Alaska (15 page)

Azazruk believed that most of his power derived from the fact that he understood animals, for whenever he moved about the vast lands between the glaciers he was attentive to the beasts that shared this paradise with him. Size was of no concern to him.

He knew where the little wolverines hid, and how the badgers stalked their prey.

He understood the behavior of the small foxes and the devices of the rats and tiny creatures that burrowed under the soil. Sometimes, when he himself hunted or helped others to do so, he felt momentarily like a wolf stalking a herd, but his major delight was always those larger creatures: the mammoth, the great moose, the musk ox, the tremendous bison and the powerful lion.

If man had a certain majesty because of his superior wit and cleverness of hand, these animals so much larger than he had their own majesty, and it derived from the fact that in this area of bitter winter cold they had found ways to protect themselves and to survive till spring warmed the air and melted the snows. They were as wise in their own ways as any shaman, and by studying them, Azazruk hoped he could perhaps detect their secrets and profit from them.

But when his study of the animals was concluded, and he had mixed their wisdom in with what he was learning about human beings, there remained another world of the spirit which neither he nor the animals could penetrate or inhabit. What caused the great winds to roar out of Asia? Why was it always colder to the north than to the south? Who fed the glaciers, when anyone could see that almost daily they died 91

when their snouts reached dry land or the sea? Who called yellow flowers to birth in the spring and red ones in the fall? And why were babies born at almost the same time that old men died?

He spent the first seven years of his leadership in wrestling with these questions, and in that time he devised certain rules. The shiny pebbles he had collected, the oddments his mother had treasured, the sticks and bones which had omen power were of profound assistance when he wished to summon the spirits and converse with them.

From such dialogue he learned much, but always in the back of his mind there remained that vision of the piece of golden ivory shaped like an animal or a man, like a smiling man perhaps, even though it had no head. And he began to see his world as an amusing place where ridiculous things happened and where a man or woman could obey all the rules and avoid all the perils but still fall into some absurd situation at which their neighbors and the spirits themselves had to laugh, and not furtively either but with great guffaws. The world was tragic, and fine men and strong animals died arbitrarily, but it was also so preposterous that sometimes the crests of mountains seemed to bend together in laughter.

IN AZAZRUK'S NINTH YEAR AS SHAMAN THE LAUGHTER

ceased. Illness brought in from the sea struck the village, and after the bodies were buried, the Athapascans invaded from the east. Mammoths left the area, the bison followed, bringing hunger, and one day when all things seemed to conspire against the clan, Azazruk summoned the village elders, more than half of them older than he, and said bluntly: 'The spirits send warnings. It's time to move.'

'Where?' the leader of the hunters asked, and before Azazruk could offer a suggestion, the men advanced the negative answers.

'We can't go toward the home of the Great Star. The people who hunt the whale are there.'

'And we can't go to where the sun rises. The people of the trees are there.'

'The Land of Broken Bays would be reasonable, but those people are fierce. They will drive us back.'

And so the logical options were discarded. It seemed that this unfortunate group, so small that it commanded no power, was wanted nowhere, but then a timid man, one who could scarcely be called a leader, suggested: 'We could go back to where we first came from,' and during a long silence the men considered this retreat, but to them the land their

92

ancestors had left two thousand years before was not a viable memory; there were tribal recollections of a decisive trip from the west, but no one remembered any longer what that ancient homeland had been like or what strong reasons had compelled the old ones to leave. 'We came from over there,' an old woman said, waving her hand vaguely toward Asia, 'but who knows?'

No one did, and that first broaching of the subject came to naught, but some days later Azazruk saw a girl cutting a friend's hair with a clamshell, and he asked: 'Where did you find that shell?' and the girls told him that in their family there was a tradition that several such shells had been brought to the village in times past by strange-looking men who spoke their language, but in a curious way.

'Where did they come from?'

The girls did not know, but next day they brought their parents to the shaman's hut, and these older people said that they had not known the shell-bearers: 'They came before our time. But our grandmother told us they had come from that direction,'

and both agreed from their different memories that the strangers had come from the southwest. They had not been like those in the village, but they had been likable visitors and they had danced. Everyone whose parents had heard the ancient stories agreed that the shell-bearers had danced.

It was this accidental intelligence, born of no sensible reasoning, which launched Azazruk in his contemplation of going to the place from which the shells had come.

After much thought he concluded that since movement into no other area was practical and since continuation where his people were seemed destined to produce increasingly bad results, their only hope lay in lands that were unknown but which supposedly were habitable.

But he could not recommend such a perilous journey without ratification from the spirits, so for three long days he remained practically motionless in his hut, his fetishes spread before him, and in the darkness, when hunger had induced a kind of stupor, they spoke to him. Voices came from afar, sometimes in tongues he did not understand, at other times as clear as the bellowing of a moose on a frosty morning: 'Azazruk, your people starve. Enemies insult them on all sides. You are too powerless to fight. You must flee.'

This he had already accepted, and he considered it strange that the spirits should repeat the obvious, but upon reflection he withdrew that harsh judgment: They are moving step by step, like a man testing new ice. And after a while the spirits reached the core of what they wished to say: 'It would be 93

better, Azazruk, if you went toward the Great Star to the edge of the frozen land and hunted the whale and walrus in the old way. So if you are brave and have many bold men, go there.'

Beating his hands against his forehead, he shouted: 'But our leader has no fighting men in sufficient number,' and the spirits said: 'We know.'

In total frustration Azazruk wondered why the spirits would recommend he go to the north when they knew it was so hazardous, but what they said next drove him to a frenzy: 'In the north you would build umiaks and go forth to hunt the great whale.

You would chase the walrus and perish if he caught you. You would hunt the seal, and fish through the ice, and live as your people had always lived. In the north you would do all these things.'

The words were so insane that Azazruk started to choke. Air caught in his throat, and he fell forward among his fetishes in a faint. He remained thus for a long while, and in his frenzied dreams he realized that in giving these impossible orders, the spirits were reminding him of who he was, of what his life had been for generations untold, telling him that even though he and his clan had lived inland for two thousand years, they were still people of the frozen seas which lesser men would not dare to challenge. He was an Eskimo, a man of wondrous tradition, and not even the passage of generations could erase that supreme fact.

When he revived, cleansed of fear by the insistent messages of the spirits, they spoke calmly: 'To the southwest there must be islands, or how could the strangers have brought shells?'

'I do not understand,' he cried, and they said: 'Islands mean seas, and seas mean shells. A man can find his heritage in many different forms.' And they said no more.

On the morning of the fourth day Azazruk appeared before the worried people who had spent the previous night outside his hut, listening to the strange sounds coming from within. Tall, gaunt, clean, sunken-eyed and afire with an illumination he had not known before, he announced: 'The spirits have spoken. We shall go there,' and he pointed toward the southwest.

But back in his hut, where his people could not see him, his resolve faltered, and he was overcome by terror at what might happen on such a journey, over distances to strange lands that might or might not exist. Then he saw that the little ivory figure was laughing at him, ridiculing his fears and sharing with him in its timeless way the wisdom it had acquired when part of the tusk of a great walrus and when lying 94

for seventeen thousand years in the muck of a glacial stream while a universe of dead fish and stricken mammoths and careless men drifted past: 'It will be joyous, Azazruk. You will see seven thousand sunsets, seven thousand sunrises.'

'Will I find a refuge for my people?'

'Does that matter?'

And as he tucked the little figure back in its pouch he could hear the laughter, the chuckling of the wind coming over a hill, the exhilaration of a whale breaching after a long submarine chase, the gaiety of a young fox chasing birds aimlessly, the wonderful, hallowed sound of a universe that does not care whether a man finds refuge or not so long as he enjoys the irreverent pleasure of the search.

THE NINETEEN YEARS DURING WHICH AZAZRUK LED HIS

wandering people back and forth in southeastern Alaska were .among the most glorious this part of the world would ever know. The animal kingdom was at its apex, providing an endless supply of noble beasts well suited to the stupendous land. The mountains were higher then, the surging glaciers more powerful, the wild-running rivers more tumultuous. It was an energetic land whose every feature struck notes of wonder, from the winters so cold that prudent animals went underground, to summers in which a multitude of flowers filled the plains.

It was a land in those years of enormous dimension; no one man could travel from one end to the other or traverse the multitude of glacial rivers and soaring peaks.

From almost any spot a traveler could see snow-capped mountains, and when he slept at night he could hear powerful lions and huge wolves not far away. Of special interest were the brown bears, as tall as trees when they stood erect, which they liked to do, as if boasting of their height. In later years they would be known as grizzlies, and of all the animals that came close to camps where travelers halted, they were the most perplexing. If food was available, they could be as gentle as the sheep which inhabited the lower hills, but if they were disappointed or enraged by unexpected behavior, they could tear a man apart with one swipe of their tremendous claws.

In these days the bears were immense, sixteen and seventeen feet tall, and in the uninitiated they produced terror, but to Azazruk, as one who had learned to consult with animals, they were big, awkward, unpredictable friends. He did not seek them out, but he spoke with them when they appeared at the edges of his people's camps, and when he came

upon

them he would sit calmly upon a rock and ask them how the 95

berries were among the birch trees and what the mighty bison were up to. The great bears, always big enough to bite him in two, would listen attentively, and sometimes come close enough almost to nudge him, and smelling that he was unafraid, never harmed him.

That was not the case with one young hunter, who, seeing a bear with the shaman and not knowing that a special relationship existed between the two, had attacked it.

The bear, bewildered by this sudden change, fended off the hunter, but when the man attacked a second time, it swung its right paw, almost decapitating the young assailant, and lumbered off. This time the shaman's ministration with leaves and moss proved futile; the man was dead before words could be exchanged, and the camp saw that great bear no more.

Why did it take nineteen years for this ordinary group of Eskimos to locate their new home? For one thing, they did not speed to some established target; they drifted along, sampling this place and that. For another, rivers were sometimes in flood for two or three summers at a time and mountains intruded. But principally the fault was the shaman's, for whenever he came upon a likely spot, he wanted to believe that this was it, and he tended to remain with his choice until adversity became so great that survival dictated a further move.

Always the people allowed him to decide, for they were aware that in shifting so radically to new terrains, they must have the unqualified support of the spirits.

Once in the later years when they were well established on the shores of a huge lake teeming with fish, they wanted to remain, and even when the spirits warned the shaman that it was time for his people to move, they spent two years dawdling along the shores of the lake, but when they reached the western extremity where a lively river left to seek the sea, they obediently packed their few belongings and moved on.

During the next year, the seventeenth of their pilgrimage, they were faced by problems far more crucial than usual, for even the most casual exploration proved that they were entering not merely upon new land but onto a peninsula bordered on both its narrowing shores by ocean. But the spirits encouraged them to test the peninsula, and when they again found themselves in close contact with the sea, after an absence of two thousand years, powerful changes began to take place, as if racial memories long subdued were surging back to the surface.

Responding to the salt air and the splashing of waves, these wanderers who had never eaten shellfish or caught fish in the sea found themselves enthusiastically doing both. Artisans

96

began building little boats not much different from the kayaks their ancestors had known, and those craft which did not take well to waves were quickly abandoned, while others which seemed adapted to the sea were improved. In a score of little ways, many of them of apparent insignificance, these onetime Eskimos were becoming sea people again.