The Wolf in the Whale Read online

  “How?”

  “Look around us. You see only a few people in the camp, no? Who do you see?”

  “Ququk, Ujaguk, Saartok,” I listed obediently, looking at the stern old hunter, his wife, and his grown daughter. “Ipaq, of course, with Niquvana, Millik, and Tapsi. And Puja and Kiasik.”

  He waited patiently through my recital. “Hnnnnn. But what you don’t see is that our tents are filled with the souls of many more Inuit than that. Each of us carries the spirits of our ancestors, and those spirits carry the spirits of their ancestors, and on and on, like the spiraled shells of the sea creatures—so small on the outside, but containing curl upon curl, tightly packed inside. Within your little body,” he continued, poking me playfully, “is the soul of your father, the son of my blood. The drum we play on feast nights, that Ipaq used when I journeyed with the Ice Bear—your father Omat made that drum to help him summon the spirits and sing their tales. He was learning to be a great angakkuq when he died, and he has left his magic with you.”

  “But I’m not an angakkuq!” I insisted.

  “You still have much to learn,” he agreed. “But you already carry a power in you that I can’t match. Perhaps I should take you with me to talk with the Ice Bear after all,” he teased, “since you are why I can speak with him in the first place.” He pressed my cheek again against his chest so I couldn’t see his face, and stroked my hair as he continued. “Before you were born, I had lost my magic. No spirit would speak to me or do my bidding.”

  “What had you done?” I gasped. In order to incur such punishment, he must have disobeyed one of the aglirutiit, the sacred rules that defined the boundaries of our lives. I knew this much about our world.

  “I still don’t know which agliruti I broke. But the spirits wouldn’t have taken my son from me, and all the other young hunters, if I hadn’t done something to offend. After your father died, I would listen to the air with all my strength, but there was only silence.” He blew the breath out through his teeth, close to my ear, drowning out the noise of the feasting around me until I heard only the roar of wind. I squirmed in his arms, trying to get away. He laughed and rubbed his nose against my cheek, tickling me with his mustache until I smiled.

  “How did you get your magic back?”

  Ataata grew somber again, brushing the cropped hair from my forehead with calloused fingertips. “When the Wolf Spirit gave you to us, he filled you with the soul of my son. And when I took you in my arms I felt my senses return. I felt the Ice Bear Spirit come to me once again and make me strong. I could listen to the world and hear the wail and growl of ice forming and cracking far away. I could feel the earth thunder as the caribou moved south and see the waves swell as the seals moved north. And when the wolves howled, I could understand their speech.”

  “Will I be able to do those things?”

  He smiled, revealing his lower teeth, worn and yellowed, beneath the thin line of his mustache. “Maybe you already can—you just don’t know it yet.”

  After the night of the caribou hunt, I understood my place. To be born already so heavy with names is something all Inuit children must bear—there are no new names, no new spirits. We come into the world already someone’s father, someone’s aunt, someone’s grandmother.

  Even after I understood that the man I called Ataata, Father, was my grandfather by blood, he was no less a parent. To me, he was both father and guiding spirit. I thought he could command the stars themselves to light our way. Puja was my aunt, my sister, and my adoptive mother, for she had nursed me side by side with her own son, Kiasik—my cousin, my sister’s son, my milk-brother. It may seem onerous, this burden of names, but in a land without other Inuit, the spirits of our ancestors kept us company in the long, sunless winters.

  In the legends passed down about life in other camps, hunters from afar would come to marry widowed women and father new children. But we were unlike any other camp. When Ataata was just a babe, his parents and three other young couples had left their homeland far to the west and come here, to the edge of the world. They had thought others would follow. Instead, no other Inuit had ever arrived.

  I realize now why Ataata celebrated that night. When Kiasik had proved himself too rash to be trusted, and Tapsi too weak, he feared our family would starve once his generation passed away. Then, with a single word in a secret tongue, I’d answered all his prayers.

  After his death, I would lead our people. I could help them survive until, someday, the spirits would guide another band of Inuit to our lonely corner of the ice.

  I became my grandfather’s apprentice, in both the world we could see and the one we could not. First he taught me the angakkuq’s language. From now on I would call the great spirits by their true names: Singarti the Wolf, “One Who Pierces”; Uqsuralik the Ice Bear, “The Fatty One”; Qangatauq the Raven, “One Who Hops.” Then he taught me the story-songs of our people—tales of adventure, cunning, creation, and death. Always at the heart of these tales loomed the great powers that guided our world: Sanna the Sea Mother and Sila the Air, Malina the Sun Woman and Taqqiq the Moon Man. We feared and revered them in equal measure.

  So, too, I learned to navigate by the shape of the snowdrifts that Sila created with Its long winter winds, and how to test the ice on Sanna’s breast with the spiked end of a harpoon shaft. How to predict the weather from the color of the halo around Malina’s golden face, and how to judge the seasons by Taqqiq’s crescent shape. With each new moon, a new season of prey. Seal and caribou, walrus and fish, goose and ptarmigan. Always Kiasik stood at my side, testing me, teasing me, urging me on with his very presence. Together, we learned to hunt the animals.

  But only I learned to speak with them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I woke out of breath, clammy and cold despite the heat beneath the sleeping furs. Kiasik, Puja, and Ataata still slept soundly beside me. Only my grandfather’s gentle snoring broke the silence. Yet the dream voices still echoed in my mind.

  Omat! A voice that could’ve been my grandfather calling to his drowning son, or my long-dead father calling to me. I didn’t know which. In that first instant of awareness, the dream lay bright and clear in my mind, like a lake bottom seen through a layer of new-formed ice. The fear still tightened my chest. Though we’d been in our winter camp for several moons, in my dream I’d walked on summer tundra, bright-green moss cushioning each step. Before me, small in the distance, appeared four young men. Although I couldn’t see their faces, and I’d never met them in my waking life, I recognized our four dead hunters.

  I began running toward them, but the spongy moss turned to sucking marsh beneath me, shortening my steps. With each stride I sank farther, the ground giving way. Water poured in the tops of my boots; mud caught my knees, my hips, my shoulders, my neck. I lifted my chin, gasping for breath like a drowning man. In that last instant, when the ground crept between my teeth and down my throat, I saw the world as a lemming would: the intricate tangle of moss and feathered plates of lichen, the air rising in plumes of steam from the sun-warmed dirt, the insects that trundled and flitted and hopped, heedless of my agony.

  The earth swallowed me.

  Then the screaming began.

  In the blackness of my earthen shroud, I couldn’t see the hunters die, but I knew they, too, had drowned in the soft ground—just as they’d drowned in the icy sea before I was born. The screams I heard weren’t theirs: they were the voices of the wives and fathers and mothers left behind.

  I slipped from the sleeping furs, knowing that though only four winters had passed since I’d first spoken the caribou’s true name, I could now dream like an angakkuq. Unlike Ataata in his trances, I couldn’t control these visions; they left me weak and dizzy, snatching at the quickly fading images of ancestors long dead, of animal spirits, of the Sun and Moon.

  I crawled from the sod-covered qarmaq and gazed at the familiar surroundings of our winter camp—Land of the Great Whale, we called it, for the shape of the mountain that rose
to the west. Our domed qarmait lay in a cluster just below the whale’s eye. Once there had been many homes. Now only three remained roofed with whalebone, skin, and sod. The others were little more than pits ringed with earth and stone, abandoned when we’d lost our young men.

  I turned my face away from the dense fog of my own breath and pulled my hood tighter. In the reflected moonlight, the world glowed thin and blue. A dusting of snow brightened the ground between the roofs, covering the stains of emptied night pots and butchered seals. In weather like this, I’d seen Ataata break the icicles from his mustache for a midhunt drink. Kiasik had tried the same trick with the first few wispy hairs upon his lip, to the vast amusement of us all. Tapsi, who had finally managed to kill his first large game only a winter past, now sported a scraggly patch of beard at each corner of his mouth. As my cousins always reminded me, my own upper lip remained perfectly smooth. I longed for the day when Taqqiq the Moon Man would grant me a mustache.

  The sky slowly lightened from black to bruise to palest purple. The color crept upward like the wavering heat of a lamp until only the topmost reaches of the sky remained black. Although Ataata had promised that the Moon of Great Darkness would end today, Malina the Sun still rested beneath the world’s rim, biding her time. She moved slowly in the winter, like a woman too fat to rise from her bed. I had plenty of time left before she appeared.

  I ducked back through the entrance tunnel and into the qarmaq to retrieve my spear. Ataata sat up slowly, blinking in the dimness. “What takes you outside, Little Son?”

  “To check the fox traps.” I was too young to hunt seal or walrus with the grown men, but that hadn’t stopped me from catching all manner of smaller prey.

  “Don’t be too long. You don’t want to miss the feast. We’re all waiting to hear you sing!”

  In preparation for the Sun’s return, we’d raised a large qaggiq in the center of camp. I’d helped Kiasik and Tapsi shape the snow blocks and lift them to the men standing inside the growing walls. By the end, Ipaq had needed to stand on a tall pedestal of snow to lift the last block into the ceiling. Tonight, after the Sun had finally returned—then sunk once more—we’d gather inside the enormous iglu to celebrate with songs and stories. It would be my first performance; I’d practiced for many days.

  “And don’t forget your parka,” Puja mumbled from beneath the sleeping furs.

  I already wore two garments, a lighter atigi with the fur turned against my skin and an outer parka with the fur turned against the cold air. “I’m not a child, Little Sister,” I insisted. She grunted to herself and rolled over, ignoring me as she usually did whenever I called her Little Sister rather than Mother or Aunt.

  As I passed by Ququk’s qarmaq, shouting tore through the entrance tunnel. As if chased by her parents’ voices, Saartok scrambled outside.

  “Where are you going?” she asked breathlessly.

  I paused for a moment. I’d looked forward to a solitary walk so I could practice, using my song to scare away any ravens who hoped to feast on the contents of my traps. Never good company, Ququk’s daughter looked even more downtrodden than usual. She’d seen more than twice my winters and by rights should’ve spent her time confiding in Puja, the only woman close to her age, rather than in a boy like me. But Puja had never been one for gossip or idle chatter.

  As a girl, Saartok had been promised to my uncle Nasugruk, a great hunter despite his youth. She had worshipped him, but Nasugruk died on the ice, just like my father and all the others, leaving her without even a child to carry his name. So she spent her days tending her old parents, who in turn spent their days making her life, and each other’s, as miserable as possible.

  “I’m going to check my traps to see if there’s something I can bring to the feast tonight.” My pity finally got the best of me. “Do you want to come along?”

  She wore her hair long across her forehead, but the thin wisps couldn’t hide the excitement in her eyes. Together we walked out of the camp and over the low rise of hills, our boots squeaking on the new snow. Saartok was taller than I, but her stride shorter—a dainty, knees-inward gait. Her woman’s parka slowed her still further. The long front flap would protect her knees when she knelt on the ground to gather plants, but it knocked against her legs while she walked. And with every stray gust of wind, her capacious hood blew straight up in the air. She struggled to hold it close around her face like a hunter wrestling a thrashing seal. When the wind died, the heavy hood lay limp against her back like an empty waterskin. When I was young and wondered why my own small hood fit tightly around my cheeks, Puja explained that women carried their babies on their backs beneath their parkas, pulling their wide hoods over the baby’s head so it might stay warm and safe. She’d shared her own hood with me for the first winters of my life. But Saartok’s hood would always lie limp.

  I itched to walk faster, to leave the woman behind. To distract myself, I searched for subtle signs on the ground—fox scat, wolf prints, the shapes of snowdrifts—and stored these markers for use later, when I would go out with the men to hunt.

  Saartok had little interest in such things. “I can’t wait for Caribou Shedding Moon, when I can collect willow bark again. My father complains of headaches,” she said mournfully.

  I almost replied, “Of course he does, with your mother’s voice in his ear for so many winters,” but I held my tongue. I spotted my trap in the distance and hurried toward it.

  “Go on,” she offered, “I’ll catch up.”

  Two moons earlier, I’d built a large stone cairn with holes in the top and bottom. I’d kept the trap full of meat scraps. Foxes got used to jumping down through the top hole, stealing the food, and exiting through the bottom unscathed. Then, two days ago, I’d replaced the bait and blocked the bottom hole. As I approached the trap, I could hear whining and scratching. I peered inside; sure enough, a trembling white fox stared back at me. The animal bared its teeth at me, its nose sliding up its snout in wrinkled fury and fear.

  “Thank you, little fox,” I said respectfully.

  Saartok came up panting beside me. “Alianait!” she exclaimed. “It’s beautiful!”

  Proud of my imminent kill, I felt a surge of generosity. “If you’ll skin it for me, you can have the tail.”

  She clapped her mittened hands and smiled. Puja would regret losing such a pretty tail for her own parka, but I couldn’t resist bringing some joy to Saartok’s life.

  With a quick thrust of my spear through its ribs, the fox’s growling ceased. I held the spear in place a moment longer; its final death spasm shivered up my blade and into my palms. I broke apart the cairn to remove the body, then carefully reassembled my trap. The fox’s blood would serve as bait for the next animal to come along.

  With the white carcass slung over my shoulder, we headed back to camp.

  “Omat,” Saartok asked tentatively, “have you dreamed lately?”

  The whole camp knew of my strange nightmares—but usually they respected my status as an angakkuq’s apprentice too much to speak about them.

  “We all dream,” I replied carefully, scanning the distance for signs of other prey.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “They may just be dreams.” I tried to feel as indifferent as I sounded, but in truth I was flattered. No one had ever come to me before with questions about the spirit world. I knew in my heart I had no right yet to speak as an angakkuq—I hadn’t even met my helping spirit. But I was a proud child even then. Besides, it was a relief to share the burden of all those voices.

  “Have you dreamed of Nasugruk?” Saartok asked, her voice catching. As usual, she couldn’t even speak of the man she’d loved without veering toward tears.

  “I dream of them all,” I said carefully.

  Saartok caught her breath. “He’s still here?”

  “No babies have been born to hold his spirit,” I said. “He has only us, and so his soul stays here.”

  “I would’ve had his baby,” she stammered,
her eyes filling.

  “He knows that,” I said on impulse, clasping her hand awkwardly through my mitten. “He misses you. He calls your name sometimes. So mournful and deep that the sound carries across the ice and under the ground.” I strayed from the truth. The hunters in my dreams did little more than moan and scream.

  “I can’t hear him,” Saartok whimpered.

  “But I can.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I didn’t want to upset you,” I lied. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “If I had a baby, his spirit might have a home.”

  “Perhaps. But who’d father it?”

  She aimed her next words at the ground. “There’s talk that I might find a husband.”

  “Tapsi?”

  Her cheeks reddened. My gentle cousin’s hunting skills remained too poor to provide for a wife. I couldn’t imagine a more unlikely pair, one always smiling and the other always weeping.

  “My father doesn’t want me to marry him,” she confided. “I tell him there’s no one else, and I’d be happy to be his wife, but he doesn’t hear me. He says Tapsi will only bring home such poor caribou that we’ll spend the winters hunched over against the cold, with no thick parkas to keep us warm. He’d rather I become second wife to Ipaq.” She shuddered. My fat uncle had seen more summers than anyone else in our camp; his hair was thinning and white, his step no longer sure on the ice.

  “Ipaq could never make a baby,” I protested. “Everyone knows he hasn’t lain with Niquvana since their first son died!”

  “I know. It makes no sense. I think perhaps…” She clutched my hand in hers.

  “Go on.”

  “I think perhaps he’d rather I stay in our home and be his second wife.”

  “Second wife to your own father! There’s no greater agliruti! Better you should marry your brother’s son, Kiasik!”

  The aglirutiit guided every aspect of life and death; they were sacred rules passed down from the time before time, from angakkuq to angakkuq, mother to daughter, father to son. Do not wear caribou hide when hunting for seals, lest you offend Sanna the Sea Mother. Do not play string games when the Sun has disappeared in winter, lest she get tangled in the threads and be unable to rise again in the spring. Do not let a woman hunt, lest she scare off the prey with her bleeding. Rules for everything: eating, hunting, playing, and, of course, sex. You must not mate with your own sibling or parent, or with the child of your parent’s sibling.