WHEN CHAGAK AWOKE, HER first thought was of finishing Seal Stalker’s sleeping mats. But then she remembered, and with the remembering came a darkness that made her want to escape back to sleep. She began to tremble. Her hands felt too light for her body, her arms and legs too heavy, her chest so full of her sorrow that there was no room for anything else.
She rolled from her sleeping furs and relit several of the oil lamps. Then she dug up some of the eggs she and her mother had buried in sand and oil at the bottom of the food cache, and she made herself eat.
The food seemed to carry the taste of ashes, and Chagak gagged, but she knew she would not have strength to finish the burials unless she ate. She closed her eyes and thought of green hills, the wind that blew from the sea, and when she had eaten two eggs, she left the ulaq.
The night before, she had not been able to find her baby brother, though she was sure where her mother had thrown him. Now in the daylight she searched again but still found nothing. Fear began to grow, wedging itself into her pain.
Storytellers told of people who took children from other tribes to raise as their own. Especially sons. Perhaps her brother was not dead. Perhaps the attackers had taken him and would raise him to be like them.
It would be better if Pup were dead, Chagak thought, and for a time she sat at the top of her father’s ulaq, doing nothing. But then it seemed as though the spirits of the dead called to her, and she left the ulaq to finish what she had begun the day before.
Chagak dragged bodies, chanted death prayers, and tried not to gag in the stench and the flies. The birds were the greatest problem. Gulls swooped and cried, trying to peck at death wounds and open eyes.
When the dim yellow sun lay at the top of the sky, Chagak found Seal Stalker.
At first she did not recognize him. His face was swollen and covered with blood from a neck wound, his belly slit from chest to groin, but then something deep within her brought forth a mourning cry and pushed it from her mouth, even as she looked at the body.
Seal Stalker gripped a spear in one hand. Another body lay nearby, the body of a stranger. There was a bloody wound in the man’s shoulder and another at the center of his chest. His feet were painted black and he wore a parka of fur seal and lemming skins, yet it was not decorated in the manner of any tribe Chagak knew, not the traders who called themselves Walrus Men nor her mother’s people, the Whale Hunters. Perhaps he was of the Caribou People, a distant tribe the Walrus Men sometimes spoke about. But why would caribou hunters leave their home to come to islands in the sea? The Caribou People were not traders. They knew nothing of ikyan or sea animals. And were not the Caribou People tall and light-skinned? This man was short and his skin, though discolored by death, was dark.
She looked at both men. Seal Stalker, the man she was to marry, and this stranger, an evil man. “They killed each other,” Chagak said aloud to the wind, to spirits that might be near.
Had her people done anything to these men? Why had they come killing and stealing? Chagak took her woman’s knife from the sheath she wore under her suk and began to slice through the dead man’s joints. But each cut also seemed to add to Chagak’s pain, as though her knife carried two blades, one for the enemy, one for her spirit.
Chagak dragged Seal Stalker’s body to her father’s ulaq. She put him in her father’s sleeping place, wrapped him in one of the grass mats she had made for him and washed the blood from his face and neck.
And when she had finished, it seemed as though she had no more energy to work, no desire to leave the ulaq. It was a large ulaq, large enough for the spirits of all her family and her own spirit.
Chagak was old enough to remember when her father had built the ulaq. He and several of the village men had spent three or four days digging an oval pit in the side of the hill. She and her mother and aunts and grandmother had hauled clay from the edge of a stream, worked it with just enough water to make it pliable, then plastered the clay over the dirt and stone floor. They had smoothed and leveled and packed the earth with their feet, all the time laughing and singing, listening to tales her grandmother told.
A whale had washed ashore earlier that summer and the chief hunter gave Chagak’s father permission to use the jawbones as the center rafters for the roof. The men lined the walls of the pit with huge rocks and packed dirt around them. With the stones and driftwood logs as support, they set the whalebone rafters, then smaller driftwood rafters, in place. The women wove willow through the rafters and helped the men finish the ulaq roof with sod and thatching.
Chagak looked up at the light coming in the roof hole. There was still time enough to bury others, but Chagak thought, I am too tired. Surely the spirits will understand.
For a long time she sat in the main room of the ulaq, blocking thoughts from her mind, not even lighting oil lamps when light no longer came through the open roof hole. It had been a difficult day. Most of the bodies were cared for, only a few left to take inside, only a few more chants and mourning songs to sing.
Tomorrow I will finish, she promised herself. Then a thought came to her, something that had first come when she saw Seal Stalker’s body: I, too, should be dead. What joy was there in living alone? She would never be a wife, never bear children. She would live in fear of spirits, in fear of strangers. And how could one person stand alone against the powers of earth and sky? It would be better to be dead.
And so that night, as Chagak lay in her sleeping place, she thought of death and the many ways she might die.
The next morning Chagak buried the last three bodies, and only the man Seal Stalker had killed was left to be eaten by birds, left to rot.
Chagak spent another portion of the day gathering any weapons she could find. There were few, not enough for all the hunters of her tribe. The attackers must have taken weapons with them when they left, Chagak thought, but it would not be good for the men of her tribe to be without weapons in the next world. How would they hunt?
Chagak spent much time in the storage places of the ulas, taking any weapons she could find, finally giving small-bladed crooked knives and burins, obsidian and hammerstones to the men for whom she had no spears. Perhaps they could make their own weapons.
It was time then for Chagak’s death. She prepared herself carefully, first eating a good meal, then washing her face and hands in the still water of a tidal pool. The spirit image that looked back at her from the pool looked old and tired, not like Chagak, a girl newly a woman having lived thirteen summers.
She combed out the tangles in her hair and, taking off her suk, washed her arms and breasts. The suk was nearly ruined. The lifting and dragging of bodies had broken many of the feathers and blood dulled the sheen of those left, but she washed off the blood and straightened the feathers. Last, she washed her woman’s knife and rubbed the blade with the shaman’s amulet she still wore around her neck.
There were some things she needed for this death, and so she began a search of ulas, taking the necessary supplies: a lamp to guide her to her family, clean sleeping furs, a seal stomach of oil, and another of food. She did not know how many days it would take her, traveling alone, to find the Dancing Lights.
She crowded all her supplies into her sleeping place. Then she sat down, her woman’s knife in her right hand, ready to cut the pulsing arteries of her neck. In her left hand she held a basket to catch the blood.
But then she felt a stirring within, a need as great as any need she had known, to once again feel the wind, to hear the sea, to have the sun on her face. And so she left the bowl and knife and climbed from the ulaq.
Chagak walked the beach, and in the midst of her sorrow she felt a gladness that she had given herself one last time to see the world, to hear the long sad cry of loons, the high-pitched kik-kik-kik of terns.
She began to sing, first songs of comfort, lullabies sung to her when she was a child, then, after the lullabies, songs of mourning, death chants for herself. Finally, as the sun was dimmed by clouds and a cold wind moved in from the sea, Chagak left the beach and returned to her father’s ulaq.
She had climbed to the ulaq roof when she heard a faint sound coming from the hill above the village, a sound as if someone besides her were mourning, as if another cry were being raised by one still living.
A child? How could a child survive the two, nearly three days since the attack? But a hope grew so large within her that it pushed up into her throat so she could not even call out. She moved toward the cry, listening carefully, always moving toward the sound, and finally made her way to the top of the hill.
First she saw only the woman’s body—Black Wing—an old woman, someone who lived with a grown grandson, someone who would perhaps had given herself to the mountain in the next winter, thus leaving more food for her family. The woman was not long dead. She lay on her side, the body not swollen, the flies just beginning to settle in the eyes and mouth.
She wore a fur seal suk, something she had no doubt prepared as a death garment, the suk too finely decorated to be practical for everyday wear. Feathers and shells hung in wide zigzag patterns down the sides and around the sleeves; patches of different furs—browns, golds, blacks and whites—made a checkered design at collar rim, cuffs and hem.
Had Black Wing made the cries? Or perhaps it had been the call of gulls. Had Chagak, not wanting to be alone, imagined that bird cries were human?
Chagak sighed and thought of the long, difficult trip back to the village. Another body to put in a ulaq. She turned to go back down the hill to get the sea lion skin she had used to put under the bodies that had been some distance from a ulaq.
But when she was halfway down the hill she heard the cry again and she was sure it was not a bird.
She ran to the top of the hill and this time she turned Black Wing’s body over. There was a bulge under the old woman’s suk and again the weak cry.
“A baby,” Chagak whispered and her heart quickened, beating so hard she could feel the pulse of it at her temples.
She reached inside the suk and pulled out the baby. It was Pup.
“I thought they had taken you,” Chagak said. Then her legs were suddenly weak, and she dropped to her knees. And as though she had found her brother dead, not alive, sobs began to rip through Chagak’s body, so deep and hard, it seemed they would pull Chagak’s spirit from her chest. She clutched the baby to her breast and through her tears said to Black Wing, “You are a brave mother. Grandmother to all our people.”
Chagak put Pup under her suk, cradling him in her arms as she walked back to her father’s ulaq.
She laid him on a fur seal skin and cleaned his body with seal oil. There were berry stains on his lips, and whenever Chagak’s fingers came close to his mouth, he tried to suck. In the four months since his birth, he had grown fat and round, but now he seemed smaller, his legs and arms as thin as they had been at his birth.
Chagak wrapped the lower half of the baby’s body in moss and wads of seal fur, then bundled him in a sealskin, fur side in.
She chewed a piece of dried seal meat until it was soft, then, mixing it with water, made a paste and let the baby suck it from her fingertips. He ate slowly, and Chagak gave him frequent sips of water, though at first he choked since she gave him the water from the edge of a shell bowl. But finally he seemed content and so Chagak laid him in his cradle, the wooden-framed hammock that hung from the rafters over their mother’s sleeping place.
When her brother slept, Chagak returned for Black Wing’s body. She could find no wound, and so decided that the woman had died from sorrow and her great age. Chagak dragged the body to her father’s ulaq, for though the distance to her father’s ulaq was greater than to Black Wing’s, Chagak saw the woman as part of her family now. Somehow Black Wing had found Pup and hidden him from the killers. It was right that she had a place with Chagak’s family. They would care for her as she had cared for their youngest child.