He bring many good things. Many times he try to keep alcohol away from the village.
But always white men bring it back. Much money. That Afanasi try to help lost ones.
Always he say "turn to God,"but nothing change. And his sons. They lost too. One, Vladimir's father. He always drunk. He should be strong hunter. But he die young.
His brother Ivan, uncle to Vladimir, he become very quiet. No more talk. No more fish. No more hunt. Just stop. Then he shoot hisself.'
The woman halted her story, studied the young schoolteacher for some moments, and added: 'Eskimo sickness jump generations like salmon upstream. First Afanasi noble man, but both his sons destroy selves. Our Afanasi in next generation noble man, but you heard what happen to his son?'
'I didn't,' Kendra said, and she gasped when the woman said: 'One day, no reason, he shoot hisself.' Shaking her head, she concluded: 'Maybe someday Vladimir's sister in Seattle have a grandson, maybe noble man too.'
THAT FIRST WINTER ENDED WITH SUCH A SAVAGE CHAIN of days in which the thermometer stayed always below thirty and often forty, that Kendra sought to provide respite from the boredom that attacked her students. She told them of the wonders of Salt Lake City and Denver and tried to explain what a rodeo was, and when she learned that one of the Barrow teachers had brought back from a vacation in Honolulu some high-quality movies of the islands, she asked Mr. Hooker if he had funds to invite the teacher down to talk to their students, and he said: 'We'll throw it open to the whole community,' and it was a festive evening.
But along with the colorful shots of tropical flowers and hula dancers throwing fiery swords from one to the other, the film had an unusual segment which the teacher introduced with special care: 'We're now going to witness the dedication of a new high school.
See the lovely murals ... imagine a gymnasium with open sides ... that's a bell tower. But what I want you to see is this old man he's coming to bless the building before anyone can enter, reassuring the gods of the islands that all is in order. He's a kahuna ... he speaks with the gods. He's what we would call a shaman.'
The film showed the solemn ceremonies, the mountains behind the new school, the wonderful craggy face of the kahuna as he asked for a blessing: 'But I want you to see especially those four men in black looking on ... Catholic priests. They don't like kahunas but they've invited him to bless their school ... and can you guess why?' And she stopped the film and said solemnly: 'I want you to study these next pictures carefully.
Eight months before what you've just seen, an earlier version of the school was finished ... students about to come to class. And someone warned the Catholic priests: "You better have the kahuna bless your school because if the gods aren't happy, it might burn down." The priests said: "Nonsense!"... and look what happened!'
She showed film taken earlier of the huge fire consuming the school, and after several minutes, when the fires abated and the ashes were visible, she said: 'The kahuna had warned them and they hadn't listened, so this time when their school was ready, they had him come in. He wears about his neck the leaves of a sacred tree, the maile.
He prays to the god of fire: "Don't burn this school"... to the god of winds: "Don't blow down this school."And now he blesses even the priests who had fought against him: "Keep these good men in health and help them to teach."And now the old man blesses us all: "Help everyone to learn." And the school had no more troubles, for the Hawaiian shaman had protected it in the proper way.'
The effect of this film on Jonathan Borodin was so disturbing that he could not sleep, and toward two in the morning he came banging on Kendra's door.
'Who's there?' she called.
'Jonathan. I have to speak with you.'
'In the morning, Jonathan. I'm sleeping now.'
'But I must. I have to see you,' so against her better judgment she put on her robe, opened the door gingerly, and admitted the distraught young man.
His problem was unique. Both in Germany and in the film he had seen that sensible men and women revered the ancient ways, and that treasured beings like shamans survived in both cultures. 'What's wrong with my grandfather?' he asked, so abruptly and so combatively that she drew back and said quickly: 'Nothing at all, Jonathan. I hear he's a fine man. Mr. Afanasi said so.'
'Afanasi!' the boy repeated with contempt. 'In our little village he opposes everything my grandfather does. But in that big city they respect their shamans. They know they're needed.'
Suddenly, without any warning, he fell heavily upon her bed, trembling as if caught by some wracking force, and after several attempts to control himself, he said softly:
'I see things that others don't see, Miss Scott. I know when the whales are coining back.' When Kendra said nothing, he caught her hand and said quietly but with great force: 'That new girl you like so much, Amy, dreadful things are going to happen to her. She'll never go to college the way you want her to. I'm not going either.
I'm going to be a shaman.'
With that, he rose, bowed toward where she stood, thanked her for her help, and said at the doorway: 'You're a fine teacher, Miss Scott, but you won't stay at Desolation very long. You represent the new ways, but with us the old ways never die.' Before she could respond he was gone, closing the door silently behind him.
He left a bewildered Kendra, aware that she should never have allowed him entrance to her room. As to his announcement that he intended to follow in his grandfather's steps and become a shaman, she understood the psychological impact the opera in Munich and the kahuna's performance in the film had had, but because her knowledge of Alaskan history was imperfect, she had no basis for judging whether his decision to become a shaman made sense or not. She was distraught and failed to sleep until nearly five in the morning.
She was inclined to report the night's bizarre events to Afanasi, but she judged that this would not be fruitful, for while the Eskimo leader had tried to be impartial in his judgment of shamanism, she had seen that he opposed it in even its mildest and most ineffective survival. What she really wished was that Jeb might have been there, for she knew that his appraisal would have been sober and relevant. In this unsettled frame of mind she prepared to complete her exciting first year of teaching, and sometimes in the late afternoon as spring approached the still-frozen north, she stopped young Borodin as he sped along on his snowmobile and tried to talk with him about returning to the university with the coming of summer.
Cryptically he referred to other interests, saying that he might look for a job at Prudhoe Bay, then adding: 'Anyway, whales will be arriving on their way north next week," and with that prediction uttered so carelessly, she was catapulted into the heart of ancient Eskimo experience. For on Thursday the village exploded with excitement when scouts from ' Afanasi's umiak stationed at the edge of the landfast ice along the inshore lane of open water reported over their portable radio: 'Lookout at Point Hope radioed five bowheads heading our way.'
Afanasi, who had been waiting many days for just such a report, stopped by the school in his pickup, shouted for Kendra to join him, then waited impatiently while she slipped into her Eskimo gear. 'You'll see something now!' he cried exultantly as they went down to the edge of the ice, where a skidoo waited to skim him over the shore ice to the open water of the lane. 'I don't like these things,' he told Kendra, 'but jump on,' and over the rumpled ice they sped, picking their way through the hummocks.
When they reached water and the waiting umiak, they were greeted by Afanasi's crew of five tested whale hunters, and Kendra watched with admiration as Afanasi deftly eased himself into position, lest his heavy feet puncture the sealskin bottom.
The whale hunters of Desolation, and any man who took pride in his reputation wanted to be one, used two kinds of craft: the traditional umiak rowed by hand when the bowheads came close to the edge of the landfast ice, and an aluminum skiff with outboard motor when the lane water was wide and the whales stayed far from shore. Afanasi, as the conservator of old ways, abhorred the skif
fs as much as he did the noisy skidoos.
He was an umiak man.
Moving lazily north up the narrow lane of free water, hemmed in on both sides by thick ice, came four adult whales, two of them more than fifty feet long and weighing fifty tons each according to the rule 'One foot, one ton,' accompanied by a youthful one not more than twenty feet long, and in stately procession the whales approached the hunters. 'Oh!' Kendra gasped as she stood alone at the edge of the ice. 'They look like galleons coming back to England after a tussle with the Spanish.'
Now Afanasi, as the most practiced and respected hunter, took over, and from the rear of his umiak, not much different from those constructed in Siberia fifteen thousand years earlier, he and his five helpers set forth in freezing seas to harpoon themselves a whale. When the huge lead whale sounded, they knew from long experience that it might stay submerged as long as six or seven minutes, and they assumed that they had missed it. But on came the others, and when they too sounded at irregular intervals, Afanasi's men feared that they might have lost their opportunity. When the second fifty-footer reappeared, it had moved over to the far side of open water, where it slipped by unscathed, but one of the smaller ones, about forty feet long, sounded well south of where Afanasi and his umiak waited, and an Eskimo who had come to stand beside Kendra said: 'That one's gonna come up right where Vladimir wants it,' and about five minutes later the whale broke through the surface, spouted, and to the disgust of the men in the umiak and those watching from shore, immediately sounded again with its great flukes thrashing, and disappeared before any of Afanasi's men could attack it with any likelihood of success.
'Oh!' the man standing beside Kendra groaned with a pain that was obviously real, and when she looked at him for an explanation, he told her: 'The International Whaling Commission, Russia and Canada and them, wanted to halt whaling altogether. But our Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission said: "Hey! It's our way of life. Allow us a few each year."'
'How many did they give you?'
'Desolation? Our quota? Two.'
'Per year?'
'Yep, and for the past two years how many do you think we landed? None.' He spat, looked out at the open water, so tantalizingly close, so inhospitable, and as he did, the third whale, still far off, broke the surface in a thunderous breach as if to tease Afanasi and his men.
'Has he lost them?' Kendra asked, and the man said: 'If anyone can catch us a whale, it's Afanasi. Lifetime he has nine. I have two. Nobody else has more than four. That's why he's headman in our village.'
Kendra turned to look at the man: 'You mean he's headman because he's brought in more whales than anyone else?'
'Miss Scott, in Desolation it don't count that he went away to college. And it don't count that he has more money and a Ford pickup. What does count is that he can take his umiak, which he mends himself in the summer season when the whales are finished, and go out and catch whales when the rest of us can't. In this village' and he-pointed back over his shoulder' it's whales that make the difference.'
Now the second of the medium-sized whales surfaced unexpectedly at the tail end of the procession, but this time Afanasi was prepared to act. Signaling the two specialists who must kill the whale the first man holding the harpoon, the second the high-powered rifle he brought his umiak into exactly the proper position, and in the early years of the century it would have been the gunner who would have fired first. But too many whales were wounded and then lost in that procedure, so now the law prohibited the rifleman from firing until the harpoon had struck.
So, with the frail umiak positioned close to the monstrous whale, the harpooner drew back his right arm, brought it forward with great force, and landed the point of his harpoon just behind the whale's ear. Immediately two bright-red rubber floats four feet in diameter and attached to the harpoon's rope spun into the sea, forming a drag from which the whale would not be able to escape.
One second after the point of the harpoon cut its way into the whale's neck, the heavy charge of explosive carried just below the point detonated, destroying much of the whale's muscular system. At that moment the rifleman fired a blast into the base of the whale's neck, and the great sea beast was mortally stricken. Harpoon point, explosive in the body, rubber floats and finally the devastating shot: it was too much for even a forty-ton whale to survive, and its blood quickly reddened the Chukchi Sea.
But now it showed why it was the leviathan of the oceans, for despite its terrible wounds, it continued moving north to rejoin the other members of its pod, and it kept on this course, always lagging farther behind, until it actually passed from the sight of the villagers watching on the edge of the ice. Miles up the coastline, when hunters from another umiak sped out to help finish it off with their explosive harpoon and rifle, the noble beast made one last effort to pull away from the braking bladders, failed, turned on its right side, and perished.
Afanasi, seeing the whale die, slumped on the rear bench of his umiak and felt no sense of triumph; it was the tenth successful whale hunt in his lifetime; he was the undoubted master of this northwestern coast; but he had lost a friend: 'Oh, gallant fighter! We honor you!' And he began to sing an old song out of respect to the whale who would bring food to all the citizens of Desolation Point. A thing of mystery had happened, the taking of a whale after two years of failure, and he was awed by the significance.
SINCE IT REQUIRED FOUR HOURS FOR THE MEN OF THE two umiaks to raft the dead whale back to Desolation, it was past midnight in a silvery light when the carcass finally approached the ice on which Kendra waited. Two huge block and-tackle devices, each housing five stout pulleys, had been positioned about fifteen feet apart, with one massive rope roven through the pulleys back and forth.
'What are they doing?' Kendra asked, and a man interrupted his work to explain: 'When we pull six feet on that end of rope, the block and tackle... tremendous leverage...
what you call mechanical advantage. You'll see the whale move maybe six inches.'
She could see nothing on the ice that would serve as an anchor for the inboard end of the device, and certainly no tree or post on shore to which to lash it, but now two teams of men began cutting very deep holes in the ice, about four feet apart, and when everyone was satisfied that the holes were deep enough, a skilled man let himself down into one of the holes and dug an ice tunnel from the bottom of one to the bottom of the other. Then, when another heavy rope was passed down one hole, through the tunnel and up the other, it provided an anchor that could not be dislodged.
The other block was run out to where the whale waited against the edge of the ice, fastened to its great hulk, and activated when Afanasi shouted: 'All hands! All hands!'
Everyone from Desolation who was on the ice at that moment grabbed the free end of the rope and began straining to pull the whale's block toward the ice-fastened one, and as the man had predicted to Kendra, the mechanical advantage provided by five pairs of pulleys produced such force that slowly, unmistakably the great whale began to worm its way onto the ice and then across it toward safety.
One of Afanasi's team, watching his whale brought home, raised a flag which he traditionally flew at such moments THANK YOU, JESUS! and women knelt to pray.
'Come on!' Kasm Hooker shouted to Kendra as she stood watching. 'It's your whale too. Lend a hand,' and she took her place on one of the ropes, helping to haul the whale the final ten yards onto the landfast ice.
She would always remember the haunting quality of the next few hours the pale spring light that suffused the arctic night; the excited concentration of almost everyone in Desolation as they pulled together on the huge ropes; an old man, bareheaded, solemnly raising a pennant in the wind to signify the taking of a whale, and the chanting of the old women singing songs inherited from their grandmothers and their grandmothers' grandmothers as the great whale was slowly pulled up onto the shore.
Oh, night of triumph! And as Kendra watched the people about her she realized that she had never known them before. Sh
e had seen them only as semibewildered Eskimos, whom she had learned to love as they wrestled sometimes unsuccessfully with the white man's ways; now she saw them as masters in their world, finely tuned to their environment and following time-proven ways of survival in the arctic. She was in awe of anyone who could contend on equal terms with the arctic seas. The education of the Eskimo children had begun last September when they appeared before her for their schooling; her education began this May night when silvery light glistened on the ice.
Once the whale was secured, men with long poles tipped with sharp blades stepped forward for the butchering, but they hesitated until Afanasi, their peerless Eskimo, guide and protector of their district, made the first ceremonial cut, and as he drew his flensing knife across the tail and then a fluke, he was not a Native who had gone to college and worked successfully in Seattle and run a profitable village corporation; he was an Eskimo, his gray-sandy hair brushed forward till it reached his eyebrows, his hands red with the blood of the whale.
Cheers rose to grace his victory. The other men sped to the butchering. Young people rushed forward to receive their chunks of muktuk, the delicious wedge of chewy outer skin and succulent inner fat. And as full daylight broke over the spot on which Desolation rested, people rejoiced that they had once again proved their ability to take a bowhead whale. Kasm Hooker, thinking it time to take his young teacher back to her quarters, said with some surprise: 'Kendra! You're crying!' and she said: 'I'm so proud to be a part of this.'
But what she enjoyed most, even though it was less Spiritually rewarding than the capture of the whale, came much later, in mid-July, when meat from the slaughtered whale was taken from the freezers and the four village umiaks were dragged ashore, tilted on their sides to provide protection against the bitter winds blowing in from the Chukchi, and rested there as gathering spots for the various groups into which the villagers had historically divided themselves. Mr. Hooker was invited as an honored guest into the shadow of Afanasi's umiak, Kendra into the one owned by Jonathan Borodin's family, and she was pleased when Jonathan was called forth to receive a ceremonial cut of meat out of respect for his having predicted when the whales would come past the point. 'How did you know?' Kendra asked him when he returned to her side, and he said: 'He told me,' and for the first time she looked up into the face of an old man who walked with a rude cane fashioned from a length of driftwood which had been washed ashore after some massive storm in Siberia.