FOR MY PARENTS
PATRICIA ANN SAWYER MCHANEY
AND
CHARLES ROBERT MCHANEY, JR.
FOR MY GRANDFATHER
CHARLES ROBERT MCHANEY, SR.
AND FOR NEIL’S PARENTS
SHIRLEY LOUISE BATHO HARRISON
AND
CLIFFORD JOSEPH HARRISON
WITH LOVE, GRATITUDE AND RESPECT
SUMMER 7055 B.C.
PROLOGUE
SPRING, 7939 B.C.
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LATE WINTER, 7038 B.C.
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Author’s Notes
Glossary of Native Words
Image Gallery
Acknowledgments
Preview: Brother Wind
About the Author
Chuginadak Island, Aleutian Chain
CHAGAK SAT AT THE roof hole entrance of the ulaq, on the thick sod that was the ulaq roof. She was scraping the last bits of flesh from the inside of a fur seal skin. Samiq and Amgigh nursed beneath her birdskin suk, each baby cradled in a sling that hung from Chagak’s shoulders.
Kayugh’s daughter Red Berry played with colored stones at the grassy edge of the beach. Now and again, the girl called to Chagak, but the waves hissing into the dark gravel of the shore drowned out her tiny voice.
Chagak wished the noise of the sea would also cover Blue Shell’s sobbing, but she could still hear the woman weep.
She thought of Blue Shell’s new baby daughter, and for a moment she stopped her work to fold her arms over Samiq and Amgigh. Two fine, strong boys, she thought. And though Amgigh was Kayugh’s son, not hers, it seemed that Amgigh belonged to her as much as Samiq did. It was her milk that gave him life. But why did the spirits bless her and not Blue Shell? Why was one woman chosen to receive sons, another given only daughters?
“A son!” Gray Bird had shouted at Blue Shell when the first pains of Blue Shell’s labor had begun, and Chagak had resented his words. Did any man know the pain a woman endured to give birth? If Gray Bird had suffered in the birthing as Blue Shell had, would he now be so anxious to kill the child?
“I have had enough sorrow,” Chagak said, boldly directing her words toward the sacred mountain Aka. But then she heard voices raised in anger, and Kayugh and Gray Bird came from Big Teeth’s ulaq.
Kayugh scanned the beach, and in long, quick strides he overtook his daughter. He pulled her into his arms and held her against his chest. Red Berry clung to him, her small face white against his parka. Then Kayugh turned to face Gray Bird.
For a moment the two men stood without speaking. Kayugh was two hand-lengths taller than Gray Bird, and the wind ruffling the feathers of his parka made Kayugh look even larger than he was.
His jaw tightened and he said, “Have you forgotten that we are the First Men? Have you forgotten that we have begun a new village? Do you think you can have a village without women?” His voice started out low and soft, but as he spoke, anger began to edge his words.
Chagak did not look at Gray Bird. Instead, she kept her eyes on Kayugh’s face, ready to grab Red Berry from his arms if Gray Bird attacked.
“Who will bear your grandchildren?” Kayugh shouted. “That?” He pointed to a rock. “That?” He pointed to a tangle of crowberry heather growing near the ulas.
Kayugh clasped Red Berry at her waist and held her out toward Gray Bird.
Do not cry, Chagak pleaded silently with the child. Please, do not cry. But Red Berry held herself stiff and still, her eyes shifting between Gray Bird and her father.
“She brings me joy,” Kayugh said. Then in a voice so low that Chagak strained to catch the words, he added, “Her mother was a good wife to me. Her spirit is with this child. I would kill any man who tried to harm my daughter.”
Slowly he set Red Berry down. The child stood for a moment looking at her father. Chagak held out her arms. Red Berry ran to her and climbed into her lap.
Then Gray Bird spoke. “If Blue Shell’s daughter lives, I will have to wait three, perhaps four more years for a son. The seas are rough; the hunts are hard. Perhaps I will die before then.”
Chagak looked at Kayugh. Would Gray Bird’s words soften Kayugh’s resolve? But Kayugh did not speak and Gray Bird continued, his voice like ice in the thin, cold air. “Each man rules his own family.”
Kayugh took one step forward, and Chagak began to slide slowly back, holding Red Berry against her with one arm.
“Chagak!”
Chagak jumped then rose slowly, searching Kayugh’s face.
“Give me my son.”
She did not want to obey. Amgigh was too small to be caught in a fight between two men. She hesitated and Kayugh called again. Chagak pulled the baby from beneath her suk and quickly wrapped him in the furred skin she had been scraping.
She took the child to Kayugh. Red Berry followed her, one hand clinging to the back of Chagak’s suk.
Chagak handed the baby to Kayugh and he held the child toward Gray Bird, opened the fur wrapping so Gray Bird could see the baby’s well-formed legs and arms.
“I claim Blue Shell’s girl child as wife for my son,” Kayugh said, then he turned and held the baby toward the island’s mountain Tugix. “I claim Blue Shell’s daughter for my son.”
Gray Bird spun and strode to his wife’s birth shelter.
Chagak thought that Kayugh would go after him, but he stood where he was, Amgigh now wailing in the chill of the wind. But soon, Gray Bird returned. He held Blue Shell’s baby wrapped in a coarse grass mat. He opened the mat and turned the child so Kayugh could see her tiny body. In the coldness of the wind, the baby’s skin quickly mottled and turned blue.
“Wrap her,” Kayugh said. “She will be wife for Amgigh.”
Gray Bird wrapped the child, moving her too quickly to his shoulder. The small head jerked against his chest.
“If you kill her, you kill my grandsons,” Kayugh said, and he stood with his eyes fixed on Gray Bird until the man returned to the birth shelter. Then Kayugh thrust Amgigh into Chagak’s arms, hoisted Red Berry to his shoulders and walked to the beach.
The summer was nearly over when Blue Shell came to Kayugh. Chagak, now Kayugh’s wife, watched from the corner of the ulaq as the woman lifted her suk and showed Kayugh the daughter suckling at her breast. But Chagak also saw the bruises on Blue Shell’s face, a long cut that ran across her belly.
“She is alive,” Blue Shell said, her voice low. “But Gray Bird has told me I must stop nursing her.”
Kayugh sighed. “Big Teeth says I was wrong. I should not have promised Amgigh, forced Gray Bird.”
Blue Shell shrugged. “I will do my best to keep her alive.” She pulled down her suk, tucked it around the baby. “Gray Bird will not let me name her.”
Chagak drew in her breath. The child would have no protection without a name. She would not even have a soul. She would be nothing.
And Gray Bird’s promise to give the girl as wife for Amgigh, what of that?
Blue Shell turned to leave, but then looked back at Kayugh. “Gray Bird says that he has given his promise, and so he will not kill the child, but he says that you do not have to keep your promise. He says you should find another wife for Amgigh.”
When she left, Kayugh paced the ulaq.
“You cannot change him, husband,” Chagak said. “Gray Bird is Gray Bird.”
“Big Teeth was right. I should have let the girl die. Now I cannot keep my promise. I cannot give my son a wife who has no soul. Who can say what spirits may come to her, to live in the emptiness she will carry?”
For a long time, Chagak said nothing. When Kayugh finally sat down, she went to the food cache and brought him a piece of dried fish. “There is a chance that Gray Bird will decide to give the girl a name,” she said to Kayugh. “Perhaps he will see that a child without a name is a curse to his ulaq, or perhaps he will name her if he thinks he can get a good bride price for her.”
Kayugh smiled, a half-smile that told Chagak of his frustration. “So Gray Bird will let her live. And he knows that each time I see the girl, I will remember that he is keeping his promise and I cannot keep mine.”
Chuginadak Inland, Aleutian Chain
LIGHT FROM THE SEAL oil lamps caught the shine of the trader’s eyes. Blue Shell’s daughter shuddered.
“A good way to use the night,” her father said, and he reached over to cup his daughter’s left breast. “One seal belly of oil.”
Blue Shell’s daughter held her breath, but she made herself look at the man, made herself meet his eyes. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes they saw the emptiness in her eyes, saw what her father would not tell them: that she had no soul. And a woman without a soul—who could say what she might do? Perhaps pull away bits of a man’s spirit when he was lost in the joy of her thighs.
But this trader’s eyes were dull, greedy for the touch of her. And the girl was afraid he would see only the shine of oil on her arms and legs, the length of her black hair. Nothing more.
“She is beautiful,” Gray Bird said. “See, good dark eyes, good round face. Her cheekbones are tall under her skin. Her hands are small; her feet are small.” He said nothing about her mouth, how words came from it broken and stuttering.
The trader licked his lips. “One seal belly?”
He is young, Blue Shell’s daughter thought. Her father liked to trade with younger men. They thought more of their loins than their bellies.
“What is her name?” the trader asked.
Blue Shell’s daughter caught and held her breath, but her father ignored the question.
“One seal belly,” he said. “Usually I ask two.”
The trader’s eyes narrowed. “She has no name?” he asked and laughed. “One handful of oil for the girl.”
Gray Bird’s smile faded.
The trader laughed again. “Someone told me about your daughter,” he said. “She is worth nothing. She has no soul. How do I know she will not steal mine?”
Gray Bird turned toward the girl. She ducked but was not quick enough to avoid the hard slap of his hand against the side of her face.
“You are worthless,” he said.
Gray Bird smiled at the trader and gestured toward a pile of sealskins. “Sit,” he said, his voice soft, but Blue Shell’s daughter saw the tightness of his lips and knew that he would soon be biting the insides of his cheeks, shredding the soft skin of his mouth. She had seen him spit out clots of blood after a bad trading session.
The girl stepped back against the thick earthen wall of the ulaq and worked her way toward her sleeping place. She waited until the two men were engrossed in their bartering, then she slipped through the woven grass dividing curtains that separated the space where she slept from the ulaq’s large main room. She could still hear her father’s voice, now low and whining, as he offered her mother’s baskets and the skins from the lemmings her brother Qakan had trapped.
She knew Qakan would still be sitting in the corner, that he would still be eating, grease dribbling from his chin to the bulge of his fat belly, his small dark eyes blinking too often, his fingers stuffing his mouth with food. But he would be watching. The one time Qakan seemed to take interest in anything besides food was when their father bargained with traders.
She heard her father’s giggle, almost a woman’s laugh, and knew that he would now work on the trader’s sympathy: Here he was, a man trying to provide for his family. See what had happened to him because of his generosity, because of the softness of his heart.
“It is my daughter; she is the one,” Gray Bird began as he always began, the same story the girl had heard many times.
“What could I do? I have a good wife. She did not want to give up this daughter. She begged me. I knew I might be killed in a hunt. I knew I might not survive to have a son, but I let this daughter live.”
And so he continued. Yes, he had refused to name this daughter, had denied her a name and thus a soul. But who could blame him? Had she not pushed ahead of brothers that might have been born, this greedy daughter, born feet first, thrusting her way into the world?
And each time Gray Bird told the story, Blue Shell’s daughter felt the hollowness within her grow. It would have been better if her mother had given her to the wind. Then perhaps her father would have named her, and she would have found her way to the Dancing Lights, been there now, with other spirits.
Yes, that would be better than growing old in her father’s ulaq. No hunter would trade for her; no man would pay a bride price for a woman without a soul. Men wanted sons. Without a soul to mingle with a man’s seed how could she bring forth a child?
Besides, she thought, I have fifteen, perhaps sixteen summers, but still have had no time of bleeding. I am woman, but not woman, without soul, without woman’s blood.
And she remembered one rare time when her mother had stood up to Gray Bird. Blue Shell, angry, had screamed: “How should I know why the girl has no blood flow! You would not give her a name. How can a father expect a girl without a name to bleed? What will bleed? The girl has no soul.”
“It is Kayugh’s fault,” Gray Bird had said, and Blue Shell’s daughter heard a whining in his words that reminded her of Qakan.
“He promised his son. He will give you a bride price…” The sharp sound of a slap had cut off Blue Shell’s words.
“He has no honor,” Gray Bird said. “He does not keep his promises.”
Then Gray Bird had begun to yell, calling Blue Shell the foul names he usually reserved for his daughter.
Blue Shell’s daughter had huddled, ashamed, in her sleeping place, and even the grass mat she pulled over her head did not block out her parents’ angry words.
But later that night when the argument had ended, she remembered what her mother had said. Kayugh would offer a bride price. Kayugh had promised a son….
A son! Which son? Amgigh or Samiq? And though she realized she had no right to ask, she had sent a plea to their mountain, to Tugix: Please let it be Samiq. And deep within, in that empty place saved for her soul, she felt a small flickering, and by morning the flickering had grown into a flame so strong she could not bear to look into its brightness: wife to Samiq. Wife to Samiq. Wife to Samiq.
Suddenly, the curtain to her sleeping place was thrust aside. Blue Shell’s daughter backed against the wall. In the past three years her father had succeeded in trading her five, perhaps six times. Each time she had fought, and the next morning her father had added his beatings to the bruises the traders had given her. But now the girl saw that it was Qakan who peered at her.
Qakan belched and rubbed his belly. “You are lucky this time,” he said, but there was no sympathy in his eyes. “Tonight you sleep alone. Our father is a poor trader….” The curtain dropped back into place and Blue Shell’s daughter sighed her relief. A night alone, a night to sleep. And she would not let herself think of the summer stretching ahead of her, the traders who would visit. Tonight she was alone.
Amgigh fingered the nodule of andesite. He planned to shear it in two with a blow from his largest hammerstone. He would get seven, eight good flakes from each half, and maybe five of those would make harpoon points.
He held the andesite in his hand, felt the weight of it pushing against his fingers. How many sea lions in that rock? he wondered. It was a question he asked himself each time he found a nodule of stone, each time he made a blade. Five sea lions for each blade? No, at best two. Two sea lions for each of five blades. Perhaps ten sea lions in the rock. If the winds and spirits were favorable. If the hunters were skilled.
Perhaps one of those sea lions would be Amgigh’s first. He should have taken a sea lion before now. Samiq had taken his first three years before.
Each time Amgigh returned from a hunt without a sea lion he saw the disappointment in his father’s eyes. But did his father realize that when Big Teeth or Samiq, First Snow or even Gray Bird took a sea lion, it was Amgigh’s point that killed the animal? His careful work. The precision of his otter bone punch, the strength of his hammerstone.
So who in this whole village had taken the most sea lions?
Blue Shell’s daughter stood on the beach and watched the sea. The wind pulled dark strands of her long hair from the collar of her suk and snarled them across her face.
She watched the sea for no reason. The trader had left; there were no hunters out in their ikyan, no women fishing.
But it was good to see the waves push up as though to reach the sky. What had Samiq told her? That the sea spirits were always trying to capture a sky spirit.
Samiq was only a young hunter, sixteen summers, perhaps seventeen, but he was wise. He asked questions and pondered many things, and Blue Shell’s daughter was always glad when he came to her father’s ulaq. She found herself watching for him when she went out to gather sea urchins or when she walked the hills picking crowberries.
A song started, began its humming in the girl’s throat, and brought words—whole and unbroken—into her mouth. It was a song about the sea, about animals that live in the sea, and its words rose and fell like the waves.
Still singing, Blue Shell’s daughter squatted at the edge of the sea and pushed a basket out to scoop up water and gravel. The basket, lined with seal gut, was one her mother had made of ryegrass; the grass was coiled and sewn so tightly that water took many days to work its way from inside to outside. The girl stood, swirled the mixture in the basket, then dumped it out. She had taken the baskets to the refuse heap and emptied them of night wastes then came to rinse them in the sea. She had meant to hurry. Her father would be angry if she stayed on the beach too long. But again, the sea had caught her eyes, had caught and held her like the eagle catches the ptarmigan.
Two days before, her father had beaten her for her slowness. Even yet the welts stiffened her back, and she walked like an old woman, slowly, carefully. Her heart, too, had felt bruised, sore with the silence of the rest of that day, her mother avoiding her eyes, her brother Qakan jeering with each smile of his too-fat lips.
At least she had been wearing her suk. Usually when she was in the ulaq, she wore only her grass apron and was bare from the waist up. The suk had blunted the blows, kept the stick from slicing her skin.
But who was she to expect better? She was less than the rocks, less even than the shells that littered the beach.
She stopped singing and held up two baskets, open sides to the wind, so they would dry. But then her eyes fell on a whiteness buried in the beach grasses. A bone, she thought. But it was too large to belong to a bird, even an eagle. She pulled it from the sand.
It was a whale’s tooth.
A whale’s tooth, Blue Shell’s daughter thought. Here? This close to the ulas?
It was as big around as four of her fingers, as long as her hand. It had to be a gift from some spirit. But, of course, not for her. Perhaps she was supposed to take it to her father so he could carve it into something and trade it for meat or skins.
She had seen other carvings—the people and animals that the old grandfather, Shuganan, had made. And though Shuganan was now in the spirit world, his carvings still held great power.
And to Blue Shell’s daughter, it seemed that it did not matter how many days Gray Bird spent carving, nor how many times he forced his family into silence as he worked, his carvings could not match Shuganan’s.
Often, when Blue Shell’s daughter was not guarding her thoughts, a part of her, something inside her head, laughed at the small animals and misshapen people her father made. Once when she was not even tall enough to touch the low sloped roof of her father’s ulaq, she had told her mother that Gray Bird’s carvings were ugly. And Blue Shell, horror in her dark eyes, had clamped a hand over her daughter’s mouth, dragged her up the climbing log and out of the ulaq to the river. There she scooped water into the girl’s mouth until the words were washed away, swallowed whole in large painful gulps down the girl’s throat.
And afterwards in the ulaq, the ache in the girl’s throat moved down into the empty center of her chest, and Blue Shell’s daughter realized the extent of the difference between herself and all other people in the world, even her mother. The pain of that knowledge was worse than the ache in her throat, worse than any beating her father had ever given her, and since then words had not come easily, but seemed to wrap themselves around her tongue, shred themselves through her teeth and come out broken. So each time Blue Shell’s daughter looked at Gray Bird’s work, she reminded herself that the carvings looked ugly only to her, that things of the spirit were as nothing to her.
She was seeing through empty eyes. Even later when she was older, and questions rolled hard and bursting in her head, she would not let herself wonder why she had always been able to see the beauty in Shuganan’s work.
Blue Shell’s daughter clasped the whale tooth and climbed to the top of her father’s ulaq. Tossing the baskets through the roof hole, she made her way down the notches of the climbing log, but before she could turn, before she could hold the tooth out to show her father what the spirits had sent him, she felt the burn of his walking stick as it sliced across the top of her shoulders.
Instinctively, she crouched. She dropped the whale tooth to the grass-covered floor and shielded her head with both arms. Fear pushed at her, wanted her to pick up the whale’s tooth and give it to her father. It would earn her three, even four days without punishment. But before she could speak, before she could cry out, her father swung his stick, first against her ribs, then across the fragile bones of her hands.
The girl held her pain in the hollow at the base of her ribs, in that space where most people hold their spirits. The pain lodged there, round and glowing like the heat of the sun. She closed her eyes, shut out her father’s anger, but even in the darkness of closed eyes she saw the white of the whale’s tooth, and it gave her courage not to cry out.
The blows stopped.
“You are too slow!” Gray Bird shouted. “I have been waiting for you.”
Blue Shell’s daughter lifted her hands from her head and stood. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw the sweat on her father’s narrow face, saw his knucklebones strain against the skin as he gripped his walking stick. She imagined his hands on the whale tooth, his lips pursed as he planned what small sad animal that tooth would become. Then Blue Shell’s daughter no longer felt pain, only anger, anger that gathered until it was as heavy as a stone inside her chest.
She had never owned anything. Her suk was one her mother had worn until the birdskins were as brittle as dead leaves. Even Samiq’s small gifts of shells or colored stones were taken from her, her father or brother prying them from her hands.
She had found the whale tooth. It was hers.
She turned slowly to face her father, and as she turned she carefully placed one foot over the tooth. She listened as her father screamed at her, and she made herself stay still when he raised his stick. She kept her eyes wide and open, and would not let herself wince.
No, she would not give him the tooth. What more could the spirits do to her than had already been done? She was nothing. How could the spirits hurt nothing?
She stood there until her father was through yelling, until with one final swing at her head, he set his walking stick in its niche dug into the earth of the ulaq walls. He brushed past her and went into his sleeping place. Then she picked up the tooth and slipped it under her suk, into the waistband of her woven grass apron, and left it there, smooth and warm against her side.
IT WAS NIGHT AND Blue Shell’s daughter was tired. Her mother, brother and father were in their sleeping places, but she enjoyed having the main room of the ulaq to herself, and so had decided to work a little longer on the basket she was weaving.
Her ribs hurt each time she took a deep breath, and all day she had felt as though she could not get enough air. She dipped her hand into the water basket and closed her eyes as she moistened a strand of grass with her fingertips.
Each time she wove baskets, smoke from the oil lamps seemed to settle close over her, prickling against her eyes until they were dry and itching.
She felt her father’s presence before she saw him, a sudden heaviness in the air, the oil and fish smell of him. She opened her eyes and saw that he was standing before her, his walking stick held across his body as if he were preparing for an attack. He looked down at the basket she was weaving.
“I need that basket,” he said. “Do not sleep until you finish it.”
Blue Shell’s daughter looked up at him but tried to keep the fear from her eyes. It was a storage basket. Good for dried fish, for berries and roots. Her father did not need it.
She wanted to tell him that it was only a woman’s basket, that her mother’s baskets were much better than hers. And though she opened her mouth to speak, the words caught at the back of her throat and would not come out. She pushed with all the air in her lungs. Nothing came except the sound of her own breath and a bleating, “A-a-a-a-a….” It was the sound of the emptiness she held within herself. Others had spirits; others had words.
“If you have to,” Gray Bird said, “you will work all night.”
Blue Shell’s daughter took another long breath, would not let herself think of the emptiness she held within her body. She opened her mouth, began slowly, “N-n-no,” she said and saw the surprise in her father’s eyes. When had she ever told him no? Her father stared at her for a moment but said nothing. He snorted and kicked at the grass on the floor then turned and went into his sleeping place.
Blue Shell’s daughter waited until she heard him settle into his sleeping robes, then again she formed the word in her mouth, felt it round and strong against her tongue. “No,” she whispered. “No.” She felt the power of the word as it traveled back into her throat and down to the center of her body.
She stood, and when she bent to pick up her partially woven basket, she felt something trickle down the inside of her thigh.
Even in the dim light of the ulaq, she knew. Blood.
She was having her first bleeding. She was a woman. A woman! Even without a spirit, without a soul, she had received the gift of bleeding. How was it possible?
Perhaps it was that one word, spoken to her father. But what had given her the courage to stand up to him? She smoothed her hands over her suk, over the small mounds that were her breasts. She felt the bulge of the whale’s tooth against her side. Yes, of course, it was the tooth.
Samiq bent over the bone hook he was shaping. His mother was nursing his baby sister, Wren, and at the same time smoothing seal oil into her husband’s hair.
Samiq glanced at his brother Amgigh and Amgigh scowled at him. Samiq turned his head and pretended he did not see. I am a hunter, he reminded himself as he felt the familiar anger rise. This spring he had already taken three seals. He did not have to make any reply to his brother’s foolishness.
Samiq had always been able to best Amgigh at any game, whether it required quickness of the mind or strength of the body. Though Amgigh was taller than Samiq, he was very thin and tired quickly. But there was a fierceness in him, a determination that Samiq admired. Even when Samiq beat Amgigh in a race, finishing far ahead, Amgigh did not stop running until he, too, had reached the final line. It was a good thing, that determination, their father said. Important for a boy, even more important for a man. And though Samiq was more skilled with the spear, Amgigh’s clever hands knapped the spearhead, and so their father always said that Amgigh’s family would never be hungry.
But there was a part of Amgigh that Samiq did not like, the contrary spirit that made Amgigh take a favorite toy from their sister and hold it high above her head until she cried; the part of him that laughed when Gray Bird derided his lovely daughter in front of other men.
And looking into his brother’s eyes, Samiq knew that it was this contrary spirit that now spoke, as Amgigh, still holding his scowl, said, “Blue Shell’s daughter—they say she has finally become woman. Her mother makes a hut for her now back in the hills.”
Their mother looked over at them. “How do you know this?” she asked.
“I saw it. Do you think because I have no sea lion teeth on a string at my neck that I cannot see?”
Samiq flushed, looked down at the necklace his mother had strung for him. She had promised one for Amgigh when he brought in his first sea lion. What more could she do than promise? Amgigh had to take the sea lion.
“Amgigh,” their father said, “if you have something good to say to your mother, say it. Otherwise, say nothing.”
Amgigh smiled, holding his lips out wide and clenching his teeth. Wren reached out and yanked her mother’s hair and Chagak slapped absently at her hand. The child began to cry.
“I will oil my ikyak,” Samiq said, suddenly ready to be away from his parents and brother, away from the crying of his sister. “Perhaps First Snow needs someone to talk to. He is alone in that new ulaq with our ugly sister.”
His father grinned at him. “And if Red Berry hears you, do you think she will be sharing any food or saving you meat from First Snow’s seals?”
Samiq pulled his parka on over his head and climbed out of the ulaq. A sharp wind cut in from the north to sweep across their wide beach. It was night, but not quite dark, the moon full.
So Blue Shell was making a bleeding hut for her daughter, Samiq thought. Did that mean Gray Bird had finally named the girl, had allowed her a soul?
Samiq walked down the beach. He stopped now and again to pick up small stones and throw them into the water. He would give the girl a present, something to let her know he was happy for her. She deserved some happiness.
“You are a hunter,” his inside voice said. “Perhaps you could give more than a gift. Perhaps by the end of the summer, you could pay a bride price.” His mother wanted him to take a wife from the Whale Hunters, but he did not think she would object to Blue Shell’s daughter. Who worked harder, who smiled more, even though her back carried the scars of her father’s beatings? He would start saving sealskins. He was ready to be a husband. Did his dreams not tell him he was a man?
BLUE SHELL’S DAUGHTER LAY back on the grass that softened the floor of her shelter. The hut had no walls, only a peaked roof of driftwood and grass mats that slanted down to the ground and was staked to the earth with bone pegs and kelp twine. Her mother had taken all night and part of the morning to build the shelter. She had woven the roof tightly to keep out the wind, and had given her daughter an oil lamp for heat and light.
The girl had not been allowed to help, only to watch, to wait in the darkness while her mother gathered grasses and driftwood and brought mats from their ulaq. Her mother had said little as she worked, but twice she turned to smile at her daughter and the girl had been surprised. She had seldom seen her mother smile, could never remember hearing her laugh. So, her mother was pleased then, glad that her unnamed daughter had become a woman.
The girl wondered about her father. She had heard Gray Bird’s bellowing when Blue Shell, wakened from her sleep, had shooed her daughter from the ulaq. Gray Bird, Qakan, too, had been wailing about curses. Was there woman’s blood on their weapons? Had she been in their sleeping places that day?
But now perhaps her father would get a bride price for her. Perhaps she would take her place as wife to one of Kayugh’s sons. Perhaps Samiq.
When Blue Shell finished the hut, she told her daughter that she would return with food and water. She would also bring strips of sealskin so the girl could weave hunting belts for the men.
The first days of being a woman were a time of power. Blue Shell’s daughter had heard stories of girls in first bleeding who had cast whales up on the First Men’s beaches, but she carried no hope that she could do such a thing. How could a woman without a name have that much power? But if the men sent sealskin to weave into hunting belts, she would make belts, strong and beautiful, to bring them luck in their hunting.
She took the whale tooth from under her suk and stroked it, studying the dents and scars in its surface. The top of the tooth where it had been broken from its roots was worn almost smooth. The tooth must have lain in the rain and sun for a time, and before that been in the sea. Perhaps it carried the same power as an amulet.
She had never been allowed an amulet. Once as a child, she had fashioned a small pouch from a scrap of sea lion hide and filled it with pebbles and shells she found on the beach. She hung the pouch from a rawhide thong around her neck, but when her father saw what she had done, he jerked the pouch from her throat, pulling so hard that the thong left a gash at the back of her neck. “No amulet,” he had said. “A girl without a soul is nothing to the spirits. They will not protect her. They do not even see her.”
But now she had the tooth. And perhaps the tooth itself had chosen her. Why else would she have found it, she, not her father, not Kayugh or Crooked Nose, not even Samiq? Perhaps it wanted to give her power, as much power as any amulet could give.
She had worn it only a day and already it had made her a woman. Blue Shell’s daughter moved her head so she could see out through the door opening of her hut.
She listened to the wind, watched as it pushed clouds into the gray curve of the sky. For these days, nine days alone in her bleeding hut, she could forget about her father. She could forget that she had no spirit. She could forget about words, words that flowed smoothly from the mouths of those around her, but that came to her only with effort: each word a new and difficult task, pried from her mouth one at a time like a woman pries chitons from a rock.
Yes, she could forget. But one thing, one thing she would remember—the reason she was here. She was a woman. Even without a name, without a soul, without the gift of words. Even so, she was a woman. She hummed under her breath, a small tune, a song without words to the whale’s tooth.
ON THE SECOND DAY of her bleeding, Blue Shell’s daughter wove hunting belts for Samiq and Amgigh.
She cut sealskin into narrow strips and wove it slowly and carefully. She strung in shells she had drilled for beads, and always kept her mind on seals and sea lions as she worked. She laid a sealskin over her grass sleeping mats, so the belts would not touch the grass, and her mother bound the girl’s hair into a tight braid at the back of her head. If even a tiny piece of grass or a strand of her hair were woven into the belt, the sea animals would know and would not come near the hunter, or worse, would bite a hole in the bottom of his ikyak so the hunter would drown.
On the third day, she made belts for Big Teeth and First Snow, and on the fourth day for her father. On the fifth day, Qakan sent his sealskin. With each man’s sealskin, Blue Shell’s daughter had only had to close her eyes to see a belt, finished and beautifully decorated, but for Qakan she saw nothing.
It is because he hates me, she thought, and could not help remembering the times he had stolen her food or had lied to their father, accusing her of breaking cooking stones or touching a hunter’s weapon.
Qakan had fourteen summers, but had never taken a seal. He did not even paddle his ikyak well, and their father blamed her for Qakan’s poor skills. She was the curse in their family, he often said. She was the reason her mother had been barren since Qakan’s birth. She was the one who kept Qakan from slaying seals.
It was her father’s way to blame others for his own shortcomings. But then, Blue Shell’s daughter thought, I am also like that, blaming Qakan because I do not want to weave his belt. She warmed her hands over the flame of her oil lamp and thought for a moment, then pulled the whale tooth from her suk. She ran her fingers over the smooth curve of its sides, stroked a furrow that had been eroded into the base of the tooth. Yes, she would make Qakan a belt and use all her good thoughts of seals and sea lions to give it power.
On the eighth day of Blue Shell’s daughter’s confinement, Samiq sat at the top of his father’s ulaq and watched the sea. He watched for the ruffling of water that would tell of herring, watched for the shimmering darkness that comes before a storm, but sometimes he also turned and stood, stretching to his full height to see the small peak that was the top of Blue Shell’s daughter’s hut. Tomorrow she would come out, would be given the woman’s ceremony. Perhaps, Samiq’s mother had said, Gray Bird would allow his daughter, now woman, to have a name.
The girl had been strong even as a child, taking beatings and scoldings without tears, without pleading. Chagak said that even though Blue Shell’s daughter was a woman without a soul, the belts she made would have power.
Already this spring three hunts had brought Samiq honor. And with the belt, who could say? He might take two and three seals in one hunt as his father sometimes did.
He turned back toward the sea, watched the high rising of the swells. He flared his nostrils; there was nothing. No smell of seal or whale, not even the lesser scent of cod.
A good day to oil my chigadax, he thought and stepped down through the roof hole to the top notch of the climbing log. His father sat in a corner of the ulaq’s central room. Wren was on his lap; she sucked two of her tiny fingers and her other hand was wrapped in the soft tangle of her hair.
“Anything?” Kayugh asked.
“Nothing,” Samiq answered. His mother was sitting, her back to them, weaving a grass mat that was suspended on pegs pounded into one wall. Above the weaving was a shelf crowded with the small ivory animals carved years before by her grandfather Shuganan.
Chagak looked over her shoulder at Kayugh, and he cleared his throat.
Samiq squatted beside his father. He reached out and smoothed the dark strands of his sister’s hair.
“The last time your grandfather Many Whales came to visit,” Kayugh began, “he asked that you be allowed to live with him in the Whale Hunters’ village this summer.” He paused, glanced first at his wife and then at Samiq.
Samiq’s heart quickened, thumped hard into the veins of his neck. “And you will let me go?” he asked.
“Long ago I promised such a thing to Many Whales, part of a bride price for your mother.”
“You promised that one of your sons would go live with him, learn to hunt the whale?”
Kayugh looked at his wife and again back at Samiq. “Yes.”
“And you choose me over Amgigh?”
Chagak started to speak, but Kayugh interrupted her. “I do not choose either of you above the other, but Amgigh will soon be a husband. He must stay here in this village with his wife.”
The rushing joy that Samiq had felt dropped cold and hard into his belly. “Blue Shell’s daughter?” he asked in a whisper.
“Gray Bird has decided to give her a name, so your father will keep the promise he made when Amgigh was a baby,” Chagak said.
“Amgigh knows?”
“We will tell him when he and Big Teeth return from their hunt.”
“He has not even taken a sea lion yet,” Samiq said and realized that he spoke in a high and squeaking voice like a boy.
“He will,” said Kayugh. “Perhaps today.”
“Yes,” murmured Samiq, seeing the sternness in his father’s eyes.
“Your father will help Amgigh pay the bride price,” Chagak said, then added, “We have decided they will live here, in this ulaq.
Samiq nodded and tried to keep the surprise from showing in his eyes. Among the First Men, it was customary for a man to live with his wife’s family, at least until the first child was born. But, Samiq reminded himself, it was not the custom among the Whale Hunters, and his mother was half Whale Hunter.
“She will be our daughter, will have our grandchildren,” said Chagak, lifting her head so Samiq saw the tight set of her jaw. “She needs to be away from Gray Bird. He beats her.”
Samiq rubbed a hand across his forehead. Yes, who did not know that? But a girl belonged to her father, and he could beat her, kill her, if he wanted.
“I think she will be safer now, if Gray Bird knows he can get something for her, sealskins or oil,” said Kayugh. “I will tell Gray Bird that Amgigh will not take a woman with broken bones.”
“Amgigh will be a good husband,” Samiq said, and his voice sounded again like the voice of a man. It would be better for the girl if she were in this lodge, and even though Samiq wanted her for himself, he would rather see her with his brother than given to some hunter who came to their beach with skins and meat to trade.
Samiq stood. “I will go outside and watch for Amgigh.”
His father nodded but Samiq saw him lift his eyebrows in question to Chagak. Samiq climbed from the ulaq. He squatted in the grass that grew in the sod of the roof.
To hunt the whale, the greatest of all sea animals. What hunter would not feel his spirit grow large and boasting at the thought of taking such an animal? Yes, he had the better share. After all, any man could take a wife, become a husband. Very few could learn to hunt the whale.
Samiq fixed his eyes on the sea and watched for Amgigh’s ikyak. He thought of whales, huge and dark, thought of their breath spouts flowing high, and would not let himself think of Blue Shell’s daughter, would not let himself feel the ache in his heart.
BY THE NINTH DAY, Blue Shell’s daughter had finished all the belts and had woven a gathering basket as well. That evening she would return to her father’s lodge. Chagak had once told her about the woman’s ceremony Chagak’s parents had held for her after Chagak completed her first bleeding. In those days, a girl had to live alone for forty days after her first bleeding. Then there were feasts and gifts.
But when Chagak’s daughter Red Berry had come to her first bleeding, the men decided that this new village on Tugix’s island was too small for one of their women to sit idle, weaving only belts and baskets for forty days. They borrowed a custom of the Walrus People: only nine days alone, only nine days to weave belts and baskets. As Big Teeth said, “Were not Kayugh’s own parents once Walrus People?”
Blue Shell’s daughter had heard Chagak’s protests: Why take the chance that spirits would be angry? Why take the chance that hunting would be cursed?
But Kayugh had said, “Who does not know that the number four is sacred to men; that the number five is sacred to women? Nine is a good number, a strong number. Nine days is the right choice. Besides, who can doubt that the Walrus People understand the ways of spirits?”
It seemed that Kayugh was right. Red Berry, now First Snow’s wife, already had a healthy son. And the hunting was good, had been good many years.
Blue Shell’s daughter remembered the feast Kayugh had given when Red Berry’s nine days were ended. She remembered the many gifts Red Berry received.
Blue Shell’s daughter knew that no celebration would mark the end of her own confinement, but it was enough that she had escaped her father’s beatings for nine days, enough to be allowed to work without fear of a stick across her back. She sighed and pushed open the mat that covered her door opening.
Her mother would soon come to get her and take her back to her father’s lodge. She shuddered, wondering whether her long absence had irritated the man or if he would treat her with more respect now she was a woman.
Perhaps he would be carving his small crooked animals and would pretend she was not there. Idly, she let her fingers caress the whale’s tooth that hung at her side. But even if he did beat her, perhaps the tooth would give her added strength, make it easier for her to endure the pain.
Of course, if her father saw the tooth, he would claim it as his own, would cover it with his carvings of men and seals and little circles that were supposed to be ulas.
Her hand closed over the tooth and she pulled it from her waistband. She would not be able to carry it with her or he would see it, but how could she keep its power for herself if she did not carry it?
Blue Shell’s daughter stared at the smoke hole in the peak of her roof and wished that the special powers she had during her first bleeding were great enough to make the tooth invisible, like the wind. She crossed her arms over her upraised knees and closed her eyes. No, she thought, it is enough that I am allowed to be a woman. How often had Qakan taunted her saying that she would always be a child, always stay in their father’s ulaq to work and to be beaten?
Yes, she might always be in her father’s ulaq, but if she could keep the tooth, perhaps she would have some protection. Blue Shell’s daughter laid the tooth against her cheek, and in the moment that it touched her skin, warmth against warmth, she saw it not as tooth, but carved into the whorls of a whelk shell. Her father would not care about a shell. He would think she carried it to hold oil to grease the cooking stone or soften skins.
She had watched her father carve, knew from his conversations with Qakan how difficult it was to carve ivory. “A whale’s tooth has a hollow center,” her father had told Qakan, “a narrow passage that tapers up into a point deep within the tooth. A carving has to follow the hollow, make allowances for it. But a whale’s tooth is not as difficult to carve as walrus tusk.” Her father had reached into the basket where he kept ivory, wood and bone for carving. He handed Qakan a walrus tusk. “See,” he had said and pointed to the inside of the tusk. “It is different here. It does not obey the knife.”
Qakan had yawned and looked bored, but Blue Shell’s daughter had listened, and she remembered what her father had said. A walrus tusk is centered with a hard and brittle ivory that chips erratically under the pressure of a blade, and when the ivory chipped, her father became angry, sometimes angry enough to lash out at her with his carving knife.
And, Blue Shell’s daughter thought, if it is difficult for my father to carve a whale’s tooth, it will be even more difficult for me.
But then it seemed as though the tooth caught her thoughts, as though its voice called to her, and she saw the tooth marked by her father’s knife, made into something it should not be.
She picked up the short-bladed woman’s knife that lay next to the pile of hunters’ belts and pressed the knife against the tooth, felt the blade bite into the smooth surface. A narrow strip of ivory curled and fell, and the girl’s heart lurched within her chest. She dropped both knife and tooth.
What had made her do such a thing? What had made her think she could carve something as sacred as a whale’s tooth? She was a woman. Only a woman, and worse, a woman without a soul.
Blue Shell’s daughter rubbed her hands down over her face. Perhaps even now, with one small chip, she had destroyed the tooth’s power. She thought of Shuganan’s beautiful carvings. Each glowed with an inner spirit; each was beautiful to see, and when she looked at those carvings, she felt joy.
Then she thought of her father’s carvings, flat and misshapen. Ugly. No, she told herself. It is me. I do not see what is there. But then she remembered Chagak’s stories of Shuganan, of his gentle spirit, and she thought, Perhaps the difference between Gray Bird’s and Shuganan’s carvings is the difference between the two men’s souls. But at least her father had a soul. And compared to her father, what was she? Why did she think her knife would be strong enough? Did her hands have the skill to make a tooth into a shell?
Again she held the tooth against her face. It was still warm, so perhaps she had not destroyed it, had not forced the spirit out of the tooth into the thin, cold air of her shelter.
But again she saw the tooth as shell, saw it so clearly that it was as though the tooth were already carved. And her hand moved to pick up the knife, as though the tooth itself were directing it. So blocking the fear from her mind, she began to carve. She carved carefully, slowly, pushing the image of the shell from her mind down into her hands, down into her fingers as they gripped the knife.
Samiq squatted in the lee of the hunter’s beached ikyan and oiled his chigadax. That morning, Amgigh had brought in his first sea lion. Their mother sat now with the hide staked out on the beach. She scraped away flesh left on the underside of the skin and the wind carried off the smaller bits of debris.
But in the midst of the joy over Amgigh’s first sea lion, Kayugh had asked both Samiq and Chagak to leave the lodge so he could talk to Amgigh. Samiq knew their father would speak to him of Blue Shell’s daughter. Yes, and how would Amgigh feel, a young man filled with the pride of his first sea lion kill, to learn that his brother would be going to hunt the whale while he, Amgigh, would stay in the village and take Blue Shell’s daughter as wife?