Surfacing Read online

  The others reappeared over the brow of the hill. They’d been off scouting for bears but had had no luck. We wanted to spot a bear because Melia and I were going home soon, and there hasn’t been a wild bear in Scotland for a thousand years. But there were no bears nearby. ‘They’ll be at the salmon spawning grounds on the side creeks,’ Teddi said.

  Then Warren told about hunting a bear. He spoke with no self-aggrandisement or swagger. On the contrary. He’d been young at the time and out hunting with his father. ‘Shoot it!’ said his father. He shot the bear. Twice. Then his father scored lines on the dead bear, in preparation for skinning it, and handed Warren the knife, saying, ‘Your bear, your responsibility.’

  ‘It look me three days to skin that bear. I never hunted bear again.’

  Too soon we had to leave, edging back down to the river in its channel and the waiting boat. Down there, the dream vision of the land was gone. I felt I’d had a glimpse of something – and a glimpse is all we have in this life.

  Back at the shingle beach, Patrick had kept the fire burning. The rain had passed. Again the sisters set to work – now we would eat salmon. They took one of the morning’s catch, wrapped it in tinfoil and set it in the hot embers. Then the fishing lines came out again, and as the first fish baked they landed several more. I could not believe the number of fish. When the fire-baked salmon was ready, we hunkered round the fire, eating its hot, pink flesh with our fingers. Then came a gateau Teddi had brought from the store; it was only slightly bashed. Having eaten, we travelled downstream again, bringing Patrick with us. They’d come back another day for the boat with the faulty engine. Right now we were going with the flow, swooping and turning with the Kanektok.

  But we weren’t done fishing. Some miles downstream we put into a slow, green easy backwater aside from the main channel. Here, in the waters around a grassy islet, there flashed the scarlet sides of sockeye salmon, dozens of them. Like silk slashes in a Tudor sleeve, the fish parted the water’s surface as they moved. Again we left the boat, again the rods came out. It was appalling. Having spawned, the salmon were rotting even before they died. Red and stylish in the water, they emerged from it like things of nightmare, mouldering, hook-faced, blotched. They were so plentiful, all our hosts had to do was choose one, throw a hook at it and haul it in. One after another the fish were landed. They flapped listlessly on the mud, then were beaten over the head. Fifteen, twenty fish skulls broke with a wet smacking sound.

  As Teddi had predicted, bears had been here, and perhaps still were, though we couldn’t smell them. On the ground among the riverside shrubs were strewn the half-chewed bodies of a dozen fish. Such profligacy!

  Having killed the fish, Teddi sliced off their heads with the curved blade of her ulu. When she threw the salmon heads back into the clear water, dozens of smaller fish shoaled round to investigate.

  I wasn’t going to get off without fishing, and soon enough Warren handed me his rod and line, and showed me how to hold it. I’d never fished before, so stood in the stern of the boat and inexpertly dangled the hook in the water. In two minutes a trout came, simple as that, like a magic creature in a folk tale, surrendering itself to me. I pulled and wound it in, the rod bending, the fish gleaming as it rose.

  * * *

  * * *

  The vision of the land stayed with me. That night, in my dark bunk, I tried to imagine it by moonlight, the whole plain covered in caribou. In truth, it almost reminded me of Scotland. The ice-worn hills were almost like Highland Perthshire but on a vaster scale, and the colours brighter and light more intense, and there were no roads or towns, no pylons or farms or dams or big houses with rich private landowners.

  There were fugitive creatures. Wolves and wolverines and bears. Rivers full of fish.

  * * *

  * * *

  If you imagine all the incidents the people here spoke of, all the looking and listening, the stories and encounters, remembered and repeated and layered over thousands of years, you might indeed come to know your own backyard. And how it might help you. From two different sources I heard the story of the young man, some decades ago, who went with friends out onto the sea-ice. They’d been hunting, but he somehow got separated from the others, and when he tried to reach land and home he couldn’t, because the ice had drifted away from the shore. Alone on the ice, he survived for four months. All he had was the clothes on his back, and his tools and weapons – and the knowledge his elders had bequeathed him.

  We were told that story, and others, not in a sod hut lit by a seal-oil lamp, certainly not in an igloo, but in the red building – a metal-clad shed raised on stilts, harsh with electric strip lights. Does that matter? The stories came from people so softly spoken, and arrived so unexpectedly, and were over so soon, I wondered if I’d heard them at all.

  The Yup’ik people might be spiritual, for want of a better word, but they’re deeply practical, attuned to the land for good reason. The next day Warren was again striding toward his office, harassed as ever, cell phone pressed to his ear, but when he spotted me he came over to deliver a formal thank you.

  ‘In our tradition,’ he said, ‘the first fish you catch you must give to an elder. I gave your trout to my mother. She sends her thanks. She says, “Now my belly is full.”’

  * * *

  * * *

  It was the last week of the dig, and there approached the finale which required days of preparation on the part of conservators like Melia: the annual ‘show and tell.’ It would take place in the red building. All the best artefacts would be laid out on display, with everyone in town encouraged to come and see and talk about them. A hot-dog stand would be erected outside, with salmon broth for the more traditional-minded elders.

  As well as Quinhagak folk, journalists and anthropologists were flying in. Maybe a TV crew. Melia now spent her days in the ‘lab,’ selecting the best of the finds, cleaning them ready to be displayed, arranging them according to theme. Posters went up at the school and store, the coin-op laundry, the clinic and the post office.

  When I took a poster down to the tribal office, where Mike Smith held a day job, there was another big poster on the wall already. ‘Birds on the Subsistence Harvest Survey,’ it said, and showed dozens of images of birds. Each bird was depicted with its English name and a blank box, for people to write in their local names. Someone with a biro had written in the Yup’ik names:

  Pacific loon: Tunutillek

  Common loon: Qaqatak

  Crane: Qucillgak

  Jeanette was there and with her help I mastered, momentarily, Qucillgak and Qaqatak, the crane and the loon. Soft and irresisting sounds, like the tundra in summer, all ‘qs’ and ‘ks’ and ‘ochs.’

  ‘You sound like a Yuup!’ said Mike.

  ‘That’ll be right!’

  When the Thursday came round, the day of the ‘show and tell,’ those not out on site excavating until the last moment remained behind at the red building for a marathon of preparation.

  Every horizontal surface was cleared of mugs, laptops, chargers, trays of fishbones, trays of woodchips, and then cleaned. The floor was scrubbed, furniture rearranged. When the hall was presentable, on its walls were hung photographs of the site: diggers huddled and grinning, Rick posing with a theodolite, Mike at a screen with the tundra receding into the distance.

  The preparations could have been for a village wedding or a bring-and-buy sale. By 4 p.m. the tables were ready, the photos mounted, and all the selected artefacts, hundreds of them, were laid out according to theme, each in a little open plastic box, each resting on the carefully numbered bag to which it had to be returned. Melia worried that artefacts would become separated from their numbers, from their contexts. Like the people who made them, they were part of a community, a culture.

  The students had scrubbed up nicely. Showers had been taken, clean shirts fetched from the bottom of backpacks. The hall began t
he day smelling of bleach, but soon the slow-cooking fish broth took over. It was a wintery atmosphere, despite the bright sunshine outside.

  Then everything was ready. The students were stationed like stallholders, each with a water-spray to keep the artefacts slightly damp, especially the wooden ones.

  It was like the anxiety before a party – will anyone come? At 4 p.m. I went to the door and was glad to see four-wheelers approaching down the street, people strolling over from their houses.

  The first visitor was an elder in a turquoise headscarf with her adult grandson. They began at the beginning, heads bowed over a long table laid with arrowheads and hunting tools, harpoon parts. Then a school party arrived, with the headteacher. How many of these people I now knew by sight. With the children, the noise level increased. The schoolkids fastened on the table of gaming pieces. Dice made of bone, and darts. Then the array of dolls, so called, the flat sticks with three lines for a face, which may be simple toys, or maybe not.

  There were the wooden masks and maskettes. A whole table was devoted to jewellery and adornment.

  Then came household things: spoons of wood, knives of stone. Favourite pieces were like old friends: the whale/seal ulu, the bowl released from the ice, a wooden carving of an owl. The materials were driftwood, antler, bone, grass, ivory, stone. The materials were the gifts of other creatures: fish, owls, caribou, seals, walrus, whales.

  The place was full of life. People wore jeans, hoodies, kuspuks; men came in their working clothes with high-vis jackets and boots. Small children were held up to view the objects. The students had to be vigilant, to make sure things weren’t picked up and put down in the wrong place.

  As the room filled and the sound of conversation grew, I wandered round table to table, eavesdropping.

  ‘And you’d pull the bow like this...’

  ‘A lamp! My mother had one.’

  ‘Nowadays we use synthetic sinew, ballistic nylon.’

  I saw George, the water man. The last time I’d spoken to him he had a mop in his hands. Here he was again, but he’d swapped the mop for his seal-hunting harpoon, which stood taller than he did. He was showing the students how his modern harpoon toggle compared to those of his Yup’ik forebears at Nunallaq. His was the same shape, same mechanism, but made of brass.

  A lady came with a basket she had woven from beach grass. She was plump and wore a bright floral kuspuk and tracksuit bottoms. Her basket was bowl-shape, a foot deep and decorated with stylised flowers in what looked like strips torn from an old polythene bag, but no, she said, it’s seal-gut, dyed. I saw her in earnest conversation with a PhD student who was studying grass-work.

  Warren was in business mode, showing round two visitors, white men wearing ballcaps. Something told me he was seeking sponsorship, to keep the dig going.

  Soon, children had taken over water-spraying duties. Two dogs scampered in, were ejected. A little girl was looking at the so-called dolls. ‘Do you like them?’ I asked. She replied, ‘If you make these, the spirits haunt you.’

  At the table given over to personal adornment were some photographs of Yup’ik people taken as recently as the 1930s – men squinting out of fur-lined parkas, their faces pierced with labrets, women with their lower lips all hanging with beads. On show was a whole tray of labrets, some two inches long, some carved with seal faces. If a seal face looks out from a man’s face, is he a man or a seal? Or a touch of both, like a selkie?

  The both at once. The seal/whale knife. I saw John Smith there with Sarah’s brother-in-law, the town’s other ivory carver, peering together at the pendant with the recurring design of concentric circles round a dot. The all-seeing eye.

  I felt that the village of Quinhagak was the dot, and around it wheeled the land and animals, sea and sky.

  Feelings inevitably ran high. The woman who had come to the site and spoken about names was saying, ‘We need to get our history back! The Pilgrim Fathers never discovered America!’

  Someone else said, ‘You know the church owns the land between here and the river? They should give it back. They can keep their church and the graveyard, but they should give us back the land. That would be a gesture.’

  A man I knew as Willard said, ‘It’s getting better. More education. We’ve got kids going to college, taking leadership roles. They’re out-migrating but contributing. We’ve still got poverty, unemployment ... We want to live a subsistence life but we have to negotiate with the world out there. We’ve got to think about the carrying capacity of the land, and the cost of fuel...’

  Hunter-gatherers who stop at the store on the way home.

  ‘You’ve got your land,’ I said. ‘So much depends on that. Where I come from, land’s almost all in private hands.’

  ‘One hundred and thirty thousand acres.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, it’s for everyone. There’s interesting stuff happening, with Native land claims.’

  When everyone had gone home, the marathon of packing away resumed. Into big plastic trunks, suitable for airfreight, went all the artefacts, the soil samples, the wood and fauna samples. There would be forty-five crates to ship to Aberdeen.

  There was an end-of-term feeling that night, with everyone in good humour, and relieved. Mike Smith and his friend Walter came to join the students for the evening, to enjoy the company of youngsters their own age. The place became a clutter again, like student digs. They hooked up a laptop and a screen, got on to Netflix, pulled up chairs and prepared to watch Game of Thrones. The opening scenes showed snow falling. Snow on snow.

  Before that, though, I asked Mike if he’d mind telling me his Yup’ik name.

  ‘Sure. Kisngalria. Kis-ngal-ggia. It means “One who has sunken.” Also, Alaskuk, A-luss-kook. I’ll write it for you. And Atlgan. That’s Atll-ggun. They were two people who died around the time I was born.’

  Walter said: ‘I’m Qaqatak...’

  ‘I know that word! That’s...’

  ‘Common Loon.’

  A boy who is a bird. I looked at Walter in delight. Qaqatak. I wanted to run round everyone I’d met, asking them all. Every Sarah and Mary. Every Smith and Jones.

  John Smith was Dunreeluk. ‘It means,’ he said diffidently, ‘something to do with light.’

  Later Melia said: ‘Did you hear John saying that his grandfather was a shaman? Twenty years ago, no one would have admitted to that. They wouldn’t have spoken about it. They’d have been ashamed.’

  The reporter wrote a long and supportive feature, but her paper hadn’t been able to resist using the word ‘treasure.’ When he saw it, Rick growled through his beard, ‘This is not about treasure. This is about cultural resilience.’

  It’s about saying, this is yours. Everything you feared you’d lost, or never even knew you had. Look. It’s here. It’s back.

  * * *

  * * *

  The ‘bow and arrow wars’ were resolved by dancing. That’s the story. A realisation came that war and terror were futile, and that competition could be carried out by other means. By dance. Singing. Feasting – and naming. I was told that the communities bound themselves together again by naming. A baby born on one ‘side’ of the conflict would be named for a deceased person on the other. They had dance festivals.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘He who loses his language loses his world.’ So wrote the Gaelic poet Iain Crichton Smith/Iain Mac a’Ghobhainn. One wonders if the converse is true. If one loses one’s world, one loses one’s language. The world of things, of making, of the land and animals and the stories and the hands’ work.

  The day after the ‘show and tell,’ almost our last day in Quinhagak, another quieter event was held. An anthropologist called Ann Fienup-Riordan had arrived. Petite, in her sixties, fearless, Ann was well known and well liked by the Quinhagak folk. She had learned Yup’ik, and spent her professional life speaking and documenting stories and histories
, and editing books like Erinaput Unguvaniartut (So Our Voices Will Live) and Quinhagak History and Oral Traditions. In her books there are many headings like:

  Travelling in the wilderness.

  She said if a red fox had crossed somewhere, that area was safe.

  They say only the south wind flattens grass.

  We are teachers to our grandchildren.

  Lead dogs are very smart.

  Squirrel hunting in the mountains.

  A story of when the ice detached and people floated away.

  Ann had come to talk again to elders whom she knew, elders who spoke little if any English. In a comfortably furnished room across the yard next to the supermarket, a room with sofas and a stove, another pot of broth was set to cook, and some equipment arranged: a sound recorder and a video camera. Into the room, carefully assisted up the external stairs, came three of the town’s oldest folks – two men and a woman in their eighties, all wrinkle-faced. They sat at a table. The window gave views of the tundra and distant mountains they had known all their long lives. Snacks were provided; the elders all were keen on cartons of fruit juice.

  I sat quietly on a sofa at the back of the room, ready to listen, though I knew I would understand nothing. It was the first time I’d heard Yup’ik spoken in a sustained way. That was the point. The elders were here to discuss objects found on the site. In this way, more would be known about the objects, and the objects would reawaken the elders’ language as they turned the objects in their old hands.

  The eldest man was brown as a nut. His eyes were narrow and his face deeply lined after a lifetime in the light and snow. He wore a sweatshirt so thick and brown, you could have mistaken it for hide. He looked just like the men in the photographs, his grandfather’s generation, minus only the labrets.