The Shadow of Everything Existing

by Ken Altabef

  Alaana’s idea rested with the spirit of the snow. The body of the snow was so vast, covering the entire world, that its inua could be seen only as a dull silver glow filling the landscape to the horizon. The spirit of the snow was ancient and unknowable, a venerable patriarch that watched over the land and all its creatures with a kind eye and a gentle embrace. Impossible to move or sway, it was possessed of a deep wisdom, having witnessed everything that had ever existed and ever happened. Every fall from grace, every flounder and lurch of progress, every triumph and catastrophe, in times of both conflict and tranquility, for all time.

  The snow was ever asleep now, having seen so much, as an old man who was beyond having to work and sits observing the activities of all his children and grandchildren. Alaana imagined the great spirit puffing thoughtfully at his pipe as he watched them, perhaps laughing slyly at their jests, perhaps gratified by their triumphs. If a shaman could rouse that magnificent soul to action, what wonders might she achieve? But Alaana could not compel the snow to do anything. No shaman could.

  A few tricks she could do. On occasion she had made little men out of hard-pack snow. She had asked the spirit of the snow to animate the figures so that they capered and danced briefly to delight the children. She had found the snow an amiable although fickle spirit, sometimes willing to grant such favor for a promise of payment in the form of children’s laughter, sometimes not.

  This situation, Alaana thought, was not so very different. Nobody could force the snow to action, but she could ask.

  “Perhaps,” she said aloud.

  “Oh, you must try,” pleaded the wife. “Please try.”

  Alaana took a deep breath and let it slowly out again.

  “Brother Snow,” she intoned, using the low cadences of the secret language of the shamans. “Apunsisuuq, who is so vast and so mighty. I am but a humble shaman, a woman who walks the crust of the land like a carrion fly crawling across your great skin. I am nothing.

  “Brother Snow, your spirit having been so near this man these past few years, having cradled him in your arms for so long, knowing him so intimately, perhaps you could spare him some small favor.

  “Spirit of the snow, who is so great and generous to the people of Nunatsiaq, put a little of yourself within this shell. Let this man walk again. Let him draw breath again. For a short time if that is all you will allow, just so that his wife may look upon the light of his eyes once more. This I beg of you.”

  The ground trembled slightly. Alaana withdrew. To press any further would be a grave mistake.

  Toonookyah’s wife leaned forward, stretching out her arm. Alaana pulled her back. Everyone stared at the figure trapped in the ice. The entire world held its breath. The water seemed to stop sloshing, the bergs to cease their straining, the floes kissing only softly together. Alaana poised on the precipice, her face a mask of intense concentration.

  The dead man’s eyes rolled up toward her.

  “Cut him out,” Alaana ordered. “Hurry.”

  The men went at the ice with their snow knives, long slender blades fashioned from sturdy antler. They hacked at the lake with clumsy hesitation, not used to digging out a live person. They didn’t have to go all the way down, for when the weight of the ice was lifted Toonookyah pushed the top layer off. Flexing limbs stiff with cold and choked by time, he stood up on the beach.

  Dripping wet, he stepped forward. Toonookyah walked again.

  A cheer rose up from the men.

  “Hush,” said Alaana. “Nothing is certain.”

  The wife, overjoyed, rushed to her husband. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed that his face still held the pallor of death, nor the little rime of frost that had settled over his eyebrows, nor that his mouth, still grimly set, held a bluish cast about the lips. Or perhaps she had seen those things, and threw herself at him just the same.

  “Toonookyah,” she cried, “Toonookyah.”

  She recoiled slightly at the touch of his cheek, exclaiming, “So cold!” Then she threw her arms around her husband’s shoulders.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said firmly. “Even if you are chill as the pack ice, it doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter.”

  Toonookyah pushed her to arm’s length. Something struck Alaana strange about his eyes. Were they still frozen solid?

  The wife wiped the stray tears from her cheeks and clawed the remnants of her hair to order. She smoothed down the front of her anorak. “Our children. Oh, how they’ve grown. Our Amaudluq, she’s so tall — almost a woman now. You won’t even recognize her.” She paused, correcting herself. “Oh, yes you will. Of course you will. Wait till you see them.”

  Her words sparked very little reaction. Toonookyah stood neutral, head slightly atilt, hands hanging loosely at his sides. The look in his eyes knocked her back, so deathly cold, so devoid of passion.

  “You look at me as if you don’t know me,” she said. “Surely you haven’t forgotten. You remember the way you used to hold me close, all through winter’s long night. The way you used to joke and laugh with me.” She chuckled softly. It was a small sound, both sad and hopeful.

  He nodded.

  “The way you used to smile upon the children. The look in your eyes as you watched me perform my duties in the house. And then later, under the bedclothes. Surely you haven’t forgotten all that.”

  “Yes, I remember,” he said.

  She smiled, clasping her hands together tightly in front of her mouth. “You have been asleep, that’s all. Now you awaken and I am here. As I’ve always been. And mine the first face you see upon awakening. As always. The first name to cross your lips in the morning.” Her voice cracked with emotion. “Say my name.”

  Toonookyah said nothing.

  Tears fell again upon her cheeks. She stretched out a hand toward his. “It doesn’t matter. Come back to our house now. Rest with me awhile.”

  He shook his head. “I can not. Your flesh is too warm. Too warm. It can never be.”

  “But it must be!” she raged, stamping her foot in the snow.

  He shook his head again, then looked away.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, but he had already begun walking down the beach.

  Crestfallen by this rejection, Toonookyah’s wife turned on Alaana.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  Her torment heartbreaking to behold, Alaana had no answer for her. The rest of the men, their smiles having faded away, looked upon the scene with sadly impassive eyes. Toonookyah’s wife could not bear to look at them. She glanced briefly at the retreating form of her husband, then made a small choking noise deep in her throat. She ran away toward the village.

  Alaana caught up with Toonookyah halfway down the beach. He was looking at the sky.

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” said Alaana. “Her hurt is even worse.”

  “The sun,” said Toonookyah. “Is it always this bright?”

  “Yes, in spring and summer. I wouldn’t look so long at it if I were you.”

  Toonookyah turned his gaze toward Alaana, studying the shaman’s face as if seeing it for the first time. Alaana was a short woman, and Toonookyah stood a full head taller.

  “There is so much to see,” said Toonookyah. He bent closer so that his nose nearly brushed Alaana’s shoulder. He sniffed. Toonookyah crinkled his nose.

  A gull screeched overhead. Toonookyah glanced up. His head traced the bird’s arc across the sky. Toonookyah always did have a good eye, thought Alaana. He could spot a seal on the ice at thirty paces.

  “I thank you, angatkok,” he said flatly, “for this very excellent opportunity. Now I see all the colors of the world through these eyes. Now I hear the breaking of the waves on shore, through these ears. The song of the gulls. And all the rest. In the many turnings of the sky, I did not ever think of it. Thank you.”

  “But the woman…”

  “I feel nothing for her,” said Toonookyah. “I feel nothing.”

  With that, he walked away.

/>   Alaana went to the widow’s tent with a heavy heart. Seeking to help, she had clumsily made the poor woman’s suffering worse. She must somehow find a way to make it better.

  As she crouched before the entrance, a bitter wind blew across the tundra, dusting cold powder in her face. Alaana sneezed, wiping the frost from her nose.

  Brushing apart the tent skins, she stepped over a pair of frozen fox carcasses, only partially skinned, where they lay stiff and smeared with frozen blood. She found the house lit by the feeble gleam of one lone soapstone lamp, left untended on the bench, the flame low and sputtering.

  Toonookyah’s wife hung dangling from the far side of the dome. She had choked herself with a loop of sinew strung from one of the driftwood posts supporting the tentskin.

  Her body swayed slightly. Drained of color, naked, lifeless.

  “Why have you done this?” Alaana addressed his question to the woman’s ghost, which hovered near the top of the room. Even in the vague glow of the lamp, the woman’s inua sparkled with fiery crimson light as seen by way of the spirit-vision.

  “Because I want to know,” the ghost answered.

  “I can’t put this back!” Alaana exclaimed.

  “You won’t have to. He has life enough for both of us.”

  Alaana set her teeth in frustration. In her arrogance she had caused tragedy and more tragedy. This would never be made right.

  “Bring him here,” the wife’s ghost said.

  There was nothing else to do. Alaana drew a small obsidian knife from the belt of her parka and cut the taut strand of sinew. She eased the body down; it was already stiff with cold. She laid the lifeless woman out on the sleeping pallet, leaving her eyes open. She did not cover her nakedness with furs.

  “Bring him to me,” she said again.

  Alaana did as she was asked. Toonookyah didn’t comment as he passed through the entranceway. Sniffing at the many pungent odors of the place, he regarded all the items cluttering the house as if for the first time — clothes that were mostly rags, some few old cooking things, a small pile of half-rotted fish ends, and even some of his own possessions and equipment. His eyes lingered on a tukaq, a harpoon-headed spear whose ivory tip held carvings wrought by his own hand in days long gone.

  “Come to me, my love,” said the wife’s ghost. “Take me in your arms, for now I am as cold as you!”

  Toonookyah regarded the body on the pallet with chillblained eyes.

  “He doesn’t have the sight, as I do,” said Alaana. “He can’t see you. He doesn’t hear you.”

  “Then speak for me!”

  “Her spirit still walks with us,” said Alaana, although it pained her to say the words. “She wants to know if you still love her. She wants to know if you will once again take her to wife.”

  Toonookyah lifted the tukaq from its resting place against the side of the tentskin, hefted it in his hand, then walked away, leaving the agonized wail of the ghost for Alaana’s ears alone.

  “I’m sorry, Amaaqtuq,” said Alaana sadly, “to see your heart broken a second time.”

  The ghost bristled. “What a fool I’ve been to think he would take me with him. To think that he still loved me.”

  “That thing is not your husband.”

  “I know. I know that,” she said sadly. “Seeing him again turned my bones inside out. The pain was too much. I thought there was a chance. No matter how small, a chance worth taking. So I leapt.”

  “As would I,” Alaana said, thinking of Ben.

  “Your husband loved you,” she said. “You know it. If you need proof of that, you have your children.”

  “My children!” Amaaqtuq lamented. “I did not think – Oh, what about my children?”

  “They will be cared for. This I promise.”

  The ghost’s eyes blazed, but no water could fall from them. “I’ve lost everything for a hopeless chance. Fool!”

  “I am the fool,” said Alaana. “I should have known. I imagined the snow to be something it’s not. The ice never returns what it takes, and the snow can feel nothing.”

  The ghost remained silent.

  “Amaaqtuq,” said Alaana, “It is best for you to go. In the distant lands across the great divide, the ancestors wait for you. Perhaps you will find Toonookyah there. Perhaps you can finally leave your pain behind.”

  Alaana stepped up on the sleeping platform and, taking her obsidian knife, cut a hole in the skin so that the woman’s soul could escape.

  Amaaqtuq looked sadly at her body on the slab. She appeared so thin and wretched, her face gray and careworn, the hair pulled out.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I died with him, those many years ago. My hurt was so great nothing could ever ease it but the cold…and the dark. I’ve been married to the snow for years.”

  Alaana held back a tear. “It’s time. Do not delay here. There is nothing left for you. Your name will be passed on.”

  When her clouded breath parted from her face, Alaana saw she was gone.

  Alaana caught up with Toonookyah at the outskirts of the Anatatook camp. He leaned upon his tukaq, watching the red sun setting between two towering ice mountains on the horizon. It was such an impressive sight that Alaana stood silent for a moment as well. The stark whites and grays of the tundra flared pink and orange briefly as the light caressed in turn each crystalline crest of the landscape.

  “Where do you go?” Alaana asked.

  “To experience. To walk and see what I may, to smell, to taste.”

  “Beware the white bear,” said the shaman. “He travels the shoreline by night.”

  Toonookyah shrugged. Brother Snow had no fear of raging bear or starved wolf pack. Alaana smiled grudgingly. Enough foolish warnings. She said, “Perhaps we will meet again.”

  Toonookyah didn’t answer.

  CHAPTER 17

  “HE’S HERE”

  After a long, miserable walk out on the flats, Alaana stumbled back into her tent.

  Old Higilak lay on her sleeping pallet beneath a thin blanket of rabbit fur. Alaana apologized for having noisily knocked over one of the cooking pots and waking her. Higilak sat up. She moved slowly and painfully as in everything she did, grunting softly, until she had settled her position, sitting up on her bed, but not straight, never straight. The blanket pooled in her lap. The lamp was not lit, but daylight set the skins to bright amber and there was enough light to see the old woman’s eyes, rimmed white with extreme age, looking back at her.

  “Alaana?” she asked.

  “Never mind, Old Mother. Go back to sleep.”

  “What about you? How long has it been since you slept?”

  “I don’t know.” In the persistent daylight of summer sleep cycles became completely confused. She hadn’t seen her husband Ben for what must have been several days. He was busy with the other hunters. After Alaana had returned from the shadow world, the lamenting voices that had tormented Ben had suddenly stopped. Alaana realized it had been his own voice, the voice of the captive shadow Ben, that had been ringing in her husband’s ears all this time, begging for help across the divide between worlds. She had never seen him so bright and cheerful as in recent days. He’d been wandering around camp in the mornings, singing happy folk songs in his native tongue.

  “I really don’t know,” she said again. “I’ve been too busy chasing after shadows and sorcerers. And now I’ve caused Amaaqtuq to end her own life, leaving two young children without a mother. I wanted to help her and I’ve killed her. It’s my duty to protect them, and I’ve killed her.”

  Higilak sighed. “I heard about it. You know what I think?”

  “Don’t say anything…”

  “Sometimes people need to die.”

  “Oh, no. Please stop…”

  “When Old Manatook left us I wanted to end my own life.”

  “But you didn’t. And now it’s many, many years later and you’ve lived a good, long life.”

  “A long life, it’s true. But it is no longe
r good. In the past year I’ve tried to end it more than once.”

  “What? How?”

  “The noose around the neck, same as Amaaqtuq.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “It’s true. I hung myself but I didn’t die.”

  Silence filled the tent for a moment.

  “And also with the knife. I bled a little but I didn’t die.”

  Again Alaana didn’t know what to say. She knew the old woman was telling the truth, but she couldn’t imagine her doing such a thing.

  “There’s a certain point where living becomes too much. Life becomes heavier than death, every day is a torment. One can put it off no longer.”

  “You aren’t a burden to anyone.”

  “I am a burden to myself. I can get out of bed, but only after a long wrestling match with the furs. From the moment I sit up my head aches. I can walk but there is terrible pain in every step. My teeth are gone and you must chew for me, and I can’t work the skins.”

  “You tell the stories. That’s useful enough.”

  “Yes, when I can remember them.”

  “Good enough. Who would tell the stories if you were gone?”

  “Noona knows them all, and can tell in several languages.”

  “My daughter? You mean the one who lives at the trading post with her kabloona husband?”

  “I think he’s a good man. A very good man.”

  “I know,” said Alaana. “He’s afraid of nothing, except maybe me.” She laughed softly. “But I think we’ve lost Noona. She may no longer be Anatatook. If she goes away with him, the children will not hear her tell your tales.”

  “Don’t worry. She can read. One day she will learn to write them down, and then everyone will know them.”

  “Perhaps. Yes, that would be something good. But until then we’ll have to make do with you, old woman.”

  “And that was enough,” she said, “to keep me breathing air. It was enough until these past few days. Something has changed. It’s Manatook. His ghost is here. I can sense him hanging about. He’s here, isn’t he?”