A Dream in Polar Fog

by Yuri Rytkheu

  But nothing turned out to be quite that simple. The harnessed pack was stubbornly motionless, and the lead dog expressed a complete indifference to John’s commands. This was a large shaggy dog with an intelligent, thoughtful look about him. There was so much disdain for John in his eyes, that the latter finally couldn’t control himself; he grabbed the whip and struck the dog twice. He climbed aboard the sled and shouted angrily: “Gu!”

  The leader looked back at him, but set off.

  By evening, more worn out than the dogs themselves, John fell into the yaranga and triumphantly informed his wife:

  “Mau! I got them to obey me in the end. They recognized me as their master.”

  “It couldn’t have been any different,” Pyl’mau smiled, “didn’t I talk to them about that very thing?”

  During the inclement autumn months John rebuilt the yaranga. Sometimes he had help from Orvo, Armol’, and Tiarat. It became a strange, but comfortable dwelling. John didn’t just blindly copy Carpenter’s Keniskun yaranga. Carpenter didn’t own a dog team, but John required one, and so he widened the chottagin and divided it into two halves: one for the people and one for the dogs. The halves were split by a low screen. In the people’s half, there stood a roughly made table with a similarly rough stool, a large crate against a wall, wardrobelike, shelves tied to the wall with bits of lakhtak strips. John also enlarged his old closet room. Now it was transformed into a decent little room, with a big bed that was laid with fine white deerskins. The heating aspect proved more complicated. He had to place the usual stone oil lamps in the room. This way, two goals were achieved at once – heat and light.

  John cut a square opening in one side of the chottagin and stretched a translucent bubble over it – a walrus stomach that had been dried and cured by a special method for making yarar drums. The chottagin was immediately lighter, and Enmyn people took to visiting John’s yaranga to take a look out the window.

  The polog did not suffer much alteration. Only the washstand gleamed from one corner. It hung on the wall instead of the god of good fortune, whose greasy mouth and ironic expression on his wooden face – covered with dried sacrificial blood and blubber – made John uneasy, whereas the god had taken the washstand’s old place in the chottagin. At first Pyl’mau objected to the relocation, but John told her decisively that the god was much better off hanging in the fresh air of the chottagin. As for the washbasin, it could rupture if the water froze.

  Having tamed the dog pack, John could now go to the tundra alongside the other hunters. Orvo showed him the places where Toko used to hunt, and said:

  “Now these are your places. You can put the bait out, for now, and when the fox fur becomes as white as snow, then you can set the traps. I’ll show you how to do it.”

  For bait, they would bring over slightly rotted meat and beached carcasses, unsuitable for human consumption.

  The sea had not frozen over yet. The changeful wind would push the icy slush far from shore, then press it close again, and during stormy winter nights the yarangas were battered by ice bombs, spat out from the waves.

  Early each morning, the men would go out collecting the sea’s bounty. Although John was more interested in good timber, he collected seaweed, too. The taste was reminiscent of half-brined pickles.

  John left the yaranga long before dawn. The waves shone in the darkness, and broke over the shingles with a muffled roar. It was slippery; lumps of ice constantly got underfoot. John was heading west. He made a mark on each plank and log he found by placing a stone over it. Whoever followed would know that he was too late, that the wood was already claimed by another. A pale dawn caught up with him not far from a narrow strait that led into the lagoon. It was a good time to turn back: There was no point in going on, as beyond the strait there were only steep crags that looked down on the water.

  John sat down to rest. He breathed deeply, his nostrils tickled by a frosty, sea-salty air. The dawn was hard at work, trying to penetrate the clouds, dense as wet curtains. Everything that had seemed ethereal in the twilight now became familiar and real.

  Only one dark object trembled at the edges of John’s consciousness. There was something unusual about it: Something enormous and black was rolling in the waves not far from the strait. At first, John thought it was just a large wave. But it differed from the rest by its incredible stability.

  John headed that way. The lighter the air grew, the more mysterious seemed the object. Only walking right up to it, did John realize that it was in fact a gigantic whale. The carcass was half-beached. The whale’s shiny black skin was covered with shells, pitted with cracks. It appeared that the whale was dead. Maybe it had been whalers who had mortally wounded him, or perhaps he had died a natural death. The sea giant was not breathing, buffeted by the waves.

  Guessing dimly that his find represented a treasure for the people of Enmyn, John hurried back to the yarangas. He went up on the grassy path to make the journey easier. A man’s shape appeared in the distance. Walking up to it, John recognized Tiarat. The other was savoring some long seaweed stems.

  “You’re up early!” he shouted to John, mouth nice and full, and then showed him some pieces of black walrus bone. This bone is much valued by American collectors, and sometimes one fragment of it can fetch a whole brick of chewing tobacco. “What have you got to brag about then, early riser?”

  “I found a whale,” John answered.

  “What did you find?” Tiarat asked.

  “A whale.”

  “You probably mistook a belukha28 for a whale,” said Tiarat in disbelief.

  “A real, enormous whale!” John shouted at him. “I’m not fooling you. Go take a look for yourself.”

  “I will,” Tiarat said doubtfully, and quickly walked off to the west.

  Then John came across Armol’. On hearing John’s news, he didn’t express disbelief, as Tiarat had – but still wanted to ascertain the truth of John’s words for himself.

  It seemed that this was the day when every man of Enmyn had decided to try his fortune in finding gifts from the sea. And although John informed each one of his find, not one of them took his words seriously. Many asked him to repeat the story again, and guessed that it was not really a whale he’d found, but a walrus or lakhtak, and most likely a belukha.

  As he approached the settlement, though, John heard loud shouts raised behind him. He turned around and saw Tiarat and Armol’ speeding toward him as though they were competing in a footrace.

  “Hey, Sson!” shouted Armol’. “You’re right! It really is a whale!”

  “A huge one! We’ve never had one like it in Enmyn before,” Tiarat confirmed.

  They overtook John and ran on, heading into the settlement.

  By the time John walked up to the yarangas, everyone was up and about. Excitement winged its way from one yaranga to the next: Sson had found a ritliu! 29 A whale! An enormous one, bigger than they had ever seen in Enmyn.

  The people were hitching up the dogsleds, readying the long-handled knives.

  “You’ve brought joy to our village! Finding such a ritliu is a great fortune!” Orvo told him.

  Pyl’mau was already at work hitching up the dogs and loading the sled with a large leather sack.

  The sleds ran in an orderly line, one after another. Pyl’mau sat back to back with her husband, respectfully silent. The dogsled caravan, racing to the whale, stretched down the coastline. Yes, Sson had had unheard-of good fortune! Orvo was right when he said that he brought luck to the settlement. There were people walking behind the last of the sleds. Pyl’mau could see the crowd bringing up the rear, and it seemed to her that all of Enmyn had left the yarangas and set off for the shore. According to custom, whatever is found on the shore belongs to the one who sighted it first. So then, today her husband is the wealthiest man in Enmyn. Today even those whose hands are strong can’t compete with the one who so recently was considered worthy only of pity and disdain. Pyl’mau herself had seen him in that light, at first. W
hen Sson came to live in her yaranga, she considered him an amusing creature, good entertainment. Well, how could she have looked on him as a person, a man, when he couldn’t even dress and undress himself? Sson was more helpless than a little child, and she had had no feelings for him other than pity, the other feelings all came later. His stubbornness, force of will, his rage when he saw that he was being helped out of pity, all this was surprising, and like Toko. That was how she had come to know Toko, as an orphan who had earned the respect of Enmyn by his willingness to work hard. At times, with an inner tremor, Pyl’mau could see the dead man’s features in Sson. At times, the similarity grew so strong that Pyl’mau would call out to Sson for no reason except to hear the sound of his voice and be reassured that he was not Toko. Even now, it’s Sson’s back she feels behind her, but turning her head, it’s Toko’s kamleika she sees.

  “Sson!”

  “What is it, Mau?”

  “No, it’s nothing.”

  “We’ll be there soon.” John said. “Look, you can see the whale already.”

  Pyl’mau made a quick about-face. Even from afar you could see a commotion of people around the whale. It was like a hunk of meat covered with flies.

  The hunters were already busy hacking up the whale carcass, cutting out rectangular chunks of skin together with the whitish-yellow layer of blubber. Their soiled faces were shiny with grease, jaws in constant motion.

  “Itgil’gyn!”30 Pyl’mau greedily reached for a piece of blubbery whale skin, sliced off a generous portion and held it out to John. It resembled the worn sole on a pair of rubber galoshes, and John made a polite refusal:

  “A bit later . . .”

  Orvo assumed control of the situation directly. He told everyone, including the dogs, to back a good deal away from the whale.

  “The stomach can blow up so bad that you’ll be covered in muck from head to toe,” he explained to John.

  The whale lay on his back. His belly rose sharply into the air. Armol’ clambered to the very top and made a deep incision. Then he got down, and tied together two spear-knives. Taking aim, he punctured the belly from afar. With a loud hiss, a putrid fountain burst from the hole. The belly subsided, and people immediately fell to butchering the carcass.

  They worked into the night. John grew hungry. Among this incredible wealth, he was the only person who felt hunger. The others had not stopped chewing for a moment. The dogs were long gone into a sated slumber, still slurping and whining in their sleep. The kids were worn out too. They had been tucked in for the night by the side of the enormous fire. Tortured by hunger pangs, John finally worked up the nerve to pick up a piece of the blubbery whale skin. The skin itself didn’t taste like any-thing, or more specifically, had a faint aftertaste. The blubber was the same as usual, except that the longer John chewed it, the sweeter it became. Without realizing it, John had consumed one piece, then another, and soon his face had also acquired a layer of whale fat and the soot from the smoky blaze, where gigantic whale ribs and blubber burned together.

  Armol’ had burrowed through to the whale jaws, and suddenly the darkness was rent with his triumphant shout:

  “The whalebone! It’s all here!”

  He dragged some long, taut plates to the fireside. There was enough whalebone to make a considerable pile.

  “Napo!”31 Pyl’mau exclaimed, and the other women echoed her as they set to scraping a white substance off the whalebone. John too was offered a taste of napo. The white substance tasted of oysters.

  John lugged the meat and blubber alongside everyone else, making piles, ripping the ribs – sturdy as ceiling beams – from the flesh, and, as morning came, was so exhausted that he simply collapsed by the fire. Orvo made himself comfortable next to John.

  “This is a real fortune,” he said, stroking the whale whisker, cleaned of napo. “I didn’t have high hopes that there would still be the whiskers inside. I reckoned this whale had been killed by a hunting schooner. That’s how they always work – they kill the whale, cut out the whalebone then throw the carcass away. Same with walrus; knock off the tusks, then throw the animal overboard . . . But the whalebone is all there! Good fortune walks together with you as you start your life with us. This is a good omen, Sson. I’m glad for you.”

  “Thanks, Orvo.” John tilted his head as a sign of gratitude.

  “It is our people’s custom that whatever is found on the seashore belongs to the one who spotted it first,” Orvo went on. “Well, even if you wanted to keep the entire whale for yourself, you couldn’t carry the meat and blubber to Enmyn in a year. But as for the whalebone, that’s all yours. That is the ancient rule. I’d like to ask you, though: What are you thinking to do with such a treasure?”

  Wavering a bit, John confessed:

  “To be honest, I don’t know myself. The whalebone, for what it is and as I understand it, doesn’t really have such great value here. What do you do with it?”

  “It’s useful for various small items: fishing lines, sled runners, all kinds of bits and pieces, cookware,” enumerated Orvo. “But only a fool would make dishes and runners from whalebone nowadays, when you can trade it for metal dishes and steel runners.”

  Orvo was silent for a while, staring into the dancing flame.

  “So what are you planning to do with it, then?” he repeated his question.

  “We’ll share it, the same way we shared the gifts from the Russian ship, the same way we’re dividing up the whale,” John said.

  “If you do that,” Orvo said slowly, “your new countrymen will not approve.”

  “But Orvo, you must agree that I was just lucky to have seen the whale first. If I’d gotten up a bit later, it would have been Tiarat who found it, rather than being second behind me.”

  “But you got up earliest of all, didn’t lie in bed with your young wife. You went outside, into the face of the cold morning, though you might have stayed home. Good fortune comes to the man who goes out to meet it . . . This isn’t about who owns the whalebone. It belongs to you, and that’s as certain as the morning about to come and the sun about to rise.

  “Fine,” John agreed. “I’ll take the stuff. And in the summer we’ll sell it to the merchants and buy whatever our people need.”

  “It’s not so simple, this buying and selling,” Orvo said. “That whale-bone would fetch snowdrifts of flour and mountains of tobacco leaf. You could dress every person in Enmyn in a colorful cloth kamleika . . . But I’ll give you a piece of advice. True enough, I don’t know whether you will take it. I can’t remember a time when a Chukcha gave advice to a white man.”

  “So who was it then, advising the captain of the Vaigach? John reminded him.

  “That wasn’t advice. I just told him what I knew was true . . . But now, I really do want to give you advice. The captain couldn’t have done any differently, but you’re free not to follow what I say.”

  “Why should I not follow sensible advice?” John shrugged.

  “Why don’t you trade this whalebone for a wooden whale boat? . . .” Orvo’s voice was as though he were expressing a deep longing. Perhaps Orvo did dream of a sturdy wooden whaleboat, good for sailing among the ice floes.

  “All right,” John agreed. “We’ll get a whaleboat and an outboard motor, too.”

  “It might not be enough for a motor,” Orvo looked doubtful.

  “It will be,” John said firmly. “I know what these things cost.”

  “But Carpenter sets his own prices,” Orvo reminded.

  “Well, we won’t be asking Carpenter,” John countered sharply. “We’ll go up to Nome ourselves and buy the whaleboat there.”

  “What a good idea!” With that, Orvo got up. “To work, my friends! Let’s get the meat and blubber back to Enmyn.”

  Over the next few days, the dogsleds were busily employed. The old meat pits turned out to be too small, so new ones had to be constructed in a hurry, hacked out of the frozen earth. A part of the meat and blubber they buried in a dense and growi
ng snowdrift on the northern face of Enmyn’s mountain.

  All that remained of the whale was a gargantuan skeleton with shreds of fat and flesh.

  “It will attract white fox,” Orvo said, and told everyone who owned fox-traps to get them ready.

  Pyl’mau brought some metal traps, touched with rust, out of a closet. John cleaned them, boiled them in rendered whale blubber, and set them outside for a few days to get rid of the metallic smell.

  In the darkest days of winter, when the sun did not peek above the horizon, over the innumerable paths made by fox paws, the hunters of Enmyn set their traps.

  17

  This year’s winter was far more brutal than the last. The blizzards swept in early, as soon as the frost locked the sea in ice. Enormous mounds formed by the shore, and the men of Enmyn had to walk to their first sea hunt, since no dogsled could have passed through the monstrous conglomerations of ice.

  As soon as one wind died down, another came to take its place. All of Enmyn was blanketed in snow. They barely had time to dig out the yarangas’ entryways before the next burst. At first, John would dig out his yaranga’s sole window, the one with the walrus-stomach windowpane, each time. But after a while, he let it go, and the only natural light inside the chottagin came through the smoke-hole.

  In the rare days of calm, the hunters went out to check on the traps, returning with a rich haul each time. Orvo was despondent:

  “If only we had more traps!”

  It seemed that all the fur-bearing animals in Chukotka came to feed off the whale carcass. Oftentimes the traps held red foxes, rabbits, and wolverines. Once John brought home a wolverine. Pyl’mau was delighted, since wolverine fur is much better than white fox.

  “But the merchants think differently,” she said. “Wolverine fur isn’t afraid of damp, doesn’t go stiff in the cold, and is very durable. Fox doesn’t even compare: As soon it’s wet it goes all limp, that one.”

  Pyl’mau was deft at skinning the foxes, and John scraped the remaining fat off the inner side of the hides and stretched the skins over a wooden frame. They ran out of frames and he had to make some new ones. For a few days, the dried pelts would flap and flutter in the frosty air, taking on an unblemished whiteness.