Granta 133 by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781905881925
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2015-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

For the few weeks of the digging season, the archaeologists took up residence in the village hall, which served as refectory, social hub, Wi-Fi station and laboratory. Sometimes in the evening Quinhagak people came by to see what we’d been up to, and to examine the day’s finds. They came in ones or twos. Mostly, they spoke little, but if we did have conversations I noticed how often and how modestly they described encounters with the natural world. For example, one evening after work Teddi came by. She sat next to me at a long plastic trestle table. I don’t know how the subject came up, but in her soft voice, she told me about a cloud that had once come to her aid. She had been picking berries alone out on the tundra, and had stayed too long. She had become exhausted and a bit sunstroked. Then, out of a clear sky, right above her, a little cloud had formed itself. The cloud let down rain, filling leaves with water for her to drink. How grateful she was to that cloud! More than one person expressed the opinion that the tundra is watchful. They said, ‘Out on the tundra, it’s like something’s looking at you.’ Sometimes you see odd things there.

John Smith is an elder with a penchant for blue jeans and Johnny Cash, who carves artefacts from walrus ivory. He told me about an encounter he’d once had with a spirit woman ‘just this high’ who had appeared before him, dancing to the beat of her tiny drum.

Another man told me about hunting a bear. He spoke with no self-aggrandisement or swagger. On the contrary. He’d been young at the time and out hunting with his father. ‘Shoot it!’ his father had said. He’d shot the bear. His father had scored lines on the dead bear, as if he was going to skin it. Then the father handed the knife to his son, saying, ‘Your bear, your responsibility.’

‘It took me three days to skin that bear. I never hunted bear again.’

If you imagine all these incidents together, all the looking and listening, the stories and encounters, remembered and repeated and layered over thousands of years, built up slowly like the frozen peat of the tundra, you might indeed come to know your own backyard. And how it might help you. From two different sources I heard the story of the young man, some decades ago, who went with friends out onto the sea ice. They’d been hunting, but he somehow got separated from the others, and when he tried to reach land and home he couldn’t, because the ice had drifted away from the shore. Alone on the ice, he survived for four months. All he had were the clothes on his back, and his tools and weapons – and the knowledge his elders had bequeathed him.

I was told these stories not in a sod hut, lit by a seal-oil lamp, certainly not in an igloo, but in the village hall – a metal-clad shed raised on stilts, harsh with electric strip lights.

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