Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Boucheron

Author:Bernard du Boucheron [DU BOUCHERON, BERNARD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000
ISBN: 9781468306231
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2012-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Nightfall. Two men were bickering on the ice.

“Where did you see the great umiak?”

“We were hunting seal, at the hole in the ice,” said the younger one.

“Where did you see the great umiak?”

There was never a direct response, for fear of appearing boastful and upsetting the Spirits.

“It was almost all day ere we killed a seal,” said the younger one.

“Umiak, umiak!”

And again: “Umiak! Umiak!”

The question became an insistent refrain, then the subject of verbal sparring.

“Umiak! Umiak! Young turd,” said the older one. “Will you tell us where you saw the umiak, yes or no?”

“Umiak! Umiak! Old turd,” said the young hunter, “the great umiak! the great one!”

By “umiak” they did not mean the traditional women’s boat, which would never have turned up out there, lost on the vast ice sheet. The great umiak, that was something else. The young hunter had mentioned it in passing and then refused to surrender any further details, to annoy his elders. The dogs growled and yelped in their sleep, their noses tucked under their tails.

“Why don’t the elders try to guess?”

The exchange of insults — “old turd, young turd”— continued until well into the night. The young hunter finally gave in, pointing in a certain direction, which they would commit to memory by noting the lay of the rippled snow on the ice, at right angles to the prevailing wind. The great umiak lay at half a night’s march. This information provoked a flurry of excitement and activity. The men unloaded their sleds and hid the seal carcasses beneath blocks of ice. They set about untangling the dogs’ traces, using their bare hands and teeth; it was an excruciating job in such extreme weather. The sleds set off slowly by moonlight over the jagged crust of the ice sheet. The men trotted alongside, cracking their whips. When the young hunter estimated that they were drawing close to the spot where they would be within earshot of the great umiak, they stopped to regroup. Silently the men chewed on their wads of frozen seal blubber. Some urinated on the ice, holding the dogs at bay with their whips for fear of exciting in them an excessive interest in the strong stench emanating from their crotches. In the warmth of the winter huts, in the glow of the oil lamps, there was often much jeering at the poor bastards who, having neglected this precaution, had been mutilated by the dogs and become the women’s laughingstock. The verbal sparring that was their principal distraction focused in this case on the dog’s tongue, which, according to the chanted jibes they liked to exchange, would replace the sex of the maimed men. “Tongue! Tongue! You use your tongue to lick instead of going inside!” said one. And another: “Dog’s teeth! Dog’s teeth! Your wife’s belly bites and snaps shut instead of lapping it up!” The women would laugh, baring teeth worn down from chewing on animal hides.

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