Alaska (8 page)

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But he did go to the immense carcass, make a cup with his hands, and drink of the blood he had provided his people.

WHEN THE HUNTERS FINISHED SLAUGHTERING THE Mammoth, they made a traditional decision.

Instead of trying to haul the mass of meat, bone and hide back to where their families waited, they decided to make their camp at a nearby stand of birch trees, so the two younger men were sent back to fetch the women, the children and the sleds.

The shift was made with ease, for the women were so starved for food that when they heard of the kill, they wanted to run off immediately, but when the men explained that the entire camp was to be moved, the taking down of the tentlike covering and the packing of the four sleds were completed quickly, and later that day when the women and children saw the slain mammoth, they shouted with joy and, abandoning their sleds, rushed for the fire where portions of the meat were roasting.

A group of hunters like Varnak's could expect to kill only one mammoth a year, but if they were unusually lucky or had at their head some hunter with exceptional skill, they might conceivably kill two. And since the taking of a mammoth was such a rare event, certain rituals for handling the carcass had evolved through the centuries.

The Ancient One, as guardian of the tribe's spiritual safety, stood beside the severed head of the beast and apostrophized it: 'O Noble Mammoth who shares the tundra with us, who rules the steppe and runs the river, we thank thee for the gift of thy body. We apologize for having taken thy life, and we pray that thou hast left behind many children who will come to us in the future. Out of respect for thee, we make this prayer.'

As she spoke she dipped her right fingers in the blood of the mammoth, then placed them on the lips of all the women and children until their lips were red. For the four hunters on whom the continued existence of her people depended, she stroked with her bloodied fingers the forehead of the dead animal and then the foreheads of the men, beseeching the beast to impart to these worthy men a deeper understanding of her kind so that they might more effectively chase other mammoths in the future.

Only when these sacred rites had been performed did she feel free to rummage among the entrails, seeking the strong gut that would be converted into sinewy thread for sewing.

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Her son, meanwhile, was trimming away the meat from the right scapula, and when that stout shoulder blade was exposed, its bone white like ivory, he began working upon it with a stone burin that flecked away bits of the bone, until he held in his hands a sturdy scraper with sharp cutting edges which could be used in butchering the meat of the mammoth prior to storing it in cool places. His work with the burin was significant for two unrelated reasons: it produced a cutting tool which was useful now, and which, nearly thirty thousand years later, would be dug up by archaeologists to prove that human beings had once lived at the Birch Tree Site in the dawn of New World history.

Each of the nine adults had some special responsibility regarding the dead mammoth: one collected the bones to serve as ceiling ribs for whatever kind of house they would later build, another washed the valuable hide and began tanning it with a mixture of urine and the acid distilled from tree bark. Hair from the legs would be woven into a material suitable for caps, and the gristle which connected hoof to leg was saved to make a kind of mucilage. The Ancient One continued probing each piece of meat, intent on salvaging thin, strong bones for the making of needles, and one man sharpened stouter bones to be inserted at the tips of his spears.

Lacking any organized agriculture or the capacity to grow and hoard vegetables, the Chukchis were forced to depend upon their hunting skills, which were tremendous, and basic to everything else was the pursuit of the mammoth, a major source of food.

So they studied its habits, placated its spirit to make it congenial, devised ways to trick it, and hunted it relentlessly. As they cut this one apart, they studied every aspect of its anatomy, trying to predict how it would have behaved in different circumstances, and when it had been absorbed into the tribe as a kind of deity, the four men agreed: 'The surest way to kill a mammoth is the way Varnak did. Fall under it and jab upward with a sharp spear.'

Fortified by this conclusion, they took their sons aside and taught them how to hold a spear in both hands, fall to the ground face upward, and jab at the belly of a thundering mammoth, trusting the Great Spirits to provide protection from the hammering feet. When they had instructed the boys, showing them how to fall and yet maintain control of their spears, Varnak winked at one of the other hunters, and this time when the oldest boy ran forward and threw himself on the ground face upward, this hunter, dressed in mammoth skin, suddenly leaped in the air, uttered a fantastic scream, and stamped his feet inches from the boy's head. The young 53

fellow was so terrified by this unexpected explosion that he let the spear fall from his hands and covered his face.

'You are dead!' the hunter shouted at the cowering boy, but Varnak uttered the more serious condemnation of his cowardice: 'You let the mammoth escape. We shall starve.'

So the spear was handed back to the frightened boy, and twenty times he threw himself upon the ground, face up, as Varnak and the others thundered down upon him, stamping their feet close to his head, and reminding him each time as the charade ended: 'That time you had a chance to stab the mammoth. If it was a bull, he might have killed you, but your spear would have been in his belly, and we who were left would have had a chance to trail him and bring him down.'

They kept at it until the boy felt that when he encountered a real mammoth, there was a good chance he might succeed in wounding it so sorely that the others would have a later chance to complete the kill, and when they stopped their practice, Varnak congratulated him: 'I think you will know how,' and the boy smiled.

But then the men turned their attention to the second oldest boy, a lad of nine, and when they handed him a spear and told him to throw himself under the body of the charging mammoth, he fainted.

AT THEIR NEW CAMPSITE NEAR THE BIRCH TREES, THE

Chukchis unloaded their meager goods and prepared to set up their crude shelters, and since they were in a position to start afresh, they could have developed some improved style of living quarters, but they did not. They failed to invent an igloo made of ice, or a yurt made of skins, or above ground huts made of stone and branches, or any of the other satisfactory types of dwelling. Instead, they reverted to the kind of hovel they had known in Asia: a muddy cave belowground, with a kind of dome above made of matted branches and skins plastered with mud. As before, the excavation had no chimney for the discharge of smoke, no window for the admission of light, no hinged door to keep away the small animals that wandered by. But each cave did constitute a home, and in it women cooked and sewed and reared their young.

The expected life span in these years was about thirty-one years, and from the constant chewing of meat and gristle, teeth tended to wear out before the rest of the body, so that death was hastened by literal starvation. Women often had three children who lived, three others who died at or shortly after birth. A family rarely remained in one place long, for animals would become wary or depleted, so that the humans 54

must move on in search of other prey. Life was difficult and pleasures were few, but there was at this time no war between tribes or groups of tribes, mainly because units lived so far apart that there need be no squabbling over territorial rights.

Ancestors had patiently learned from a hundred thousand years of trial and error certain rules for survival in the north, and these were rigorously observed. The Ancient One repeated them endlessly to her brood: 'Meat that has turned green must not be eaten. When winter starts and there is not enough food, sleep most of each day. Never throw away any piece of fur, no matter how greasy it has become. Mammoth, bison, beaver, reindeer, fox, hare and mice, hunt them in that order, but never ignore the mice, for it is they that will keep you alive in the starving time.'

Long and cruel experience had also taught one fundamental lesson: 'When you seek a mate, go always, without exception, to some distant tribe, for if you take one within your own set of huts, fearful things result.' In obedience to this harsh rule, she had herself once supervised the killing of a sister and a brother who had married.

She would grant them no mercy, even though they were the children of her own brother.

'It must be done,' she had cried to members of her family, 'and before any child is born. For if we allow such a one to come among us, they will punish us.'

She never specified who they

were, but she was convinced that they existed and exercised great powers. They established the seasons, they brought the mammoth near, they watched over pregnant women, and for such services they deserved respect. They lived, she believed, beyond the horizon, wherever it chanced to be, and sometimes in duress she would look to the farthest edge of sky, bowing to the unseen ones who alone had the power to make conditions better.

There were among these Chukchis certain moments of transcendent joy, as when the men brought down a really huge mammoth or when a woman trapped in a difficult pregnancy finally produced a strong male child. On wintry nights when food was scarce and comfort almost unattainable, special joy came to them, for then in the northern heavens the mysterious ones hung out great curtains of fire, filling the sky with myriad colors of dancing forms and vast spears of light flashing from one horizon to the next in a dazzling display of power and majesty.

Then men and women would leave the frozen mud of their mean caves to stand in the starry night, their faces to the heavens as those others beyond the horizon moved the lights about, hung the colors, and sent great shafts thundering clear across the firmament. There would be silence, and the chil-55

dren who were summoned to see this miracle would remember it all the days of their lives.

A man like Varnak might expect to see such a heavenly parade twenty times in his life. With luck he might help to bring down the same number of mammoths, no more.

And as he neared the age of thirty, which he was doing now, he could anticipate the swift diminution of his powers and their ultimate disappearance. So he was not surprised one autumn morning when Tevuk said: 'Your mother cannot rise.'

When he ran to where she lay on the ground beneath the birch trees, he saw that she was mortally stricken, and he bent down to give her such comfort as he could, but she required none. In her last moments she wanted to look at the sky she had loved and to discharge her responsibilities to the people she had helped guide and protect for so long. 'When winter comes,' she whispered to her son, 'remind the children to sleep a lot.'

Varnak buried her in the birch grove, and ten days later her grave was covered by the year's first snow. Winds whipped it across the steppe, and as it drifted about the cave-huts, Varnak wondered: Maybe we should winter in the place we left, and he went so far as to consult with other adults, but their counsel was unanimous: 'Better stay where we are,' and with this resolve these eighteen new Alaskans, with enough dried mammoth meat to keep them alive through the worst of the winter, buried themselves in their huts to seek protection from the coming storms.

VARNAK AND HIS VILLAGERS WERE NOT THE FIRST TO cross from Asia into Alaska. Others seem to have preceded them at different spots by thousands of years, moving gradually and arbitrarily eastward in their constant quest for food. Some made the journey out of curiosity, liked what they found, and stayed. Some fought with parents or neighbors and wandered off with no set purpose. Others passively joined a group and never had the energy to return. Some chased animals so fast and so far that after the kill they remained where they were, and some were allured by the attractiveness of a girl on the other side of the river whose parents were making the journey. But none, so far as we can deduce, ever crossed over with the conscious intention of settling a new land or exploring a new continent.

And when they did reach Alaska, the same patterns prevailed. They never knowingly set out to occupy the interior of North America; the distances and impediments were so great that no single group of human beings could have lived 56

long enough to complete the passage. Of course, had the route south been ice-free when Varnak and his people made their crossing, and had they been driven by some monomaniacal impulse, they could conceivably have wandered down to Wyoming during their lifetime, but as we have seen, the corridor was rarely open at the same time as the bridge. So had Varnak been intent on reaching the interior of North America assuming that he could have generated such a purpose, which he could not he might have had to wait thousands of years before the pathway was released from the ice, and this would mean that a hundred generations of his line would live and die before his descendants could migrate toward Wyoming.

Of a hundred Chukchis who wandered from Siberia into Alaska in Varnak's time, perhaps a third returned home after discovering that Asia was in general more hospitable than Alaska. Of the two-thirds who remained, all were imprisoned within the enchanting ice castle, as were their descendants. They became Alaskan; in time they remembered nothing but this beautiful land; they forgot Asia and were able to learn nothing about North America. Varnak and his seventeen never went back, nor did their descendants.

They became Alaskans.

By what name should they be known? When their ancestors first ventured into the north they had been called contemptuously Those Who Fled the South, as if the residents knew that had the newcomers been stronger, they would have escaped eviction from those favorable climes. During one period when they could not find acceptable sites for their camps, they were known as the Wanderers, and when they finally came upon a safe place to live at the edge of Asia, they took its name and became Chukchis.