Secrets

by Ken Altabef

  Alaana knew little of transformational spells. Such knowledge had been strictly kept from her by Old Manatook. And yet she had come to realize that in order for this magic to work the souls of the animals must still reside within the skins. The beasts had to be killed in a certain way in order to trap their spirits whole, so that the men could use the skins to change form. When they donned the skins, the men would remain in control, using the enslaved wolven spirits as tools for the transformation.

  Alaana sensed no aura emanating from the ruddy wolfskin in her hands. Her spirit-vision revealed nothing. She sniffed at it but the snow had washed away all stink of man or beast. She was undaunted. The spirits must be hidden there, locked inside. Trapped. Helpless.

  She arranged the skins along the widespread arms of a salmon-drying rack and stood before them. From her medicine bag she produced powdered dogbane and a withered sprig of black claw root which she felt certain would be useful in drawing the spirits out. And after that? She had faced the bestial fury of these creatures once, all snapping snouts and slashing teeth. She was not eager to do so again.

  Alaana arranged a totemic necklace across the front of her parka, a string of polar bear claws that had been the sacred amulet of Old Manatook. After all, it had been Old Manatook in the form of a great white bear who had slain these men in wolf shape. The wolf spirits would be wary of confronting his power again. At least, that’s what she hoped.

  Kneeling before the rack, Alaana hesitated, envisioning herself torn to pieces by angry ghosts and left to rot in this place, alone, her scattered bones mingling among the foul corpses that littered the camp. A silly way to die. A fool’s errand? She didn’t think so. The wolves had not been her enemies. She could not leave them like this.

  She began a low chant in the secret language of the shamans. It was hard work penetrating the binding spell, constructed as it was by some northerly shaman with far more experience in such matters. With no ritual to fall back on, Alaana had to feel her way, unlocking the soul cage layer by layer. She made up for inexperience with extreme patience as she sought out the proper phrasing to unwind the knots. Strand by strand, the process was an education in itself. In time she began to feel the animal spirits imprisoned within the skins, scratching and clawing at their unnatural bonds from inside.

  A snowy owl appeared in the limbs of the tree above. Alaana was not surprised, as the snowy owl was attracted to spirits of the newly dead, often ushering them to the world beyond. From its niche between drooping limbs which had already shed the snow and ice of winter, the owl cooed softly. Alaana had no time for it.

  In the end Alaana’s education would remain incomplete. As she struggled to dismantle the deepest workings of the spell, the alpha wolf burst through the weakened soul cage. The ethereal form of a huge reddish wolf, the very one who had killed her friend Uatchiaq, rose up above the rack of skins.

  It snarled and snapped, crushing air in its powerful jaws. Bodiless, but no less deadly, the fire-eyed spirit raged on the point of attack. Alaana shrank back, realizing her necklace of protection was no help against it. Worse yet, the ghost was angered by the token. She tore the amulet from her neck and laid it before her on the bare rock of the ancient hearth.

  The angry tarrak did not surge forward and finish her. For now the ghost was more concerned with liberating the souls of its fellows from their skins.

  As the barriers came crashing down all six wolf spirits rose up in a rush, presenting Alaana with a menacing sky full of misty apparitions. She ended her chant. Out of breath from her exertions, she remained sitting cross-legged in the slush, carefully oblivious to their growling and snapping. She avoided their gaze. Even dead, these animals followed the instincts of the pack. They saw no need to attack a submissive enemy.

  “I did not slay you,” reminded Alaana, eyes still downcast. “I did not bind you. Fly away. Be free.”

  The wolf spirits seethed, restless on the point of attack. But the lead wolf circled warily in the air, calling the others to order with a sharp authoritative bark.

  One by one, the inua began to drift away, pulled upward into the pale blue sky until only the alpha remained. The great tawny spirit bowed its pointed snout toward the young shaman, mewling softly. Alaana doubted the proud beast had ever made such a sound during its hard, raging life. And then it went to join its fellows in the sky.

  Alaana paused for a moment’s rest before undertaking the final task of the afternoon. All was quiet. No malign influences had been attracted by the ritual. The gray sky was etched by wisps of mist trailing the wolves to the great beyond. The cave entrance sparkled, its rocky surface jeweled by water trickling down from above. Alaana thought what a beautiful sight it was. If Ben were to see it, what a marvelous song he would create.

  The snowy owl remained balanced in the down-drooping limbs of the tree. It hadn’t gone with the spirit wolves’ passing. Alaana thought this strange. The majestic bird swiveled its broad head, following her with a hypnotic stare.

  She walked to the cairn of stones the Anatatook had placed over the body of Old Manatook, whom they had found dead in the cave, locked in battle with the man-wolves. Alaana felt a tide of sadness at the gravesite. She had never properly mourned her teacher; she had still been so angry. When Old Manatook departed on his mysterious journey three years ago Alaana had fully expected him to return.

  For years Alaana had resented the shaman for leaving her to take his place at the age of thirteen, with unfinished training. Since then she had stumbled in the role, nearly causing starvation and death to the settlement. And all that time, Alaana realized, she had been suffering misplaced emotion. She was angry only at weaknesses in herself. It was up to her to fulfill the role of shaman now, regardless of the circumstances. She must rise to the task.

  Turning her anger toward Old Manatook wasn’t fair. The powerful shaman had returned just when he was most needed, answering Alaana’s call for aid in facing the crisis of the man-wolves. And Old Manatook had given his life, saving them. For that Alaana could not help but feel grateful.

  She solemnly replaced the uppermost stones of the cairn where they had rolled out of place. Her feelings for Old Manatook would not as easily be sorted out this day, but at the gravesite she did pay homage to her old friend and master, whatever his faults. The same nagging questions remained. Why had he gone so often to the north? What had he been doing all that time?

  The snowy owl trilled a somber note.

  The strange thing was, under the cairn lay not the body of a man, but the body of a polar bear. Alaana had found the tanned skin of a man, which Old Manatook had been using all his life to appear as one of the Anatatook. It was the same spell the man-wolves had used.

  The snowy owl hooted again, becoming more insistent. Something stirred the branches of the pine. The wind picked up, carrying the smell of magic. Alaana listened intently, clearing her mind to the one-pointedness of concentration necessary to receive messages on the wind. The skin at the back of her neck tingled. And there it was. Faint, and coming from far away, the echo of a distant chant. The message rose and fell, a call for help, a desperate plea in the secret language of the shamans. With a dissonant crack of thunder the strange song ended, resolving itself into an eerie, diminishing wail. Alaana knew it had been the call of a distant shaman, but one that was not for her. It had been meant for Old Manatook.

  Alaana waited, listening. The snowy owl stared down, silent and motionless. The wind did not return.

  CHAPTER 12

  LOUISIANA

  A thin film of gristle and liquid fat ran ahead of Higilak’s blade as her semicircular knife scoured the hide. Her lower back was already aching from bending over the flat stone and the skins.

  From where she was kneeling, Higilak could hear the young women laughing, happy and playful now the winter was over. A group of the young wives, abandoning their work, had gathered around Agruta and her boy-child. The child had just recently learned to walk and was demonstrating his newfound skills
to the circle of cheering women.

  “This is old woman’s work,” she said to Ben. “You should be with the other men.”

  Ben, seated on a rock in front of their tent, shook his head. “Then who would keep you company, Old Mother?”

  It pleased Higilak that he should call her by the same adoptive title Alaana used. Higilak, who had no children of her own, had been very happy when young Alaana had left her family’s tent to come live with her. In exchange for what little guidance Higilak could offer her, Alaana returned genuine affection. She was pleased again when Ben, after his rescue from the Yupikut, had joined them. Higilak now enjoyed a pleasant sense of family developing within the confines of her tent. Although it was an odd sort of a family, she thought, with all of them sleeping in separate bunks.

  Ben had not come to live with Alaana as his wife. He kept a discrete distance from the young shaman.

  “There are other old women here,” she said wryly. “I am not so decrepit and loathsome as I must seem. Surely one of them would take pity on me, I think, if you took a moment to socialize.”

  Another round of praise in peals of wonder and delight drifted across the compound.

  Ben shrugged. “I don’t feel right with them.”

  “Ah. And why? Because you speak a little differently? We can understand you well enough.”

  “They don’t want me on the hunt,” he said plainly. “They think I’m bad luck.”

  “Dark skin isn’t bad luck. There is no such taboo, and believe me, I know them all.”

  Higilak leaned in closer over her scraping work. The musk ox skin, far too heavy and stiff for suitable clothing, would make a sturdy patch for the roof of their tent and an extra blanket for next winter.

  Ben blew a few tentative notes on his bone flute.

  “Surely you can go with Kigiuna,” suggested Higilak. “He’s not superstitious.”

  “He offered, but…” Ben glanced down at his useless left arm. “I just get in the way. I can’t shoot the bow and there’s no room in the kayak for a man who can’t paddle. It doesn’t matter. I have a good eye for spearfishing. I’ll get some trout for us tomorrow. It’s good enough. Today I’m enjoying the sunshine and the laughter of the mothers and their children.”

  “You sound like Alaana.”

  Ben said nothing.

  “When Manatook and I first came here, we knew no one,” said Higilak. She pointed to her matrimonial tattoos, which ran down her chin in three lines that had a distinctly different pattern than those of the other Anatatook women.

  Ben continued fiddling with his instrument, but his brow wrinkled slightly, indicating to Higilak that he hadn’t noticed that difference before.

  The young man’s pain was obvious. In the time he had lived with the Anatatook, a full turning of the moon, the ghosts had not faded from his haunted eyes. Higilak thought that if only he would speak of his past, release the bitterness he was carrying pent up inside, she might find some way to help him.

  “Do you have any family? Back there in Looseeaana?”

  Ben smiled at her stilted pronunciation. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

  “You must miss them dearly.”

  As usual Ben grew slightly annoyed at her probing. “There’s an empty space inside of me where my father lives. And my mother. I saw my mother murdered right before my eyes. You can’t know how it feels.”

  “Can’t I?” said Higilak. “I watched my own father die. A senseless, inglorious death at that. Oh yes. When I was your age, my entire village was destroyed. Every last man, woman and child. Everyone I had ever known or loved, wiped away by an evil so terrible only a force from the heavens could contain it.”

  Ben seemed shocked by this, but he knew from the earnest expression on Higilak’s face that it was true.

  “In time,” continued Higilak, “Manatook and I made a life here, with these good people. I’ve never regretted that. You can do the same.”

  The young man shook his head. “I don’t think so. Nobody trusts me here, and they never will.”

  “Alaana doesn’t feel that way.”

  Again, Ben glanced away at mention of Alaana’s name. “I remember summer time in Louisiana. It was warm. I mean it was hot. The sun was ferocious. And birds singing. That’s where I belong. As soon as I get a sled and a dog team, I’m going to go south.”

  “Running away?”

  “I’ve been running all my life.” He sighed. “You want to know? I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. My parents were slaves. They worked on a farm, growing mostly sugar cane.”

  “We get sugar from the white men sometimes,” Higilak said.

  “Yes, that’s where it comes from.”

  “Louisiana?”

  “Thereabouts. When Mister Lincoln freed the slaves my parents stayed working on the farm. There wasn’t any place else to go. Nothing really changed much at all. The workers still got whipped just the same. We ate the same stale porridge, sang the same old songs. Kept our heads low, just the same.

  “Then one night when I was just about seven there was some big ruckus on the farm. A fire. Gunshots. My father was killed. Shot dead. I didn’t see it happen, but my mother and I had to run. We couldn’t stay on that farm any more. Trouble was, there wasn’t any place for a slave woman and her child to go. There wasn’t any place for us to go. We headed north, thinking things might be better for us there. My mother did what she could along the way. We went from town to town and everywhere we went…”

  He paused, and from the pained look on his face Higilak thought he might not continue. “Men took advantage of her. A couple even tried to take advantage of me if you know what I mean. Until finally she met Mr. Douglas. That Mr. Douglas was a good man. He wanted to take care of us. He really did. He had a lot of big, crazy ideas, you might call them dreams. Well, he got the gold fever, and we went up to a place called the Yukon. It was mighty cold, just like here. He had a stake, a claim and he was going to get some gold out of the ground and everything was going to be all right. We were going to be all right.”

  Such a long pause followed, Higilak feared she might never hear the rest. “What happened?”

  “Those raiders happened. They caught us out alone up there and they killed Mr. Douglas. Strung him up, his guts hanging out like a bloody apron. Just like my father, I guess. That was Verlag who did it. Well, he’d never seen anything like my mother. She was a beauty. A real beauty. He didn’t like me much. But as long as I was around he had something to hold over her, to make her do whatever he wanted. They’d never seen a black woman before, and I guess owning her gave Verlag some type of status, though he treated her just as badly as his other women. And those Yupikut don’t have much use for children. I was born free, but now I learned what it was like to be a slave all over again. I ran errands for them, little things, and when I got in their way they beat me and one time I raised my hand and Verlag’s shaman — he did this.”

  Ben motioned to his useless arm.

  “Oh how terrible,” said Higilak. “I’m sorry.”

  Ben shrugged. “Tell you the truth that wasn’t the worst thing he ever did to me.”

  Another silence followed. Higilak didn’t dare ask.

  “The shaman took away my arm just like that. He didn’t even need to touch me. He just looked my way, said a few words. That was it. And then I realized there was nothing I could do, no way I could ever fight back. The shaman was too powerful.”

  “They said he was killed in a raid. He got what he deserved.”

  “He got killed, but that was a lot less than he deserved if you ask me.”

  Ben continued his tale in an icy, matter-of-fact tone. “They laughed at me. They laughed when I cried. They laughed when they beat me. They were always laughing at me. And after a while they killed my mother. They kept me around after that, I don’t really know why. I guess, just for the entertainment. They considered me an amusing fool I guess. I couldn’t run away. There was no place to go. I would’ve died out on
the tundra alone. And I wasn’t going to do that. Not for them. Not for anybody. That’s my story.”

  “Whatever horrible things may have happened to you, please understand that we are not the Yupikut. If you truly wish to make the journey south you may try, but you’ll still be alone. I think you should consider staying here with us. There’s a future here for you. Maybe even with Alaana.”

  “Alaana?”

  Higilak smiled. “Yes, even a foolish old woman can see that she likes you.”

  “I could never be with Alaana,” Ben said. He would say nothing more.

  CHAPTER 13

  HIGILAK’S TALE

  By the time Alaana returned from the wolf-camp it was well past dark. She found the village already abed, a hard day’s work ended. After she stowed the sledge and fed the dogs, she felt ready for a good sleep as well. When she lifted the door-curtain of their tent she found Higilak had left a meal for her in the entranceway. Too late to light the lamp and wake everyone, she would eat it cold under the night sky.

  Higilak was an exceptional cook. Tonight she had prepared a type of stew Alaana had never before tasted but had a warmly satisfying flavor that lingered in the mouth, even eaten cold.

  The clear polar sky, full of stars glittering in their celestial hearth, shone down on the camp. The quiet was broken only by the occasional yap of a dog or some stray laughter in the dark. Lovers, she imagined, would be snuggling in their beds. Her people had little need of her at the moment. Food was plentiful in the wake of the recent oxen run and the band would be moving to their summer camp soon.