Surfacing Read online

  Mike followed my gaze.

  ‘That’s where the wolves are!’ he grinned.

  * * *

  * * *

  There was one track down to the river where I could go alone without fear of bears and often did. It was right down at the estuary, and it served four or five old-looking houses. The very last dwelling had a roof of corrugated iron, painted in three vertical bands like a flag. I thought of it as a tundra flag, because it was tundra colours: rust-red, reedy-brown and willow-green. Immediately after that house, the track ended abruptly with a hand-painted sign blocking the way. CAUTION DANGER, it read, because the road was gone. There was nothing but a two-metre drop down to the fast-flowing water.

  Unless the air was still and the bugs awful, the CAUTION DANGER sign made a comfortable backrest for looking over the river. At high tide, the river was as wide as a city street, and on the far shore grew willow-scrub, then tundra to the horizon, all under the vastest sky. Sometimes it was silent by the river, but now that the salmon season was getting under way, metal skiffs passed at speed, driven by lads in waterproof overalls. If they saw me, I’d get the friendly, reticent wave.

  On site, the workdays were long, but the evenings were free, and light until very late. After dinner one night Melia came with me to the CAUTION DANGER sign and identified the new birds I was seeing, the waders called yellowlegs, poking in the mud when the tide was out, warblers, and some familiars: snipe under the reeds, and flocks of teal. From time to time a merlin perched on a bare branch lodged in the river mud.

  Curious, the owner of the last house joined us, a black-haired woman in a T-shirt and sweatpants, smoking a cigarette. She looked appraisingly at the swept-away road and said, ‘They’re moving my house soon. The land is eroding so fast. I come out here in the morning in my robe with a coffee, but every time more is gone. The next full moon tides, I think all this chunk of earth we’re standing on will be gone.’

  ‘Moving your whole house?’

  ‘Yeah. All the houses down here. I don’t want to move. I like this spot, the views. You can come here, catch a fish, even a seal. You can catch a goose for dinner...’

  ‘Where will you be going?’

  ‘Just up to the junction...’ She pointed toward where a derelict cannery stood at the end of the road. ‘It’s not a nice view.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Often in the evenings, a few villagers would come to the red building to see what had been discovered on the site. They were shy to enter, even though it was their own building, their own culture, their own site and stories.

  There was always something new to show a visitor. In fact, every evening after dinner Rick conducted a popular little ritual called ‘Artefact of the Day,’ when the day’s best finds were handed round to be admired. There was a good-natured vote for the ‘best,’ which brought credit to its finder. It might be a line-weight shaped like a seal, or a pendant carved of mammoth ivory, or a piece of a basket made of woven grass, all preserved because frozen these five hundred years.

  I grew to like the atmosphere in the village in the evening; the long gloamings before the sun set in ruby streaks behind the church. There was always the grind of four-wheelers but also the sounds of children laughing and playing, the thump of a basketball. Down at the river, all secret creeks and muddy inlets, rickety wooden fish-drying racks awaited their catch, and fishermen attended to their boats. Once, we met a young couple coming home from the tundra. The man was carrying a plastic tub brimful of berries, the woman had a puppy in her arms.

  ‘Good picking!’ said Melia. ‘What’ll you do with them?’

  The girl spoke shyly. ‘Make akutaq. Eskimo ice cream. You mix them with fat...’

  ‘Seal fat?’

  She pulled a face. ‘No, something we buy from the store.’

  The young man said. ‘Back in the days when people lived in sod houses, they mixed the berries with caribou fat. We’ll bring you some, yeah.’

  * * *

  * * *

  July soon turned to August. One afternoon dozens of dragonflies with spotted wings hatched all at once from the damp mud around the site. The tide was far out, leaving only pools and reflections; phantasms shimmered on the horizon. A buxom elder arrived, driven by a youth on a four-wheeler along the beach. I half overheard the conversation: Rick and the elder were discussing Yup’ik names, which have meaning, but she was saying that the young people feel obliged to change them if they go away to college. I’d yet to hear a Yup’ik name.

  Of the finds on the site, she said, every family had their own designs. She said, ‘My ancestors tattooed their faces.’

  Rick had said it’s a matriarchal culture. If you need permission to do something, the ultimate decisions rest with women. Like the excavation, for example. It was the women elders who eventually gave permission.

  ‘How do you find these women?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you find them. You’ll be led there.’

  That afternoon grew hot, over seventy degrees. In years past, the site couldn’t open until the ground thawed in August, but that thaw was now occurring in July.

  As the berry season began drawing to a close, so the salmon season opened and suddenly the whole town was talking about fish. From the screens we could count a dozen boats out at sea, especially on an incoming tide. They caught the salmon in nets as they were heading upriver to spawn. That was ‘commercial fishing,’ with the catches sold. There was also ‘sports fishing,’ when anglers from the southern USA came to spend time and money here, camping upriver with local outfitters. And then there was ‘subsistence fishing,’ with families catching enough to last them the winter. The fish would be frozen, or dried or smoked. Big salmon, the length of your arm.

  One fisherman brought a gift of sixteen salmon to the red building. What to do? Cheryl the cook put the fish in buckets and asked the grocery store to keep them in their chill cabinets. She was planning a ‘subsistence supper.’ A dish of akutaq also appeared, perhaps from the young couple with the puppy. It didn’t look promising, fat and berries mashed together, with a bit of green sourdock (the name just means ‘mixture’), but it was dangerously good. High fat, high sugar, ideal for taking on long cold trips by dog-sled.

  On the Wednesday, that week’s Delta Discovery had arrived. The strapline said it was ‘Alaska’s largest independent Native-owned and operated newspaper.’ It covered the whole delta, and its tone was couthy. The front page was devoted to a photo of two wee girls out on the tundra somewhere. Iqvaryarluk! Berry-picking! Inside was news of a ‘burn closure,’ which meant a ban on campfires and such, because the tundra was so dry and combustible. Warren, passing by, pointed over my shoulder to the article, saying, ‘That’s never happened before, round here.’

  A cheery column called ‘Chasing the Ambulance’ listed the week’s call-outs, in the notorious town of Bethel, from where the planes flew:

  Medics responded to a report of an intoxicated person unable to walk. Upon arrival, the person was found sitting on the ground. Patient was assessed and taken to hospital.

  A person who was suicidal.

  A person bleeding from the head.

  A bicycle accident.

  An unconscious person in front of the United Pentecostal Church.

  * * *

  * * *

  There was one elder who was particularly interested in the dig. The name he used was John Smith and he was the grandfather of Mike Smith. John was a youthful sixty-eight or seventy, small of stature. Like most of the men, he usually wore thick-checked lumberjack shirts and workmen’s jeans. His greying hair was loosely slicked back. He had high cheekbones and a slightly flirtatious air with women. I suspect in his youth he may have had a bit of a quiff. He liked Johnny Cash.

  He’d often drop by of an evening to see the day’s finds, especially any pieces in walrus ivory, because he himself was
a carver.

  John was valued for his presence, his link to the Yup’ik language, his stories. He spoke slowly, as if weighing every word, but that seemed to be the Yup’ik way. Think first, speak slowly. He spoke also with his hands: gesturing, sometimes mimicking. He could mimic a bird with his hands.

  One day, the excitement was an earring that had been found on site, carved of walrus ivory. It was a flat platelet, about one centimetre square, with two smaller pendant circles, a bit like owl eyes. The platelet itself had been carved with a dot amid concentric circles, which Rick said was a common design and may represent the all-seeing eye.

  John took the earring into his hand, turned it, scrutinising it.

  ‘How old is this?’ he asked

  ‘Five hundred years.’

  ‘How’d they do that, without metal? Make those perfect circles?’ He looked around at us, and said with reverence, ‘What kind of people were they?’

  ‘Your kind of people, John!’

  We’d often hear John make remarks of wonderment and of sadness for the culture which was past.

  ‘There are no Eskimos any more,’ he’d say. ‘All gone.’

  John could remember sealskin-covered kayaks on the river. ‘All gone now.’

  And dog teams, and dog-sleds.

  ‘Now, everyone uses outboard engines and snow-machines. Too. Much. Noise!’

  ‘Do you know how to travel by dog-sled?’ we asked.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ He nodded, paused. ‘You need seven dogs. Smart ones. They will find their own way home.’

  He made a motion with his hands, exactly like the paws of a running dog.

  ‘They smell their own trail.’

  Then he re-enacted the feeding of sled dogs, one by one, throwing them a lump of blubber each.

  When John told a story or an anecdote, or fetched something out of his memory, I had to listen closely. His voice was soft and often I was unsure whether the event happened to him, or his grandfather, or someone else entirely. I don’t know whether it matters. It was a case of listening, and learning. For example, who was the man caught in an obliterating snowstorm when he was trying to reach home on his dog-sled? He had been travelling a long time and the blizzard was dreadful, but all at once the dogs stopped and refused to go on. Nothing would make the dogs move. So the man had to dig in and wait till the storm passed or the light came – and when it did, he realised the dogs wouldn’t go home because they already were home. His house was right there.

  Rick is only a few years younger than John.

  ‘Huh,’ Rick said ruefully. ‘When he was out on a dog-sled, I was sittin’ on a sofa watchin’ TV.’

  John came by every few evenings, and when he’d had enough he’d slip away again, but not before he’d made a little drawing if required. If one of the students had found an earring or a pendant, what better souvenir could she have of her time excavating a Yup’ik village than a replica made by a craftsman? Legally, only Native carvers are allowed to work in walrus ivory, and here was one right here, with his blue check shirt and jeans, and slow smile.

  ‘The ivory – you have to work it with your hands. Ivory will become like soap. I learned from my uncle. I watched my uncle, sanded for him, polished. I listened to his stories. You have to be in a very quiet place.’ He laughed. ‘No kids!’

  He kept a little workshop by his house near the river.

  ‘John,’ the girls would say. ‘Can you make this, please?’

  Enjoying the attention, he’d study the piece in question, turn it, feel it, then tilt his head. ‘I can try.’

  He’d ask a fair price. When he came back three or four days later, everyone would crowd round to see the finished work: pendants shaped like tiny seals, earrings with concentric circles. Designs that had lain in the earth for five hundred years were alive again, warming against the skin.

  One evening I asked him a daft question. ‘John,’ I said. ‘Where does your walrus ivory come from?’

  ‘From a walrus!’

  ‘Funny guy.’

  ‘They come down here in spring, March time. On the ice.’

  ‘I’d love to see a walrus.’

  ‘Once, one swam upriver here. Taking shortcut to Hooper Bay. A teacher shot it with only a .22 magnum. We harpooned it and dragged it to an old couple at spring camp.’

  The thought of a teacher shooting a walrus confounded me.

  ‘Yeah,’ said John, under the strip lights, ‘We harpoon them. We gotta remember. If the planes stop flying and no food comes in, we gotta remember how to live.’

  John mentioned that his wife was going berry-picking to a place she favoured somewhere upriver.

  ‘Can we help?’ asked Melia. ‘Go with her? I love picking berries.’

  John demurred, then gave his slow reply. ‘She likes to be alone, on the tundra.’

  ‘Not scared of bears?’ I asked.

  He gave me a smile. ‘She talks to them.’

  ‘What does she say?’

  ‘She says: “I’m here. I’m here. Quan-tah. If you give them your presence, they’ll leave you alone.”’

  Around that time there was a remarkable find. An undamaged ulu was recovered. An ulu is a woman’s knife, with the blade set under the handle, and this one had a blade of greenish stone, still with a sharp edge. This handle was about five inches long, a nice fit in the palm. It was another woman who found it, one who happened to be an expert on such knives.

  ‘Look,’ Teresa said, as it was passed round. ‘The handle’s carved in the shape of a seal.’ It had the swell of a seal’s body and, when you looked at it front on, a seal’s face looked back at you, dolefully, as though the seal knew exactly what the woman was about to do with her ulu, her knife.

  When John Smith next came to the red building, he also turned the ulu in his hands, nodding in sad recognition. But at once he spotted something we had all missed. Yes, a seal. But look: if the seal is facing right, then what is facing left? A beluga whale! There’s its eye, there’s the blowhole, see?

  Again he said, softly, ‘We gotta remember. We tell the kids, you gotta remember! If the planes stop flying...’

  After three or four days of freakish heat the weather cooled, the wind shifted, with an edge already hinting at autumn. Then came a morning of haar – cold sea fog. No planes flew. There was a sense of closing down. When the others had gone to the site, five of us remained in the red building, where the conversation turned to language. We sat at the table in the windowless room, speaking in English. John Smith was there, and Erika Larsen, a photographer of Sami descent who had arrived on assignment from National Geographic. Also, an archaeologist from the Aleutian Islands, Sven Hakansson, an old colleague of Rick’s and himself a Native American. The talk was about Native people being discouraged or even forbidden to speak their own languages: the language of memory, of materials, of the land, of the hands’ work. Of having parents who’d become ashamed of ‘that dirty language.’ Of being sent to boarding school, where every day began with a chant: ‘English is my language.’

  Erika told us she had been on a course in Norway to learn something of the Sami language. It was noteworthy, she said, that those people who were most angry learned least.

  Later, after the fog had cleared, word reached us that a snowy owl had been seen out by the airstrip. One of the pilots had spotted it when he was coming in to land. Melia suggested we take a run out there to look for it.

  Beside the gravel runway, one small building housed a waiting room and a back office. In the office we discovered a young woman whose job was to log the aircraft as they came and went, and to make phone calls if one was late. ‘Did you see a snowy owl here?’ Melia asked. ‘The pilot says he saw one when he was landing.’

  The girl smiled shyly. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘It’s yours?’

  ‘Ye
ah. We raised it up. My husband caught it up the river. It was a chick and we raised it up. The kids loved it. Then we let it go, just a few days ago. I got pictures on my phone...’

  She showed us pictures of a man with a grey owlet on his gauntleted arm, a video of two toddlers hunkered down laughing as the owlet hopped around and tried to hide under the struts of the house.

  Melia whispered, ‘It’s not a snowy owl, it’s a great horned. Poor thing’s scared.’

  ‘What did you feed it on?’

  ‘Mice. We set traps for mice. Bits o’ fish.’

  ‘And now it’s out here?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Does it recognise you?’

  She laughed. ‘No.’

  At the edge of the runway there was an upholstered seat, big enough for two, that looked as though it might have come from a bus. We sat there and surveyed the land, the mountains, the sky. A single patch of snow was shining in the mountains. We saw a couple of jaegers sitting on tussocks. No owl. A dark dot appeared in the sky which looked like a plane coming in, but then transformed into a flock of geese, already heading south.

  Back at the red building, two of the postgraduate students were sorting through trays of bird-bones with tweezers. They were bones from geese or cranes which had been cut prior to making small objects, maybe needles or awls.

  Finding these bones, and the seal/whale ulu, suggested that a women’s work area had been exposed at Nunallaq. High-status women, judging by the jewellery finds. Matriarchs. A woman’s belt had also been discovered, decorated with caribou teeth. John said, ‘My aunt had a belt like that! It was her weapon. If you saw her untying that belt, you ran!’

  I liked that people talked so readily and unembarrassedly about animals and birds and the land. They didn’t give ‘information,’ instead they told incidents, anecdotes. Like coming at a subject sideways, not straight on. One morning I was standing by the grocery store looking out at the mountains, when a man joined me. I knew him only as George. He’d be in his sixties, with an earnest, attractive face. I knew him to see because he was the unassuming janitor who looked after the red building and the bunkhouse where we slept.