Re: Episode 8-2: Brought to a Head
"We were starving on the coast of Alaska," Sky Dog said, his gaze meeting Collins' then roving over the others, pale fingers gesturing as though to wind a string of telling around the listeners. "I was carrying my sister in my shirt and leading Igor, my kujjai, for that they were too weak to fly far or for to carry me...our pack-beast we had lost to wolves before we got on the ice, and the snowstorming had driven us south, so we did not see the markers of the Seal People to guide us. It was bare country we came to, and myself, for the first time I was lost - a place I had never migrated to before, or been visiting."
"So. We are trying to get properly onto the land, but there are cliffs. Beside us, the little ice, not yet so far out to sea, and the sky is grey with the light going as the sun hides for the winter - only a little each day, yes? Then the grey is moonlight on the snowclouds. We try to dig for seaweed. I am feverish with hunger. It is some days like that, then, on the cliffs, the forest's-favoured." He tugged at the skin of the bear by his shoulder, unwilling to say the word, then rolled to a crouch and lifted the still-furred jaw from about his neck to meet the rest of the skull it was hinged to, mimicking the animal's looking back and forth with considerable artistry. When the 'bear' looks down, the shaman looks up, pushing back the skull, and settles.
"I see him, and I know we are kin - kin in whiteness, yes, but also in power, and hunger. He sees me and knows this also: he says to me 'I will eat you, brother'," the voice that passed the shaman's lips was entirely unlike his own: a deep, breathy grating. "-he says to me. I laugh - well I am feverish - and I tell him 'no, I will eat you first!' Me, down on the beach and himself up there and much stronger than myself who has no gun, it makes him also to laughing...and so and along we go - he paces and I pace, and our bellies empty-" Sky Dog demonstrated the rolling gait of a bear pacing a tiring reindeer and a young man slogging along an icy shore, his hands tucked into the bear paws, bear skull low and eager, back and forth, back and forth. "-all the day, and I hardly dare to sleep, but when the night is black for a few hours we must, or break our legs in pieces." He shuddered, remembering.
"On waking in the grey-light, he is gone. I am afraid he has found a way to climb down behind us and beg my sister to fly high and seek for him, and send my helper-spirits also. So I find he is crossing the land we are on, that goes out into the sea; straight over, he is going, singing his hunting-song, and he will come to a bay he can come down on the beach, and eat us." Sky Dog shrugged.
"He is powerful: he is a honey-paw, a most-beloved...but I am a shamán, and I have skill to match his singing, though I am weak from many days without food. He does not think it. I sing strength to my steed's sinews, I sing warmth to my own heartstrings - like the reindeer I am running, and I pass the ground below me - like the little green-bird flying, like the wind across the birches, I sing this to my running. Igor falls, he is too tired, but we are close enough where the fur-clad will come, and I have dreamt what must be done."
"I leave Korpi with my reindeer, I take my knife and all my fishooks - all my needles and my flint-sharps, all my tacks and nails of iron...my small things for the trading, all the harpoon-tips and tin-lids...and I climb to the top of the cliffs and make snowballs." He paused until people stopped laughing.
"In the snowballs are my fishooks, all my bone-sherds, flint and splinters...I go and piss among the trees, so the great-paw he will smell me - smell me hot and living, as though I speak a challenge...then I take up my young-man-knife," he indicated his heavy blade, "-and cut my right palm bleeding. I leave the snowballs, holding them a time in my hand until they are red on the white plain of the grey world - leave them some here, some there...and yes, he comes to eat the fresh-blood snowballs, the forest most-beloved, very soon he comes to eat them and at the last I am throwing them to him."
"He does not understand why his belly hurts him, why his throat is getting sorer - puts it down to hunger, yes, hunger and the sharp frost coming - and I sing to the bone sherds, to the tin-lids and the fishooks, sing to them to find me, that have my blood and onnir," Sky Dog made a clawed pulling gesture as though hauling points through bear flesh. "Then he feels that he is injured, bleeding before and behind, and he roars, with the spittle, yes? Very red with his own bleeding: 'Brother! Bond-twister, you have tricked me!'" Sky Dog rose somewhat, making it easy for the imagination to picture the hanging skin as full of huge and angry bear, the swinging jawbone snapping in blind, furious agony. Then he straightened, a man again, himself, bargaining on an Alaskan clifftop:
"I tell him 'I cannot fight you; it is not well to come at me, it is below you to do so, God's-beloved.' Thus I warn him, but the honey-eater is angry, very angry, yes? He runs at me. I jump for the branches that are hanging, and he goes over." He shucked the bearskin in lieu of description: a blurred fall of heavy white fur, a splayed pile of once-animal, broken. "I go down to him, yes, down though I am aching all over, and he also is still alive, so I stick my knife in under his ear and cut his poor throat, and drink his blood and much onnir with it."
Sky Dog paused, unconsciously licking his teeth, then took on the bear's voice again, this time in a whisper: "'This is a sin,' the great-paw gives me to know with his eyes, as his bird-soul crouches to fly out. I say 'I will not deny it, if they ask me. I will tell your dying, brother, and if I am ever a bear, and yourself a man, you may do this thing to me.'"
"And he dies, and I eat his liver and skin him, and cut him in pieces, and all the little pieces for Korpi also...but Igor is still tired, and winter without light is coming, and I do not know that without him I will not die...so whilst I am still very full with the bear's onnir and his body, I take off my man's clothes - Ha! It is starting to...blizzard, you say? Yes, and put the clothes and the meat onto Igor, and Korpi with them, and make a harness of the rope-" he gestured over at Igor, who had indeed worn a rope during the day. "-then I cut as to skin myself, put the most-beloved's skin over my skin and his shape over my shape...so I am as he was, and take my reindeer and my sister on my back and with my nose, I find a band of Yupiq. It is not easy! I think one more day running, or to be in the blizzard as a man, it would have ended me. But I came there, and became again a man - as they fed Igor, I went to sleep!"
Sky Dog grinned again, wrapping himself in his bearskin as though it were an ordinary blanket. "I do not know how many days I was sleeping, for it was the Long Night when I awoke, but the first thing I told to the people was the death of the honey-eater, as you have heard it."
He stretched, still alert to the night. "I have kept my promise."