A Dream in Polar Fog

by Yuri Rytkheu

  Spending two more days in Enmyn, Captain Bartlett and Kataktovik provided the village inhabitants with a few days’ worth of duck meat. Then the hunters went out to ply their craft. Armol’ bagged two nerpa, and brought the news that the ice was checkered with large meltholes and crevices, where fat spring nerpa frolicked.

  The visitors needed to get going toward the Bering Strait, from where they intended to cross over to their own side.

  John caught a few dozen of the stringy dogs, and wrangled together two workable packs.

  Early on a spring morning, when a dazzling sun rose over the distant hills, the dogsleds set off down the coast toward the ancient Chukchi settlement of Uelen. The second dogsled was driven by the imperturbable Tiarat, even more withdrawn after the long hungry winter. He didn’t even call out to the dogs, just looked at them with a kind of intensity and, meeting his eyes, the leader of the pack drew himself in as though from a blow, and dragged the rest of the dogs along.

  Captain Bartlett sat on John’s sled. His stern face, weathered by the northern winds, was anxious. He told John that there were people waiting for help, left behind on Wrangel Island.

  On the way to Uelen they stopped in a few small settlements where people were only beginning to recover from the long hungry winter. Disaster had touched the entire region from Enmyn to Cape Dezhnev.

  Between the Neshkan and Inchoun settlements, set on one of the sandbanks that stretched far into the Arctic Ocean, the travelers came across a lonely snow-covered yaranga. No one came out at the dogs’ barking. After digging out the entrance, they looked inside, a terrible scene lay before their eyes: From underneath the collapsed polog protruded half-eaten human bones. John carefully raised the hides and saw the bodies of a man and a woman. Their eyes had been pecked out, and there was only the thinnest layer of skin left on their faces.

  “Here is the true face of the North,” John quietly told Captain Bartlett. “Look and remember. And when you make your reports to the geographical societies, don’t forget to mention the dispossessed, the people of the North, who can be not only loyal and obedient guides, but also true heroes. For ages they have been battling a merciless enemy – the Arctic climate. Instead of monuments, it is their bones that remain in this ground, and yet these people do not retreat, they stubbornly cling to these frozen limbs of Mother Nature.”

  The sleds were slowly moving away from the desolate yaranga. In the calm of the spring evening, the crows cawed loudly as they circled over the yaranga’s smoke-hole.

  “This is terrible,” Bartlett said with a shudder. “Such a small folk, to lose so many!”

  “If the resources that you’ve spent on proving man’s ability to exist in the Arctic and in looking for new lands had been used to plumb the soul of the Northern man, all the world and humanity would be graced with a wealth much greater than a scrap of icy wasteland lost in the Arctic Ocean,” John said quietly, but with certainty.

  The famine had also come to Uelen’s people, but not in the same degree. Here, there were none of the shadows that remotely resembled human beings that the travelers had met in the other settlements.

  Spending the night and feeding the dogs, the travelers made for Keniskun and Robert Carpenter.

  The trader met his visitors with boisterous exclamations and, without letting them collect themselves, immediately ushered them to his natural bath, the hot springs.

  “I read about Stefansson’s expedition in last year’s papers!” Carpenter declared over dinner. “This is a grand undertaking! Truth be told, it interested me more than the beginning of the war in Europe!”

  Carpenter felt free and easy with his guests. He talked loudly and kept on giving orders to his wife and daughters, so that they had barely any time to bring more and more victuals.

  Somewhat to the side, Kataktovik and Tiarat made themselves comfortable at a separate little table. They ate in silence, paying no attention to the white people’s talk.

  Captain Bartlett, mellowed by his reviving bath among virgin snows, raised one toast after another.

  “I propose we drink to the steadfast people of the North!” he announced, nodding toward Kataktovik and Tiarat.

  “In that case,” Carpenter remarked, “they should have some, too.”

  They agreed amongst themselves that John and Tiarat would not be going further. Robert Carpenter would be responsible for the captain of the Karluk from here on.

  “Go back to yours,” the merchant told John in a paternal tone. “I heard that you’ve weathered a hard winter. Lost your whaleboat . . . Harsh, the North is, harsh!” he repeated it, making a concerned face. “It’s hard around here, when you’re not used to it.”

  John and Tiarat took some cartridges, gunpowder, a little tea, sugar and tobacco on credit, and then set off on their journey back.

  Captain Bartlett and Kataktovik headed south, down the craggy coastline of the Bering Sea. After a while they met with Baron Kleist, an official of the Russian government, who assisted them in getting to Providence Bay. From there, Bartlett sailed to St. Michael in Alaska on the whaling ship Herman and sent the Canadian Naval Department a report of what had happened.

  The Russian government and the United States of America, whose shores were closest to where the catastrophe had occurred, agreed to save the remains of the Karluk’s crew, marooned on Wrangel Island. The Americans sent the ship The Bear to the subpolar island, the Russians, the icebreaker steamships Taimyr and Vaigach. But the Russian vessels, already within sight of the island, suddenly turned back, having received the order to return – Russia was at war.

  Beyond the Far Cape, on a narrow shingled beach, the walruses came to breed. Winter survival depended on how many animals they could bag here. According to Orvo, this breeding ground had lain empty for many years. The walruses had abandoned the spot for a long time after some American schooner had organized a hunt there. The sailors went down to the water in half a dozen whaleboats, approached the peacefully sleeping beasts and opened fire. Shots thundered in the crisp, silent autumn air, blood spurted like fountains over the shingles, touched with the first frost. The gigantic animals were dropping their toothy heads onto one another and turning still. The surf was blood-red.

  Having decimated the breeding ground, screaming, the sailors rushed to shore. Each of them held an enormous axe, and used it to hack the tusks from the half-dead walruses.

  When the schooner, loaded with walrus tusk, sailed away, the people of Enmyn – who had been observing this savage hunt – came down onto the beach. Tears stung their eyes. Their hands that held the spears, useless now, trembled. “I somehow managed to hold my people back, or they would have attacked the sailors,” Orvo confessed. It was from Orvo that John learned that after their breeding ground has been fouled, walruses might leave the place for a long while, even forever, and move to a different spot.

  “It’s a good sign, the walruses coming back to their old breeding ground,” Orvo said, as he and John walked up to the Far Cape to get a look at the hundreds of fat bodies that had waddled up onto the shingled beach. “The gods have not left us without their mercies and have rewarded us for the sufferings that fell to our lot last winter.”

  Orvo had uttered these words solemnly, and from the shingled beach, the old walruses called back to him as they frolicked and luxuriated in the icy tide.

  With each passing day, the number of animals on the beach increased, and soon nothing except a grunting mass of bodies could be discerned from the high promontory.

  The men gathered in John’s yaranga to discuss the impending hunt and divide forces so as to get as many walruses as possible and ensure a serene and well-fed winter for themselves.

  The past winter had left a visible mark on each of them. Even the proud Armol’ had something new in his step, as though something in his joints had gone awry. Over the summer, the people had regained strength, got back their confidence, yet as the cold days grew nearer, their recent privations preyed more and more often upon their
minds.

  Pyl’mau brought every single cup that could be found in the yaranga into the chottagin, and set to feeding her guests. There was some flour left from the Uelen supply, and everyone got half of a large pancake fried in nerpa fat. They drank the tea noisily, slurping it from the cups.

  Orvo stared at the bottom of his old faience cup and inspected the hieroglyphics carefully, as though he might divine something from them.

  Unexpectedly for everyone, the first to make himself heard was Guvat, Enmyn’s poorest and quietest denizen.

  “I’ve had plenty to eat and drink. If there’s nothing else to do, may I go back home?”

  Everyone turned toward him.

  Burly and awkward, Guvat stood in the middle of the chottagin, grinning like a fool.

  “If that’s how you see it, you’re free to go!” Orvo said harshly. “And everyone who agrees with Guvat, you can all shove off to your yarangas.”

  The old man fixed the hunters with a dark, angry look.

  “When, when are we going to stop behaving like children, never thinking about our future? When I look at Guvat, I see in him all of our carefree foolishness. We have one desire – to be well fed. Today’s fat grows over our eyes, and we can’t see tomorrow’s famine . . . Yes! Today we have eaten well. But remember last winter, and you’ll taste boiled straps on your tongue! Your ears will ring with the dying moans of your family! You have no memory!”

  Orvo paused, cleared his throat and continued:

  “We’ll go after the walrus together, and position our people so that not a single large animal escapes to the sea. We have to kill the grown ones, no touching the pups. They are our living stores.”

  Guvat, who’d been standing to the side, now quietly sat back down in his place.

  The hunters agreed with Orvo.

  When everything had been decided, and silence crept over the chottagin, Armol’, who’d so far been quiet, suddenly spoke. He straightened up sharply, and flexed his shoulders, becoming, for a moment, that old jaunty and lucky ankalin 41 who feared neither sea nor tundra.

  “Orvo! The trouble isn’t our not looking forward. The trouble is the white people’s ships. We’ll wait and wait until it’s time to go after the walrus. And then the whites will come in their ships, shoot their cannons – and there’ll be only gun smoke left of our breeding ground, and of our hopes.”

  “So what do you advise?” asked Orvo.

  “Get our own cannons to fire against the white people,” Armol’ joked with a crooked grin, and a glance at John.

  “Why don’t we hear what the white man himself has to say!” Guvat suddenly offered, as though trying to brush off Orvo’s accusation that all the laziness and recklessness of their people was epitomized in him.

  “What can I say?” John shrugged.

  They would never forget, would they, the people of Enmyn, that he was not one of them. And they’ll remember it every time some trouble comes from those they call the white people . . .

  “What can I say?” John repeated. “If the wolves are circling the herd, what does the reindeer herder do? He goes to protect the herd and takes weapons with him. I think that this is exactly what we need to do.”

  “You are right,” Armol’ echoed. “But how will you catch up with a fast motorized ship in a hide boat with oars? They’ll run away, or else open fire.”

  “I don’t think they’re all criminals aboard the ships,” John objected. “Are all white people the same? Many of those who reach our parts are decent enough. They study our seas, currents, ice floes, discover new lands ...”

  As he was speaking, John began to feel uncomfortable – what did the scientific interests of Stefansson’s expedition matter to the Chukchi? They had to protect their lands and sea dominions, and of course, the most sensible thing white people could do was to leave the inhabitants of the North alone.

  “If there are no objections, I’ll be responsible for protecting the breeding ground,” John said. “If anything happens, I’ll answer for it with my life.”

  No one dared look John in the eye. Heads lowered in agreement, the men were breathing heavily.

  “It was a good thing you said, that you’ll guard our sea herd,” Orvo said, and turning to the others, concluded: “But everyone will help.”

  First of all, they had to set a watch over the paths to the breeding ground. There was only one pair of binoculars for the whole village – Orvo’s, and the old man treasured them. They finally agreed on Orvo’s keeping a watch himself, but sometimes giving the binoculars to someone else, to those he trusted especially.

  It was harder to resolve the challenge of a quick approach to a ship, if it should try to get near the walrus nursery.

  “We’d never catch it on oars,” Tiarat frowned. “And if the ship’s got a motor, then it’s all over.”

  “But I’ve still got a motor and a supply of gas,” John remembered. “From the whaleboat. Maybe it can be fixed to the hide boat? I’ll give it a try.”

  Armol’s ears pricked up, thinking of his own whaleboat that had been carried off by the hurricane.

  “How can you fix a metal motor to a hide boat? It’s the same as giving a rabbit wolf’s teeth,” he said gloomily.

  “It’s the teeth that everything depends on anyway,” Guvat remarked with a deeply thoughtful air. “As soon as the hare shows his wolf’s teeth – all the animals will flee from him.”

  “I’ll have to try it first,” John thought, “and only then show them. Maybe Armol’ is right: the hide boat won’t be able to take the motor’s power and will break apart as it goes.”

  Tiarat was considered the settlement’s best woodworker. The frames of each of Enmyn’s hide boats had been made either by him or under his supervision. Looking at the elegant construction devoid of a single nail, held together with sparse wooden spikes, but primarily with lakhtak strips, it was hard to believe that this miracle had been envisioned complete in his head. There was not a single scrap of paper, not a line drawn in the making of this astounding creation.

  So it was Tiarat that John came to, resolving to talk it over with him – whether it would be possible to shore up the hide boat so that it could hold the weight of the gasoline motor.

  Tiarat lived on the outskirts of the settlement, almost on the bank of a noisy stream that sparkled in the cold sun’s rays. It was a well-chosen spot for a yaranga. There was water near at hand, and the mound over the stream served as a natural buffer against the winter snowdrifts.

  The yaranga was not especially prosperous, but everything was sturdy and well set in its place; even its inhabitants stood out by their cleanliness, somehow unusual among the Chukchi. Tiarat had eight children. His eldest, married son lived here, too, as well as an impoverished nomad – the suitor of Tiarat’s middle daughter, the beauty Umkanau.

  Tiarat was working on something as usual, but he immediately put aside his gatteh – a small crosscut axe – and hailed his guest with reserve and dignity:

  “Yetti!”

  “Ee-ee,” John replied, and sat down on the polished whale vertebra that had been offered him. John noted at once that in this many-peopled yaranga, they took care of their clothes, polishing the seats so as not to tear the pants.

  He’d brought along a page from his notepad and the stump of a pencil. As he outlined his idea, John drew it on the page.

  Tiarat bent low over the drawing, and John could feel the other man’s hot breath on his own face.

  “The metal paws won’t be able to grab the thin planks on the stern,” John was saying, marking it with the pencil.

  “Even if they did grab, the planks still couldn’t take it,” Tiarat observed. “But this can be fixed, we can make an additional, special plank for the motor. It’s simple. Like this.”

  He plucked the pencil stub from John’s loop holder and confidently drew a new stern, rigged up and strengthened with the motor in mind.

  “This is how it could be done,” he concluded and added: “But the firs
t thing is the hide boat itself. When the hide vessel goes over water, it’s always under sail or with oars. The mast stands in the keel, on the sturdiest part of the hide boat, as though right on the backbone. The oarlocks on the sides, they’re also pulling the boat through the water evenly . . . Need to think about that. Think very hard. It could happen that the motor will make the hide boat wrinkle and shrink like an empty leather sack. We’ll think about that, and you also think about the motor. It’s all in working order, right?”

  The motor was all right, but it couldn’t do any harm to dismantle it once more, oil some of the parts and check the magnet.

  John extracted the motor from the cellar where it had lain all winter, carefully tucked in among burlap and hides, and set it down onto a walrus skin spread out in the middle of the chottagin. The news that John was about to “butcher” the motor sped like lighting through the village, and the curious flocked to his yaranga.

  So as not to get in the way, the guests sat down a little to the side, leaving John and his motor the lighter part of the room, under the round smoke-hole in the roof.

  In the universal silence, when the only sound was the metallic clanging, John took out the flywheel with some difficulty. With bated breath, the people followed his every move. When the heavy, shining flywheel bearing the convex legend General Motors was set down on the walrus skin, an old woman whispered, with unfeigned terror:

  “He’s taken off the head.”

  “Picking at the brains . . .” the others echoed.

  “Getting to the feet, now,” said Yako, when John separated the three-bladed propeller.

  Yako was helping his father.

  Pyl’mau had a rag ready, and thoroughly wiped down each component of the engine.

  “Likes cleanliness, the motor,” said one of the spectators.

  “All white people like cleanliness,” another concurred.

  “But a motor isn’t a person,” countered a third.