Surfacing Read online

When the elders were settled and the tape running, Ann brought in a tray of half a dozen objects and set it on the table. Unlike in Kim’s Game, the objects remained in view. This was a test of memory of a different order. One by one, one at a time, the elders took up the objects. Their fingers were thick. They had known much work and many winters.

  On the first tray were snare-pins, root-picks, a bucket handle. Everyday objects. They turned the objects, felt and examined them, and begin to speak. Explanations, lore, stories. Ann was there to understand, guide, clarify. The bucket handle was made of bentwood; the root-picks, which women would have used to dig for edible roots, were made from the ribs of sea mammals.

  The language was soothing. The elders spoke softly, making sounds like wood gently knocked on wood. Through the window, a green rib of tundra, a wall of mountains. The objects were turned, demonstrated. The last time they had been touched by Yup’ik hands and named like this was five hundred years ago.

  From time to time a phrase was translated into English, for clarification. An antler scraper. ‘To take the fat off the skin?’ ‘Yes, like this.’ Now they were examining a stone pick, weighing it, testing its edge. They identified the source of that particular kind of stone, a particular valley in the mountains.

  Out the window, a flight of geese passed, the grasses rippled. It would soon rain. The eldest man had the stone pick in one hand as he reached for a chocolate cookie with the other. I was listening to the language of this landscape, as expressed with the hands and eye. The sun had favoured a few clouds over the mountains. The broth simmered.

  ‘This is from a woman’s toolbox. Knives, needles, thimbles. They’d keep them close by.’

  The objects are out of the earth, back in the hands of people who call them into memory and know them, weigh them, test them, name them. Truly, they have come home.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was time to leave. But before that the site had to be backfilled, and closed down for winter.

  In the last few days, I walked, knowing I’d never see anywhere so spacious and so radiant again.

  That’s okay. I wished the Quinhagak people well.

  I wish them their reclaimed past.

  I wish them a future. I wish them snow.

  Intending to head to the shore, I walked out along toward the three turbines, and there through my binoculars watched a big flight of geese coming in, and a jaeger hovering like a kestrel. Closer, a large mammal made me pause. I’m here! But it was just a village dog.

  The turbines’ columns made strange fluty sounds. A duck quacked from some hidden pool.

  I wanted to sit a while and look out to sea, in hopes of seeing beluga whales, because if you don’t look, you don’t see, and I was going home soon.

  Out across the Bering Sea, a vapour trail.

  At the spot Sarah had brought me on her four-wheeler, I sat on a tussock and looked out, now with binoculars, now with my naked eye. The tide was coming in, white horses in the distance. The river flowed to my right, leftwards lay the miles of shore down to the site, where the heavy work of backfilling was about to begin.

  I sat letting my eyes sharpen, hoping for whale-blows as they chased salmon.

  The ryegrass, for basketmaking, grew behind me. Sand with pebbles and feathers.

  A couple of pacific loons riding on the water.

  Then, coming down the riverside, there appeared a four-wheeler. It was driven by John Smith. In his blue, thick-checked shirt and windblown hair, I realised I’d never seen him outdoors before.

  ‘I’m looking for animals,’ I said. ‘And birds.’ A natural and unembarrassing thing to do. ‘Beluga whales.’

  ‘Yes, they come by. Chasing the herring-fish. Mostly in spring. We harpoon them! They’re tough. Good for the teeth.’

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’ I asked.

  ‘Just out for a look around.’

  Like Sarah had been, and Warren had done, up on the bluff upriver. Janitors of a huge, open-air domain.

  This business of looking at the land – no one says, ‘Come on, hurry up, what are you looking at?’

  ‘What’s that?’ John asked, pointing. He had good eyesight, for a man of seventy who wears glasses, with the optician an aircraft flight away.

  ‘A gull. See.’ I handed over my binoculars. John checked the gull, then began slowly panning the sea.

  ‘My, these are good! Ha! I just came out for a look-see, and I found a shaman! Seeing far, far...’ He gestured toward the horizon.

  ‘Nah,’ I laughed. ‘They’re just half-decent binoculars...’

  ‘There were women shamans, you know. Stronger than the men, some of them. They could put you in a trance!’

  He handed the glasses back.

  ‘And could you get out of the trance?’

  He made a strange gesture. This man who could mimic sandhill cranes and owls was doing something odd with his hands. Weaving and catching. ‘You had to find your way out.’

  In the silence of the shore, the strange light, it discomfited me. Frightening people, shamans.

  ‘There were good shamans, too,’ said John, reading my thoughts.

  ‘Are there any nowadays?’

  He considered.

  ‘No. But there are people with strong minds who might want to do you harm.’

  ‘John, what do you think will happen, in the future?’

  It was a while before he answered.

  ‘I hope snow. The grasses are long.’

  ‘Is that a sign of snow to come, long grasses?’

  ‘In what way, the future?’

  ‘I mean the land. Animals. People. Yup’ik people. Climate change.’

  ‘I don’t concern myself much with people. The animals ... We are conserving now, caribou, fish – that’s good. We’ll adapt. We’ll expect the unexpected. Mother nature will do what she will do.’

  ‘If anyone adapts, you people will.’

  He smiled at me. ‘We watch you people on TV!’

  ‘And what do you think of us people on TV?’

  ‘We watch you running about wild!’

  ‘Come and see what we’re really like. Come to Scotland.’

  ‘By dog team!’ he said.

  ‘Smart ones!’ I laughed.

  ‘Which way do I go?’

  I pointed east, upriver. But I could equally have pointed west, over the Bering Sea, to Siberia. Just keep going.

  * * *

  * * *

  By Labor Day it was cool in the mornings and, as Mike noted, the swallows were gone. I walked to the end of the street, to where the tundra opened. I wanted to remember how the tundra grasses rippled, how the light, so radiant, fell from the sky. I passed a discarded freezer full of garbage bags, and some playful puppy dogs. Then a little girl ran up to me. She had something exciting to tell: ‘There’s a Big Foot!’

  ‘Where!’

  ‘Upriver! My dad saw it. He’s got a photo. It’s got four toes!’

  ‘I’d love to see the photo,’ I said, but already she was gone, running up the stairs and into her house – the one with whalebones and an upturned snowmobile outside.

  The shore was empty. Silent. Again the tide was out, as it had been the first time I came here. Unutterably silent, shining. It still unnerved me. Tyre tracks on the dark sand, and miles of emptiness. I walked down toward the site, then stopped, suddenly unsure. What to do? Walk to the site? Go back into the village? Might there be bears? There had been no mention of bears lately.

  I walked south along the silent shore. It was too quiet.

  In the distance, a movement. Something on the beach. I watched, squinting. Not a bear, not a woman, not a raven. It was a four-wheeler, of course. Actually, two four-wheelers, heading toward me at speed, churning clouds of sand.

  Soon they were on me, but they slo
wed and I recognised the four village lads hired as labourers to help with the backfilling. They were heading home for lunch.

  They stopped.

  ‘You wanna ride?’

  Choices, choices. A last, solitary walk by the silent shore of the Bering Sea, or a lift with these diffident handsome Yup’ik boys?

  I was old enough to be their mother.

  The sea shone, the sky was vast. I’d never be here again.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

  The Eagle

  A SHAPE IN THE AIR above the ridge has caught my attention and, rather than drive squinting upwards through the windscreen, I pull over at the next passing place and switch off the engine.

  It’s summer, a long July gloaming. The road I’m taking cuts through a rough glen. There are no houses on this stretch, only the thin road and a lochan of peat-coloured water. The hill on the left is a steep strew of bare rock and heather rising to a ridge which runs north for about a mile and a half; the hill on the right is lower. The whole glen, now I’ve stopped, has become a place of entrancing desolation.

  I leave the car, feel the breeze and look up. Maybe it’s just a buzzard and you know what they say – if you’re asking yourself, ‘Is that an eagle or a buzzard?’ then it’s a buzzard. Ninety-eight per cent of all eagles are buzzards. But there’s something in the authoritative way the bird is occupying airspace, a black hyphen above the near-bare crest of the hill.

  Now the bird is joined by another, at a distance, and the two of them are dark against the evening sky. The two are in relationship, you can sense it, but not obviously acknowledging each other.

  I have the first in the binoculars now: yes, the long, straight underside of the wings, the deep indentations, spikes almost, of the wing tips. It shows no colour except the back of the head or nape, which is markedly pale, and which now and again ignites in the evening light. But I have to look hard to see that. I lower the glasses and watch both together, a team. What marks them out is the way they treat the air: as a resource, a birthright, theirs in never-ending abundance.

  Now one peels off and glides down into the glen on the far side of the ridge and is gone from view. In its absence, the first eagle flies lower down toward the valley floor here where the road runs, where I stand leaning against the car. This bird is hanging in the air on one side of the hill, its mate like a counterweight on the other.

  Because it’s dropped height, it’s not now a shape exposed against the sky but a movement camouflaged against the heather and bracken of the hillside. It’s consequently difficult to follow, until it turns and for a moment displays the brassy colour of its back. I realise that, in all the time since I left the car, it has not once beaten its wings.

  Down here at the roadside the ground is damp, bog cotton shivers. No other vehicle has passed. Over this landscape the eagle moves as though the air were ice; as if it were a puck sliding over ice.

  For a moment there I lost the eagle, but now it’s visible again. It’s coming closer and looks as though it might pass almost directly overhead. I try to keep track of it in the binoculars, and sure enough it descends at a long angle, flies across the road and glides toward the lower reaches of the hill on the other side. This would be a journey of about a kilometre on the ground – a stumbling ankle-twisting walk it would be, too. Now it’s swinging round and in turning shows a mantle of colour on its upper side, more brassy than golden. It’s obtained some updraft from somewhere and slides up the air again, as though riding an invisible escalator. At last, when it must feel itself about to stall, it makes four quick deep wing-beats, and carries on.

  Weeks later, I ask an acquaintance who is a glider pilot about the feel of air. Are there really different textures of air, and can you feel them? ‘Oh, yes, yes, yes!’ she says. Even encased in a glider? ‘Certainly,’ she says. ‘It’s as different as a road surface changing as you drive, and as sudden. You feel it through your body, the glider feels it, having no engines, nothing to propel you through...’

  Then, unprompted, she says, ‘I often imagine what it must be like for the big birds. Like eagles, who feel the air so much more than we do, much more sensitive. You know how they loop round and round, feeling out the thermals that will lift them? It must be like swimming in a lake, bathing now in warmth, now in coolness...’

  I’m still leaning against the car, and until now had the first eagle in sight, in the binoculars. It was drifting along against a slope of rock and dark heather. But now I see something I hadn’t noticed before. It’s a shed made of corrugated iron, mustard-coloured, halfway up the hill. It’s enclosed in a decrepit wire fence, with a lopsided sign saying, DANGER: KEEP OUT. The eagle has just passed over it, but the shed distracts me for a moment too long. What danger could there be in a ramshackle old hut? And who would go there, anyway? In that moment, in that change in the texture of my attention, a lurch like when you drive from smooth tarmac onto cobbles, I lose sight of the eagle altogether. It’s vanished, its mate has vanished, and there’s nothing to do but drive on.

  Links of Noltland

  I

  BECAUSE A TRACTOR was lumbering toward me, I’d pulled into a passing-place. It was silage-cutting time on Westray and many tractors were abroad on the island’s few miles of road. The driver waved as he passed. In the lay-by, I stayed put, just looking around.

  On my right, in a field behind a wire fence, a bull was chewing slowly, lost in his bull’s dream. To the left, the land sloped down toward a small loch. All the land surrounding the loch was fenced with stone dykes or barbed wire, all had been turned into fields. Only the heights of the smooth hills beyond were left uncontained. Of the lower fields, some were lush with grass and held cattle, or ‘kye’ – farming folk here still use the old Scots word. Other fields were ripe with brittle-gold barley.

  I drove on down into the town of Pierowall, a straggle of shoreside grey houses and stores. Because the tide was low, plains of bright mustard-gold seaweed were exposed, with a few seals hauled out. At the school, which was closed for the summer holiday, I turned sharp left and followed a thin road as it began to climb up over the hill to serve the last few farms on the island’s west side, the side exposed to the Atlantic. Up there were cliffs and a lighthouse, then nothing else till Newfoundland, as folk are quick to tell you.

  Before the hill, however, a small sign indicated a track that led to a beach. I’d been told to follow this track, so I bumped along between stone walls. Behind the walls, more pale cows were grazing, another farm with its tractor in the dungy yard.

  ‘Links of Noltland,’ the sign had said. It means something like ‘the sandy dunes of the land of the cattle’ in a mix of Scots, Norse and English. The car I was driving had been kindly loaned to me. It was an elderly island car but a loan nonetheless, so I drove gingerly round the potholes down to the track’s end, where a white minibus was already parked. This was the edge of another bay, north-facing, a shallow half-mile of creamy sand and slabs of rock. It rose into cliffs in the eastern distance. I left the car. Big waves were driving ashore, leaving plumes of rainbow hanging in the air behind them. Heaps of tangle had been freshly delivered by the tide, but no one was collecting it. In the recent past it would have been scooped up for fertiliser; in the remote past, before peat ever formed on the hills, it would have gone for fuel.

  I floundered through dry sand, past a prominent stony mound toward a gate in a wire fence. A sign on the fence, intended to explain something about the dunes behind, had itself been thoroughly sand-blasted. The gist was that the dunes were man-made, restored and planted with rye and marram grass. Beyond the fence, I could see spoil heaps and a few figures wrapped against sand and wind, intent on the ground beneath their feet. Here also was that symbol of the globalised world, the shipping container. Two shipping containers in fact, a green one and a blue, parked in the sand. The shipping containers served as office and mess-hut and store.

  T
he Links of Noltland archaeological dig was begun almost a decade ago. Its directors are Hazel Moore and Graeme Wilson, a couple who now live on Westray and have established family life here. It was Hazel who showed me round at first, crossing the site to meet me like a moving flame. She is small of stature with coppery-bright hair that catches the sun, and very bright blue eyes. Her accent is a broad Dublin.

  Hazel led me to the east side where, backed by spoil and an array of old tyres, we had an overview of the site. I saw a species of chaos, but my eye was far from attuned. Before me were sections of walling a metre high at most, freshly exposed, and stones everywhere, embedded in the earth, and wheelbarrows, buckets and string. Among the stones, eight or ten people were at work, some drawing plans, some scraping with trowels, filling buckets with the earth they’d removed. All wore jackets, most had hats of some sort, to keep their hair out of their eyes. It was August, but not balmy.

  Hazel explained that a dune system which had existed for millennia had recently been obliterated by the wind. A natural cycle had been interrupted. Across a mere fifteen or twenty years the ancient dunes had collapsed, and the vegetation had vanished.

  Orkney is a windy place, storms are not unknown, but the couple’s interim archaeological report had called this sustained erosion ‘exceptional and unprecedented.’ But with the sand and vegetation scoured away, a ground surface had been exposed which had been recognised as an extensive Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement. Houses, workshops, walls, even field systems and soil, it was all here. They wouldn’t last, though: having been exposed after their long burial, those remains too were immediately vulnerable to the wind.

  Hazel said: ‘This whole site is not going to last. And it’s not just Orkney, this erosion is something we’re seeing throughout Scotland. The archaeology we are digging has been buried for five thousand years, and it has never been exposed like this in all that time. What’s happening is significant really to ... well, to archaeology, but also to us, the human race.’