And She Was (5 page)

Slukax hadn’t argued. Neither she nor Aya had heard Tugakax speak
before about her time with the Russians. They had seen an old man and a woman, carrying a small child, coming down from the hills just before sunset. The old man had approached the women, who went to meet them, Slukax in the lead. He explained that they had traveled for three weeks across the mountains seeking a new village to join. He had gestured toward the woman.

“Tugakax, my granddaughter,” he said, “makes fine kamleikas and mats. She will work hard.”

Slukax looked at the woman, who had not once glanced up from the ground. She could see the lighter and rounder eyes of the child in the woman’s arms. They must have suffered much and been in great danger to risk traveling inland. “We do not have much,” Slukax said. She led the newcomers to an
ulax
and gave them enough food for two days.

The old man had remained only long enough to see Tugakax and her child settled into village life. Then he had disappeared into the ocean with the other old man. Aya had tried to make Tugakax welcome. She invited the new woman to come with her to collect shellfish at low tide and was careful never to mention her child’s mixed face. Gradually Tugakax had begun to smile, to let other women watch her child. But she had never spoken of her life before.

As Aya looked at Tugakax now, she understood that for this woman suffering soaked through to her soul, and that angering the spirits could add nothing to her pain.

Slukax nodded. “Three hunters are better than two.”

After several days of kayak practice, Slukax decided they were ready to throw.

Aya had watched her brother and other hunters use the throwing board before and thought it easy enough. But as she practiced, she discovered how ignorant she had been. The throwing boards had been made to fit each hunter’s arm, the length of the throwing handle equaling the length between the hunter’s middle fingertip and elbow. These weapons did not fit her body. And the women had no one to explain or demonstrate. Only the chance strike taught them the series of movements, the correct angles, the perfect moment of release.

Slukax pretended to know more.

“No! No! Aya, you are twisting your wrist too much. Straighten the angle.”

“No! No! You both are turning the shoulders too much.”

But they knew Slukax’s lectures were without meaning. She knew no more than Aya or Tugakax. Her throws hit with no more regularity.

In the weeks that followed, the sun grew more cautious, traveling ever closer to the horizon. As the women snuck from the village on foraging trips from which little food resulted, three more died. The old woman and two more children. Nine were left, and the snows would come any day. Practice had become a luxury.

Late fall, the women knew, was not good hunting. They gathered before dawn in the cove to the east of the village where they had hidden the kayaks and weapons. They mixed charcoal with water and painted dark lines under their eyes to cut the ocean’s glare. Aya and Tugakax lifted the one-hole kayak and carried it to the water for Slukax, then the two-hole kayak for themselves.

Childlike waves tickled Aya’s ankles as she strapped her weapons to the bow of her boat. She watched Tugakax and Slukax do the same. Aya’s fingers trembled as she tested the weapon straps. The air clung to her like damp hands. They had dressed in warm parkas, then waterproof seal-gut kamleikas. Aya’s eyes traveled across the endless gray hunting fields. The ocean had always meant life, comfort, and safety. As the sun rose that day, she knew it as an enemy, intent on taking her body below for its own purposes. She understood the fear she had seen the men cover with elaborate ceremony, costume, and words. She felt awash in ignorance. The sea spread to the end of the world, and its creatures knew it like a lover. It would protect them with everything it had, and Aya had little skill with which to steal a piece for her dying village.

The three women paddled their kayaks out past the reef rocks to the east. They paddled around the next cove, keeping their boats angled slightly out to sea to oppose the tide that pressed them back to shore. They paddled for two hours until they reached the kelp beds. The seals had been here two days before when Tugakax scouted them. A few would likely remain until the snows.

Before the men left, seal meat had comprised half of the village’s diet. Their kamleikas were made from the watertight throats; their
kayaks from the hides. With these creatures, Aya and her people felt a dependence as strong as a family bond. Aya’s mouth watered just observing the dark brown heads undulating in the waves.

Slukax raised her hand, and Tugakax held her paddle in place under water, slowing the kayak behind Slukax’s. The women watched the dark brown bodies, each as fat as two boats and as long as one, seeking fish among the kelp near shore. They remained until their fingers ached and legs cramped, quietly paddling backward to keep their boats stationary. Aya felt her breasts swell with milk, then leak inside her kamleika. She had heard the men’s stories of finding prey then waiting often nearly a tide until the right moment. But neither she nor the other women knew what they were waiting for, how to tell if the time was right. They waited until they felt the tide shifting under them.

Slukax looked at Aya. She motioned toward a seal feeding closest to shore. Nothing would make them more able or ready. The women dug their paddles into the water like shovels. The kayaks shot forward.

Aya fastened her eyes on the beast as the boat skimmed across the tops of the kelp. Several animals rolled aside as the boats cut toward the target.

When they were fifty feet away, Aya slid her paddle across the bow into the paddle holders and reached for her throwing board. She hadn’t realized how cold her fingers had become and fumbled with the skin loops that secured her weapons. Tugakax held her paddle to the side at the top of the water to stabilize the boat for Aya’s throw.

Aya glanced at the seal, now less than thirty feet away.

Slukax yelled, “Aya, now!” Slukax had positioned herself on the ocean side and fumbled with her own throwing board.

Aya slid the board free and ran the dart, tipped with a barbed harpoon point, through its groove. She glanced at the careful loop of sinew coiled on the kayak’s bow that connected the dart to an inflated seal bladder. She hoped they would whip away from the boat as they should. She raised the throwing stick above her shoulder, pinned her eyes on the fatty neck, and threw.

She felt every rise and fall of the boat and the pull of the tide as she watched her dart speed toward the seal, then wobble as it lost momentum. She could see Slukax’s dart skim across the water and sink, its inflated bladder bobbing uselessly at the surface.

Aya watched her harpoon point scrape through a layer of gray-white fat on the seal’s shoulder and tilting uselessly into the water. Although the seal had only been grazed, it lifted its head with a great fountain of water. A silver fish flopped in its mouth as the animal turned toward the boats. It rolled underwater, somersaulting its silver-brown body to point toward the ocean, churning a wave that rolled outward toward Aya and Tugakax.

Slukax let loose another dart, heaving it forward so hard her kayak rocked to the lip of its hole. But the seal was moving now, and the spear sliced into the ocean harmlessly. The animal dove and resurfaced to the offshore side of Slukax’s kayak. The seal peered behind her at the would-be hunters with her soft brown eyes. Aya’s eyes locked on the animal’s. She knows, Aya thought. She knows we are women. Then the seal rolled down again. The deep cleave of her tail disappeared into the gray sea.

Suddenly the women were alone. They had failed, and that failure stretched to the end of the world. The other seals had blown out air and descended to the sea floor to escape. They were well beyond range now. Tugakax paddled furiously to keep the kayak in motion so that the water, churned into a dozen patterns, didn’t roll them.

When the water calmed, they paddled toward one another and lashed their kayaks together for stability. Aya felt she needed to explain but had no words. For once, Slukax didn’t harangue her for aim or form. Her miss was not hers alone, and the other women knew they could have done no better. Slukax unlashed the kayak cover and reached inside for a small bag of dried berries and clams. The women passed the bits of food among themselves without speaking and watched the shore recede with the tide.

Twice more the women tried to spear a seal in the weeks that followed. The sea mammals, trusting their bulk and eager to feed before winter’s scarcity, didn’t grow more wary. But the women’s aim didn’t grow more sure either.

Their efforts led to death nonetheless.

Aya returned to the warmth of her
ulax
late after their third failure. Although the weather was turning, the
ulax,
dug five feet below
ground, remained warm. Rafters of whalebone and driftwood held up the dense sod roof. The sleeping quarters, separated by woven grass mats, lined the side walls. Piled with mats and hides, only a small oil lamp or two were needed to keep warm. The
ulax,
twenty feet wide and thirty feet long, was too big for their needs, now that the men were gone.

She took her baby from the thin arms of the woman who had been watching her and put the infant to her breast. Anshigis sucked eagerly with the strength of her hunger. Aya leaned against the wall. She had been thinking of her husband much of the day. She had known him all her life, but as a husband only a year before he’d gone to fight. He was a good husband, able, gentle. She had never known how much she needed him, his bravery in the kayak, his warm hands at night. When he’d courted her, she’d known only that he made her laugh and that people said he would bring her many fine skins to sew. If he did live, if he was in hiding on another island, somewhere far inland, if he did return, would he want her now? Would he know what she had done?

Behind her thoughts a panic began to form. Aya looked down at her baby, still sucking eagerly. She had not felt the tingling release of milk. She shifted Anshigis to her other breast and waited, trying to relax her shoulders, think of something else. Anshigis became frustrated and fussed through her increasingly frantic sucking.

Slukax descended the ladder just as Anshigis gave up and set to wailing, flailing her fists against her mother’s dry breasts. Aya’s eyes met Slukax’s. Slukax turned around on the ladder and departed. Aya slid her finger into her baby’s tiny, wailing mouth, but the baby soon found nothing flowing and returned to her wail.

When Slukax returned, she had a small bundle of berries in her hand. She didn’t look at Aya or Anshigis but sat against the opposite wall and began to mash the berries in a carved bowl. To the mash she added water and poured the pale pink mixture into a tube of seal intestine, tying off one end and squeezing the other tight with her fingers. She handed it to Aya.

Anshigis did not like the feel of intestine in her mouth, and she did not like the sharp taste of berry. She cried and fought as Aya pried her gums apart and let drops of the mixture fall into the baby’s mouth. She force-fed half the mixture, then tied the open end and set it next to
her. Anshigis slept for a few minutes, fitfully, then came full awake. She arched her back and opened her mouth wide to let a stream of pink juice flow out. To Aya it seemed the fluid of life. She let it stain the baby’s wrap and seep into the floor.

“Try again in a while,” Slukax said.

Aya tried for the next two days, coaxing and forcing fluid into Anshigis. Sometimes the baby’s body accepted it, most of the time it did not. Aya mixed her ration of stored eggs with water or fat; she made soups of nettle and edible leaves. Slukax gave part of her own ration to Aya, trying to coax milk from her body again.

The third day Aya woke up with Anshigis curled at her chest. She knew. The tiny body was still warm, but life was gone. Aya brought her knees up and wrapped her arms around the baby’s body. She felt the punishment of her failure to throw the spear, and beyond that the punishment of God. She had made herself unclean, touching weapons, lifting the kayaks, breaking taboos.

A groan, deep and empty, rose from Aya, the sound of mothers across time and place, who understand that their children have suffered and died for their sins. Allowances are made for no sound worse than this; the vibrations would rip the universe apart.

Slukax left her alone there, visiting her boys in another home. She brought food to Aya that went untouched and spoke words that went unheard. Nothing moved in Aya’s mind those first days.

She was vaguely aware when Tugakax and Slukax descended the ladder and quietly sat by her side. She felt Slukax lift her sleeping skins and her hands. Slukax pulled the baby into her own arms and leaned back. She closed her eyes and let a low moan through her lips. Then she began to rock, forward and back, a rhythmic moan pressed out with each forward motion. She rocked Anshigis’s body like this for an hour or more then passed the body to Tugakax, who did the same. When another hour had passed, Tugakax gently pushed Aya into a sitting position and handed her the baby.

Aya looked at the two women, rocking and moaning for her baby. She held Anshigis to her chest and rocked with them. The moan that grew from her own mouth rose to a wail for a time then dropped to nearly a whisper, a cycle that lasted through the night.

When dawn came, the women began to dig. They removed the skin floor from Aya’s sleeping place and dug a small, deep pit underneath. Aya wrapped Anshigis in skins and lay her down. She was not able to replace the dirt over her only daughter, and Tugakax took over. When the burial was complete, Aya curled up on her daughter’s grave and let her rocking moan carry her into sleep.

Tugakax and Slukax let Aya mourn. They told the other women about the death. Mothers held their children and forced them to be still, to conserve energy. Mothers who had lost babies already, dreamed of their wombs and wondered if they would ever be full again. They longed for their men, for a whale, for children with happy, full bellies. The wind did not blow that day, nor the night that followed. The women cast quick glances at the sky, the mountains, the ocean, looking for movement in the clouds or grass or waves that would signal the wind’s return. They saw no movement and shuddered.