Alaska (12 page)

He served his community well. Indeed, he seemed to have only one weakness, an insatiable craving for power and ever more power, and the young woman Nukleet was the first in the community to discover this terrible infirmity and identify it. She had started worrying about her good husband's helplessness before this forceful shaman, and quickly she had transferred that concern to herself. Now, perceiving the real danger, she asked her father to walk with her beside the sea, which was beginning to fill with ice: 'Can't you see, Father? It's not Oogruk or me. It's your power he's really after.'

The headman, a considerable force in any Eskimo community, ridiculed his daughter's fears: 'Shamans look after the spirits. Headmen look after the hunt.'

'If the separation is allowed to continue.'

'He would be no good in an umiak and hopeless in a kayak.'

'But if he controlled those who went in the umiak?'

She made no headway with her father, who was preoccupied with trying to bring in enough food before the winter closed in, and in the next weeks she saw little of him, for he and his men were out upon the great sea where the ice was forming, and to her relief and his, he succeeded in bringing home many fat seals and one small walrus. The shaman blessed the catch and explained to the people that the hunts had been successful because this time Oogruk had been left at home.

IT WAS A DIFFICULT WINTER. WITHOUT A WHALE ON THE

beach the little village of Pelek lacked many necessities, and when the long night settled in, the sea froze solid along the shore and nearly so to a far distance out.

Since Pelek perched on the extreme eastern tip of the Chukchi peninsula, it lay some distance south of the Arctic Circle, which meant that even in midwinter the sun shone briefly, a cold, reluctant orb

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which gave little warmth. Then, as if frightened by venturing so far north, after two meager hours it disappeared and twenty-two hours of freezing darkness returned.

The effect of this cold on the sea was spectacular, for not only did the sea freeze, it also heaved and fractured and disrupted itself so that enormous blocks of ice, taller than the tallest spruce to the south, rose eerily from the surface, standing about like structures thrown by some malevolent giant. The effect was staggering, a jagged, broken surface along which one could travel by sled for only a short distance before being forced to detour the monstrous towers of ice.

But interspersed among the great blocks were spacious areas where the frozen sea remained flat, and to such places men and women came with fishing lines, and with stout poles treasured from generation to generation they pounded on the ice until they broke their way to water, and down these holes they dropped their lines with the ivory hooks with which they caught their winter food. It was arduous work to dig the holes and a bitterly cold assignment to sit there hour after hour waiting for a fish to strike, but the people of Pelek had to endure it or go hungry.

In the long hours of darkness the Eskimos, like the prudent Siberians before them, slept much in order to conserve energy, but occasionally groups of men would venture far out on the ice to where free water stood, and there they endeavored to catch a seal or two, for the rich blubber was needed to supplement the deficient diet.

When such a catch was made, the men responsible butchered the seal immediately, gorging on the liver, but the slabs of meat and blubber they carried home across the ice, shouting news of their success as they approached Pelek. Then their wives and children ran to the shore and far out onto the ice to help drag home the welcome meat, and for two unbroken days the people of Pelek feasted.

But mostly in these difficult winters the Eskimos of Pelek stayed close to their huts, periodically knocking away the snow that threatened to engulf them, and huddled by their meager fires. No Eskimos in this part of the north lived in igloos; those imaginative and sometimes beautiful ice houses with their splendid domes would come later and only in regions thousands of miles to the east. These Eskimos of fourteen thousand years ago lived in excavated huts with superstructures of wood and whalebone and sealskin, much like those which the Siberians of Varnak's day, fifteen thousand years earlier, had known.

In the dark winter, fears and superstitions flourished, and it was in this enforced and nervous idleness that the shaman 75

could best work his spells. If a pregnant woman had a difficult delivery, he knew who was at fault and he was not loath to identify the evildoer. He had not the power of life and death that was reserved for a community consensus but he could influence the decision. Alone in his small hut at the edge of Pelek, and inland from the sea which he tried to avoid, he sat among his pebbles and his charms, his bits of bone and precious ivories, his aspen twigs which had happened to grow in premonitory forms, and cast his spells.

This winter he directed his spells against Oogruk first, and he did this for solid reasons: Oogruk with his gentle ways and crossed eyes is the kind of man who becomes a shaman. And that lucky labret might spur him, too. Better to force him from the village. The tactic was sensible, because there was little chance that when Oogruk fled, his desirable wife would go with him. She would stay behind, that was certain.

And when the shaman had collected to himself whatever powers Nukleet had, her father would then be vulnerable to him.

These men and women of Pelek, twelve thousand years before the birth of Christ, eleven thousand years before the sophistication of Athens, thoroughly understood the drives which motivated men and women. They appreciated their relationship to the land, to the sea and to the animals which occupied both. And none comprehended these forces better than the shaman, unless it was this unusual young woman Nukleet, with whom he was obsessed.

'Oogruk,' she whispered in their dark hut, 'I think he'll make it impossible for us to live in this village another year.'

'He hates me. He turns all men against me.'

'No, the one he really hates is that one over there,' and she pointed to where her father slept. And she assured her husband that whereas he, Oogruk, was first on the shaman's list, while she was second, they were both no more than expendable targets by which the medicine man planned to attain his real goal.

'What's that?'

'The destruction of my father. The possession of his power.'

When Oogruk, tutored by his wife, began to unravel this ugly web, he saw that she was right, and a quiet fury began to build within him. But when he tried to devise some way to defend himself and Nukleet during the shaman's first assaults, and then to protect his fatherin-law against the sorcerer's major attack, he found himself helpless. The shaman was essential to the village, and anything that damaged him endangered the entire community. So Oogruk remained paralyzed.

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His initial fury was transmuted into a kind of dull ache, an uneasiness which never left his mind, and it produced a curious reaction. The cross-eyed fellow began to sequester in the snow surrounding his fatherin-law's hut bits of whalebone, and spars of wood washed up by the sea during the previous summer. He acquired sealskins and lengths of sinew from the bodies of dead animals, and as he furtively collected these items a plan evolved. He visualized that congenial group of huts on the eastern edge of the sea, where he and his fellow hunters had been revived when they were without food, and he thought repeatedly: It would be better over there.

When he had surreptitiously assembled enough stray elements to consider seriously what might be done with them, he had to take Nukleet and her father into his confidence, and when he did, he revealed a revolutionary concept: 'Why not build a kayak with three openings? Men paddling front and back. Nukleet and the child in the middle?'

His father quickly rejected such nonsense: 'Kayaks have one opening. If you want three, you build yourself an open umiak.'

But Oogriik, slow-witted as he seemed to be, saw that necessity was more important than convention: 'In high seas an umiak can be swamped and everyone drowns. But a kayak, properly lashed down, can be rolled over and refloated. Then everyone lives.'

When his fatherin-law continued to insist upon an umiak, Oogruk said with startling force: 'Only a kayak can save us,' and the older man salvaged his pride by shifting the discussion: 'Where would we go if we had such a kayak?'

'Over there,' Oogruk replied without hesitating, and in that pregnant moment, with his left forefinger pointing eastward across the frozen sea, he committed himself and his family to the idea of leaving this village forever.

So Oogruk began to build a kayak, and when word of this reached the shaman's ears, that hairy fellow crouched among his magic pieces, his tattered garments rank from perpetual use and filth, and began to cast spells, asking penetrating questions throughout the community: 'Why is the kayak being built? What evil thing does cross-eyed Oogruk have in mind?'

The headman, hearing this insinuation, answered it boldly: 'My stupid son-in-law lost my good kayak when he chased the whale last summer. I'm making him replace it.'

And by this lie the headman committed himself. He too was prepared to leave Pelek forever and test his fortunes in the world across the sea, even though he realized that over there he would no 77

longer be a headman. The quiet glory of leading his people in decisions would be surrendered. Other men would stand in the stern of the umiak when the whale was pursued, and better men, younger and stronger, would fight the walrus and apportion the meat when the kill was made. More than either his daughter or her husband, the headman appreciated how much he was surrendering if this flight was made, but he also knew that he was powerless once the shaman turned his face against him.

When the necromancer learned that the new kayak, whose ribs now lay exposed in the snow, was going to have three openings, he deduced that all of the persons against whom he was plotting were preparing to escape his dominance, and in the last days of winter before the great sea melted to make the use of umiaks and kayaks feasible again, he decided that he must take action against the would-be fugitives, and now he stepped forth boldly to establish his authority.

'There has never been a kayak with three openings. The spirits frown on such contaminations.

And why is it being attempted? The headman is preparing to sneak out of Pelek, and if he takes his hunting skills elsewhere, we shall starve.” When he uttered these words, all knew that he was threatening to sentence the headman to a cruel existence: he must remain in the village to guide the hunting, but in shame he must also surrender his leadership to the shaman. In the hunt he would be a free man, in all else a suspected prisoner.

It was a diabolical punishment made possible only by the unquestioned faith these Eskimos had in their shaman, and the only recourse either the headman or his children could envisage was flight. So construction of the kayak was hastened, and when in late spring the snows melted and the sea began to show signs of breaking free of its icy blanket, Oogruk and the headman worked strenuously to complete their craft, while Nukleet, who had in a sense initiated the strategy of flight, gathered those necessary things which she and her daughter would carry at their feet during the sea crossing. When she realized how pitifully small the cargo would have to be, and how much she must abandon, she felt sorrow but no lack of determination.

Had she been inclined to waver, or be in any way dissatisfied with her husband, she would have had, in these middle days of spring, ample excuse for quitting the conspiracy, because the shaman began to implement his plan for getting rid of Oogruk and rendering her father impotent. One day when the ice was fairly gone from the sea and flowers were beginning to show, he arrived at the headman's hut accompanied by three young men who carried in their arms a worn 78

kayak with only one opening, and in a harsh voice, his head thrown back as if he were talking to spirits, he cried: 'Oogruk, whose evil ways allowed the great whale to escape, who brings additional disfavor to Pelek, it is the judgment of the spirits who guide us and of the men of this village that you leave us.'

Neighbors who had gathered from the surrounding huts gasped when they heard this harsh pronouncement, and even the headman, who had led these people in so many ways and with such proven skill, was afraid to speak. But in the fearful silence that followed, Nukleet moved to stand beside her husband, and with her free left hand brought her four-year-old daughter along with her, and with this simple gesture she let it be known that if Oogruk was expelled, she would go with him.

The shaman had intended that Oogruk leave immediately, but this unexpected development frustrated that plan, and in some confusion the visitors withdrew, carrying their kayak with them. But this temporary setback did not cause the shaman to relinquish his scheme for restructuring his village and finding himself a wife, so that night young men who were never identified crept up to the headman's house in the darkness and destroyed much of the new three-man kayak.

Nukleet, out early to gather firewood, was the first to find the vandalism, and when she saw what the shaman had caused to be done she did not panic. Aware that others might be spying upon her, since the hut she occupied was apparently doomed by the spirits that guarded the village, she continued on her way to the beach to see what driftwood the sea might have thrown up after the winter freeze, and when she had an armful she returned home. There she wakened her men, warning them to make no public lamentation when they saw what had happened to their kayak.

Quietly Oogruk and her father went out to inspect the damage, and it was the former who decided that the broken ribs could be replaced and the ripped skin repaired.

In three days the two men had the kayak serviceable, but this time they moved it halfway inside their hut, with Oogruk sleeping upright in the hole that remained outside, his head resting on his arms folded over the rim of the hatch.

The Eskimos of this period, and of subsequent eras too, were a peaceful lot, and they did not engage in murder, so that although the shaman had declared war against these two men, he was not free to kill them or to have them killed. That would not be tolerated. But he was, as shaman, entitled to warn his people against persons who might bring disaster upon their village, and this he did with fervor and effectiveness.