Opening Chapter: The Storyteller
—There were trees covering the shoreline of Tehek. They were low, stunted by the steady northeast wind that blew down unencumbered and unrelenting from the Pole, over Baffin Bay, and into Nunavut.
—Unencumbered?
—Nothing could stop the wind.
—But trees? Real trees?
—Not like the ones you see in pictures. Scrub pine no higher than your waist, but they were trees nonetheless.
—But there are no trees now. Only grass and sedge and flowers in July.
The child leans forward, arms supporting her head. She knows, everyone knows, but she wants to hear more about the trees…about the old times. The old man shifts uncomfortably in his seat. The arthritis has almost overwhelmed him—on some days the medicine doesn’t help—but he recognizes the eagerness and the curiosity.
—You’re right, little one, but this was in the before times when animals hid in the undergrowth near Tehek while hunters and their children starved.
—Was it Sedna? Did she trick the hunters into not seeing the animals?
The children know the myths and legends, but when the old man talks about them, they seem almost real.
—Yes, it was always Sedna. She was ugly and her shape was frightening, but the animals did not make judgments on such things. That is what humans do. For many years our people died of starvation while the sun sank lower and the caribou ruled the winter.
—Why did Sedna hate us?
The question arises from another corner of the classroom. The grizzled storyteller opens his thermos and takes a sip of tea as the children wait for the answer. Their teacher fidgets: Miss Laird the children call her, though he remembers only because of the wood nameplate on her desk.
Her face shows concern: the old man who knows the old ways also has an old penchant for vodka and is not above adding a bit to…to anything. He sips slowly from the thermos, a small amount (not enough to make a difference, Miss Laird thinks with some relief), then screws on the cap and finds the boy who asked the question. It was a good question but he isn’t sure what it was. He straightens some of the fringe that circles his coat. His mind, sometimes as sharp as ever, goes dull for a moment. But just as he is about to ask what the question was about, he remembers.
—Sedna does not hate us. We harm the land. We steal the water. We flatten the hills. We dig for gold, oil, minerals. And now we melt the frost. Sedna has good reason to hate us, to hate all mankind.
He hesitates: there is a fine line between scaring the children and captivating them. He amends the statement:
—Sedna is angry sometimes, like the rest of us. But she does not hate us. —Tell us about the miracle. Tell us about Tehek.
—We can no longer count on miracles.
—Tell us, though. Please.
He reaches for his tea once again, then shifts it away. The teacher is relieved.
“Yes,” the young instructor says, capturing her students’ excitement, “the children love that story.”
Everyone waits.
The old man’s face, weathered and grey is furrowed from decades in the inhospitable north, and maybe too many years of isolation, of sleeplessness, even of alcohol. He has paid the price for his prescience, his foresight, his gift of prophecy—all attributes that others assign to him but that he has always dismissed. Yet he cannot deny the children their story, though as with anything else that grows dimmer with age, he often has trouble believing it ever happened.
—It was just after the solstice….
A murmur grows. It’s beginning. Every child knows the solstice, the legends, and the celebrations. He waits for a beat until quiet returns.
—But in this solstice the happiness did not come. People were sad, children were sick, the hunters returned each day with nothing. Not even the lake would give up any of its treasures. People spoke of moving. People right here. But where would they go? Where would you go?”
—My house is here. My grandmother is next door.
—My best friend lives up the street. Who would my best friend be?
Others join in, pick out classmates: the thought of leaving is preposterous, but not without fear.
—Someplace warm, people said. But there were no planes to take people away. Only…here. Then one day a woman whose baby was very sick went off by herself to hunt the woods around Tehek.
—Uki.
The children know. Miss Laird smiles. The old man will tell the story and the class will end. Whatever is in his thermos will be drunk somewhere else.
—Yes. Uki. She had a bow and arrow, but she also carried an axe, and as the sun rose above the horizon on that short day, she cut down her first tree. The trunk was narrow and she had little trouble. Then she cut a second, and a third. Her exhaustion grew—she had no food because there was no food—and she grew weak. After the fourth tree she heard a voice behind her, or maybe in front of her, or maybe within her. And she answered, though only she heard the question, “because my baby is starving and these trees are hiding the animals.”
—Did Sedna attack her?
—No. Nothing happened, and so Uki answered again the question only she heard. “I do not want your trees, but I must take them down so that we can hunt.”
—All of them?
—Yes, all of them, by herself if she had to. Not even a chainsaw.
Some of the children laugh at the anachronism; others are so mesmerized by the image that the joke is lost on them.
—But just as she prepared to swing the axe again, a voice told her to stop. “Get the hunters and bring them back tomorrow.”
The woman didn’t want to trust the voice, but darkness and exhaustion would stop her before she accomplished anything worthwhile. She returned to the hamlet and gathered the hunters. “Go in the morning,” she said. “The hunting will be good.”
They doubted her, scoffed at her, called her a bad mother for running off and leaving her babies unattended. It was not true: the three children were warm and dry, but hungry and sick too. To quiet their laughter she dared them. “We will go now,” she said. “Not tomorrow.”
When the men who doubted her arrived at Tehek, the sun had fallen below the horizon. But it went no farther west, went no lower. Minutes passed, and hours, and all that time the four men and two women hunted while the sun stood still. In the end the trees had vanished, and there were hardly reeds or sedge. There were only caribou, standing idly in the dusk as if believing they could not be seen. The hunters took what was needed, but no more. Enough to meet the crisis, to save the village, the children, the babies. Explanations were imagined and given, but Uki herself received no praise or honor; after all, she had merely relayed the news. All that time the real darkness never came.
The hunters returned, the feast began at midnight and lasted until the sun reappeared. At noon Uki went back alone to give thanks. The area looked as it always had, low growth and vegetation and animals which, if they were there at all, were hidden among the trees and scrub brush.
She stood next to the trees she had cut down: they lay where she had left them in a small clearing. Nakurmiik, she yelled, repeating it loudly in every direction. Nakurmiik. Thank you.
The children are silent, then several of them clap. The old man smiles and the expression draws in his skin and makes him look even older.
—Tell us about the woman. What happened to her?
The children know the answer. There will be no clapping this time. Hearing the old man tell it will mean more to them, but the ending is not a happy one. In the children’s sanitized version Uki is forced to remain there forever to live with the spirits, never to see her own children again.
The adult version is even more dismal, filled with rape and unwanted births until such time that she has atoned for the souls her axe destroyed that afternoon. Animism makes no distinction when it comes to souls—they live within cold-stunted ground cover as well as within exalted men.
—And every once in a while Uki would visit her children in a dream, and they would know it was their mother who saved the village, who saved the world.
He hesitates.
And these were the blessings of the Creator.
He says the words not because it is the true ending, but of late he cannot finish the tale without crying. He hopes that maybe the children will not notice. A few seconds pass before Miss Laird steps in.
“Let’s thank our visitor,” she says, handing him a tissue. He is crying after all.
—You are good listeners. I will come back again.
As the children push toward the door waiting to be dismissed, their teacher puts a hand on the storyteller’s shoulder.
“And they would know it was their mother who saved the village, who saved the world,” she says to him, “but she could never hold her children to her breast, and they could never feel a mother’s love. I remember that ending from when I was in school. You don’t say that anymore?”
“Too sad,” he says. “Too sad for the children.”
But it’s more than that. Maybe it is empathy for the woman suddenly bereft of the people she loved, or the fact that his own fantasy about rescuing Uki from the angry spirits has grown more fantastical with the passage and the ravaging of his already diminished powers. He had a wife once, a woman he had made love to. Now he can no longer imagine what that was like to hold her, how he would even approach a woman anymore. The urges, faded and muddled, remain; but the imagination will no longer support even the simplest fantasy. And if an approach were to bring more rejection, then what?
The teacher finds the old man’s anorak, the boots, the mittens and, for some reason, two scarves.
“The children love your stories,” she says.
“Because they believe that they could have happened,” he says. “Do you, Deidre Laird?” He repeats her name, grateful for having remembered it.
“I love storytelling,” she says. “It’s a lost art.”
He squeezes her hand for a moment. The answer has surprised him in its honesty, but disappointed him too. People, even good people, have finally and thoroughly placed themselves above divine assistance, renounced the spiritual in favor of the temporal. The old vision returns—a world spinning more violently out of control until such time that no deity—Inuit, Christian, Aztec, none—can save it.
“You too are a blessing from the creator,” he says, then lets go of her hand and walks out into the reassuring cold, where he feels less like a stranger. Or worse, an impostor.
Copyright, Chuck Radda, 2018
