ACTIVE PARKED THE SUBURBAN at the senior center. Like nearly every other building in Chukchi, it boasted T1-11 siding and a shingle roof. A gaggle of four-wheelers and snowmachines were parked in front, along with two pickups and a rusted-out yellow Subaru.
The center was a three-spoked wheel with no rim. Each spoke was a wing where the elders had their bedrooms. The cafeteria, TV room, and administrative offices filled the hub.
Active checked in at the office and they found Pauline in a game of snerts with three other old ladies in the light pullover parkas called kuspuks.
“Hi, Aana,” Lucy said to Pauline, nodding to the other women at the table.
Pauline looked up from her cards through her big cataract glasses, smiled, and returned Lucy’s greeting. “And it’s good to see you too, Nathan,” she said. “You guys come over sometime, I’ll make some fish-head soup.”
“I’d like that,” Active said. “How about the second Tuesday of next week?”
Pauline grinned and shook her head, looking to Lucy for sympathy. “Same old Nathan, ah? So bossy.”
“Did you ask anybody about Saganiq and Natchiq?” Lucy asked.
“I asked these ladies here, but they don’t know anything. That right, Annie? June? Bessie?”
The snerts players nodded in unison, looking mildly crestfallen at their failure to be of help.
“Well, Nathan thinks his grandfather Jacob might know something. You want to help me translate?”
Pauline beamed and glanced down the hall leading, Active knew, to his grandfather’s room. Then she caught herself and looked serious. “Maybe Nathan will give me a ride to bingo tonight in his trooper truck, ah?”
It was Pauline Generous’s usual price for any favor he asked. He sighed in resignation. “With the flashers on,” he said.
“And the siren.”
He shook his head and masked a grin. “And the siren.”
“OK, I’ll help then.” She excused herself from the snerts game and they made their way down the hall to Jacob Active’s room.
Active saw through the half-open door that his grandfather lay sleeping on top of the bedcovers in the afternoon sun, Kay-Chuck playing softly from a little radio on a stand beside the bed.
Jacob Active had creased brown skin stretched tight over his cheekbones and a shock of silver hair that stood straight out from his head like dandelion fuzz. He wore a hearing aid in his left ear. Its lobe was missing, taken by frostbite on the trail long ago, according to Martha. The right side of his face drooped from the stroke, and a silver thread of saliva trailed from that corner of his mouth. Beside the radio on the nightstand lay a pair of cataract glasses as big and thick as Pauline’s.
Nathan sensed Pauline beside him, and moved so that she could look in. Her face softened. “You want me to wake him up?”
Active nodded and the old woman walked to the bed, took a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand, and wiped the sleeper’s chin. Then she touched his arm. “Jacob,” she said. “Jacob, it’s Pauline.”
Jacob stirred and blinked, looking lost and confused. Pauline handed him the glasses. He put them on and peered about. “Ah, Pauline,” he said. Then came a few phrases of Inupiaq in the whispery old-man’s voice.
Pauline answered in Inupiaq, then stepped aside to show him who was with her. The old man smiled at Lucy and glanced briefly at Nathan, then away.
“I’m going to tell him why we’re here, then Lucy can talk to him,” Pauline said with a look at Nathan. She spoke again in Inupiaq. Nathan heard his own name, then Lucy’s, Victor Solomon’s, Saganiq’s, and Natchiq’s.
Jacob was silent for some time after Pauline finished, then he squinted and rattled off a burst of Inupiaq.
Pauline spoke again. Nathan heard his own name again, and the Inupiaq word for grandson. Then Pauline leaned over and spoke into Jacob’s hearing aid, so that only she and Jacob knew what she said.
Finally the old man raised his eyebrows and said, “Ee,” the Inupiaq word for yes.
Pauline rearranged his pillows and helped him sit up against the headboard, then turned. “He’ll do it, but he wants some tea. I could bring it while you guys get started, ah?”
She left the room. Lucy pulled a chair up to Jacob’s bed and took a seat. Nathan pulled up a chair, but a little farther off, and took out his notebook.
Jacob spoke in Inupiaq for a few seconds, then looked at Nathan.
“He says how is your mother and is she still with that white man?” Lucy translated.
“Tell him she’s fine, and, yes, she’s still married to Leroy, and she still loves her father.”
Lucy made the translation. Jacob frowned and looked away from them for a moment, then spoke in Inupiaq.
“He says he loves her too, and he’s sorry that some things can’t be helped when you get too old. But he does want to help you in your trooper work, so he will tell you what he can remember about Saganiq and Natchiq. He finds that he can’t remember what happened this morning, but things from his youth are as clear as if they happened yesterday. Still, he’s not sure he can remember all that he heard when he was a boy. But he will do his best.”
Active nodded. “That’s all I ask, Ataata.” He thought Jacob smiled slightly at the Inupiaq word, but it was impossible to be sure.
The old man spoke again through Lucy, Nathan interrupting with questions only when he couldn’t help himself. The account was halting at first, but picked up speed and assurance as it went on. It was as if one memory led to another, like the links in a chain.
“You want to know about Saganiq and Natchiq, ah? My dad and the other people his age used to speak of them often when I was a boy. I think my dad knew both of them a little bit, maybe. Maybe when he was a boy he saw Natchiq sometimes. And that Saganiq, maybe he still lived around here until just before I was born.
“Anyway, my dad and those other people, they said Natchiq came from way up on the Isignaq River, around that place we call Rough Creek today. Nobody lives there any more, but, used to be, if you would go up there and look around in the willows, you could see the old pits where those people had their houses. One time I went up there with my dad and we walked around and dug down into a couple of pits to see what we could find. Dad, he dug up this old broken ax made out of jade, and he says, ‘Maybe Natchiq used this to chop a tree, ah?’ I don’t know if you can still do that today, since the whites made their national park up there.
“Anyway, Natchiq came from up there around Rough Creek. There was just him and one sister, but I guess she died when she was little, because I never heard anything about her. So he grew up mostly by himself, just him and his mother up there on Rough Creek.
“When he was little, he would always help her out and he learned lots of things from her, like how to make a sod house or set snares for rabbit and ptarmigan, that kind of thing. What people needed to know to stay alive in those days.”
“What about his father?” Nathan asked. Lucy translated the question, and Jacob frowned in concentration for a moment.
“That’s a funny thing, those old stories never said anything about Natchiq’s father. Maybe his father died when he was little, or maybe his father left his mother for some reason. I never heard. The stories only tell about his mother, and how he always helped her out and learned things from her.
“But he also learned things himself just by watching and listening, and pretty soon he was the best hunter around that place. He could catch any kind of game. If it was squirrel or caribou or bear, didn’t matter, Natchiq could catch it. Or maybe the game gave itself to him because of who he was. That’s what some people thought.
“His magic or whatever it was started one day when he was out checking his snares. He came to a nice place by the river, so he sat down to rest on a piece of driftwood. Pretty soon he heard a little bird chirping. Then he listened close and he heard that it was chirping in Eskimo and it was saying, ‘Father and son, father and son.’ And then he went home saying it to himself. ‘Father and son, father and son.’
“After that, he went back to that spot whenever he could, because he always felt real peaceful and calm whenever he heard that little bird chirping, ‘Father and son, father and son.’ Then after a while, the little bird added to what he was chirping. He starts to say, ‘Father and son, the source of intelligence. Father and son, the source of intelligence.’
“Now Natchiq was getting home later and later every time and his mother was starting to worry. She asked him why he was so late, and he said he was just tending his snares, because that little bird never said, ‘Tell about me.’
“So Natchiq was going around saying to himself what the bird said—‘Father and son, the source of intelligence. Father and son, the source of intelligence’—and he went to his resting spot to hear the bird whenever he could.”
“What did he mean by that, ‘the source of intelligence’?” Nathan asked.
“Nobody ever really knew except Natchiq. Sometimes he called it his father. His father in the sky.”
“It sounds like the naluaqmiut God.”
“That was what a lot of people thought later on when the whites finally come into our country and started to talk about Jesus and everything. They thought Natchiq’s source of intelligence was God. But at that time when Natchiq was still alive, the Eskimos had never heard of God yet or seen any white people, and Natchiq never explained anything about his father in the sky.”
Jacob looked confused, and there was a hurried conference in Inupiaq. Then Lucy turned to Nathan. “He can’t remember where we were. Wasn’t he just telling us how Natchiq’s mother was starting to worry because he came home so late?”
Nathan nodded. Jacob picked up the story and Lucy continued translating.
“Sometimes Natchiq wouldn’t come home at night at all, and his mother got more and more worried. She kept asking, ‘Why are you gone so long? What do you do?’
“Suddenly he decided it was time to tell his mother, so he said he’d been listening to a little bird and he told her what it said: ‘Father and son, the source of intelligence.’
“When she asked him where it was, this source of intelligence, he said it was somewhere up above, but he felt so much reverence, he didn’t even dare look up to see.
“Now his mother was worried more than ever. She asked him, ‘Are you turning into an angatquq?’
“He told her not to worry, he wasn’t turning into anything. He was just listening and learning. He told her, ‘I know something is helping us, and that the little bird calls from somewhere. But I don’t know the source.’
“After that, his mother started to calm down for some reason, and never worried anymore. ‘I’m almost an aana now,’ she told herself, ‘but I never heard of the source of intelligence before.’
“One day Natchiq told his mother that his source of intelligence was saying it was better if he married a certain girl. He went off hunting to the north with some other men and when he came back, there was this girl in their camp who came to visit his mother. He asked her to eat with them and then after they ate, they were building a new sod hut when Natchiq put his head down and thought for a long time. When he looked up again, he said he’d been in a peaceful place, in contact with his source of intelligence. ‘It is better if I marry this girl,’ he said then, and that was how he got married.
“So he lived up there around Rough Creek with his mother and his wife and they had a happy, peaceful life, because he was a good hunter, and he had his source of intelligence in the sky.”
“And Natchiq said he was not an angatquq?”
Lucy started to translate, but Jacob raised his eyebrows and spoke first, apparently having figured Nathan’s question out for himself. Lucy waited till he finished, then delivered the response.
“He says Natchiq was not an angatquq. He hated the angatquqs.”
There was a tap at the door. Lucy opened it and Pauline came in, followed by an aide in a light green uniform carrying a tray with tea and a stack of pilot bread on it. The aide set it across Jacob’s lap and he helped himself with gusto remarkable in an eighty-two-year-old, Active thought. Pauline sat at the foot of the bed, one hand on his ankle, and watched as he ate.
When the pilot bread was gone, Jacob took a sip of tea, nodded at Lucy, and picked up the tale again.
“See, before Natchiq came along, the angatquqs ran everything. A few of them were good. They tried to help the people when life was hard. But most angatquqs used their power to take whatever they wanted—food, women, boats, furs, fishing nets, anything.
“They controlled everything by taboos. If your daughter got sick, it meant you broke some kind of taboo, even if you didn’t know it was taboo. Like if you ate caribou with your left hand instead of your right hand, maybe that was a taboo. But only the angatquqs would know. So if somebody in your family got sick, then you had to go to the angatquq. He would talk to his spirits, find what taboo you broke, and tell you what to do about it. Maybe you couldn’t eat any berries for a year, or any masru—”
Here Lucy broke into a brief discussion with Pauline, at the end of which Lucy explained—in English—that she hadn’t been able to think of the English term for the plant known as masru. But, with Pauline’s help, she now believed the white man called it the Eskimo potato.
At the sound of this term, Jacob’s face brightened momentarily and he raised his eyebrows, repeating the phrase in English. “Eskimo potato, ee, Eskimo potato.” Then he resumed the story, and Lucy resumed translating.
“Maybe you can’t eat any Eskimo potato for one year. And you have to pay the angatquq or your daughter still don’t get well.”
“The angatquqs got paid?” Nathan asked.
“Oh, yes, that was how they got rich. Sometimes an angatquq would be the richest man in the village, and he would have three or four wives maybe.
“A lot of the taboos had to do with women. Like when a young girl became a woman, people in those days thought she was unclean. So she had to live in a hut by herself, maybe for a year. There would be a bucket of water out front, but no one could drink from it but her.
“It was the same way if a woman was having a baby. She couldn’t be around other people. She had to go out in a hut or snowhouse by herself and have the baby all alone. No one was allowed to help or go around her for a few days. If she had a hard time, maybe she or the baby would die.
“Some taboos, maybe they were just to have fun with your kids. Like if the northern lights were out, you couldn’t whistle or they would come down and cut off your head, that was one taboo. But even today, a lot of old people still won’t whistle if the northern lights are out.
“A lot of other taboos had to do with food. Like how you couldn’t cut caribou skin during fishing season or you would die. Or if you ate beluga whale the same time you ate berries or anything else from the ground, you would die. Or during the dark of the moon, you had to put ashes on your food, or you would die unless you got an angatquq to help you.”
“The people let the angatquqs do this?” Nathan asked. “They believed what the angatquqs said?
“The people in those days never really believed anything. They just had fear. Their whole life was based on fear. They never had anybody to teach them any different till Natchiq came along.”
There was a tap at the door and everyone paused. The aide returned, now bearing a tiny paper cup with a tablet in it. “Time for his blood-pressure medicine,” she said.
She spoke to Jacob in Inupiaq, and he obediently downed the tablet, chasing it with the last of his tea. He raised the teacup and spoke to her, and she lifted her eyebrows and took it away with her.
Jacob noticed the pill cup in his hand and gave it to Lucy, who dropped it into the waste can beside his bed. Then he looked at Nathan and began speaking.
“Pretty soon, word started to spread about Natchiq, because everywhere he went, he would talk about his source of intelligence and he would act different from other people. When he put up his tent, he would put down willow branches for his bed, instead of spreading his furs on the ground. And he took baths and kept himself clean, like we do now, which people never did in those days.
“And always he carried a long pole with him, and he would put it up outside his tent wherever he camped. Every seventh day, he would put a strip of sealskin on top of that pole, and he wouldn’t do any work. He would just play a drum and look like he was thinking, maybe in a trance or something.
“People laughed at him when he did that. They would say, ‘You’re just lazy, that’s why you don’t work.’ And Natchiq would say he was only doing what his father in the sky told him.
“Then they would ask, ‘What did he tell you?’ and that’s when Natchiq would start to talk against the taboos. He would tell the people they didn’t have to live in fear, and he would break all the taboos.
“Like the taboo about a young girl having to live alone when she first became a woman, he broke that taboo. He came to this camp up on the Katonak River where there were people living, and there was a young girl off in a sod house by herself. He went there and he drank from the water bucket in front of her house, and everybody thought he would die. But the next morning, he was alive like anyone, and people started to wonder about the taboo. When he got down to Chukchi, he did the same thing again. And he told the people that the old taboo about women having their babies all alone was wrong too, and pretty soon it would go away like all the other taboos.
“He kept breaking all kinds of taboos. When he came down to Chukchi, he went across to that place Tatuliq where everybody hunts beluga. Everybody was afraid to eat beluga at the same time as berries or any other food that came from the ground because of the taboo. So Natchiq, he went and picked some wild rhubarb and cooked it in his tent. While it was cooking, he went along the beach asking people for a piece of beluga blubber to eat with the rhubarb. People were so scared by this, a lot of them went in their tents and wouldn’t even talk to him. But finally someone gave him some blubber and he took it back to his tent and ate it with his rhubarb and nothing happened. Never got sick; the next day he was healthy and strong as any of them. After that, a lot of people started eating beluga with any other food, just like we do now.
“Any other taboo, he would break it whenever he could and tell people they didn’t have to be afraid. He said, ‘If we don’t believe in the taboos, then they don’t have any power over us.’”
Jacob stopped talking. Lucy queried him in Inupiaq, but he waved her off and motioned Pauline over. He spoke into her ear in Inupiaq and she responded, “Arigaa.”
Then she eased him off the bed and helped him hobble into the bathroom.
Nathan and Lucy watched this without a word.
Finally, Lucy broke the silence. “Aren’t they beautiful together? I just hope—” Apparently having thought better of whatever was to come next, she kept it to herself, and neither of them said anything more until Jacob was back on his bed.
He spoke in Inupiaq to Lucy, who turned and looked at Nathan. “He says where was he before he went to the bathroom?”
“He was talking about how Natchiq broke all the taboos.”
Lucy translated this. Jacob lifted his eyebrows and said, “Ah-ha.”
“BESIDES BREAKING the taboos, Natchiq always made prophecies, too. He said a new kind of people, white people, would come into the country and then everything would change for the Inupiat.”
“Nobody had heard of white people in those days?” Nathan asked.
“Maybe a few people had heard of white-man ships passing by the coast, or maybe when Siberian people came over to trade, maybe they talked about seeing white people, but there weren’t any around Chukchi and nobody here had ever seen any. This was right before all the whalers came into our country with their ships, I think.
“Anyway, Natchiq said everything would be different for the Eskimos when all the whites come. People would wear different clothes, eat different food. Some Eskimos would be made rich and some would be made poor.
“He predicted there would be thin pieces of birch bark that people could write on. He said boats powered by fire would ride in the sky. ‘This is what some of you will travel in someday,’ he told them, ‘a boat powered by fire.’
“And he said there would be boats that could go up the river without anybody poling or without people and dogs on the banks pulling them up by ropes.
“A lot of people didn’t believe him. ‘That will never happen,’ they said. ‘You’re going crazy, that’s why you talk like this.’
“But Natchiq just said it was what his source of intelligence told him, and he kept doing whatever he wanted. Another thing he predicted was that the newcomers, the whites, would find something of great value to them up by where the Walker River runs into the Isignaq. A big city would grow up there, that was what he said, with lights that stretched to the mountains on both sides of the Isignaq.
“Later on, after Natchiq was gone and his predictions started coming true, like about all the white people coming into the country and the boats that could run by their own power, some of the Eskimos that still remembered him started to think he wasn’t crazy after all. They thought maybe he could be right about the whites finding something they want at Walker River, too. So they moved up there and started Walker Village, thinking they would get rich when the whites finally made their strike. Maybe they still think that, ah?”
Jacob looked Nathan’s way as Lucy translated this. Nathan gave the nod that seemed to be called for, and Jacob continued.
“Ah-hah. But the rest of what Natchiq said about Walker was not so good. He said that after it became a big city, there would be two winters together and no summer in between, with snow up to the treetops. Then, when breakup came, the flood would reach all the way to the shoulders of the mountains and a great big whale would surface on the river, right where Walker used to be. Then there would be a day that was split in half.”
“What did he mean by that?” Nathan asked. “The end of the world?”
“He never explained it. When people would ask him, he would just look sad and not say anything. Maybe he was sad because his father in the sky didn’t explain it to him, or maybe he did know what was coming next, but it was too sad to tell.”
There was another break as the aide returned with Jacob’s teacup, refilled. Then he continued.
“Of course when people started to listen to Natchiq about the taboos, the angatquqs got worried. They said, ‘Don’t believe anything Natchiq says—he’s crazy.’
“But Natchiq answered that he was more powerful than the angatquqs, because their power came from the earth but his power came from his father above.
“At that time there were lots of angatquqs around Chukchi and the biggest one was Saganiq. He and the other angatquqs tried to find some way to kill Natchiq. In those days, angatquqs could do what they call—”
Lucy interrupted the proceedings with an apologetic look at Nathan. “I don’t know how to translate what he’s saying—it’s a new word to me. I have to talk to Pauline.”
She turned to her grandmother, still perched on the foot of the bed and now sipping from Jacob’s teacup. Inupiaq flew back and forth between Jacob and the two women for a few moments, and then Pauline said, “He mean soul travel.”
Lucy nodded in recognition, smiling. Then she continued the translation.
“Those old angatquqs could do soul travel. Their spirits would leave their bodies and fly around, sometimes they would even run into each other and have big fights on these trips. At least, that’s what people thought, in those days.
“So Saganiq decided to use soul travel to find Natchiq’s soul and kill him. He went out flying and pretty soon he came to Natchiq. Natchiq was sitting on his chair and all around him was this bright glow. Saganiq tried to attack his soul, but the glow just got brighter and then Natchiq’s chair started to rise upward. Saganiq tried to attack again, but the glow got even brighter and Natchiq’s chair rose even more. Pretty soon, the glow was so bright that Saganiq couldn’t even look at it, and he knew he couldn’t kill Natchiq that way.
“When Saganiq come back to his body, there was Natchiq waiting, and he said, ‘The one of the earth has tricked you. He is weak, not strong. Only my father in the sky is strong.’
“But Saganiq wouldn’t give up. Him and two other angatquqs, they put a spell on some food to poison it and they gave it to Natchiq. But when Natchiq ate it, nothing happened. He just laughed and said, ‘Even the poison you make doesn’t hurt me. I eat it up. I could swallow you up if I wanted to.’
“Now Saganiq was really mad and he said, ‘I think something might block the passage if you tried.’ And he pulled out his kikituq, this amulet of a snowy owl that he always carried in his clothes, and he waved it in Natchiq’s face. Natchiq just laughed again and said, ‘I could swallow that, too.’ He tried to take it, but Saganiq put it back in his clothes and he walked away.
“Not long after that, Natchiq was out hunting one day, and he caught a baby snowy owl that got lost from its parents. He brought it back, made a cage for it out of willow branches, and he kept it that way. He tamed that owl and he named it Saganiq and whenever anybody would come around, he would show them that tame owl named Saganiq sitting in its cage. Until finally one day, Natchiq killed that owl and ate it, to show people that Saganiq and the old-time angatquqs didn’t have any power anymore.”
Nathan shivered, and interrupted despite himself. “He ate Saganiq’s kikituq?”
“Ah-hah, Natchiq cooked it and ate it and everybody thought he would die for sure that time. But he didn’t die, he stayed as strong as ever. And after that hardly anybody would listen to Saganiq or the other angatquqs. The people didn’t worry so much about taboos, either. Our people finally started to have a happier life. They did it themselves, even without the whites and their Christianity.
“Well, the angatquqs didn’t have their power anymore, and Natchiq started to think it was time to go north, to tell the people up there what his father in the sky said about the taboos and the angatquqs and what would come in the future. So one day when it was just starting to be spring, like now, Natchiq told the people he was going to what we call Barrow now, where there was also lots of angatquqs, then maybe Canada. Him and his wife, they took off up the trail and they never came back.”
“What became of them?” Nathan asked.
“I guess nobody ever found out for sure, or at least I never heard. Some people thought Natchiq made it through the mountains to Barrow, and then went to Canada. Some people thought Saganiq’s kikituq flew up there and killed Natchiq’s soul somewhere in the mountains, but maybe his wife made it back to Chukchi, only she was so weak by then she died, too. This was right about the time the naluaqmiut missionaries started to come in, and they told people not to talk about anything to do with angatquqs if they wanted to go to heaven. So everything after that kind of got lost from not being talked about, even though lots of people had memories of what happened with Natchiq before the missionaries came.”
Nathan was silent for a time, digesting his grandfather’s story. Fascinating enough, and probably with elements of truth. But what did it have to do with Victor Solomon’s murder?
“What family was Natchiq from?” he asked. “Are his relatives still around today?”
Lucy translated this, and Jacob squinted a no, then spoke in Inupiaq.
“Like I say before, he come from up on the Isignaq River, and nobody lives at that place now. If he’s connected to any family around here, I never heard about it. Maybe his people moved into some of the villages upriver and got new names from the naluaqmiut and they don’t even know they’re related to him. Or maybe his line died out if he died on the trail. His story is all broken up and now nobody knows who he was.”
“I think someone knows,” Nathan said. Jacob looked at him sharply and he realized the old man had understood at least the gist of what he had said.
“Who?” his grandfather said in English.
“Did you ever hear Whyborn Sivula talk about Natchiq or Saganiq?”
Lucy translated, but Jacob seemed to figure it out before she finished and spoke rapidly in Inupiaq to her.
“He says he never heard anything like that, and why do you think Whyborn would know who Natchiq was?” Lucy translated.
“Tell him I’m going to talk to Whyborn and find out the rest of the story, and then I’ll come back and tell it to him.”
Jacob smiled and lifted his eyebrows and said, “Arigaa.” Then he laid his head against the pillows and closed his eyes.