by Jack Lasenby
Arku ate another huge meal, and I left with him, pushing behind at the handles of the sledge. Arku ran at the front, encouraging his dogs. Jak went with me, Nip with the Shaman.
Arku’s dogs ran in a fan, each with a leather trace back to a ring of iron on the front of the sledge. Sometimes one crossed its trace with another’s, and the lead dog turned around and thrashed the pair who fought.
At first I was clumsy at steering. Every time we began, one of the dogs would half-crouch, still running, and shit, and Arku would crack the whip over its rump. I had to dodge the shit. Hitting anything could damage the runners. Before we left, Arku had put the fine finish on them, necessary for travelling.
He melted a pot of frozen mud and spread it on the runners. It froze hard, and he shaved it smooth with his knife. He then filled his mouth with warm water and sprayed it on top of the frozen mud. The water froze at once into a polished surface which made it easy for the dogs.
Each time we stopped, we checked the runners. When one was damaged on a rock I hadn’t dodged, Arku laughed. I thought we would have to light a stone lamp, melt some mud over its flame. Arku grinned. He took a mouthful of frozen meat from our stores, chewed it to pap, plastered it on the runner, and shaved it smooth. Since we had no water, we pissed a new surface on the runners, reloaded the sledge, and drove on.
The colder the weather, the tougher the going, the more Arku laughed. He found hardship funny. When my weak leg got tired, I tried laughing, but heard a false note in my voice. And so did Arku, for he laughed at me.
When two of the dogs leapt at each other, and the fight spread, Arku waded through the snapping jaws. Cracking heads with the butt of his whip, lashing the dogs into their places, the lead dog biting, slashing, and helping him. We straightened out the traces, and were off again. There was no slowing the dogs: their joy was to pull the sledge as fast as possible. Only at night, when we could travel no further, Arku and I hung on to the sledge and dragged them to a stop. They fell in their traces, exhausted. Except for the lead dog, Chaka, who paraded up and down, punishing with a snarl here, a snap there.
“He remembers that one got out of line. And that Roka didn’t pull her share. That is why Chaka is leader.” Arku grinned. “And one day he will get too old.”
“What happens then?”
Arku doubled up. “Then the others get their revenge. They will drag him down, the pack of them, rip him to pieces!” He clapped his gloves together and spluttered as if he would swallow his tongue.
“Kill him?”
“That’s the price for being leader. If you could ask Chaka, he would say it is worth it!”
I supposed it was funny, in some strange way. My laughter didn’t seem quite right, but I was in Arku’s world now, and I remembered something I had read in the Library: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” The Shaman had explained it to me. Well, I thought to myself, “I’m in Rome now.” I watched Chaka thrash the other dogs, and kept Jak close.
“How did Chaka get on with Meeka’s dogs as you drove up to the cave? Did he fight his lead dog?”
“All they could manage was to pull the sledge. But if they ever meet again, he will kill Meeka’s lead dog. He forgets nothing, Chaka.”
Each night we fed the dogs with meat and fish. One big frozen lump each. They caught and swallowed them down whole. They could not risk chewing them, losing them to their fellows to right and left.
Each night we put up a skin tent. With a stone lamp we boiled our meat. We laid furs on the snow floor and slept warm under more. We beat the snow from our clothes and hung them and our boots to dry in a net under the roof of the tent. I kept Jak with me. Well away from Chaka.
Arku’s village at last: far below, steep-roofed houses tucked under a cliff. Beyond them a white plain.
“The sea ice,” said Arku. “Where the seals should be.”
“Do you believe in the Droll?”
Arku spat. “Others do. Not me.” He laughed, and I felt better. If Arku didn’t believe in superstition, my work of healing would be easier.
“What is the Droll’s gift?”
“Some people believe the Droll must have a sacrifice. That if somebody is given to her, she will send the seals back.”
I looked at the village beneath our feet. “Superstition!” I said. “Let’s get down.”
Chapter 22
Starvation and Laughter
Thick turf and stone walls. Pitched roofs of driftwood under more turf and a cape of snow. No rowdy barks. No shiny faces, smiles, bright eyes peeping. Arku ran for the biggest house. I tethered his dogs and followed with Jak, pushing my face into a stench of soft air.
Our firepot of smouldering moss would not flame. I propped open the door, let in fresh air, blew on the moss again, and lit lamps. Arku knelt by the sleeping bench. A baby and a young woman had been dead some time. An old man and woman just alive. Two younger women and a boy. Gnawed bones on the floor. I felt sick.
I began melting soup, fetched hunks of meat from the sledge. Astonished people so thin could be alive, I examined, reassured them as the Shaman had taught me. Smelling their skin, the sores, listening to the workings of their insides. I chose the powders carefully, mixed them with water, trickling it between withered lips. Soon we were spooning a little soup into them.
From house to house, dragging the dead outside, dosing, feeding, dressing sores. I simmered dried leaves and lichens as the Shaman had shown me. When people vomited I gave them more until it stayed down. There were seven houses. In each at least one frozen corpse. Several old people died after our arrival. And two more babies, pathetic shrunken scraps.
The survivors fed, cleaned, made comfortable, I took Jak and searched below the cliffs. Scratching away, I found the Shaman’s green-leaved plants growing under the snow. We boiled and fed them to those with rotting gums. I was giving the last of the liquid to a child when Arku shouted outside.
“Seals!”
We drove out, tethered a dog at each breathing-hole to keep the seals from using them. I stood on a square of bearskin by a hole. “The seal hears the slightest noise,” Arku warned. He stood in the distance now, motionless over another breathing-hole.
My spear with its rope rested across two forked sticks. I watched the thin rod of bone poking through the crust of snow. Its other end down the hole so a seal rising to breathe would push it up. Dogs restless at all the other holes, the seal must come to mine. Was there a hole we hadn’t found? A seal breathing there, safe?
Arku’s figure looked different. Had he moved? Taken his spear? He was bending down, that’s what it looked like. I listened for his shout across the ice and heard another sound. Looking down, careful not to shift my feet, I saw the rod jiggle. It made a tiny creak, rose, and I heard the whoosh of a seal’s breath.
Take my spear from the forked sticks. Slow! Raise it. Silent! Think each movement. The rasp of the rod rising. A snuffle and another whoosh. Lift my heels off the bearskin. The spear held high. Must hit its head… Plunge! Down through the snow. Follow it with all my weight. Finish on my knees. Something shudders through the spear-shaft, solid weight sinking back, the shaft twisting against my grip.
I take a turn of the rope around my waist. Lean back upon it. Reach for the snow knife and chop. There! The chamber of the breathing-hole. And the seal, spear through the top of its head. That heavy weight sinking back had been its sag into death.
Cutting away the ice. Rope under its flippers. Pull. Lean back. “Ohei! Ohei!” My seal came half up on the ice and slipped back. And thrilling across the air, Arku’s, “Ohei! Ohei!”
I shortened the rope, dug in my heels, bent my knees, and threw my weight backwards. With a great suck, my seal burst out of the hole. Over on my back, the seal slithering on top of me. And Arku was there, leaping, pointing. “Making love to your seal! The girls will be jealous!” Yelling back, laughing, too, I scrambled up, remembered Hagar’s story and slit open the guts, pulled out the liver, took a slice and threw it across the ice
in thanks.
“What are you doing?” Arku leapt even faster than his dogs and grabbed the slice.
“An offering. To the gods.”
“Let the gods catch their own seals. Superstitions!” Arku shook his head.
Cramming hot liver into our mouths, we laughed at each other. The sweetness! Blood running down our chins, teeth red with blood, lips flecked flesh, bloody-handed, we roared satisfaction.
“Too good to waste on gods,” said Arku.
Back at the village, the starving mumbled and sucked fresh meat and blood. They recovered fast as Arku and I killed more seals.
Tuka and Lekka got well and soon joined us on the ice. Tuka – whose wife had died – was a squat, flat-headed man, broad and powerful. One of the Cliff People’s best hunters. Because he was still too weak to drive his spear hard enough, he lost his first seal. In the distance I saw him smash his spear, throw the end at a dog, and heard his curse across the ice.
Lekka was younger, tall and good-looking, though still thin. He, too, missed a seal, and Tuka shouted some insult. Arku grinned at me and rolled his eyes upwards. He meant Tuka and Lekka didn’t get on.
The Cliff People had nearly died out, yet these two, just recovered, were taking up their old dislike. If Arku spoke to Lekka, Tuka pushed in and wanted to be part of the conversation. He didn’t like the fact that Lekka killed two seals.
“Thin,” said Tuka, looking at Lekka’s.
Lekka grinned and stared meaningfully at Tuka’s one. “A certain person,” said Lekka, “is getting too old to be a hunter.” Tuka snarled and curled his ugly lip. Like dogs, they needed someone to keep them apart.
The seals were back! Hunting, scraping, drying, curing the skins, it was as if the Cliff People had never known starvation. I showed them the green-leaved plants growing under the snow at the foot of the cliffs. They said they must grow well there, because of the shit that fell from the birds’ nests. They nodded, agreed when I reminded them the green leaves helped cure them of the rotting illness, but I wondered if they would remember next time they were hungry.
When I asked him why they called themselves the Cliff People, Arku said it was because of the thousands of birds which nested there. They killed them in huge numbers, stored them for winter, he said. Froze huge stacks of eggs. He would have liked me to taste them, but they had eaten them all, waiting for the seals to return.
There was one way of eating the birds he described. “You gut a seal, take out not just its guts but the meat and the skeleton, too,” he said, “through the mouth. So you have a bag.”
I thought of the way I had made airbags of the goatskins and told him.
“Like that! Only we leave the blubber attached to the skin. Sew up the holes, any cuts. Fill the sealskin through the mouth.”
“With what?”
“A small bird that nests on the cliffs. Stuff the seal with them. Sew up the mouth. Bury it under rocks before summer has ended. The blubber cooks the birds, we say. The ice they are buried in, under the rocks, stops them from going bad. And when we eat them next winter, the birds taste of – ” Arku stopped and smacked his lips. “They taste so sweet! Like – ” But he was dribbling at the thought of them. Wiping his mouth. He could not describe their taste better.
I laughed. “Do you take the feathers off?”
“No,” Arku giggled. “You pull them through your teeth, so you spit the feathers out that side of your mouth.”
I pulled a face, and he pointed at me. “We will make you a sealskin of birds, Ish. Once you have tasted them, you will want to stay and become one of the Cliff People. Lekka and his wife are the best bird hunters. You will eat a whole sealskin of their birds by yourself!” He crouched, stuck out his stomach, and farted. We laughed together, but I noticed Tuka scowling.
“Other people can stuff sealskins with birds, too,” he said.
“Ah, Ish,” Arku smiled, “when the birds are nesting in their thousands, when we are catching them and stuffing the sealskins, freezing them for winter, storing their eggs, there is nobody else anyone would want to be but one of the Cliff People. Nowhere else anyone would want to live but under the cliffs. Once you have tasted a sealskin of birds, you will never want to go back to the Shaman’s cave.”
The joy in Arku’s voice! I felt some of his pleasure myself. He wriggled, stamped both feet on the ice. “Perhaps we shouldn’t let you taste them. We need our Shaman. And he needs you to replace him.”
For a moment, the merry look left his face, and I felt a vague sense of worry. But Arku thought of the birds again, and his face lit up. “Whenever we come to visit you in your cave, whenever you come to heal us, I will make sure there is always a sealskin of birds just for you!” We laughed at each other again. Arku often reminded me of Taur.
Starvation forgotten, the Cliff People got on with the business of living. The only disagreeable thing was the continual unpleasantness between Tuka and Lekka. I asked Arku why he did not keep them apart, but he just grinned. “People must lead their own lives. Only the Shaman may tell us what we should do.”
We had wrestling matches, and foot races. There were too few dogs left, so people wore harnesses and pulled the sledges against each other. They stuffed the surviving dogs with all the meat they could eat, asked me for spells to make them breed again. I liked to listen to them talk of dogs, of famous teams. And they were always asking me about Jak, and all the other dogs I remembered.
A young woman and a man, Cheena and Kelu, planned to marry. People talked and laughed and planned for the feast. I listened and thought of the hilltop above the cliffs where Arku and I had carried the dead. From behind one house we had collected a heap of bones in sealskins and buried them, too. By now I understood what the Cliff People had done to survive. There was no point in discussing it. No reason to condemn people who had saved their lives at such cost.
Arku laid something beside each pitiful remains: a spear, a pot, a knife. With the bodies of the babies, a bone toy. And we covered them with stones. When we buried the young woman from the big house, Arku laid the tiny baby in her arms, wound their hands together with a blue bead necklace he took from his neck. I knew by then they were his wife and child.
I thought often of the dead asleep on the hill. The living, I knew, missed them, visited their graves. There was a hollowness to Arku’s eyes, but he laughed as much as ever. He had to survive.
Nevertheless, I watched astonished as the villagers feasted on the seals, eating every last fragment before the hunters went out for more. As if starvation had not taught them anything. I thought of something the Shaman had said, wondered did they behave that way by choice? Was risking starvation the best way to avoid it? Did hunger drive the hunters out to stand on the ice all day? Their life was so different to what mine had been. And, of course, I wondered did Jak and I seem as strange to them?
The Cliff People’s clothes were different to the Seal People’s. The women’s boots were shorter, the bearskin’s longest hair around their tops dyed black. Instead of a decoration of beads over the shoulders of their tunics, they sewed them around their sleeves and across the front of their tunics. The men’s spearheads were a different shape. I tried Arku’s and found it a little heavier.
“Where do you get your spears and knives?” I asked. “Your cooking pots?”
Arku pointed south. “We swap meat, furs and skins with the Coal People. They swap us knives and spears rather than hunt themselves.” His strong, square teeth glistened, breath steamed. “Their village is inland and made of stone and timber. Bigger houses than ours. Too big. They have to heat them with the black coal and spend their lives making things of metal. The Coal People are poor hunters: the white bears know it!” It was clear what Arku thought of people who preferred working metal to hunting.
“Do you marry each other?”
Arku bent over and smacked his thighs with huge hands. “A man from the Coal People cannot marry one of our girls. He could not feed his family.”
&nbs
p; “What about you. Could you marry one of their girls?”
“Of course! But who would want to?” I wondered again at what makes us different. “It is good to make a spear. But to kill with the spear, that is better!” Arku’s broad shoulders were still shaking as we drove out on the ice.
We returned, sledge heaped with seals. I was getting better at driving the dogs, but a fight began after Arku went off to speak to another hunter. I leapt in, clouting with the whip handle. Kicking. Thrashing. Chaka, the leader, looked at me, running out his long tongue. He knew I was not Arku. He yapped, threw himself against his harness, and we were off again, Arku running to join us ahead. I knew he would be laughing at my troubles.
I thought of the dry rustle the Shaman sometimes allowed himself and wondered about myself. I was more like the Shaman than Arku. In fact, I found myself missing the Shaman.
Taur and I used to laugh. Often. I thought of Hagar’s piercing cackle. But Arku’s laughter was different. Again I thought of the dead on the hill. “I suppose Arku has to laugh,” I said to myself. “Or give in.”
Ahead of the sledge, he ran beside the dogs, cursing them, yelling, cracking his whip. Something moved across the snow to the north. Even through the mask, I could not see for the white dazzle. I shaded my eyes. Arku saw me and looked, too.
“The Shaman! Coming to marry Cheena and Kelu. After the – ”
I was so surprised, I cut him off. “How does the Shaman know they want to get married?”
“Of course he knows.” And Arku whipped up the dogs.
Chapter 23
The Carny
The Shaman was already inside Arku’s house, checking my work. “Arku’s people will accept you, when you become their Shaman,” he said without looking up.
Such praise! More importantly, I realised I had missed him. All that time in the cave, hearing his stories, learning to read and write, visiting the Library. Learning healing from him. Despite his remoteness, I had grown to love the Shaman, as if he were my father. I wondered if he was pleased to see me, but knew he would never say so.
