A Dream in Polar Fog

by Yuri Rytkheu

  “I’d like the pelts to go toward the purchase of truly needed things.”

  “Maybe you know what it is they want?” Carpenter asked carefully.

  “They need a wooden whaleboat. And obviously, a whaleboat needs to have an outboard motor to go with it.”

  “They’ve gone mad!” Carpenter exclaimed. “I can even understand them wanting to have a wooden whaleboat, but one with a motor! Savages that have no understanding of even the simplest mechanisms, and they wish to own an internal combustion device! It’s too funny!”

  “I don’t see anything funny about it,” John objected. “A motor would make their lives significantly easier. They would be able to bag more animals, and that means more food.”

  “You’ve definitely influenced them. And you deny it!” Carpenter said with irritation. “In that case, why don’t you want to become a partner?” After a pause, he added in an insinuating tone: “Once again, I give you a friendly warning: If you strike out on your own, it won’t go well for you. You have no idea what independent trade would be like here, without solid support.”

  “I don’t intend to set myself in competition with anybody!” John said wearily. “And if we’ve come to friendly warnings, I must tell you frankly that I will not allow trading robbery in Enmyn. I ask you, Mr. Carpenter, not to take advantage of my countrymen.”

  “What are you saying, dearest John?” Carpenter smiled. “I’ve been dealing with them for fifteen years. Ask them if there’s a single person who could complain of unfair dealing from me. More than that, a good half of the hunters from Keniskun to Cape Billings have acquired their guns from me. And not for cash, on credit! And many of them are still far from having paid in full.”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Carpenter, but I do understand something of commerce, and you will never convince me that you trade to your detriment, purely out of charity.”

  Flummoxed, Carpenter muttered:

  “Commerce is commerce . . .”

  “Let’s save business discussions for tomorrow,” John suggested. “You are fatigued from your journey, you must have a good rest.”

  He walked the guest to his little room, where Pyl’mau had laid out a bed and heated the chamber with a grease lamp.

  John climbed into the polog, but no sooner had he undressed then Carpenter’s red face appeared from underneath the upraised door flap.

  “Forgive me, John,” he said, in some embarrassment, “but I won’t be able to sleep a wink until I’m convinced that there’s no one behind you in this . . . Let me be perfectly frank: If there is someone behind you, someone who can offer you a bigger share, I am prepared to work together with you. I have experience, and as you have seen, influence over the natives.”

  “I give you my word, there is no one behind me!” John, annoyed and tired, waved him away. “Now, good night!”

  But as soon as he shut his eyes, there was Pyl’mau, gently shaking him awake. She whispered:

  “Orvo has come for you.”

  John stuck his head out into the chottagin.

  “What now?”

  “We can’t do without you,” Orvo told him quietly. “Come and join us. You know how important this is to us.”

  John got dressed and followed Orvo outside.

  A fire blazed inside Orvo’s chottagin, and above it was a puffing kettle. Fire-smoke and pipe-smoke billowed up around the smoke-hole. Armol’ and Tiarat sat behind a wide plank set with teacups.

  Orvo slid a whale vertebra toward John, and the other sat down. Granny Cheivuneh was quick in handing him a strong cup of tea.

  “This is what we’re arguing about,” Orvo began. “My advice is to gather up everyone’s pelts and buy the thing that will be useful to everyone – a whaleboat and outboard motor. Only we don’t know whether our furs will be enough for such a purchase.”

  “You’re forgetting about the whalebone,” John reminded.

  “If we add the whalebone, then we probably will be able to buy a whaleboat,” Orvo was cheered.

  “And whose whaleboat will it be?” Armol’ inquired. “I’ve got five twenties of white fox, and Tiarat has only got two twenties.”

  “The whaleboat will belong to everybody. All of Enmyn will own it.”

  “I don’t agree,” Armol’ said. “Maybe I don’t need this whaleboat at all, maybe I need totally different things.”

  “So what do you need?” asked Orvo.

  “That’s my own business,” Armol’ muttered.

  “Listen friends, I am telling you again: the whalebone and all my pelts – I haven’t got as many as Armol’, of course – I’m handing them over to you. Dispose of them as you see fit. But to my mind, Orvo is right. A whaleboat would open up a path to the distant places, where the walrus gather. We’d be able to hunt them wherever we wanted to . . .

  “And who is going to drive the motor?” Armol’ asked. “None of us have ever dealt with one before.”

  “I can do it,” John declared.

  Armol’ sniggered: “But will he obey one without hands?”

  “He will,” said Orvo. “So we are agreed?”

  “Agreed,” answered Tiarat.

  “There’s still time to think it over before morning,” Armol’ said evasively.

  Rising with the dawn, Carpenter appeared at breakfast having made the rounds of the entire settlement. Cheerful and contented, he plopped noisily onto the roughly built stool.

  “In commerce, just like in hunting, the early riser is the one who has the luck!” he loudly declared, sinking his teeth into nerpa meat.

  Over tea, he spoke to John.

  “So what do you intend to do with that?” He nodded toward the whalebone, piled by one of the yaranga’s walls.

  “The whalebone belongs to everyone,” said John.

  “What a big happy family you are around here!” said Carpenter, exasperated.

  “And that’s why,” John calmly continued, “I can’t make the decision myself. I do know that my countrymen would like to trade it for a whaleboat.”

  “What is it with you people and whaleboats around here?” Carpenter exclaimed. “I can understand that the uneducated Chukchi might have a fascination with this new contraption. But you, haven’t you seen for yourself that for these parts nothing is better than the hide boat? It’s a familiar, time-tested vessel. But a whaleboat needs looking after, and it’s not as though it’s as quick as a hide boat under oars.”

  “We mean a whaleboat with an outboard motor,” John clarified.

  “And who is going to wind the motor?” asked Carpenter. “Do you realize, these Chukchi will take it to bits and pieces as soon as they clamp eyes on it? That’s how curious a people they are. Did you see an alarm clock in Tatmirak’s yaranga? No sooner had he gotten it home than the Eskimo decided to find out what’s knocking around in there. He took it apart, but couldn’t manage to put it back together again. The mechanic from Nome barely managed to fix it.”

  “It’s not such a bad thing that they’re curious,” John smiled. “That means it’ll be easy to teach them to handle the motor.”

  “You are an incorrigible Utopian!”

  “I wish these people well.”

  “You have a strange way of thinking,” Carpenter began in a different tone. “If we are to speak frankly, what difference can it make to you how these savages live? You’ll stay here a while and then leave. There have been many here who wanted to live the primitive life, but sooner or later they all went. And it will go the same for you. That’s why I am advising you to look out for yourself first. If you like – take your whalebone to Nome yourself, I won’t stand in your way – but don’t interfere with my trade in Enmyn.”

  “I am not interfering,” John answered calmly. “I only ask that you consider the Chukchi’s wishes and sell them a whaleboat.”

  “All right, they’ll get a whaleboat,” Carpenter promised on reflection. “But I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”

  Carpenter devoted the rest of the day
to selling the wares he’d brought along. Buyers – bestrewn with pelts, fox and wolverine pelts – crowded inside the chottagin. The women brought slippers, decorated with beads and white deer hair, and embroidered chamois gloves.

  Carpenter would pick up a hide, shake it out, then blow on it, puffing his thick lips out along the grain, and toss it into the pile. The buyer would ask for the desired goods, and Carpenter handed them over immediately. If the asked-for item wasn’t available, he would note it down in his notebook. Almost every inhabitant of Enmyn had gone in and out of the chottagin. It was mainly the men who traded, but a few women had come as well. Orvo and Armol’ had not been among the buyers, though their wives had been there.

  Tiarat bought a new Winchester and, with a guilty look in John’s direction, paid twenty white-fox furs for it.

  The trade finished late. Carpenter had sat over his notes for a good few hours after that. Shutting his notebook with a bang, seemingly pleased with the results, he gave a cheerful shout:

  “And now we can have a drink! Business is done!”

  Pyl’mau noiselessly set the table and disappeared inside the polog.

  The men were alone inside the chottagin, by the light of the dying fire.

  “So what did you decide about the whalebone?” Carpenter asked again.

  “I’m going to follow your advice: drive to Nome and try to buy a whaleboat there.”

  “I’ll give you letters of introduction.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That way, there will be two whaleboats in your settlement,” Carpenter said with a smile.

  “Do you think I can get two boats for the whalebone?” John asked doubtfully.

  “I don’t know about that,” Carpenter chuckled. “As for one of those boats, it’s Armol’ who’s buying. He’s already made a deposit – one hundred and fourteen white-fox pelts, plus twenty of red fox . . .”

  “So the joint purchase of a whaleboat isn’t to be,” John thought sadly.

  “I think that will be even better,” Carpenter said brightly. “You’ll all have two whaleboats instead of just one.”

  “Yes, perhaps that will be better,” John was thoughtful as he answered.

  “You’ve given me a splendid welcome, and have done everything possible for me. Please accept a few modest gifts from me.”

  The trader rose, went to his luggage and split off a sealed, twenty-pound sack of flour, a bag of sugar and a brand new 60x60 Winchester with three crates of cartridges.

  “This is for you, dearest John.”

  “That doesn’t look like a gift,” John said. “So much at once. No, I couldn’t take it.”

  “You will offend me. You will offend me mortally and for life.” Sincere disappointment was written on Carpenter’s face, and his voice shook.

  “Wait a moment,” John dove inside the polog and returned within a few minutes, accompanied by Pyl’mau.

  “In that case,” he said, “accept a gift from me, too.” John lay a spectacular polar bear skin at Carpenter’s feet. “I bagged this animal in late autumn. He came to our settlement and knocked on my door.”

  “Oh, thank you! Many, many thanks!” Carpenter was moved. “Allow me to make a special offering to your charming wife.”

  Pyl’mau was presented with a set of needles, colored thread and a length of cloth for a kamleika.

  Early the next morning, Carpenter departed.

  18

  Winter days resemble one another like twins. When the weather was quiet John would go out onto the ice, and when it was inclement he would work in the house. If stormy weather stretched into days, he’d spend the long winter evenings in Orvo’s yaranga, listening to his tales of the ancient ways of the Chukchi people or his own sojourn in America.

  From time to time there was a distinct whiff of alcohol about the old man, and John was at a loss as to where Orvo could have gotten the drink. One day he actually asked the old man about it point-blank.

  “I make it myself,” Orvo declared with some pride.

  In the cellar beside the polog John discovered a primitive moonshine apparatus – an amazing contraption. A fairly large vessel woven out of tree-bark strips served as the reservoir. The funneling pipe was the barrel of a 60x60 Winchester. The wooden reservoir had a metal bottom, under which an everyday grease lamp gave off a low flame. Out of the muzzle, instead of a bullet exited a slow drip of murky water with an undeniable odor of fermentation.

  “Did you think of it yourself?” John asked.

  “Seen things like this over in America. True, those were made differently . . . But I’d got a good idea of how they work. The main thing is to have flour and sugar. And I’ve got plenty of those. Traded all my sables for the supply. It didn’t work out with the whaleboat, and so at least I’ll have my fill of the joy-making water . . .”

  Orvo had been saddened by the failure of the joint whaleboat purchase. Often, brimming with the “Winchester brew,” the old man launched into long complaint of man’s imperfections to John.

  “Maybe it’s all for nothing, a person being given reason,” he would ponder. “I know that boozing is no good, that’s what my reason tells me, but still I drink. Reason was telling Armol’: You should live together with everyone else, and the whaleboat should be bought by all of us together, but he did the opposite – bought it for himself alone. So many things we do against our reason, and mostly we don’t live our lives the way reason tells us . . . So then, it looks like it’s useless, this human reasoning? Eh? What do you say, Sson MacLennan?”

  When Orvo began talking this way, it meant that despite maintaining his usual composure on the outside, the old man was actually very drunk indeed.

  Came a true bright day to Enmyn. A sliver of the sun rose over the horizon, washing the snows and ice hummocks on the sea with pink light.

  “The sun has awakened,” they were saying in the yarangas, smearing the idols with grease and sacrificial blood in gratitude.

  “The sun has awakened, the day has begun,” whispered Pyl’mau over the wooden face of the idol that had changed places with the washstand. “Let the new day bring happiness to our whole settlement, to all people. Let good fortune stay with our hunters, and especially with my husband, Sson. He has no hands, and so he needs your protection and help more than the others . . .”

  Pyl’mau swirled the blood and fat together in a wooden cup and rubbed some on the idol’s mouth. The god’s greasy face was smiling, and it often disconcerted John to intercept his contented, placated look.

  And when the Long Days came, and they had to perform the rite of Lowering the Hide Boats, John was unexpectedly called to the men’s morning gathering.

  Pyl’mau awoke her husband herself and, still inside the chottagin, before he opened the outer door, hurriedly gave his face a smear of cold nerpa blood. With a bloody mug and accompanied by little Yako, John set off for the tall whalebone supports on which the hide boats rested.

  Young men untied the straps that belted the hide boats to the supports and carefully lowered the hide vessels to the snow, setting them facing the sea, stern to the tundra.

  As he did the year before, Orvo walked around the boats, wooden dish in his hands and incantations on his lips, scattering the sacrificial food to the Dusk, Dawn, North, and South. And just the same, the dogs collected the gods’ offerings, but quietly, as though they grasped the solemnity of the occasion.

  The high-vaulting sun glowed bright over Enmyn and the ritual-makers. The sky was so bright, so blue, that even the snow seemed a light blue, and in shadow the blue seemed spilled from the sky straight onto the snow.

  Going on a hunt became a pleasure: a long day with warmth flowing down from the sky. Many took young boys along, training them in the hunter’s craft. Yako was keen to go with John, but was still too young.

  “When the ducks take flight, then I’ll take you along to the sandbank. You’ll throw your eplykytet right into the flock,” John promised him.

  “You’ll definitel
y take me, Ateh?”33 the boy would ask.

  “I will, Son,” John answered back.

  Duck season arrived. Three-year-old Yako didn’t hit anything, of course, but was still proud of being taken along by his father. Pyl’mau was glowing as much as her son. In conversation with her friends, she never missed an opportunity to mention that “Yako went duck hunting with his father.”

  John got used to the new Winchester, Carpenter’s gift, and Orvo trimmed the stock and butt, taking off some wood that he reckoned was extraneous. The Winchester took on a strange appearance, but did become much lighter.

  The hunting season was a good one. Almost every day John brought home one or two nerpa, and Pyl’mau, heavily pregnant now, brought him a ladle of water with an ice chip floating inside. Every so often, before going to sleep, John would retire to his small cubbyhole and write in his notepad.

  My second winter living in Chukotka is coming to an end. Memories of the past no longer trouble me. I have the feeling that I am dead to the past, and if another world, the next world really exists, then the people who end up there might remember life on earth with the same sort of feeling. Pyl’mau is soon to have a child, and so I will become deeply rooted among these people that fate has given the farthest corner of the planet to inhabit. Thank God, these people haven’t many of the habits that have come to complicate the lives of modern men. Their life is simple and plain, they are honest and sincere. When they meet, there are no complicated ceremonies of greeting. One simply says to the other: “You’ve come?” And the other replies: “Yes.” And yet sometimes the evil wind from the outside world manages to seep in. Otherwise, where would Armol’s miserliness come from? Why did he decide to go against these people’s ancient commandment – owning everything jointly and considering any earned wealth to be the wealth of all? Undoubtedly, the evil spirit at work here is Mr. Carpenter. But the Chukchi themselves can no longer manage without many of the things invented in the white men’s world. The less my new countrymen interact with white people, the longer they will resist passing laws that create only the illusion of order, but in reality just complicate life – the longer they will preserve their spiritual and physical health . . .