A Dream in Polar Fog

by Yuri Rytkheu

  “You in a cheerful mood?” Toko asked.

  “Tell me,” John turned to him, “could you live in another place?”

  “What other place?” Toko didn’t quite understand.

  “In the lands where I’m from, for example.”

  Toko was striding forward silently. The question had been put to him in all seriousness and he was bound to give a substantive answer.

  “If I had to,” Toko slowly uttered. “If there were no other way out. But maybe I couldn’t survive it even then.”

  “But why?” John objected. “I am living in your land, after all.”

  “Because you have the hope of returning,” Toko answered. “It’s as if you’re a visitor here. The ships will come, take you back to your warm homeland, to your family and friends. Time will pass, and your life here will seem to you a vague dream. You know, there’s a sort of dream that you can never remember clearly . . . A dream in polar fog . . .”

  “A dream in polar fog?” John mused, and after some thought, made the objection: “No, the things I’ve lived through here I will never forget . . . Toko, I wanted to ask you: What would you say if I decided to stay here forever, on your shores?”

  “Well, you could live among us, too,” Toko said thoughtfully, “but you do have a chance of returning, and your loved ones probably haven’t lost hope. Maybe afterwards you’ll come back to us. We need the white people’s friendship, because they have more skill and knowledge than we do. They’ve thought up things that make a man’s life easier.”

  “I worry that interaction with us will bring your people nothing but trouble,” John said harshly.

  “Look at how long I’ve known you, but I never heard anything ill from you,” Toko said, smiling.

  A fire blazed inside the chottagin. Pyl’mau melted some snow and handed it to John for his face washing. John gripped a clean white rag between the two short wooden holders that stood in for fingers, wet it and made a few passes over his face. Toko washed his face too, something he’d picked up from his white friend.

  Faces washed, the men sat down to breakfast.

  11

  “We need lakhtak,” Pyl’mau remarked to the men with increasing frequency. “There’s nothing left for shoe soles. If you don’t get some, you’ll end up going barefoot.”

  The hunters would go out to the fast ice. The long-awaited south wind had lost its way in other lands, and the ice-sheets were firmly welded to the craggy shore.

  Flocks of wild duck took flight over the far land spit.

  Toko shook John awake early in the morning. They breakfasted on cold nerpa meat. Pyl’mau put a few pieces of boiled nerpa into a leather satchel for the road.

  “What’s this? We’re taking food? But when we go out on the sea, we can’t take even a little bite along!”

  “That’s custom,” Toko answered. “For duck hunting we can take some food along, but it’s sin to take it to sea.”

  “Don’t you think that some of your customs simply make your life more difficult?” John inquired while helping to hitch up the dogs.

  “There are some rules in life that make one person’s life difficult, but help all people together,” came Toko’s meditative reply, one that convinced John that it was better to drop the subject altogether.

  Their path ran along the shore. John and Toko were by no means the first to go out – the snow was already marked by the passing of a good many dogsled runners. On approaching the Pil’khyn Strait the hunters picked up speed. Armol’ had taken his younger brothers along. The boys held eplykytet16 in their laps, and were picking through walrus teeth for slinging. They were smilingly contemplating John, decked out with two eplykytet.

  “Hey, Toko, how is he going to manage throwing an eplykytet into a flock?” Armol’ shouted from his sled.

  “He’ll manage,” Toko assured him. “He’s already tried it on the ice, in the lagoon.”

  For a few days now, John had been mastering the art of eplykytet throwing under Toko’s supervision. This turned out to be a great deal harder than learning to shoot a Winchester. The very first attempt almost ended fatally – for Toko. The eplykytets, sliding off John’s stumps, whistled past Toko’s head at half a finger’s breadth. And another time, John even managed to hit himself. Despairing of ever taming the disobedient device, John informed Toko that he would do without duck. But Toko was resolute:

  “A true man must be able to tackle everything!”

  “Well, it’s not as though I would take these bones with me to Port Hope!” John shook the eplykytet up and down. “I’ve got a decent shotgun at home.”

  “No great feat to bring down a bird with a gun,” Toko rejoined. “You try it with this.”

  And once again, patiently, he set to demonstrating how to swing the bunch of walrus teeth on their thin sealskin thongs overhead, until he finally taught John to launch the eplykytet in the right direction.

  In places, snow had already left the shingled promontory, and from afar the dark bald spots resembled patches on an endless white canvas. The patches were where the hunters disposed themselves, looking out for the flock of ducks that flew overhead from the opposite end of the lagoon.

  Toko had decided on a little hillock where the shingle was dry, and led the dog pack off to the shore, so they’d not see the ducks and frighten them off by barking. Armol’ and his brothers settled down nearby.

  “When the flock moves closer, we need to lie down and be still,” Toko was admonishing his comrade. “Jump up only when the ducks are right overhead.”

  John listened and nodded quietly, charged with the kind of excitement familiar to any hunter.

  For some time, John and Toko talked quietly, scanning the horizon line. The flocks were flying either to the left or to the right of them.

  “Maybe we should try another spot?” John suggested.

  “Be patient. The ducks will come to us, too,” Toko answered calmly.

  And truly, very soon an enormous flock came into view not far from where they lay. The din of beating wings grew with each passing moment. The dense dark stripe resembled a racing hurricane rather than a flock of birds. The roar was like that of Niagara Falls.

  Toko and John pressed tight against the damp shingle.

  Crossing the shoreline, the ducks rose sharply upwards, yet they were still flying so low that John felt the wind generated by their wings. The eplykytets whirred upwards. They numbered four instead of two. Somehow Armol’ and a younger brother of his had turned out to be close by. Three ducks, bound in leather thongs, plummeted to the ground.

  John raced toward them, but was beaten by Armol’ and Toko.

  Armol’ handed him back his eplykytet with a caustic little smile.

  “Missed,” he said.

  John was nonplussed. For some strange reason, every time he came across Armol’ he felt an odd kind of disquiet and often caught himself talking to the man in an obsequious, even guilty, tone. This time, too, John quietly said:

  “I can’t do it yet.”

  “Hard for a white man to learn our way,” Armol’ pronounced, tying two of the ducks together by their wings.

  The second flock was much larger than the first. Once over the shingled sandbank, it blocked the sunlight. This time, John also had some luck. His eplykytet wrapped itself around a large fat lylekeli.17

  “Fortune has favored you,” was Toko’s restrained praise.

  “Got lucky,” said Armol’.

  In truth, there was such a profusion of ducks that you could have thrown an eplykytet blindfolded.

  By the time the sun crossed to the western side of the sky, Toko and John had almost three dozen of the ducks.

  John, flush with triumph, was promising Toko:

  “As soon as I get home to Canada, I’ll send you a shotgun, right away. One shot into such a dense crowd and you can go back with a full sled!”

  “I’ll look forward to that,” Toko said, uncertainly.

  When their sled was running over the
beaten path back, Toko settled himself comfortably and launched into song. John had heard Chukchi singing before, but could glean no great pleasure from the doleful, plaintive melody. It seemed to him that everyone just sang the same song. There were almost no words, and one could only guess at the feelings that overwhelmed the singer.

  It was hard for the dogs. During the day the snow had melted in the sun, becoming too loose for the sliding runners. Again and again, John and Toko would jump off the sled and help the dogs.

  The Sacred Whale Jaws loomed ahead, the track became more solid, and now they could have a rest.

  “Why is your ancestress called the White Woman?” asked John, as he recalled that according to Chukchi legend, the woman who was buried under these bones had given birth to the Chukchi people.

  “That was what they called her,” Toko answered.

  “And why whale bones in particular, over her grave?”

  “She gave birth to whales as well as to people, didn’t she?” Toko answered in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Whales?” Stunned, John was about to inform Toko it was nonsense, but then the absurdities of the Bible came to mind, and he only asked:

  “Can you tell me something about her?”

  “Every child remembers this legend,” said Toko, “and you should know it also, because you too might be a whale’s brother.”

  “A whale’s brother?” John had to ask again.

  “Well then, listen,” Toko said, leaning back comfortably. “The old men tell us that a time long ago, a beautiful young woman lived on this shore. And such a beauty she was that even the great sun forgot to leave the sky as it gazed on her, and the stars would shine in daylight just to get a glimpse of her. Out of her footprints grew lovely flowers and pure water springs appeared.

  “The beauty often came to the seashore. She loved to look at the waves and to hear their murmur. She would fall asleep to the whispering of the wind and the wave, and then the sea creatures would gather onshore to get a look at her. The walruses climbed up onto the pebbled beach, the seals watched her without blinking with their great round eyes.

  “One day, a big lygirev18 was swimming past. He noticed the crowd of sea beasts on the shore, grew curious and finally swam up close. When he saw the beautiful maiden, he was so taken with her that he forgot where he had been going.

  “When the weary sun sat down for a rest on the horizon, the whale returned to shore, touched his head to the pebbly beach and turned into a fine young man. The beauty saw him and lowered her eyes, shy. And the young man took the maiden by the hand, and led her into the tundra, to where the grasses are soft, to the carpet of flowers. And so became the custom – each time the sun set toward the line of the horizon, the whale would come back, turn into a man, and live with the beauty as a man with his wife. The day came, and she knew that she would soon bear a child. Then the whale-man built a spacious yaranga and lived there with her, and returned to the sea no more.

  “Little whale calves appeared. Their father housed them in a nearby lagoon. Whenever they got hungry, the babies would swim to shore – and there was their mother, coming out to meet them. The little whales grew quickly, and soon the lagoon was too small for them, they wanted to be let out into the freedom of the wide sea. It pained their mother to see them go, but what can you do – whales are a sea folk. Her children swam off to the sea, and the woman was with child again, except that this time she gave birth not to whales but to human babies. Meanwhile the whale children did not forget their parents, often coming to shore to frolic in front of their mother and father’s eyes.

  “Time passed. The children grew up, the parents grew older. The father no longer went out hunting, now his sons brought the food. Before their first sea hunt, their father called them to him and gave them a word of parting:

  “To one who is strong and brave, the sea is a life giver. But remember: your brothers the whales and your distant relatives the dolphins and porpoises, live there. Do not hunt them, but take care of them . . .

  “Soon the father died. And the mother was too old now to see her sons off on the hunt. The whale-people increased in number, the sons all took wives and each had many children. More and more food was needed, as the whale’s descendants became the Chukchi and the Eskimo people, hunters of sea life.

  “Came one bad year, when there were few beasts to be had by the shore. The walruses forgot their watery way to the settlement, and the nerpa had retreated to distant islands, so the hunters had to go further and further to sea – where some were lost on the ice, and some in the fathomless depths.

  “But the whales continued to cavort and play cheerfully close to shore. And then one of the hunters, a son of the White Woman, said:

  “‘Why don’t we hunt the whales? Just look – mountains of blubber and meat. One carcass will feed all of us and the dogs through the winter.’

  “‘But have you forgotten that they are our brothers?’ the people answered him.

  “ ‘What kind of brother are they,’ the hunter scoffed, ‘if they live in the water, and not on land, their bodies are long and huge, and they don’t know a word of human speech.’

  “‘But they say . . .’ the people tried to set him straight.

  “ ‘Old wives’ tales for little children,’ snapped the hunter. He fitted out a big hide boat, taking with him the strongest and most skillful oarsmen.

  “It turned out to be an easy job. One whale swam to the hide boat himself, as he had always done upon seeing his brothers come out to sea. But this reunion spelled his death.

  “They harpooned the whale and dragged him to shore; to haul him onto the beach they had to call up all the villagers, even the women and little children!

  “The one who had killed the whale went to his mother’s yaranga to tell her what a treasure he’d gotten for his people. But the mother already knew, and was dying of grief.

  “‘I killed a whale!’ the hunter exclaimed, entering the yaranga. ‘Pulled in a whole mountain of meat and blubber!’

  “‘It was your brother you killed,’ his mother answered. ‘And if today you have killed your brother just because he does not look like you, then tomorrow . . .’

  “And then she died.”

  Toko fell silent.

  John was silent too.

  “And everything went from there,” Toko said finally, “so now even when a human kills another human, nobody is much surprised.”

  There was lively commotion in the settlement. Each yaranga blazed with a fire, and blue pillars of smoke rose steeply into the clear sky. Down and feathers floated around in the air – they were plucking ducks inside the chottagins, cauldrons were on the boil, and delicious clouds of steam roused the appetites of both the people and the dogs.

  Pyl’mau had stoked up a great fire inside the chottagin. She took some ducks right off the sled and set to cooking.

  John and Toko unhitched the harnesses, stored away the sled on its wooden supports, chopped up some kopal’khen and fed the dogs. On entering the chottagin they both took off their hunting footgear. Looking over John’s torbasses, Toko noticed a small rip in the sole, and showed it to Pyl’mau.

  “Need lakhtak,” Pyl’mau said. “You’ll end up barefoot by summer, there’s no leather for shoe soles.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll go out to the fast ice,” Toko replied.

  John had slipped off to his tiny room. Shutting his eyes, he could still see the endless duck swarm flashing by, and his ears still hummed with Toko’s voice, recounting the ancient legend.

  John rose from his pallet, took out his notepad and wrote: 21 (?) May, 1911. Enmyn settlement. Today I went duck hunting and used a weapon first employed by people of the Stone Age. And I felt like one of those people, and treated my friend Toko accordingly. But what he has told me is very far from primitivism. This legend holds so deep a meaning that I doubt if Toko himself can comprehend the import of what he told me. Bible parables are like a child’s mumbling compared to the idea that pervades the de
ep poetry of this legend . . .

  Then John wrote down the ancient tale, trying hard to recall the smallest details.

  And yet I suspect that Toko’s telling me the tale was not without a purpose. Perhaps thus was his way of introducing to me, through allegory, the idea of universal brotherhood – that unattainable dream of mankind, rooted in the first beginnings of history.

  Reading over what he’d written and carefully inspecting the handwriting, John noted with satisfaction that his writing had improved. It was more even, and the letters almost ceased escaping between the lines. After another satisfied glance, John stuck a pencil in the holder-clasp and continued:If only a year ago, someone had told me I would find that the native women here possessed undeniable charms, I’d have called him a brainless fool and taken it as an insult. It seems that each woman is beautiful in her own place. My imagination can’t set Jeannie in this hut, just as Mau would seem out of place in our living room at home. And yet, both of them – Jeannie and Mau – are lovely enough to arouse a man’s feelings. Being among these people has obviously done me some good. I’ve started to look at many things more simply, and that means more precisely and more open-mindedly. I know already that I’ ll have a hard time leaving them, and even at home, in Port Hope, my ears will go on ringing with Chukchi speech and I’ll dream the dreams of this shore . . . Dreams in polar fog. And too, I feel that although I may be covered in grime, it’s as if I’ve shed something, some sort of bark that kept me from feeling another man’s joys, pains and emotions . . .

  “Sson, time to eat!” he heard Toko’s voice call. “Come out here.”

  John paused for a moment over the open notepad, then shut it and came out into the smoky chottagin, where Pyl’mau was moving around in the firelight.

  She placed a large wooden dish filled with duck meat onto a little low table. This time there were no knives – bird flesh being quite susceptible to being torn apart by teeth.