Kisnglaria

Kisngalria wanted to leave behind the lidless sockeye salmon he’d caught, when he got separated from the others. Custom demanded that he give it as a gift, to fill another’s belly. It was heavy, too heavy, almost as large as him, but he’d carried it in two arms, with a grim determination, determined to show his father he could do it. He planned to give the salmon to his mother’s mother.

The elder’s travelling companion had come along to pick berries. She had busied herself with thick fingers given from much work, and woven a windbreak, and started a fire, before she left them to find her own way.

The rain had passed quicker than a morning lullaby. Quaatak, his father’s father had helped him haul the line and land it. He watched the gleaming rainbow in the air, and the fish quiver and gave its last dance on the mud embankment.

Quaatak’s elegy for the sockeyed-salmon, for life, in their soft, forgotten, language sounded sweeter the further they got from missionaries.  ‘When one loses one’s world, one loses one’s place in the world.’

Kisngalria felt great joy but also sadness for the salmon.

Quaatak squinted into his soul as he looked over the shallow water and endless land. He reminded him, he must carry that feeling always, wherever he went, wherever he held a line from the stern of the boat or dangled a hook or flung a spear or followed the trace of an arrow, always have gratitude and sorry in your heart, or you too will get lost.  

In the grassy inlet, the fish rotted. The vivid scarlet colour that had moved with a flick of tail through the green easy backwaters on the main channels it came to spawn, peeled off like silk slashes turning to mush on pink flesh. Skull broken, the sockeye bloated.

The riverside shrubs carried the corpses of other salmon, half-chewed bodies, discarded by bears on side creeks.

Quaatak said the bears, were our ancestors, they carried all the seasons on their bodies. Common loom, crane, and crow.  Salmon and berries and trout and seal and walrus even the Beluga whale in the endless waters. Bears carved space for the caribou and wolves. And they had to be given space too. Killing a bear was a big responsibility, scoring lines to haul it, and honouring it by taking skin and fur could blunt a good knife quicker than a sledge-dog ate blubber. And there was a note of warming; not that it was needed, it might not be you eating the chewy meat. Our ancestors pulled on the mask and looked through the eyes of bears.   

Cold black clouds and hungry bears coloured Kisngalria’s thoughts when the mist drifted over the camp.  His legs weary, hunger, and the smell of home blew in the wispy smoke rising from the windbreak. He heard a young woman’s voice and laughter. Much laughter, it seemed to be coming from above his head.

A splash from behind him, and he turned his head. When he turned back, the only sound he could hear was his breathing.

‘Quaatak,’ he cried out. ‘I am standing. I am standing like a man.’

He listened and not just with his ears. The wind too was still. He could no longer catch the wood smoke, bringing with it the scent of home. He placed the salmon down at his feet, nudging it with his big toe.

The young woman’s laugher swirled around him like a soft blanket as the mist grew denser. When he his eyes shifter right, it came from the left. And when he turned around it was in front of him.  When he shut his eyes, it echoed inside his head. And he wanted to run, run fast, but he repeated the story of Quattak aloud.

He felt his father’s father presence beside him. Yet, he knew, if he reached out a hand he would not, could not, touch him. And the laughter would take him over and wrestle him to the ground until he frothed at the mouth.  

‘When I was younger than the world,’ Quaatak whispered. ‘I followed the white bush tail of the red fox, because where it goes no bear will dare follow. It led me far from home and never seemed to tire. I had sturdy dogs pulling my sledge swiftly through the snow. They tried to keep up.  Skipping ahead of us, the red fox called out with a long, hollow, howl.

‘Snow began to fall thicker and thicker and I turned the dogs. Set them to find home. A lead dog smells the trail left behind, find its droppings long buried under the snow. I gave its head and let it lead.

‘The red fox howled from in front of us, and behind us, and to the side of us. I was no longer hunting its tail. It was hunting us. I grew ice-blind staring into wind. The lead dog toiled and slowed. I grew colder and colder. The snow grew thicker and thicker on the furs and skin of my shoulders. My head bent under its weight. The dogs, creating their own tomb, refused to go further, no matter how I cajoled them.

‘I am standing,’ Quattak beat his chest. ‘I am standing like a man.’

‘A door opened and I spotted a wavering taper. My wife led me in by the hand to the warmth. The lead dog would go no further because it had brought me home.’

Around the fire, Kisngalria had heard that story many times, but now it beat in his thin chest. He had asked his father’s father whether he rewarded the lead dog.

His father had answered, when his father’s father would not. ‘You do not reward a dog for being a dog.’

Kisngalria mouthed the words again, calling his father into existence, ‘You do not reward a dog for being a dog’.

He cried out, once more and beat his chest. ‘I am standing. I am standing like a man.’

The laughter around him grew dimmer and stopped. He nudged the sockeyed salmon and slimy scales rubbed watery skin into the spaces between his toes. The mist flittered away and he could taste the smoke from the windbreak on his throat.

A bent old man in bear skins, much older than Quattak, his father’s father, tended the fire. Much older than any man Kisngalria had met or seen. He stared back at him and smiled. Kisngalria knew that the old man was himself visiting his younger self. And Mother Earth had paid him a great honour.

The old man unbent his body. ‘I am standing. I am standing like a man’.

Kinsgarlia answered in a faltering voice. ‘I am standing. I am standing like a man.’  

The old man began a slow dance around the fire and chanted.

‘Your father’s father found the fire,

No one else could hold,

Its burnt weight.

You must find the snow,

Featherless light,

Fledgling that falls too easily from the nest,  

Too early,

Or too late,

You must wait,

Or it becomes forever hollow.

Our world depends on snow.

Even as time melts away,

In slow shadows,

Between sea and shore,

Brought by the storm

Of wind and our home in the sky

Beached and burnt to ash

And sea glass.

We fall.

We fall.

We fall.