The Chukchi Bible (5 page)

Mlerynnyn's heart brimmed with a strange, unaccustomed tenderness. He already had children from his first wife, whom he had taken, according to custom, from the neighboring Aivanalin settlement of Nuvuken. He loved his children, looked out for their well-being, and when the hungry days came his own worst suffering stemmed from his inability to feed them. But this little creature with her amazingly narrow eyes released an ocean of unexpectedly warm feeling within him. Whenever he gazed at the little
girl, at the way she suckled her mother's breast with its tracery of blue veins, a spray of hot blood washed over him. Sometimes she would open her languorous little eyes and study her father intently as he bent over her.

By the time they reached their native Uelen, the lagoon was ringed with fast ice.

The men of Uelen peered with surprise and trepidation at the enormous deer herd that stretched over the level white surface of the lagoon. Even the dogs dared bark at the antlered animals only from afar.

Keu walked up to Mlerynnyn and said: “From now on, you shall be called Mlakoran, for you have brought a priceless gift for our people, the ‘four-legged food that walks about the yaranga.'”

Mlakoran made his way up to his own yaranga, cradling his fur-swaddled daughter in his arms. Tul'ma, dressed in a richly decorated woman's costume, trudged a few steps behind him. She walked with her eyes down, but Mlakoran said, loudly and clearly so that everyone would hear: “This is my new wife and my new child – Koranau!”

Now Mlakoran divided his time between Uelen and the nomadic herding camp, between his family on the shore and his family in the heart of the tundra, far from the sea. He became a bona fide deer herder and now went sea hunting only rarely, preferring to tend to the herd. He even learned to communicate with the Kaaramkyn, and little Koranau's chirping in two languages at once brought kindly smiles from the grown-ups.

Mlakoran chose two Uelen families, culled a smaller herd for each, and ordered them to go and form their own tundra camps. Their task was to learn how to tend to the animals, so in the future they would be able to replace the Kaaramkyn.

But the first experiment was not a success. In the very first winter the Uelen deer herders ate the young-bearing part of the herd, making it impossible for the herd to increase. As sorely as he was tempted to beat his fellow tribesmen, Mlakoran could not do it in front of the captive Kaaramkyn, who, although they were allowed to move freely about the tundra, must not forget that they were, in effect, bondsmen. To add to the loss of the does, most of the deer had simply scattered over the tundra, and the Kaaramkyn had to spend several days retrieving even a part of the original herd.

Deer herding turned out to be harder than it first seemed. The “four-legged food that walks about the yaranga” required undivided attention and a constant state of alertness, lest individual animals move in a different direction from the herd. And the antlered beasts were always just waiting for a herder to look away, busy with something else.

The Luoravetlan deer herders muttered to themselves, cursing the day and hour they'd given in to the temptation of having food permanently just outside the door, and agreed to move to the tundra. Yet they did not speak these thoughts aloud: Mlakoran dealt forcefully with dissenters, be they Kaaramkyn or his own tribesmen. This was the source of many arguments between him and Uelen's chief shaman, Keu – a man strong as he was ancient, seemingly fossilized into a changeless old age. Only he dared raise his voice to Mlakoran. He would chide the tribe chief for having abandoned his people and having married a foreign woman; this, despite Keu's own marriage to an Aivanalin woman from Nuvuken.

The people of Uelen had not accepted Tul'ma. When Mlakoran came into his native village and his own yaranga, the tundra side of the family was allotted a separate polog, as though they were untouchable or suffering from a contagious illness. Although by now Tul'ma could speak Luoravetlan, there were few who would speak with her, and she spent much of her time taking her daughter to the shore, where they spent hours observing the life of the boundless sea, watching the waves and the marine birds that were so plentiful in summer. Sometimes she would croon a song, long and plaintive, which seemed to come from deep within her throat; and hearkening to the strange sounds, Keu would shake his head reproachfully and say openly, within earshot of everyone, that it was plain to see, the woman had put an enchantment on Mlakoran.

In an enormous
klegran
yaranga, Keu tirelessly communed with the
spirits, trying to free his tribesman from the Kaaramkyn woman's magical wiles. He called upon all his spirit helpers and sacrificed to them generously, but all was in vain: each time, Mlakoran quickly grew bored with life on the seashore and bolted for the tundra without even bothering to hide his joy.

The “four-legged food that walks about the yaranga” did not save the people of Uelen from winter famine: just as the harshest season approached – the peak of winter, when the sunlight was least and the long frosts bound up the open water – the deer herds moved to their winter camp, away from the shore. Reaching the deer herd required a journey of many days, on sled dogs weakened by hunger.

This angered and irritated Keu, who starved alongside the other villagers. He felt that Mlakoran was deliberately turning away from his hungry, inconvenient kinsmen, loath to give them an extra deer to eat. Watching the Uelen hunters come home empty-handed after a whole day out among the ice hummocks, in the freezing wind, he would remember Mlakoran's luck – especially that last hunt, before they had set off to find deer, when he had bagged an umka and a nerpa in one go. And there was something else that Keu noticed: a true deer herder would think hard before slaughtering one of his deer, deliberating whether he could manage without.

Keu often visited the yaranga of Mlakoran's abandoned wife, to listen to her wails and sigh with sympathy, hinting by degrees at the magic that had obviously been wrought upon her poor husband. “We'd managed to live without deer, didn't we?” the shaman thought. “What use are these antlered beasts if you have to travel and travel just to get to them? Try finding a tiny camp in a snowy fastness.” He felt his hatred for Mlakoran growing, pressing on his heart and making it hard for him to breathe.

Keu had a son, to whom he'd passed his skill as a shaman. From his father the young man learned how to ease the suffering of the sick, how to heal dogs, drive away curses, perform the rites of the departing dead.

Keleu, a youth of amazing strength – with large, perceptive eyes unusual for a Luoravetlan – did not shave the crown of his head, but let his hair grow free. His long, sparse beard fluttered as he strode – Keleu always walked quickly. The young shaman possessed a resonant, melodious voice and had no equal when it came to composing new songs and to dancing. He was the first of the Luoravetlan to incorporate singing techniques of the neighboring Aivanalin, and their use of the big, sonorous
yarar
. This large tambourine was made of a specially tanned walrus stomach stretched over a whalebone frame. The sound of a yarar could carry a great distance, and could even be heard from the far side of Uelen's lagoon. Keleu liked to make little figurines from walrus tusk and carved ornamentation even onto plain bone buttons. He was the first to depict the creation of the Earth, Sky, and Man on the surface of a polished walrus tusk.

Besides all this, Keleu was a lucky hunter, could chase tirelessly after a white bear, and always took the prow position of the harpoon-wielder when the skin boats went to hunt whale.

Keleu was known for his affability, and his tribesmen never saw him cross and frowning. You could wake him in the middle of the night, and he would always go to the aid of someone who was ill.

Mlakoran tried to make an ally of him, showing him many signs of respect, but Keleu continued to behave the same way with everyone, including the chieftain of the Uelen Luoravetlan.

Now the old shaman's clan was becoming more and more prominent and influential in Uelen. The last word in disputes belonged to Keu, and
since Mlakoran was usually away, the ascendant family of Keu tended to deal with community matters.

Why do the
rekken
– the tiny people who, lore has it, deliver illness – most often come just at the break of winter, when the sun starts to peek over the horizon? It was just in those quiet sunny spells that Uelen was struck by a plague. People burned up within days from incredible fever and ceaseless coughing. The living barely managed to bury all the dead.

Even Keu himself fell ill.

Keleu went to the outskirts of the settlement, where the rekken rested underneath the shadow of a tall snowdrift. Their leader informed Keleu that their little dogs must be fed, else it would take them months to make the journey from the first to the last of the yarangas strung out along the shore.

Keleu dragged over the last of the kopal'khen, stores that had been put aside for the spring sacrifices, and begged, pleaded with the little people to hurry.

“That does not depend on us,” said the leader of the rekken. “You should talk to the Outer Forces.”

Keleu put on his father's garment, a long, loose shirt of napped wild deer hide, trimmed with wolverine fur and decorated with free-swinging bits of colored stone. He used a strip of white nerpa skin embroidered with holy ornaments to tie back his hair. Tambourine in hand, Keleu dove into the darkness of the fur-lined polog, its stone lamps extinguished. His father was breathing heavily in one corner of the dwelling, his breath struggling to flow, as though against barriers of stone.

Slowly, Keleu was elevating himself to the highest degree of divine inspiration. When he thought he could feel himself beginning to levitate off the
floor and touch the fur-lined polog ceiling, he dampened his ardor slightly. What he needed was to hear. To hear the mysterious voices that prophesied in human language from an equally mysterious source. Keleu slowed his ragged breath and was all attention. At first what he heard seemed like nothing but a random jumble of words, devoid of meaning:

Followed by this, very clearly and beyond mere suggestion:

Keleu pitched forward with shock and horror; he felt the coolness of the walrus-skin floor covering on his face. He could not believe what he had heard, not at first. This was impossible! In ancient times it had so happened that human sacrifice was required. But Keleu could not think of such a thing in living memory.

His father stirred in the corner of the yaranga and asked:

“Let me have some water.”

Keleu called out for the women and told them to give his father water.

The terrible words he'd heard during the ritual would not leave the
young shaman. He tried to forget them, tried to think of other things, to keep himself busy, going off to the ice floes to hunt polar bear for days at a stretch. But no sooner did he stand still than a voice descended directly from the skies and filled all the visible space: “Mlakoran must fall by his daughter's hand!”

A few days passed before Keleu revealed this to his father. Keu listened to his son in silence and said:

“This portends grave misfortunes for us. We cannot disobey the Voice from Above, but Mlakoran will not be easy to convince either.”

“So what do we do?”

Keu did not answer right away. Many times in his life he'd had to make difficult decisions, but nothing like this had ever happened before.