Lacking any organized agriculture or the capacity to grow and hoard vegetables, the Chukchis were forced to depend upon their hunting skills, which were tremendous, and basic to everything else was the pursuit of the mammoth, a major source of food.
So they studied its habits, placated its spirit to make it congenial, devised ways to trick it, and hunted it relentlessly. As they cut this one apart, they studied every aspect of its anatomy, trying to predict how it would have behaved in different circumstances, and when it had been absorbed into the tribe as a kind of deity, the four men agreed: 'The surest way to kill a mammoth is the way Varnak did. Fall under it and jab upward with a sharp spear.'
Fortified by this conclusion, they took their sons aside and taught them how to hold a spear in both hands, fall to the ground face upward, and jab at the belly of a thundering mammoth, trusting the Great Spirits to provide protection from the hammering feet. When they had instructed the boys, showing them how to fall and yet maintain control of their spears, Varnak winked at one of the other hunters, and this time when the oldest boy ran forward and threw himself on the ground face upward, this hunter, dressed in mammoth skin, suddenly leaped in the air, uttered a fantastic scream, and stamped his feet inches from the boy's head. The young fellow was so terrified by this unexpected explosion that he let the spear fall from his hands and covered his face.
'You are dead!' the hunter shouted at the cowering boy, but Varnak uttered the more serious condemnation of his cowardice: 'You let the mammoth escape. We shall starve.'
So the spear was handed back to the frightened boy, and twenty times he threw himself upon the ground, face up, as Varnak and the others thundered down upon him, stamping their feet close to his head, and reminding him each time as the charade ended: 'That time you had a chance to stab the mammoth. If it was a bull, he might have killed you, but your spear would have been in his belly, and we who were left would have had a chance to trail him and bring him down.'
They kept at it until the boy felt that when he encountered a real mammoth, there was a good chance he might succeed in wounding it so sorely that the others would have a later chance to complete the kill, and when they stopped their practice, Varnak congratulated him: 'I think you will know how,' and the boy smiled.
But then the men turned their attention to the second oldest boy, a lad of nine, and when they handed him a spear and told him to throw himself under the body of the charging mammoth, he fainted.
AT THEIR NEW CAMPSITE NEAR THE BIRCH TREES, THE Chukchis unloaded their meager goods and prepared to set up their crude shelters, and since they were in a position to start afresh, they could have developed some improved style of living quarters, but they did not. They failed to invent an igloo made of ice, or a yurt made of skins, or above ground huts made of stone and branches, or any of the other satisfactory types of dwelling. Instead, they reverted to the kind of hovel they had known in Asia: a muddy cave belowground, with a kind of dome above made of matted branches and skins plastered with mud. As before, the excavation had no chimney for the discharge of smoke, no window for the admission of light, no hinged door to keep away the small animals that wandered by. But each cave did constitute a home, and in it women cooked and sewed and reared their young.
The expected life span in these years was about thirty-one years, and from the constant chewing of meat and gristle, teeth tended to wear out before the rest of the body, so that death was hastened by literal starvation. Women often had three children who lived, three others who died at or shortly after birth. A family rarely remained in one place long, for animals would become wary or depleted, so that the humans must move on in search of other prey. Life was difficult and pleasures were few, but there was at this time no war between tribes or groups of tribes, mainly because units lived so far apart that there need be no squabbling over territorial rights.
Ancestors had patiently learned from a hundred thousand years of trial and error certain rules for survival in the north, and these were rigorously observed. The Ancient One repeated them endlessly to her brood: 'Meat that has turned green must not be eaten. When winter starts and there is not enough food, sleep most of each day. Never throw away any piece of fur, no matter how greasy it has become. Mammoth, bison, beaver, reindeer, fox, hare and mice, hunt them in that order, but never ignore the mice, for it is they that will keep you alive in the starving time.'
Long and cruel experience had also taught one fundamental lesson: 'When you seek a mate, go always, without exception, to some distant tribe, for if you take one within your own set of huts, fearful things result.' In obedience to this harsh rule, she had herself once supervised the killing of a sister and a brother who had married.
She would grant them no mercy, even though they were the children of her own brother.
'It must be done,' she had cried to members of her family, 'and before any child is born. For if we allow such a one to come among us, they will punish us.'
She never specified who they were, but she was convinced that they existed and exercised great powers. They established the seasons, they brought the mammoth near, they watched over pregnant women, and for such services they deserved respect. They lived, she believed, beyond the horizon, wherever it chanced to be, and sometimes in duress she would look to the farthest edge of sky, bowing to the unseen ones who alone had the power to make conditions better.
There were among these Chukchis certain moments of transcendent joy, as when the men brought down a really huge mammoth or when a woman trapped in a difficult pregnancy finally produced a strong male child. On wintry nights when food was scarce and comfort almost unattainable, special joy came to them, for then in the northern heavens the mysterious ones hung out great curtains of fire, filling the sky with myriad colors of dancing forms and vast spears of light flashing from one horizon to the next in a dazzling display of power and majesty.
Then men and women would leave the frozen mud of their mean caves to stand in the starry night, their faces to the heavens as those others beyond the horizon moved the lights about, hung the colors, and sent great shafts thundering clear across the firmament. There would be silence, and the children who were summoned to see this miracle would remember it all the days of their lives.
A man like Varnak might expect to see such a heavenly parade twenty times in his life. With luck he might help to bring down the same number of mammoths, no more.
And as he neared the age of thirty, which he was doing now, he could anticipate the swift diminution of his powers and their ultimate disappearance. So he was not surprised one autumn morning when Tevuk said: 'Your mother cannot rise.'
When he ran to where she lay on the ground beneath the birch trees, he saw that she was mortally stricken, and he bent down to give her such comfort as he could, but she required none. In her last moments she wanted to look at the sky she had loved and to discharge her responsibilities to the people she had helped guide and protect for so long. 'When winter comes,' she whispered to her son, 'remind the children to sleep a lot.'
Varnak buried her in the birch grove, and ten days later her grave was covered by the year's first snow. Winds whipped it across the steppe, and as it drifted about the cave-huts, Varnak wondered: Maybe we should winter in the place we left, and he went so far as to consult with other adults, but their counsel was unanimous:
'Better stay where we are,' and with this resolve these eighteen new Alaskans, with enough dried mammoth meat to keep them alive through the worst of the winter, buried themselves in their huts to seek protection from the coming storms.
VARNAK AND HIS VILLAGERS WERE NOT THE FIRST TO cross from Asia into Alaska. Others seem to have preceded them at different spots by thousands of years, moving gradually and arbitrarily eastward in their constant quest for food. Some made the journey out of curiosity, liked what they found, and stayed. Some fought with parents or neighbors and wandered off with no set purpose. Others passively joined a group and never had the energy to return. Some chased animals so f
ast and so far that after the kill they remained where they were, and some were allured by the attractiveness of a girl on the other side of the river whose parents were making the journey. But none, so far as we can deduce, ever crossed over with the conscious intention of settling a new land or exploring a new continent.
And when they did reach Alaska, the same patterns prevailed. They never knowingly set out to occupy the interior of North America; the distances and impediments were so great that no single group of human beings could have lived long enough to complete the passage. Of course, had the route south been ice-free when Varnak and his people made their crossing, and had they been driven by some monomaniacal impulse, they could conceivably have wandered down to Wyoming during their lifetime, but as we have seen, the corridor was rarely open at the same time as the bridge. So had Varnak been intent on reaching the interior of North America assuming that he could have generated such a purpose, which he could not he might have had to wait thousands of years before the pathway was released from the ice, and this would mean that a hundred generations of his line would live and die before his descendants could migrate toward Wyoming.
Of a hundred Chukchis who wandered from Siberia into Alaska in Varnak's time, perhaps a third returned home after discovering that Asia was in general more hospitable than Alaska. Of the two-thirds who remained, all were imprisoned within the enchanting ice castle, as were their descendants. They became Alaskan; in time they remembered nothing but this beautiful land; they forgot Asia and were able to learn nothing about North America. Varnak and his seventeen never went back, nor did their descendants.
They became Alaskans.
By what name should they be known? When their ancestors first ventured into the north they had been called contemptuously Those Who Fled the South, as if the residents knew that had the newcomers been stronger, they would have escaped eviction from those favorable climes. During one period when they could not find acceptable sites for their camps, they were known as the Wanderers, and when they finally came upon a safe place to live at the edge of Asia, they took its name and became Chukchis.
An appropriate name would have been Siberian, but now that they had unwittingly committed themselves to Alaska, they acquired the generic name of Indians, later to be differentiated as Athapascans.
As such they would prosper across the middle section of Alaska and positively thrive in Canada. One sturdy branch would inhabit the beautiful islands forming southern Alaska, and improbable as it would have seemed to Varnak, some of his descendants thousands of years later would wander southward into Arizona, where they would become the Navajo Indians. Scholars would find the language of these Navajos as close to Athapascan as Portuguese was to Spanish, and this could not have happened by chance.
There had to have been a relationship between the two groups.
These wandering Athapascans were in no way related to the much later Eskimos, nor must they be visualized as moving consciously onward in some mighty fanlike emigration, carrying their civilization with them to unpopulated lands. They were not English Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic in a purposeful exodus, with provisional laws adopted on shipboard before landing among the waiting Indians. It is quite probable that the Athapascans spread throughout America with never a sense of having left home.
That is, Varnak and his wife, for example, as older people, would be inclined to remain where they were among the birch trees, but some years later one of their sons and his wife might see that it would be advantageous for them to build their cave-hut somewhat farther to the east where more mammoths were available, and off they would go. But they might also maintain contact with their parents back at the original birch-tree site, and in time their children would decide to move on to more inviting locations, but they too would retain affiliation with their parents, and perhaps even with old Varnak and Tevuk at the birch trees. In this quiet way people can populate an entire continent by moving only a few thousand yards in each generation, if they are allowed twenty-nine thousand years in which to do it. They can move from Siberia to Arizona without ever leaving home.
Better hunting, an addiction to adventure, a dissatisfaction with oppressive old ways, motives like these were the timeless urges which encouraged men and women to spread out even in peaceful times, and it was in obedience to them that these early men and women began to settle the Americas, both North and South, without being aware that they were doing so.
In the process, Alaska would become of crucial importance to areas like Minnesota, Pennsylvania, California and Texas, for it would provide the route for the peoples who would populate those diverse areas. Descendants of Varnak and Tevuk, inheritors of the courage which had characterized the Ancient One, would erect noble cultures in lands that would rarely know ice or have any memory of Asia, and it would be these settlers and the different groups who would follow them in later millennia who would constitute Alaska's main gift to America.
FOURTEEN THOUSAND YEARS B.P.E., WHEN THE LAND route was temporarily submerged because of melting at the polar ice cap, one .of the world's most congenial people lived in crowded areas at the extreme eastern tip of Siberia. They were Eskimos, those squat, dark Asian hunters who wore their hair cut square across their eyebrows. They were a hardy breed, for their livelihood depended upon their venturing out upon the Arctic Ocean and its attendant waters to hunt the great whales, the tusked walruses and the elusive seals. No other men in all the world lived more dangerously in a more inhospitable climate than these Eskimos, and none labored more strenuously in these years than a bandy-legged, sturdy little fellow named Oogruk, who was experiencing all kinds of difficulties.
He had taken as his wife, three years earlier, the daughter of the most important man in his seaside village of Pelek, and at the time he had been bewildered as to why a young woman of such attractiveness should be interested in him, for he had practically nothing to offer. He had no kayak of his own for hunting seals, nor any share in one of the larger umiaks in which men sailed forth in groups to track down whales that glided past the headland like floating mountaintops. He owned no property, had only one set of sealskins to protect him from the frozen seas, and what was particularly disqualifying, he had no parents to help him make his way in the harsh world of the Eskimo. To top it all, he was cross-eyed, and in that special way which could be infuriating. If you looked into his left eye, thinking that this was the one he was using, he would shift focus, and you would be looking at nothing, for his left eye would have wandered. And if you then hurried back to his right eye, he shifted that one, and once more you were staring at nothing. It was not easy to talk with Oogruk.
The mystery of why the headman's pretty daughter Nukleet was willing to marry such a fellow was solved rather soon after the wedding feast, for Oogruk discovered that his bride was pregnant, and at the boats it was whispered that the father was a husky young harpooner named Shaktoolik who already had two wives and three other children.
Oogruk was in no position to protest the deception, or to protest anything else for that matter, so he bit his tongue, admitted to himself that he was lucky to have a girl as pretty as Nukleet on any terms, and vowed to be one of the best hands in the various arctic boats owned by his father-in-law.
Nukleet's father did not want Oogruk as part of his crew, for the hunting of whales was a perilous occupation and each of the six men in the heavy boat had to be an expert. Four rowed, one steered, one managed the harpoon, and these positions had long been spoken for in the headman's umiak. He led the way. Shaktoolik held the harpoon. And four stout fellows with nerves of granite manned the oars. In many expeditions against whales, these men had proved their merit, and Nukleet's father was not about to break up his combination simply to make a place for his lightly regarded son-in-law.
But he was willing to provide Oogruk with his own kayak, not one of the best but a sturdy craft which was guaranteed not to sink light as a spring breeze through aspen, watertight as a seal's fur regardless of how the waves assaulted i
t. This kayak did not respond quickly to paddle strokes, but it was many times better than Oogruk could ever have owned by himself and he was grateful; his parents, killed when a whale overturned their small boat, had left him nothing.
In midsummer, when great sea animals were on the move, Oogruk's father-in-law, aided by Shaktoolik, launched his umiak from the pebbled shore fronting the village of Pelek. But before they departed on what they knew might be a perilous excursion, they indicated with shrugs that Oogruk was free to use the kayak on the chance that he might creep up on some dozing seal and add both a needed fur and meat to the village larder. Standing alone on the shore, with the rude kayak waiting some distance to the east, he looked through squinting eyes as the abler men of the village set forth with prayers and shouts to try to intercept a whale.
When they were gone, their heads six dots on the horizon, he sighed at his hard luck in missing the hunt, looked back at his hut to see if Nukleet was watching, and sighed again to see that she was not. Walking dejectedly to his waiting kayak, he studied its awkward lines, and muttered: 'In that one you couldn't overtake a wounded seal.'
It was large, three times as long as a man, and covered completely by watertight sealskin to keep it afloat in the stormiest seas. It contained only one opening, just big enough to accommodate a man's hips; the sealskin was secured snugly at the top around the hunter's waist and sewn to the kayak by lengths of whale tendons that were pliable when dry, an impermeable bond when wet.