The Wolf in the Whale Read online

  I slowed my song still further, letting every humming drumbeat fade to silence before I struck the hoop again. “Finally Taqqiq crawled from the entrance tunnel. Malina opened her mouth to beg him for help.” I held my mallet poised above the rim for a single long breath. “Taqqiq’s forehead was smeared with black soot.”

  I continued drumming, faster now, pacing the qaggiq until I stood before Ququk and his family. “Malina screamed at her brother, accusing him before the whole camp of breaking this most sacred agliruti. For no man shall lie with his sister, or his mother, or his daughter, or even with his sister’s daughter.”

  Ququk shifted on his bench, his jaw clenched tight. I stared at him, daring him to protest as I sang an old song suddenly made new.

  “Malina took up her ulu and cut off her breasts. She handed them to Taqqiq. ‘If you enjoy my body so much,’ she said, ‘if you want so much to bite at my breast, then take these!’ Her brother’s face was pale with fear and shame. He ran toward Malina to stifle her cries. But she broke from his grasp and began to run, grabbing a lamp to light her path as she sprinted away.”

  I angled my mallet against the rim so my drumbeats echoed the crunch of Malina’s footsteps in the snow, the rhythm of her pounding heartbeats. I turned my gaze inward, watching the story fly before me like a cast harpoon. I moved to follow it, my feet carrying me swiftly around the qaggiq. “Her brother took another lamp and struck out after her. But Malina was faster. Taqqiq’s lamp slipped from his grasp and sputtered in the snow. He picked it up, the flame faltering and weak. But still he could see his sister’s lamp, and so still he ran.” I was panting now, my words barely squeezing through.

  “On and on they ran, until great Sila the Air took pity and lifted Malina up until her feet touched only clouds—higher and higher into the sky, until she became the Sun, red with her woman’s blood. But Sila does not play favorites: It lifted Taqqiq, too, with his weak flame. He became the Moon.”

  Finally my drumming slowed. “Even now they run above our heads.” One more drumbeat. A long, resonant boom. “Brother and sister, suffering for their wickedness.” Another beat. “An eternal chase.” I struck the drum one last time. “Now and forever.” I finished as I’d been taught: “Here ends this tale.”

  “Alianait!” Ataata led the shout of approval from the crowd.

  My milk-brother took in my delighted audience with a furrowed brow, and I worried his old jealousy would return. But when Tapsi turned to him, gabbling my praises, Kiasik merely grinned and lifted his chin as if to claim some of my success for himself. I did not begrudge him that. I had pride enough to spare.

  Ataata smiled broadly; he’d never doubted I would be as great a storyteller as my parents. Only Ququk did not cheer. His usually somber face looked positively thunderous.

  Soon my uncle Ipaq quieted the crowd with an upraised arm. “Omat has told us a great and true story!” More cheers. “One we must remember as our children grow older and look for mates. My son, Tapsi, has come into adulthood.” This was true—barely. My cousin had killed one small, maimed walrus cow, though not without a good deal of assistance from his father. “It is time he had a wife.”

  No one seemed more surprised than Tapsi himself, who looked past his mother and sister to the available women. There weren’t many—he looked first at Puja, thrice his age, then, only slightly more hopefully, toward Saartok. Finally, although our mothers had been siblings, his eyes rested on me. He looked somewhat pleased at what he saw. I scowled at him fiercely while my heart thudded against my ribs in sudden terror. That would teach me to meddle in other people’s affairs—to have Ipaq choose me for his son’s wife.

  I need not have feared, however. My uncle grinned at Ququk’s daughter, reaching for her hand. “Saartok is still young enough to have children, and she has grieved too long. I ask Ququk to give her to my son, so our camp may once again ring with the laughter of children!”

  On any other night, Ququk would’ve flatly refused. Since Saartok was his only living child, he would keep her in his household, even after her marriage—but he would have to take Tapsi, too. Accepting the camp’s weakest hunter into his home meant that Ququk would assume the heavy responsibility of feeding the couple and any children they might have. But he looked briefly at his daughter, and then at me, and I knew he understood my warning. Either he’d allow this, or I’d tell everyone that he’d wanted to lie with his own daughter. The wrath of our entire camp and all the spirits would fall upon him.

  Ququk grunted his acceptance of the match.

  Saartok and Tapsi joined hands in the center of the circle. She stood half a head taller than he, and many years of chewing hides had worn her teeth, but the fox fur in her braids gave her a youthful air, and Tapsi’s hesitant smile matched her own. Perhaps his cheerful nature would wipe away some of her perpetual sadness.

  That night, a young man and his wife would lie together in our camp for the first time since before my birth, and hope for our people would spring anew.

  Leaving the qaggiq, Saartok broke away from her new husband and rushed to me. She lay her cheek against mine. “I’m sorry I said you were just a girl,” she whispered. “You’ve helped me more tonight than any grown man could.”

  I felt my face burn at the compliment and couldn’t contain my smile as the new couple slipped off into the night.

  I headed back toward our qarmaq, my step light, the worries of the day forgotten until Puja stopped me with a hand on my arm. She glanced around to make sure no one else was near. “I thought you were going to tell the story of the Orphan Boy.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “After you spoke with Saartok.”

  I shrugged, but she wouldn’t be put off so easily.

  “I know what you and Ataata talked about today.”

  My heart drummed in my chest. Was Puja going to say Ataata had lied? That I would indeed become a woman one day?

  “I don’t always agree with him,” my milk-mother went on. “I would’ve taught you more about being a woman. Just in case. But I think now Ataata was right. I don’t know what part you had in what happened tonight…”—I braced myself. This would not be the first time she accused me of acting above my age—“but you did a good thing.”

  She looked around slowly at the surrounding qarmait full of uncles and aunts, cousins and siblings, each generation more closely interwoven than the last. Saartok and Tapsi were not just the first new couple in our camp—they would likely be the last. Any other pairings would break the aglirutiit and bring the spirits’ anger down on us all. “If we are not careful,” Puja murmured, “we will destroy ourselves like a bear trapped in a collapsed den, who eats its own young to survive. Tonight, you’ve given us a way out. At least for now.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  A walrus has hips like a fat woman, big wide hips that sway when she swims. Ataata taught that if you look carefully, you can see the woman the walrus used to be. The flippers don’t join together until far up her body, as if her legs have been slow to transform. Or perhaps the walrus has always been a walrus, but is now on her way to becoming a woman. It wouldn’t be the first time a sea animal changed to a human, or a wolf to a whale, or a man to a woman. These things happen all the time.

  The walrus swimming beside my kayak was still a walrus, for now. A big female with long face bristles, as if a sea urchin had perched upon her snout, enjoyed the view, and decided to stay. As a child, I’d thought walrus whiskers would be venomous like urchin spines, and that an angry walrus might spike me with them. But Ataata said they merely served as the walrus’s eyes and ears on the dark ocean floor, where it rooted for the countless clams it needed to fill its enormous belly. The tusks were the real danger. Yellow tusks, scored with claw marks—like those of the female near us—meant the walrus hunted seals, not clams at all. She’d probably lost her mother soon after weaning and never learned to scour the ocean beds; she might charge my kayak, hoping to knock me into the water and spear me upon her tusks. I k
ept a safe distance from her, careful not to arouse her anger.

  Three springs after my first performance as a story-singer, I was still a boy—not yet a man but not a woman, either. Perhaps, as Ataata had said, I was something in between.

  My nightly prayers had so far worked, and I hadn’t bled. With my grandfather, I hunted everything from ptarmigan to seal pups, but I had yet to kill a full-grown seal or walrus. The previous summer, Ataata had deemed me too young, although Kiasik had returned from the seal hunt with his harpoon proudly bloodied. I’d grown over the long winter, and though still far smaller than Kiasik—shorter even than Tapsi—I no longer looked quite so foolish holding a harpoon. When Ataata pulled me forward the morning of the walrus hunt and placed the weapon in my hand, I couldn’t repress a grin. Once I proved my manhood, no one could take it away from me.

  Crouched in his own kayak, Ataata raised a hand for silence, his eyes following the path of the walrus beside us. We must not scare her, lest she panic and try to sink us. I’d heard that even clam-eating walruses could swim on their backs beneath our boats, ripping holes through the bottoms with their sharp tusks. Revenge, I thought, for we covered our boats with walrus hide and braided our ropes with the spiraled skin of their calves.

  The length of her tusks branded her a young animal, perhaps my own age. I couldn’t suppress a feeling of relief that she wasn’t our target; she reminded me too much of myself, an orphan trying to survive in a dangerous world. She coursed through the clear ocean, waving her big hips at us, each hind flipper paddling in turn, as if she swaggered sideways through the water. I stifled a laugh at the image, careful to remember Kiasik’s warnings: I must not show any weakness in front of the other hunters. They had all been born with a hunter’s most precious weapon. I had not.

  The walrus dove beneath the surface. Ataata whispered a chant to Taqqiq the Moon Man and Sanna the Sea Mother, and then motioned us to ready our paddles. We scanned the horizon for a sign of the walrus surfacing. Her skin was very light, a sure indication that she’d been in the cold water for a long time—an auspicious sign. Soon she’d head back to the haul-out, and we need only follow her to find the entire herd. But her light skin also made her harder to spot among the scattered icebergs and the bright, sun-spangled ocean swells.

  Finally the Moon Man must have heard our prayers, for I spotted the pale walrus and jerked my arm toward her excitedly. Ataata’s weak eyes couldn’t see that far, but he trusted me and motioned for us to head that way.

  As the Sun crept her slow path across the sky, the unmistakable rumble of the walrus haul-out rolled across the water, a sound more like a calving glacier than like roaring beasts. A moment later, we spied the dark smudge on the white landscape. The mass of animals lay on one of the season’s last large expanses of ice, surrounded by plenty of open water—the perfect location for a hunt.

  I unfastened my harpoon from my boat and checked the knots: one that tied the long rope to the handle, another that fastened the toggle head to the foreshaft. Striking a walrus and then letting it slip away beneath the waves because a rope came loose would be a great affront to Sanna. The Sea Mother doesn’t take kindly to a hunter who wastes her children.

  Our young walrus guide struck the ice with her tusks, using them like claws to pull herself out of the water and up the slippery edge. Even surrounded by her kin, I could still pick her out, her skin light among the dark brown bodies of the others. Soon, as her body warmed, she’d become one more indistinct animal among many.

  Kiasik didn’t need to ask me if I was ready. Our eyes met; he smiled. We’d done this over and over on walruses sculpted of snow.

  I followed his kayak to a stretch bare of animals on the far edge of the ice. We tethered our boats and clambered onto the floe. The strips of seal fur on our boot soles quieted our tread as we paced closer to the herd.

  Eyebrows lifted, Kiasik signaled toward two young males side by side. I raised my own brows in acknowledgment, hoping the beasts wouldn’t hear the pounding of my heart.

  We tied the ends of our long harpoon lines together, with plenty of slack so the joined ropes wouldn’t impede the weapons’ flight. Kiasik readied his harpoon, and I hefted my own shaft above my shoulder. We locked eyes and matched our breaths, just as we’d practiced.

  Then, at the same instant, we let our harpoons fly, the long hide ropes unfurling behind like smoke on the wind. Kiasik’s blade pierced his target in the ear, a killing blow. My harpoon struck the neck of the other animal, only wounding it. The injured walrus roared in anger, alerting his neighbors to danger. As one, the herd lifted their heads and swiveled their massive bodies in our direction. Kiasik tensed, ready to turn and run for his boat if they charged us.

  “Go away,” I called to the herd in the angakkuq’s tongue. “We are almost done here.” I willed my voice to stay calm, although my knees quaked. A charging walrus would crush me easily. But the beasts understood me; they lumbered to the ice edge and slid into the water, disappearing beneath the waves. Still connected to Kiasik’s kill by our rope, my wounded walrus remained behind. He rolled his red eyes toward me; pink foam flew from his lips with every panting breath. His flippers beat the ice, and his body thrashed like a worm’s as he tried to reach the sea, but the toggle head had done its work, swiveling into place so it wouldn’t come loose. I longed to deliver the beast from his torment, but approaching him now would get me gored. Patience, I reminded myself. Patience.

  A few other walruses surfaced near the ice, unwilling to abandon their kin. Ataata, still in his kayak, readied his own harpoon and let it fly, striking a young walrus in the side. He quickly strung an inflated seal float onto his harpoon line, then tied the end of the rope to his boat. When the walrus tried to dive, the float kept it from going too deep. It tried a different form of escape, swimming frantically toward the horizon, unwittingly towing the hunter behind.

  My own walrus finally showed signs of fatigue. I approached cautiously, keenly aware of the foam-flecked tusks. He watched me with beady black eyes nearly hidden in folds of brown skin. His bristles jerked in time to his spasmodic panting, his nostrils flaring and closing, flaring and closing. The misty cloud of his breath smelled of clams and salt and darkness. When I was just close enough to reach him with a thrust of my lance, I stopped and planted my feet as firmly as I could on the slick ice. I aimed for the back of his head, where a small cross in the wrinkles of his flesh marked the killing spot. With the force of my whole body, I plunged my weapon through his tough outer skin, through his blubber, and into the top of his spine.

  Kiasik, already starting to prepare his own kill for butchering, laughed and tossed back his hood. The wind ruffled his gleaming black hair. “You’re so small, Omat, you had to lie on top of your lance!” he teased. He was right—I stretched prone across the hulk of my kill. I laughed with him as I slid down the side of my walrus and back onto my feet like a child playing on an iglu roof.

  Ququk, who should have been fishing by a safe ice hole at his age, not joining in the dangers of a walrus hunt, had successfully killed his own beast the traditional way—slamming an anchor into the ice to keep his walrus from escaping, rather than pinning it to its neighbor. He silenced us with a curt gesture. “Your walrus’s spirit hovers nearby. Would you show it such disdain with your boastfulness? You prove yourself too young to join the hunt if you can’t respect the hunted.”

  “I do respect—” I began.

  “Some would say you shouldn’t even have come. If we were not so desperate for hunters, you wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

  I knew he spoke not of my unusual hunting technique, but of the lack between my legs. I wanted to fly at him, but such was not our way. A young man did not attack an old one. I turned aside instead, hiding my flushed cheeks.

  Kiasik would not question his elder, either, but I could tell from the tightening of his jaw that he was angry. Without looking at Ququk, he let out a long sigh. “I’m glad I didn’t harpoon Omat’s walrus. It was
much fiercer than mine—I’m not sure I could’ve given it a good death.”

  The old hunter’s mouth tightened in annoyance at Kiasik’s implicit reproach. He stalked away, leaving us to our bloody task.

  Kiasik flashed me a bright smile.

  I smiled back, warmed by his regard. In response he puffed out his chest, just a bit. Like a male ptarmigan, I thought. Preening under his mate’s attentions. Fear gripped my stomach. Was Ququk right? At the moment I finally claimed my manhood, why did I suddenly feel like a girl?

  For the rest of the hunt, I concentrated on the task at hand, ignoring Kiasik. I dribbled fresh water into my walrus’s mouth, quenching its soul’s thirst so it might be reborn. No matter what Ququk said, I knew well how to respect my prey.

  After towing its attacker in circles, Ataata’s walrus finally exhausted itself. He easily dispatched it with a blow to the head. We all worked together to butcher the animals—they were too heavy to drag home in one piece. With our slate knives, we peeled away the skin and blubber in long pieces, each as thick across as my palm. Next we chopped off the heads and tusks and set aside the flippers to ripen. In a moon’s time, they’d be everyone’s favorite food. Finally we pulled the innards from the stomach in one long ribbon.

  With the butchering finally complete, Ataata stood at the ice edge, dropping the bloody entrails into the water. They’d sink to the bottom and feed the tiny creatures, who would in turn feed the walrus, who would later feed us. The hood of his parka was thrown back, his chin-length gray hair floating in wisps around his weathered face.

  “Calm water,” he said softly to the bottom creatures, asking them to allow us a safe journey home. “Calm water.”