Alaska (162 page)

'How many did they give you?'

'Desolation? Our quota? Two.'

'Per year?'

'Yep, and for the past two years how many do you think we landed? None.' He spat, looked out at the open water, so tantalizingly close, so inhospitable, and as he did, the third whale, still far off, broke the surface in a thunderous breach as if to tease Afanasi and his men.

'Has he lost them?' Kendra asked, and the man said: 'If anyone can catch us a whale, it's Afanasi. Lifetime he has nine. I have two. Nobody else has more than four. That's why he's headman in our village.'

Kendra turned to look at the man: 'You mean he's headman because he's brought in more whales than anyone else?'

'Miss Scott, in Desolation it don't count that he went away to college. And it don't count that he has more money and a Ford pickup. What does count is that he can take his umiak, which he mends himself in the summer season when the whales are finished, and go out and catch whales when the rest of us can't. In this village' and he-pointed back over his shoulder' it's whales that make the difference.'

Now the second of the medium-sized whales surfaced unexpectedly at the tail end of the procession, but this time Afanasi was prepared to act. Signaling the two specialists who must kill the whale the first man holding the harpoon, the second the high-powered rifle he brought his umiak into exactly the proper position, and in the early years of the century it would have been the gunner who would have fired first. But too many whales were wounded and then lost in that procedure, so now the law prohibited the rifleman from firing until the harpoon had struck.

So, with the frail umiak positioned close to the monstrous 987

whale, the harpooner drew back his right arm, brought it forward with great force, and landed the point of his harpoon just behind the whale's ear. Immediately two bright-red rubber floats four feet in diameter and attached to the harpoon's rope spun into the sea, forming a drag from which the whale would not be able to escape.

One second after the point of the harpoon cut its way into the whale's neck, the heavy charge of explosive carried just below the point detonated, destroying much of the whale's muscular system. At that moment the rifleman fired a blast into the base of the whale's neck, and the great sea beast was mortally stricken. Harpoon point, explosive in the body, rubber floats and finally the devastating shot: it was too much for even a forty-ton whale to survive, and its blood quickly reddened the Chukchi Sea.

But now it showed why it was the leviathan of the oceans, for despite its terrible wounds, it continued moving north to rejoin the other members of its pod, and it kept on this course, always lagging farther behind, until it actually passed from the sight of the villagers watching on the edge of the ice. Miles up the coastline, when hunters from another umiak sped out to help finish it off with their explosive harpoon and rifle, the noble beast made one last effort to pull away from the braking bladders, failed, turned on its right side, and perished.

Afanasi, seeing the whale die, slumped on the rear bench of his umiak and felt no sense of triumph; it was the tenth successful whale hunt in his lifetime; he was the undoubted master of this northwestern coast; but he had lost a friend: 'Oh, gallant fighter! We honor you!' And he began to sing an old song out of respect to the whale who would bring food to all the citizens of Desolation Point. A thing of mystery had happened, the taking of a whale after two years of failure, and he was awed by the significance.

SINCE IT REQUIRED FOUR HOURS FOR THE MEN OF THE

two umiaks to raft the dead whale back to Desolation, it was past midnight in a silvery light when the carcass finally approached the ice on which Kendra waited. Two huge block and-tackle devices, each housing five stout pulleys, had been positioned about fifteen feet apart, with one massive rope roven through the pulleys back and forth.

'What are they doing?' Kendra asked, and a man interrupted his work to explain: 'When we pull six feet on that end of rope, the block and tackle... tremendous leverage...

what you call mechanical advantage. You'll see the whale move maybe six inches.'

She could see nothing on the ice that would serve as an 988

anchor for the inboard end of the device, and certainly no tree or post on shore to which to lash it, but now two teams of men began cutting very deep holes in the ice, about four feet apart, and when everyone was satisfied that the holes were deep enough, a skilled man let himself down into one of the holes and dug an ice tunnel from the bottom of one to the bottom of the other. Then, when another heavy rope was passed down one hole, through the tunnel and up the other, it provided an anchor that could not be dislodged.

The other block was run out to where the whale waited against the edge of the ice, fastened to its great hulk, and activated when Afanasi shouted: 'All hands! All hands!'

Everyone from Desolation who was on the ice at that moment grabbed the free end of the rope and began straining to pull the whale's block toward the ice-fastened one, and as the man had predicted to Kendra, the mechanical advantage provided by five pairs of pulleys produced such force that slowly, unmistakably the great whale began to worm its way onto the ice and then across it toward safety.

One of Afanasi's team, watching his whale brought home, raised a flag which he traditionally flew at such moments THANK YOU, JESUS! and women knelt to pray.

'Come on!' Kasm Hooker shouted to Kendra as she stood watching. 'It's your whale too. Lend a hand,' and she took her place on one of the ropes, helping to haul the whale the final ten yards onto the landfast ice.

She would always remember the haunting quality of the next few hours the pale spring light that suffused the arctic night; the excited concentration of almost everyone in Desolation as they pulled together on the huge ropes; an old man, bareheaded, solemnly raising a pennant in the wind to signify the taking of a whale, and the chanting of the old women singing songs inherited from their grandmothers and their grandmothers' grandmothers as the great whale was slowly pulled up onto the shore.

Oh, night of triumph! And as Kendra watched the people about her she realized that she had never known them before. She had seen them only as semibewildered Eskimos, whom she had learned to love as they wrestled sometimes unsuccessfully with the white man's ways; now she saw them as masters in their world, finely tuned to their environment and following time-proven ways of survival in the arctic. She was in awe of anyone who could contend on equal terms with the arctic seas. The education of the Eskimo children had begun last September when they appeared before her for their schooling; her education began this May night when silvery light glistened on the ice.

Once the whale was secured, men with long poles tipped 989

with sharp blades stepped forward for the butchering, but they hesitated until Afanasi, their peerless Eskimo, guide and protector of their district, made the first ceremonial cut, and as he drew his flensing knife across the tail and then a fluke, he was not a Native who had gone to college and worked successfully in Seattle and run a profitable village corporation; he was an Eskimo, his gray-sandy hair brushed forward till it reached his eyebrows, his hands red with the blood of the whale.

Cheers rose to grace his victory. The other men sped to the butchering. Young people rushed forward to receive their chunks of muktuk, the delicious wedge of chewy outer skin and succulent inner fat. And as full daylight broke over the spot on which Desolation rested, people rejoiced that they had once again proved their ability to take a bowhead whale. Kasm Hooker, thinking it time to take his young teacher back to her quarters, said with some surprise: 'Kendra! You're crying!' and she said: 'I'm so proud to be a part of this.'

But what she enjoyed most, even though it was less Spiritually rewarding than the capture of the whale, came much later, in mid-July, when meat from the slaughtered whale was taken from the freezers and the four village umiaks were dragged ashore, tilted on their sides to provide protection against the bitter winds blowing in from the Chukchi, and rested there as gathering spots for the various groups into which the villagers had historically divided themselves. Mr. Hooker was invited as an honored guest into the shadow of Afanasi's umiak, Kendra into the one owned by Jonathan Borodin's family, and she was pleased when Jonathan was called forth to receive a ceremonial cut of meat out of respect for his having predicted when the whales would come past the point. 'How did you know?' Kendra asked him when he returned to her side, and he said: 'He told me,' and for the first time she looked up into the face of an old man who walked with a rude cane fashioned from a length of driftwood which had been washed ashore after some massive storm in Siberia.

The man was Jonathan's grandfather, convinced that his spells had brought the whales to Desolation, and she observed that he looked upon her with disfavor. The young man made no effort to introduce her, and silently the old man withdrew from the festivities.

It was a gala afternoon, an explosion of Eskimo spirits, with their foods, chanting and quiet, sometimes motionless dancing. At the height of the celebration, each umiak sent forward a young woman to participate in the highlight of the 990

day. The men of the village gathered around a huge circular blanket made of several walrus hides stitched together, picked it up and pulled it taut. Then into the middle climbed one of the competing girls, and at a signal, with rhythmic movements which alternately loosened and tightened the blanket, the men all tugged outward, tossing the girl high in the air. The Eskimos had done this on the shore at Desolation for fifteen thousand years, and it still sent chills down the spine to see human beings fly aloft like birds.

But this day was to be special, for when the competition ended, Jonathan Borodin suddenly pushed Kendra Scott forward to the blanket, and a cheer went up urging her to try, and with a courage she did not know she had, she allowed herself to be moved toward the blanket, but she was much relieved when Afanasi came forward to caution the men: 'Not too high.'

Standing in the middle of the blanket, she felt its instability and wondered how she could maintain her balance, but once the up-and-down motion started she felt herself miraculously kept aloft by the blanket's rhythm. Then suddenly she was fifteen feet in the air, all arms and legs. Her composure gone, she descended in a heap.

'I can do better!' she cried as she sat up, and on the second try she did. Now I'm an Eskimo! she said to herself as she was lifted out of the blanket. I'm part of this sea, of this hunt, of this tundra.

A FEW DAYS AFTER DESOLATION'S CELEBRATION OF THE

whale and while her mind still echoed with reverberations of that awesome capture, Kendra was vouchsafed an ugly glimpse of the flip side of subsistence, for one of her students dashed into school with exciting news: 'Miss Scott! Hurry to the shore.

A new breed just floated in!”And before she could ask him what he meant he led her to the seashore, where the obscenity exposed repulsed her so acutely she nearly vomited.

'What is that dreadful thing?'

”The new breed.'

'What do you mean?'

'A walrus with no head.' And when she studied the sodden mass she saw that the boy was right. It was the corpse of a walrus, but it had no head and in its bloated condition it looked as if it had never had one.

'How did this happen?' she asked, and the boy said: 'The law says that because you're white, you can't kill a walrus. But because I'm an Eskimo who lives on walrus meat, I can.'

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'Nobody lived on this walrus.'

'Or on any of the other new breeds. Eskimos kill them, like in the old days. But now they cut off only their heads. For ivory. The rest can rot.'

'How shameful!' and as details of contemporary hunting unfolded, the rotting carcass on the beach became increasingly repulsive. 'Does something like this happen very often?' she asked, and he replied: 'All the time.' He kicked at the wasted meat of the huge corpse: 'Kill them just for the ivory.'

As the months passed, Kendra found along the shores of the peninsula many such bloated remains of animals that had once majestically commanded the ice floes. In ancient days they had fed scores of people; today they fed no one, and the ugly process was defended by naive sentimentalists who cried: 'The walrus must be preserved for the Eskimos who use him for subsistence.' But the great beasts were really used to fill curio shops with gimcrackery for tourists from the Lower Forty-eight.

When Kendra brought this hideous miscarriage of law to Afanasi's attention, she saw again what an excellent man he was, for he was prepared to admit the anomalies of the situation: 'We Eskimos take refuge in the word subsistence in contradictory ways revolving around the word ancient.

We want government to respect our ancient rights to whale and walrus and polar bear.

Also our rights to vast areas of land we hunted over in times past. And we demand special consideration where land rights are concerned.'

'You're a principal champion of such rights,' Kendra said admiringly.

'I am. They'll be the salvation of the Eskimo. But I also see the nonsense in the claims. My ancient hunters want to use radios to track whales, and skidoos to rush out to the edge of the whales' lane. And outboard motors when they get there. And explosive harpoons to help kill the whale, and the best block-and-tackle money can buy to haul them onto the landfast ice. And when they feast on their catch, they demand Coke and Pepsi to wash it down.'

'But could you return to the true ancient ways, even if you wanted to?'

'No. And if next year NASA devises some trick whereby whales can be spotted by lasers bounced off the moon, we Eskimos will enshrine that device as a time-honored segment of our revered ancient ways.' He laughed. 'Is it any different in Utah? Didn't your Mormons finally accept blacks as part of the human race only when they needed them for your football team?'

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'I'm not a Mormon, and sometimes I suspect you're not an Eskimo.'

'Wrong again. I'm the new Eskimo. And with help from teachers like you, there'll soon be thousands like me.'

IN THAT TRYING PERIOD WHEN SPRING HAD OFFICIALLY

arrived but violent storms still gripped the tundra, all the widely scattered schools across the vast North Slope enjoyed a three-day holiday so that their teachers could convene for a Wednesday-to-Sunday professional seminar in Barrow, and Kendra especially looked forward to this opportunity to inspect the famous eighty-four-million-dollar high school in that town. It was arranged for Harry Rostkowsky to fly down to pick up Vladimir Afanasi, Kasm Hooker and Kendra Scott, but when another board member said that she would like to attend the sessions, a curious situation developed: Jonathan Borodin, the would-be shaman, stepped forward with the suggestion that since he was already planning to go to Barrow on his snowmobile, Kendra could ride with him the relatively short and safe distance of forty miles. With the same daring that had prompted her to try the blanket toss, she agreed to the proposal, and when both Afanasi and Hooker warned against it, she replied: 'I've always wanted to see the tundra, and Jonathan is an expert with his Snow Go.'

'The SnowGo is a great killer of cocky young fellows who think they know how to operate it,' Hooker said.

Nevertheless, early on Wednesday morning, when a wondrous light from the returning sun suffused the shoreline of the sea, the two adventurers set forth, with Kendra, her bag and two gallons of spare gasoline stowed behind Jonathan as they set out on a northeast heading for Barrow. Since his machine could do more than forty miles an hour at top speed, he and Kendra figured to be in Barrow well before Rosty left in his plane to pick up the others, and since he could also make well over forty miles to the gallon, they faced no danger of running out of gas in an area so bleak and forlorn that not a single sign of human occupancy would be visible during their entire trip.

Kendra reveled in the journey, and the fact that she was making it with Jonathan posed no problems, for she was six years older than he; a kind of mother-son relationship had developed between them, and he had shared with her many ideas and imaginings that he would never have told anyone else.

However, at the halfway point of their journey she became aware that he had quit the northeast heading which she knew 993

they needed to follow to reach Barrow. He was heading almost due west, right toward the still-frozen Chukchi, and in some perplexity she tapped him on the shoulder: 'This isn't the way, Jonathan.'

Without turning to answer, he shouted: 'You're going to see something, believe me,'

and after a run along the edge of the ominous sea he stopped at a monument rising from the bleak tundra, and without dismounting, Kendra read the solemn message: Will Rogers and Wiley Post

America's Ambassadors of Good Will Ended Life's Flight Here

August 15, 1935

'Did they crash here?' she asked in awe, and Jonathan replied: 'My grandfather was the one who ran in to Barrow to tell the people.'

'Do you know who Will Rogers was?'

'Someone important, I guess. They made a fuss about him.'

He was so insolent in his attitude toward the two men that she cried, with an intensity he had not seen her display before: 'Dammit, Jonathan, these were fine men. Who accomplished things. As you could if you put your mind to it. Don't you realize the opportunities you're throwing away?'

'Like what?'

'Like almost anything.' She spoke as the primordial teachers, the ones forty thousand years ago who had taught the progenitors of the Eskimos how to make better harpoons and use them more productively.

When Jonathan showed his usual indifference to what she was striving to accomplish with him, she lowered her voice and said pleadingly: 'When we reach Barrow you'll see Eskimos who lead their people. Study them. Because one day someone like you will have to take their place.'

Leaving him sullen and silent by his snowmobile, she went to the shore and gathered a handful of sea-washed rocks, which she arrayed about the base of the monument in homage to a man her father revered as a great American.

The greatest revelation for Kendra on the trip to Barrow stemmed not from the SnowGo ride or the lonely cenotaph by the sea, but from what happened when she reached the famous Barrow High School. From the outside the school looked quite ordinary, about what one would expect in Utah or Colorado in a community that had fallen on hard times; low, rambling, and of no distinguished architecture, it seemed like a makeshift patchwork, and Kendra was disap-994

pointed. But when she entered the building and saw the lavishness with which it had been equipped, she was amazed, for she had never before seen anything to compare with such luxury and abundance.

School was not in session, of course, but seniors had been delegated to show the visiting teachers around, and since Kendra was the first to arrive, she fell into the care of the young man who was president of his class. Dressed in a neat woolen business suit, he introduced himself as the son of a Lower Forty-eight electrical engineer who managed the governmental radar installations, and he took her first to a spacious section of the school devoted to electronics: 'We have, as you can see, a complete radio and television broadcasting setup, very popular with the students.'

He then showed her the bank of computers: 'Here students learn how to encode and to service computers.' The shops where household appliances and automobile engines were torn apart and reassembled were impressive, and the wood shop was better than the average professional carpenter's shop: 'There's talk about having the students build a house each year, right in here, and selling it to someone outside. It could be done, you know.' The home-economics room was a delight, with every kind of equipment that students might come into contact with if they later on went to Anchorage or Fairbanks to work in the hotels and restaurants.

'Doesn't anyone study books in this school?' Kendra asked, and the president said: 'You bet. I do, and so do most of my buddies,' and he led her to the academic classrooms, the spacious library and the science laboratories which would have graced the average college, and she said: 'Well, the instruments of learning are certainly here, but does anyone learn?'

The young man was a scholar destined to go far; his parents were both university graduates, father from Berkeley, mother from San Diego State, and they had instilled in their three children a love of learning. But their son also had an acute mind where the political realities of any situation were involved, which probably accounted for his having been elected president: 'You seem interested, Miss Scott, and you'll appreciate what I have to say. But if you take all the equipment I've shown you and scale it from the most up-to date to the least, and you come back here next week, you'll find that all the really advanced apparatus, like the television, the radio, the high-powered computers, they're all being used by white kids like me from the Lower Forty-eight whose parents work here for the government, while the older stuff that doesn't cost too much, like for machine overhaul and carpentry, it's all being used by the Eskimos.'

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Kendra stopped in the hallway, turned to face her guide directly, and said: 'What a terrible thing to say,' and he replied without blinking: 'What a terrible thing to have to say.' But there it was: this fantastic school was, at great expense, training white students to take their places at Harvard and Chicago and Louisiana State, and training its Eskimo students, except for the unusual child who broke loose from village constraints, to be waitresses and bellhops and auto repairmen.

She sat on a bench in the hallway outside the library and asked her guide to join her, and this he was eager to do, for he was interested in the problems that concerned her. She mused: 'I wonder if it's different anywhere, if you look at things honestly.

In Utah and Colorado, there were very few Mexicans or Indians mastering computers.

And when I was in Germany, I was told that students were identified at age twelve as to which of three curricula they would follow to determine the rest of their lives.

They said it was the same in France and Japan. Very bright guys like you to make decisions. Average guys for drones' work. Below average, laborers to keep the system running.' She reflected on this for some moments and said: 'I suppose it was the same in ancient Egypt... everywhere.' Then she touched him on the arm and asked bluntly: 'Are you ever ashamed to be in this school?' and he replied with no hesitation or embarrassment: 'Not at all. The money keeps pouring out of the ground. I think it's wonderful they had the guts to spend it on something like this.'

In the days that followed she saw the young man frequently, and it was at his insistence that they resumed their serious conversation. Then, on Saturday afternoon, he asked: 'Could some of us kids talk with you this afternoon?' and she replied: 'Yes, if I can bring along an Eskimo boy about your age,' and he said: 'Delighted.'

Seven of them met in the school cafeteria, where the students had prepared light refreshments, and the president asked, before introducing Kendra: 'Where's your Eskimo?'

She said without emotion: 'Tooling around on his snowmobile,' and the session began.

Four of the seven local students were white children of specialists imported from the Lower Forty-eight, but the three who showed the keenest interest were Eskimos, two seniors of remarkable perception and a boy in his junior year whose reluctance to speak out did not indicate any lack of sharpness in his ability to follow the discussion. It started with the white students' wanting Kendra's opinion about which colleges to apply to, as if that were the major problem 996

facing them, and they appreciated her knowing response. One girl asked a clever question: 'Considering that my hometown is Barrow, Alaska, what first-class university might want someone like me to demonstrate its geographical diversity?' and Kendra said without hesitation: 'The top ones. They'll be hungry for someone like you,' and the girl asked almost insolently: 'F'rinstance?' and Kendra rattled off: 'Princeton, Chicago, Stanford, and I hear good reports about Smith,' then she added: 'You guys are pretty hip. It's a pleasure to meet you.' But then she gently led the talk to the situation of the three Eskimos, and only when she had helped the dark-skinned, Asian-looking young people to feel at ease did she unload her blockbuster: 'Your president, Paul, when he was showing me around on the first day, pointed out that all the expensive, modern electronics and computer equipment is used almost exclusively by the white students from the Lower Forty-eight, while the less sophisticated stuff like carpentry and auto-repair tools are monopolized by the Eskimos. What about that?'

'It's true,' the Eskimo girl said, 'but our problems are different from their problems.'

'In what way?'

'They'll make their lives in the Lower Forty-eight. We'll make ours in Alaska.'

'You don't have to stay in Alaska.'

'But we want to,' the girl said, and she received surprising support from the reticent boy: 'I don't dream of going to Seattle. I don't even dream of going to Anchorage.

I dream of working here in Barrow even after the oil money stops flowing.'

Moved by compassion for these young people, Kendra said very rapidly: 'But don't you understand that to accomplish anything in Barrow, anything important, that is, you'll have to have a college education? Don't you see that all the good jobs, those with good pay, go to educated people from the Lower Forty-eight? Or to the Eskimos who have gotten an education?'