A Dream in Polar Fog

by Yuri Rytkheu

  The young men stationed by the surf-line had not let even a single wounded walrus escape. The ones to leave were the cows, the strong young bulls, and the very young pups who still had only small white growths instead of tusks, reminiscent of unkempt snot-nosed children.

  The surf was streaked with red. The rising sun dappled its rays across the rock, greasy with blubber and blood, across the sweat-shiny faces of the hunters. Their arms were tired, their heads throbbing from the nauseating smell of blood and the walrus bodies, and there came a moment when John realized that he could not make another single blow. But no sooner had he thought this than Orvo’s voice rang out:

  “Enough! Let the rest go back to the sea!”

  The young men parted ranks and freed up a passageway to the open water. But the walruses were not especially keen to get in, sensing that this was not the native element that was for them both the cradle and the medium of adult life. Still, it was worse to be on this blood-stained ground, among their suddenly silenced and motionless brethren. The walruses swam out to sea, looking back in bewilderment, and emitting loud anxious bellows, as though calling to those who had for some strange reason decided to stay behind among the two-legged ones with their deadly rays fixed onto long sticks.

  Tiarat took out a big knife and slit the belly of a young walrus that was lying nearby. He extracted the steaming, still-quivering liver, and sliced off a large portion for each of the hunters. The liver was warm, with a sweetish tang. It was excellent for slaking both hunger and thirst.

  When they had their fill, the hunters fell to butchering the carcasses. Great skill and dexterity was essential for wielding the long hunter’s knife, and so John was employed instead in dragging the hides and chunks of meat off to the side, and helping to sew up the enormous kymgyts. By evening, two hide boats of women had arrived to help. They had brought with them cauldrons and fresh water. Fires came ablaze on the spot that had only recently been teeming with walrus life, and thick smoke streamed up to a sky swathed in a thickening frosty mist.

  Together with the women, the children had come. They wandered around the dead animals and poked them with sticks, miming the hunters. Yako played with them, and soon his festive kamleika, sewn from a ten-pound flour sack, was soaked through with blubber and blood. But the boy was delighted! Screaming, he dashed between the half-butchered carcasses, leapt over them, sank his sharp teeth into the juicy pulp of raw walrus liver and, every few minutes or so, ran to his ateh, to help thread the thick uncured hide-lashing that stitched together the gigantic kymgyt. Each of the hunters carved his personal mark on his own kymgyt, and so each kymgyt was prepared according to the owners’ individual tastes. Pyl’mau had been placing chopped hearts and kidneys, layering the meat with strips of lard, in some of hers. Tiarat’s brand, for example, was the picture of a deer, as his ancestors had been born of tundra dwellers. Orvo was cutting out the inypchick – the killer whale – character. John stamped each kymgyt with the letter J, until his wife perplexedly inquired:

  “What animal does that sign represent?”

  “That’s the letter J, the start of my name.”

  “But your name is Sson, not Jay.”

  “That’s what you all call me, but really, my name is John.”

  Pylmau set down her pekul’ and stared at her husband, puzzled:

  “What do you mean – really? So then, all this time we’ve been living with you, we’ve been calling you by a wrong name?”

  “Oh, it’s no big deal,” John waved his hand, “Sson, John, what’s the difference?”

  “How can you say that?” Pyl’mau was aghast. “A man’s whole life is in his name. A man who loses his name, loses his life!”

  “Mau, this isn’t the time to be talking about it,” John tiredly replied, “let’s wait until we’re back home, and then we can discuss the matter at leisure.”

  “I wouldn’t think of talking about something important right this minute,” Pyl’mau shot back, insulted. “But why did you keep silent and put up with it for so long, when we kept calling you by the wrong name? . . .”

  “So what sign did you use when Toko was alive?”

  “A hare’s head. Toko was a very fast runner, and so the name Miliut – hare – became his nickname. But his real name was still Toko.”

  “Let’s do this, then,” John suggested, “I can’t draw a hare, and anyway it would be hard for me to do without hands. You put a hare on the kymgyts, and I’ll do my J.”

  “Let’s do that,” Pyl’mau agreed, and busied herself with the next walrus.

  Night had come and gone unnoticed. Only by morning, when dawn blushed over the east, did they see that almost all the work was done: Under the stony incline, on a shingled sandbank, there lay a neat row of kymgyts – each family having done exactly what was required. The remaining carcasses they hacked to parts and piled inside an enormous stone larder, cut into the crag itself untold centuries ago.

  They brought some of the kymgyts back to the settlement, and stacked them in uverans, earthen pits whose bottoms glinted with permafrost even in the hottest height of summer. The rest was left beside the Far Cape, painstakingly covered over with stones so that the white foxes and wolves, and especially polar bears, could not steal the cache.

  It took a few days to cart the fat, hides, meat, bundles of half-cleaned intestines – material for future waterproof cloaks – enormous and heavy yellowish tusks, flippers – everything that walrus could give to man, even the whiskery heads. Everything was either brought over to Enmyn or carefully stashed in the stone depositories of the Far Cape.

  The people of Enmyn looked forward and into the face of the coming winter with confidence. Steadily, but without undue haste, winter equipment was being prepared, snowshoes were being patched up, winter clothing sewn, new torbasses, kamleikas from the cloth presented by the Canadian Naval Department. All that was lacking were some deer hides. But at this junction, as though apprised of the Enmyn people’s needs, Il’motch had moved his herds closer to the seashore and presented himself in John’s yaranga like an old friend. He arrived with a gift of a few skinned deer carcasses and lots of kamusses for torbasses. Among the array of the deer herder’s gifts were a multicolored fawn skin and some specially cured skins for a warm winter kukhlianka.

  “All this for me?” John was at a loss for words.

  “Yes,” Il’motch said solemnly. “For you are my coastal friend, and I offer you a part of my wealth, and the things you need.”

  It was hard to think of an appropriate return gift for Il’motch.

  26

  The reindeer herd settled in on the opposite side of the lagoon. And there, in a cozy narrow valley, whose stream was glazed with a thin layer of ice, stood the tentlike tundra yarangas, haloed in blue smoke – as each day there were visitors from the coastal settlement, a feast always had to be ready.

  John drove up his dogsled from the seaward side. The pack sensed a deer herd was grazing just beyond the hill, and pulled in that direction. But the pack leader, obeying John’s quiet commands, held a course for the first yaranga belonging to the camp elder and chief, Il’motch.

  His host had sighted John from afar and came out to meet him together with his sons – tall young men with slightly bowed legs. Eventually, John learned that the curvature of the reindeer herders legs owed not to their riding the deer, but to a peculiarity of the children’s garments. Little boys wore special pants, with a little codpiece, just like a sailor’s. The codpiece was packed with moss that was replaced as and when necessary. Sometimes the mothers were too busy, or the boys themselves prefered to ignore the small discomfort caused by the dampness, so they carried on running up and down the tundra tussocks, merely trying to keep their legs wide apart. The springy tussocks gave a deer herder’s walk elasticity, and when he walked over even ground, his walk was a sight for sore eyes – it was as though he were dancing rather than walking.

  Il’motch’s sons rushed to the dogsled, grabbed the ostol from the vi
sitor’s hands and brought the dog pack to a halt.

  “Amyn yetti!” Il’motch stepped forward with a wide smile.

  “Ee-ee,” John replied, and followed his host inside.

  Il’motch’s traveling yaranga was different from the one John had seen on the two previous occasions. There was nothing extraneous here, and the polog had been sewn from sheared rather than long-haired hides, to make it easier to transport ...

  “I’m always very glad when such a guest comes to visit me,” Il’motch continued with a warm smile, motioning broadly for John to sit down on a snow-white deerskin.

  “Before I sit down, I’d like to unload the dogsled.”

  “Don’t you worry!” Il’motch raised a hand. “My sons will unpack everything and bring it right inside the chottagin. They’ll feed and tie up the dogs.”

  And true enough, no sooner had the words left his lips than the young men appeared in the cramped doorway, carrying the bundles of gifts. John had decided to deviate a little from what Pyl’mau had advised and presented his tundra friend with walrus hides, fat that had been poured inside whole sealskins, pulled off stocking-style, lakhtak for shoesoles, dried walrus meat on the bone, and a few bits from Captain Bartlett’s parting gifts.

  Il’motch wasted no time in opening the pipe tobacco tin and, taking in a delighted draught, became engrossed in the picture of Prince Albert, with cane and top hat, pictured on the canister.

  “If he showed up here in the tundra with such a bucket on his head, the wolves would run from him, much less the deer,” he said thoughtfully.

  Wordlessly, John nodded to indicate his agreement. But it seemed that Il’motch did not wish to be taken for a person of limited perspective, and so went on:

  “Your beasts would be frightened of me, too, if they saw me in the stuff I’m wearing right now. Right?”

  “I doubt it,” John replied. “In winter, our shepherds don’t look much different from the Chukchi tundra dwellers.”

  “Shepherds don’t, maybe,” Il’motch agreed, “but this person,” he tapped a blue fingernail against the tin, “he’s an unusual sort. He needs to put such a long head somewhere, right? So he has to wear that kind of strange hat.”

  John couldn’t suppress a smile:

  “He’s got a perfectly normal head. As for the tall hat, it’s only worn on holidays. Like the chamois overall that you wear on big visiting trips.”

  “You don’t say,” Il’motch was sincerely surprised. “And here I thought his head was that long, too.”

  Falling silent for a while and watching the women preparing a treat for John, Il’motch resumed the genteel conversation:

  “Yes, many wonders on the earth! And we don’t even know everything about it. Listen to one storyteller, and it seems that the earth is something like a bowl that’s floating on the sea. Another says it’s made up of layers. And we’re on the top layer, and the ones who died recently are in the next one down, and so on. They say there are shamans who can talk to such distant ancestors that the ancestors don’t even recognize them. That’s what our storytellers and wise men say, and what about yours?” Il’motch inquired.

  “Our wise men have proven that the earth is like a ball,” John informed him.

  The scientific determination of the earth’s shape did not produce an effect upon Il’motch.

  “Well then!” he exclaimed, with almost a kind of joy. “Yours are saying strange things, too!” And he continued, but in a serious tone:

  “No way to find out everything, though. You should know yourself. What you want, how good your life is on the earth? . . . And it’s enough to know where the grazing lands are, what rivers and mountains there are around, and where . . . The head, for our guest!” He curtly instructed a woman who was setting up a large wooden trough on a short-legged little table. “Clear enough, there are wonders in all the lands. Now I’ve heard, is it true, that in the lands of the white people there are springs of the bad joy-making water?”

  Now the purpose of this conversational thread became clear to John, and with a smile, but firmly, he said:

  “Nonsense! There are no such things!”

  “But the fat for the rumbling engines,” Il’motch objected, displaying an unexpected and astonishing possession of the facts, “so then, that doesn’t flow from the ground, either?”

  “The fat does flow,” John answered, “but there aren’t any springs of bad joy-making water.”

  “It’s not right, what nature does! Not right!” Il’motch’s disappointment was palpable, and, in the near certainty that his guest had not picked up on the hint, suggested they begin the meal.

  But here John finally extracted the whiskey bottle from his pocket and set it on the small table, next to the trough full of boiled deer meat.

  With a passing glance at the bottle, and noting that it had not even been opened, Il’motch, reining in his impatience with all his might, ordered:

  “Women, bring cups.”

  Now it was John’s turn to marvel at Il’motch’s willpower. The deer herder comported himself as though a bottle of whiskey was a commonplace thing at his table. He drank, trying not to show any greediness, or desire to take a large swig.

  Under his guidance, John ate the deer’s head, and had to admit that he’d never had anything as delectable before. Even before they sat down to eat, Il’motch had issued an order for a few large rock-salt crystals to be placed on the table.

  “When I heard that you came looking for my camp last winter, I was much grieved,” said Il’motch. “My heart bled, when tidings came that your daughter was dead. Oh, if only I’d been near you then with my herd!”

  Having eaten his fill, John attempted to find out from his friend how many heads his herd numbered.

  Eyes half-closed, Il’motch was silent for some time, noiselessly moving his lips.

  “My own reindeer, the ones with my brand, will be forty or so twenties,” Il’motch answered. “But in our camp there are also five other yarangas. They don’t have as many reindeer. Some have only one or two twenties. I let them graze near my own herd. I don’t mind it. And it’s not as boring for them.”

  John tried to imagine the combined headcount. If you took, say, fifty reindeer per household on average, that would mean that Il’motch controlled a herd of a thousand reindeer. That he was the real owner of the herd and the decider of the fates of those living in the camp – of that there was not a doubt. “So you’re a capitalist, after all,” John thought with some irony, recalling his student days’ discussions of the new teaching from the German philosopher Karl Marx. But aloud, he praised his tundra friend:

  “They look good, your herders – well fed, neatly dressed.”

  “And that’s all because I don’t let them get lazy,” Il’motch, on whom the alcohol was beginning to take effect, said smugly.

  After the meal, John let his friend understand that John was giving him the remainder of the liquid inside the bottle.

  “Velynkykun,” Il’motch thanked him politely, speedily snatched up the bottle and secreted it somewhere in the bowels of his traveling home.

  Over the course of the evening, Il’motch had repeatedly sampled the bottle’s contents, and the darker it grew, the more talkative he became. And when they lay down to sleep, he suddenly told John:

  “I met your countrymen in the tundra.”

  “Probably Captain Bartlett and the Eskimo Kataktovik?” John conjectured. “They’d been to see me too.”

  “No, not them, very different people. The kind I’ve never seen before in my life!”

  “What kind, then?” John was intrigued. “Maybe they were Russians?”

  “I can tell a Russian from an American as easily as I can tell a dog from a wolf, even at a distance,” Il’motch boasted. “Those people were Americans. They’re easy to recognize by their talk. They were rummaging in the mouth of the springs, by Lake Eeonee, as happy as if they’d found the source of the bad joy-making water. They came to our camp, asked fo
r some deer meat, but they had nothing to trade for it except yellow sand that looked like dried baby shit, like an infant’s that’s still at the breast . . . One of them did give a knife, though. They offered weapons. But when I had a look at the kind of weapons they had, I lost all interest in them. They were measly little guns, in leather holsters, like the children of big guns . . . I still gave them two carrion deer. We don’t eat that kind here – dead of hoof rot! But the whites were glad of it, all the same. Starved-looking, they were, hairy up to the eyes . . .

  Il’motch fell silent, and a trickling sound was heard in the darkness.

  “You’ve become a real luoravetlan, and I can tell you all of it,” Il’motch went on. “We moved camp from Lake Eeonee, and two moons later, on our way to the coast we went the same way back. We found only human remains by the side of our sacrificial hill. They’d long been eaten by the birds, but you could tell from the clothing that it was a white man. There were no other things with him. There was a round hole in his skull. From a bullet. I was surprised – so then, the little guns can kill a person after all . . .”

  John’s sleepiness had evaporated. Hardly breathing, he listened to Il’motch’s tale, not daring to break the flow with a careless or inappropriate question. There was no doubt in his mind that the two had been gold prospectors. So these wolves had managed to reach even here, and the story told by the old reindeer person was only the usual kind of tragedy to accompany such ventures.

  “The second one turned up in the mouth of the Big Stream. He hadn’t been killed. Either he died on his own, or the wolves got him. Lying next to him were two of the little guns, a shovel, and two little bags of that yellow sand they offered to trade us for the deer.”

  This time, Il’motch’s silence was a long one. He turned to and fro on his deerskin, evidently battling the temptation of one more sip from the bottle. Finally unable to restrain himself, he glugged and gurgled in the dark.

  “And then what?” John couldn’t wait any longer.

  “And that was the end of it,” Il’motch answered calmly, with a wide yawn.