "Peel the outer layers off, like this. You see?"

  "Uh-huh," Kate lied. She got the definite feeling that Olga explained things one time and one time only.

  "There are inner blades, here, and outer blades, what we call seconds. Keep them separate."

  One blade of grass looked pretty much like another to Kate, but she sorted hers into what she prayed were the correct piles. "Okay."

  "You split it, like this, with your thumbnail."

  After nearly a month at sea on a crab boat. Kate didn't have much in the way of thumbnails and her first efforts were clumsy at best.

  "All right," Olga said. "This is the spoke, and this is a weaver. The spokes are the frame, and the weavers are twisted around the frame. Okay. You take a piece of grass and twist it. Here, I'll start yours for you.

  Remember, you work always from the bottom up, and clockwise."

  "Who taught you how to do this, Auntie?"

  "My grandmother, a little. The rest I taught myself by taking some old baskets apart."

  "No one else does this anymore?"

  "Very few. Many of the old weavers who were left died in the flu epidemic in 1919," Olga said, "and of course none of them told anyone else how they did their weaving."

  "Why not?"

  "Because every weaver had her own special weaving styles, and there was jealousy between the villages.

  Each one always wanted to be the best, so each one kept her ways secret from the others." Olga sighed a little. "Now they are all dead, and the weaving is almost dead, too."

  "Not as long as you're alive, Auntie," Becky said, and the girls giggled.

  "For which you should be glad," Olga told them, "or you wouldn't be able to buy that new Michael Jackson album. No," Olga told Kate, "dabble your fingers in the water first. The grass must be damp to work. Not too much! Only wet down as much as you are going to use at one time. You have to wrap up what you don't use, and it will mildew if you put it away damp."

  After straining and sweating an hour, Kate produced her first weave, a tiny circle of clumsy stitches that nevertheless was recognizable as the beginning of a basket. "Good," Olga said. "Now keep going."

  Easy for you to say, Kate thought. "You've got a lot of grass here," she said, nodding at the pile on the kitchen floor. "Looks like enough to keep you weaving until next Christmas."

  Olga shook her head and extended her arms in a circle, the tips of her fingers barely touching. "From this much grass, you get this many weavers." She put her right forefinger and thumb around her left wrist.

  "That's all?"

  "That's all," the old woman confirmed. "That's why it's important to pick the best grass."

  "And where is the best grass?"

  "Away from the salt water. Grass on the beach is too thick. It gets brittle after curing."

  "So you pick in the hills?"

  Olga nodded, her face bent over her basket, her expression absorbed as she conjured some especially intricate design out of the rim. "You learn where the good grass grows. If you keep picking in the same place the grass gets better."

  "That's why we go back to Anua every year," Becky interpolated.

  Kate broke a spoke. "Anua?"

  Her voice must have sounded as startled as she felt because Becky cast her a curious glance. "Sure. It's where our family comes from."

  "Oh." Kate began the arduous process of
threading another spoke into the weaving, running through a mental list of questions to ask. She couldn't afford the appearance of prying or she would lose all the confidence she had gained so far. She recognized the investigator in her superseding the fellow tribal member and was momentarily ashamed of herself.

  But two men were missing, and probably dead and she didn't like Harry Gault so she said in a casual voice, "So if you're from Anua, why do you live in Unalaska?"

  "It was the war," Becky said. "Tell her the story, Auntie."

  "It was the war," Olga said. Her voice dropped into a rhythm, slipping into it so effortlessly and so seamlessly that Kate didn't notice it at once. "The Japanese soldiers came.

  "Then the army came.

  "The army moved all of the people from the islands.

  "They put them in towns and in camps in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound.

  "It was too hot up there for the people.

  "Many of the people died.

  "After the war, the army brought us back.

  "The people that were left wished they had died with the others.

  "The houses were gone.

  "The villages were gone.

  "Even the ones where there had been no Japanese.

  "The army said they destroyed them because they couldn't leave the villages for the Japanese to use.

  "We couldn't go back.

  "There weren't enough of us.

  "There was nothing to go back to.

  "So now we live in a few villages instead of many.