Alaska (16 page)

Azazruk, as fearful as any about forging ahead into a world so different, was encouraged to continue by the unwavering support of his fetishes, for when he spread them in his skin hut beside the ocean, they spoke only approvingly of this venture, and the most ardent encouragement came from the little ivory figure. 'I think,' Azazruk said to it one night as the waves of a rising sea thundered outside, 'that you wanted to bring us to the sea. Did you once live here?' And above the storm he could hear the little figurine laughing, and on later days, when the seas were calm, he was sure that he heard chuckles from that pouch.

The clan spent that year pushing ever westward, exploring their peninsula as if just around the next hill they would find the refuge they sought, but sometimes in the distance they could see smoke from unidentified fires and this meant they were not yet safe. In this uncertain state of mind, they reached the western end of the peninsula, and now they were confronted by a question, the answer to which would determine their history for the next twelve thousand years: should they try to maintain a foothold on the peninsula or should they plunge ahead onto the unknown islands?

Rarely does a people have an opportunity to make within a limited period a decision of such gravity; choices are made, of course, but they tend to creep up on a society over a much longer period of time or even to be made by refusing to choose. Such a moment would occur eons later when black people in central Africa had to decide whether to move south out of the tropics to cooler lands fronting the southern oceans, or when a group of Pilgrims in England had to decide if life was likely to be better on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

For Azazruk's clan their moment came when they elected, after painful deliberation, to quit the peninsula and try their fortunes on that chain of islands stringing out to the west. This was a daring decision, and of the two hundred who had left their relatively secure settlement eighteen years before, fewer than half had survived to enter the islands, but many had been born along the way. In a way this was fortunate, because it meant that the majority of those who would execute the decision would be younger and more prepared to adjust to the unknown.

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It was a sturdy group that followed the shaman across the narrow sea onto that first island, and they would require both physical stamina and moral courage to exist in these forbidding terrains. In the chain there were more than a dozen major islands they might have chosen and more than a hundred lesser ones, some little more than specks. They were dramatic islands, many with high mountains, others with great volcanoes covered with snow much of the year, and Azazruk's people looked in awe as they moved along the chain. They explored the big one later to be known as Unimak, then crossed the sea to Akutan and Unalaska and Umnak. Then they tried Seguam and Atka and twisted Adak, until one morning as they probed westward they saw on the horizon a forbidding island protected by a barrier of five tall mountains rising from the sea to guard its eastern approaches. Azazruk, repelled by this inhospitable shore, cried to his rowers in the first boat: 'On to the next one!' but as the convoy passed the headland to the north, he saw opening before him a splendid wide bay from whose central plain rose a towering volcano of perfect outline and surpassing snow-capped beauty that had been sleeping peacefully for the past ten thousand years.

'This is to be your home,' the spirits whispered, adding a reassuring promise: 'Here you will live dangerously yet know great joy.' With this surety Azazruk headed toward the shore, but halted when the spirits said: 'Beyond the headland there is a better,'

and when he explored further he came upon a deep bay rimmed by mountains and protected on the northwest, from where storms came, by a chain of islands curved like a protecting hand. Along the eastern side of this bay he found an estuary, a kind of fjord flanked by cliffs, and when he reached its head he cried: 'This is what the spirits promised us!' and here his wandering clan established their home.

The travelers had not been on Lapak even one full season before, on a much smaller island to the north, a tiny volcano, which reached not a hundred feet above the sea, exploded in a dazzling display of fiery fumes, as if it were an angry whale spouting not water but flame. The newcomers could not hear the sparks hissing as they fell back into the sea, nor know that on the far shore, beneath clouds of steam, a river of lava, apparently endless in supply, was pouring into the sea, but they did witness the continued display, which the spirits assured Azazruk they had organized as a welcome to his new home. And because the young volcano sputtered whenever it was about to explode, the newcomers named it Qugang, the Whistler.

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Lapak had a broken, rectangular shape, twenty-one miles east to west at its widest, eleven north-south in its two extended arms. Eleven mountains, some reaching more than two thousand feet high, rimmed the outer circumference, but the shoreline of the two bays was habitable and in certain places even inviting. No tree had ever stood on the island, but a lush green grass grew everywhere, and low shrubs appeared wherever they found a valley offering protection from the wind. The salient aspect, apart from the two volcanoes and the protecting mountains, was the abundance of inlets, for this was, as the spirits had foretold, an island totally committed to the sea, and any man who elected to live on it knew that he must make his living from that sea and spend his life in obedience to its waves, its storms and its abundance.

Azazruk, surveying his new domain, noted with assurance the several small rivers that threaded inland: 'These will bring us food. On this island our people can live in peace.'

Prior to the arrival of Azazruk's people the island had never known inhabitants, although occasionally some storm driven hunter in his solitary kayak or group of men in their umiak had been tossed on the island, and one morning some children playing in a valley that opened onto the sea came upon three skeletons of men who had died in dreadful isolation. But no group had ever tried to settle here, and it was generally supposed that no woman had ever set foot on Lapak before Azazruk's people came.

However, one day a group of men who had gone fishing in one of the rivers that came down from the flanks of the central volcano was overtaken by nightfall and sought refuge in a cave high on a mound overlooking the area of the Bering Sea subtended by the chain of islands, and when morning came they saw to their astonishment that their cave was occupied by a woman unbelievably old, and they ran to their shaman with cries of 'Miracle! An old woman hiding in a cave.'

Azazruk followed the men to the cave and asked them to wait outside while he investigated this strange development, and when he was well within the cave, he found himself facing the withered, leathery features of an ancient woman whose mummified body had been propped upright, so that she seemed to be alive and almost eager to share with him the adventures she had experienced in the past millennia.

He remained with her for a long time, trying to visualize how she had reached this island, what her life had been like and whose loving hands had placed her in this protected and reverential position. She seemed so eager to speak to him that he bent forward as if to hear her, and in a low voice he spoke 99

comforting words to himself, as if she were uttering them: 'Azazruk, you have brought your people to their home. You will travel no more.'

When he returned to his hut by the shore and took out his stones and bones for guidance, he heard her reassuring voice directing his decisions, and much of the good that his people enjoyed on Lapak Island came from her sage advice.

WITH NO TREES AND LITTLE SPACE SUITABLE FOR SUCH

agriculture as had been developed at this time, how did the immigrants expect to live? From the largesse of the sea, and it was astonishing how the oceans had anticipated the needs of these daring people and supplied them in abundance. Were they hungry?

Every bay and inlet on the island teemed with whelks and shellfish and slugs and seaweed of the most nutritious kind. Did one hunger for something more substantial?

With a string made of seal gut and a hook carved from whalebone, one could fish in the bays and be almost certain of catching something, and if a man found a pole among the flotsam, he could perch himself upon a protruding rock and fish in the sea itself.

Did one require timbers for building a hut? Wait till the next storm, and onto the shore right before one's land would come an immense pile of driftwood.

And for one who dared to leave the land and venture upon the ocean itself, there was a richness no man could exhaust. All he needed was the skill to build himself a one-seated kayak and the courage to trust his life in this frail thing that even the smallest wave could crush against a rock. With his kayak a man could go two miles from shore and catch beautiful salmon, long and sleek. At ten miles he would find halibut and cod, and if he preferred, as most did, the heartier meat of the large sea animals, he could hunt for seals, or venture out into the body of the ocean and test his courage -against titanic whales and powerful walruses.

It was easier to spot a whale than one might suppose, for the islands of the chain were so disposed that only certain passages were available to creatures of this size, and Lapak rested between two of them. Whales cruised so close to the headlands that they were regularly visible, but their hunting became an uncertain matter. The brave men of the island would chase a whale for three days and wound it grievously, but fail to bring it to shore. With tears in their eyes they would watch the leviathan swim away, although they knew it to be so stricken that it must die at sea and drift ashore at some distant spot to feed a group of strangers who had played no part in its capture. But then some morning a woman rising 100

early in Lapak to gather kelp along the shore would see not far off an object floating on the sea, and it would be of such tremendous size that it could only be a whale, and for a moment she would think it a live wanderer that had ventured close inland, but after a while when it did not move, a surge of overpowering excitement would possess her and she would run screaming to her men: 'A whale! A whale!' and they would rush to their kayaks and speed out to the dead giant and attach inflated sealskins to its carcass to keep it afloat as they nosed it slowly toward their shore. And when they butchered it, with women beating on drums, they would see the fatal wounds inflicted by some other tribe and even find harpoon heads behind the whale's ear.

They would give thanks to the unknown brave men who had fought this whale so that Lapak could eat.

It was some time before Azazruk's people discovered the real wealth of their island, but one morning as the shaman huddled in the middle of the island's first six-man umiak, built by a powerful hunter named Shugnak, the boat strayed among the chain of little islands leading to the small volcano. Since these rocky protrusions were dangerous, Azazruk warned Shugnak: 'Not too close to those rocks,' but the hunter, younger and more daring than the shaman, had seen something moving in the masses of matted kelp that surrounded the rocks, so he pressed on, and as the umiak entered the tangled seaweeds, Azazruk chanced to see a swimming creature whose appearance so startled him that he cried aloud, and when others asked why, he could only point at this miracle in the waves.

Thus the men of Lapak made their acquaintance with the fabled sea otter, a creature much like a small seal, for it was built similarly and swam in much the same way.

This first one was about five feet long, beautifully tapered and obviously at ease in the icy waters. But what had made Azazruk gasp, and others too when they saw the creature, was its face, because it resembled precisely the face of a bewhiskered old man, one who had enjoyed life and aged gracefully. There was the wrinkled brow, the bloodshot eye, the nose, the smiling lips and, strangest of all, the wispy, untended mustache. From its appearance, exaggerated in the telling, would be born the legend of the mermaid, and in fact, this face was so like a man's that later hunters would sometimes be startled by the watery vision and refrain momentarily from killing the otter lest an involuntary murder take place.

In the first moments of meeting this amazing creature, Azazruk knew intuitively that it was special, but what happened next convinced him and Shugnak at the stern of the

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umiak that they had come upon a rare sea animal: trailing along behind the first otter came a mother, floating easily on her back like a relaxed bather taking the sun in a quiet pool, while on her stomach protruding above the waves perched a baby otter, taking its ease too and idly surveying the world. Azazruk was enchanted by this maternal scene, for he loved babies and revered the mysteries of motherhood, even though he had no wife or children of his own, and as the loving pair drifted past he called to the rowers: 'What a cradle! Look at them!'

But the hunters were staring at something even more extraordinary, for trailing behind the first two otters came an older fellow, also floating on his back, and what he was doing was unbelievable. Perched securely on his ample belly lay a large rock, and as it rested there, held in place by his belly muscles, he used his two front paws as hands, and with them he slammed down upon the rock clams and other similar sea creatures, knocking them repeatedly until their shells broke so that he could pick out their meat and stuff it into his smiling mouth.

'Is that a rock on his belly?' Azazruk cried, and those in the prow of the umiak shouted back that it was, and at this instant Shugnak, who was always tempted to throw his lance at anything that moved, swung his paddle so dexterously that the rear of the umiak moved close to the basking otter. With a skillful launching of his sharp lance, Shugnak pinned the unsuspecting clam-eater and dragged him to the boat.

Secretly he skinned the otter, throwing the flesh to his women for a stew, and after the skin had cured for some months, he appeared with it draped about his shoulders.