Eagle Drums, page 5
After one turn of the moon, their corner of the great hall was filled with drums in various stages of being built, alongside a large pile of ruined materials from the boy’s mistakes that they would find some use for later.
Savik had insisted that the boy learn to make different sizes of drums. Piŋa could now work with a variety of materials and skin, ensuring that no matter the hunting season, he would always find a way to make the drum.
One morning, Savik stood over the boy’s shoulder as Piŋa attempted to tighten thick sinew around a drum, lashing the skin down tight across the circle of wood. This part of the process was always tricky and required just as much luck as skill. This drum was the largest Piŋa had tried making; it was unwieldy and awkward, and the sinew was uncooperative, even with the special self-tightening knot he was using. The boy’s face grimaced. Sweat dotted the bridge of his nose.
“Your knot isn’t right,” said Savik.
“It’s fine,” the boy said in a tight voice.
“Your knot isn’t right. Take it apart and do it over.”
The boy glared at the man briefly, then set the drum down. The sinew knot loosened as soon as he released it, and the oiled sheepskin slid from the wooden frame onto the ground in a messy, unappealing lump. From the corner of his eye, he could see Savik clench his jaw, skin darkening with the insult. Piŋa held his breath, waiting to see what his reaction would be. Savik grunted at the boy’s obvious disrespect, waved an angry hand in his direction, and walked off, his heavy steps pounding out his displeasure. The boy exhaled in relief.
Savik would come back tomorrow; he always did. Often in a sourer mood than usual.
Piŋa stared at the unfinished drum in front of him, his mouth pursed with annoyance and anger. He reached over and pulled at the damp sinew till it came loose from the drum.
“The knot is fine,” he whispered at the dark empty space around him.
10
PTARMIGAN
It had been a while since the eagles brought him any meat at all, a couple of weeks at least. Everyone living in the aerie waited for winter to break its grip on the world. The skies were filled with storm after winter storm as the seasons fought with each other and made it impossible for the eagles to fly and hunt. Piŋa was happy he had a small amount of food preserved and hidden away for times like these.
Then one day the skies cleared long enough for a bit of hunting and gathering. Piŋa pulled on as many layers as he could and ventured out to scour the ground under the snow for any plants or berries he could find. After a few hours, his face had gone numb and he could barely move his fingers. He made his way back to the hall empty-handed.
When he reached his sleeping area, he was surprised to see six rock ptarmigan hanging from a hook that he used for his winter gear. Seemed the eagles had better luck than he had. Piŋa quickly shed his gear and began to dress the birds for cooking. He was excited for the change in diet, knowing that late-winter ptarmigan hadn’t started eating willow buds yet, so their bellies would be full of berries and other edible herbs, and their meat would be sweet and tender without the taste of bitter willow.
As he worked on the ptarmigan, carefully plucking their snow-white feathers and setting them aside to use later, the smell of the birds on his hands tickled a memory as gently as the tiny downy feathers tickled his nose.
* * *
Wintertime was always his most favorite season when he was young. Late spring was usually hectic with cleaning out the siġỊluaq and preparing for the hunting seasons. Summer was filled with travel to escape the hordes of mosquitoes, and fall was the busiest, as they hunted and gathered in a frenzy to fill their stores for the coldest parts of the year.
During most of the year, Piŋa’s older brothers went away on hunting trips or on supply runs. But in winter the family spent time together indoors, enjoying their hard-won meals and telling stories and jokes by lamplight while they repaired and replaced gear. Even after all these years, he could still hear Atau’s loud, barking laugh and Malġu’s rumbling chuckle echoing through their family’s sod house.
His earliest memory of them all together was the day they taught him to make ptarmigan snares. He was about five years old, finally tall enough to travel the deep snow, but still too young to go far from their home.
The long winter was giving way to an early spring, and soon his brothers would be off to scout the trail for his family’s seasonal migration to their summer camping grounds. The deep snow glittered in the sunlight as the top layer melted and refroze at night. Atau led the way, using his towering height to aim their small party like an arrow through the dense, leafless brush. He took long steps in the deep snow, using his forearms to clear the willows, all while mumbling colorful curses at the snow clinging to his boots. Malġu walked closely behind Atau, using his girth and weight to break through the snow so that Piŋa could follow in his wide footsteps. As Malġu waded, he pointed here and there at the willows and their fuzzy little buds that had appeared in the early spring sun. The air smelled green and new, like melting ice and fresh dirt.
They came to a clearing where the snow was peppered with tiny shallow tracks that barely broke the surface, a million little Y-shaped impressions, each barely a finger long. Piŋa looked into the willows, expecting to see the animals that made all of these tracks, but the willows were empty. The animals were long gone because of all the noise the boys had made as they approached.
Atau reached up and began snapping the tops of the willows, careful to keep the buds intact till he had gathered an impressive armful. Malġu sat and pulled out some braided sinew lengths and motioned for the boy to come forward. Piŋa sat in front of him, eyes wide as he watched Malġu’s nimble fingers create a sliding loop with a special knot. It was like a lasso with a short tail.
“Piŋa, watch closely. Watch how I make the knot.” He repeated the knot over and over in slow motion with several lengths of braided sinew, making sure that the boy could see how it was done. “Now you try,” he said.
The boy took his hands out of his mittens and practiced tying the special sliding knot while Malġu watched, pausing only once in a while to rub his hands together to warm them. A couple times Malġu reached over and undid the boy’s work completely with a gentle rumbling. “Almost, almost. Good job, baby brother. Good job.” But soon they had a pile of about ten small loops, each one about a man’s handspan across.
When Piŋa finished, Atau began creating a wall about as high as his knee in the clearing using the willow branches he had broken off. He stuck the branches in the snow so that the springtime buds were at the top. They all crouched around one of the gaps in the short willow-branch wall.
“Ptarmigan are not fancy or smart, which is why there are so many. If you’re not smart, then you have to be plentiful!” Atau said, and then laughed his loud barking laugh. Malġu’s round belly jiggled a little with quieter chuckles. “Come, baby brother, and let me show you how to do some population control—and get some tasty springtime birds for mother’s stew.” They wove the sinew loops between the willow-tip buds they had stuck in the snow, carefully constructing a short wall.
“See here, ptarmigan behave the same always and forever. They fly and walk along willows searching for the buds at the tips to eat. They love them some early springtime willow tips, ami? But they can be lazy. If they see or smell them on the ground, they will eat those first.” Atau made his fingers do a happy little dance as he walked his hand along the wall, smacking his lips as he made his hand pretend to eat the buds. “And when the silly birds walk through the gaps, they don’t know that we put our snare there, so they get caught! And since they are not very smart, they pull until they can’t pull no more. The end. Ptarmigan population control, and some fresh meat!” Atau’s fingers walked through a snare, and it tightened around his wrist as he pulled away from it, eyes wide in a dramatic fashion. Piŋa laughed loudly at the performance, delight brightening his face.
* * *
The springtime memory of that day dissolved into the darkness of the eagles’ hall. The smell of rotten bird brought him back to the present like a winter storm, overpowering the memory of the green willow buds. The echo of the laughter from that day stung the boy’s eyes. His brothers. His smart, brave brothers. Killed by mythical beasts for some still mysterious and endless task. Piŋa frowned at the pile of ptarmigan feathers in front of him. Suddenly all he wanted was to be back there, following his brothers through the willows. His chest ached with the need to have someone … anyone … break through the deep snow for him to ease his path forward.
What if I am still too small, big brothers? What if it’s too deep for me to get through?
11
HOLLOW
Two moons elapsed before the boy was deemed a passable maker of drums. Savik stopped meeting him in the mornings in the hall, leaving Piŋa on his own to practice all of the skills they taught him so far. The Eagle Mother would escort him in the mornings to his collection of drum-making supplies and then drift off again for her nap, waving her stick in the air in dismissal. She would come back in the evening to guide him back to his sleeping area. And so his days went.
This space of time between winter and spring was the most barren part of the year. The snow reluctantly gave way to reveal the pale, colorless ground beneath. What was once protected and insulated by deep layers of snow was scorched by the new sun, and even the hardiest of plants withered away to prepare for the growing season to come. This was the part of the year that food stores were likely to run out, even in prosperous times. And Piŋa was far from prosperous.
He carefully portioned out what food he had left. He slow-boiled what bones he could find in a shallow stone bowl over the seal-oil lamp he had in his room, trying his best to remove as many nutrients and as much residual fat as he could from the marrow and knuckles. He took care to check on his shrinking store of dried herbs and roots often, airing out any of the pieces that looked like they might become too damp and develop mold. But he hadn’t been told what the next step was going to be, or even when it was going to be, and this uncertainty eroded his determination.
* * *
Eagle Mother ignored all of his polite questions. Eventually he took to asking her point-blank if he was done with his task and could go home. At first, she would answer him with brief words, saying that he needed to have patience, but after about a week of this routine, she just refused to answer him at all. Instead, she stabbed him with her stick until he quieted.
Days melted into one another. The feeling that he needed to be doing something grew and grew until he could almost physically feel it simmering and building. He found himself jumping from one emotion to another—frustration, sadness, anger, and exhaustion. Not knowing when this was going to end made him feel like he should be doing more. And slowly, that feeling spilled over and left him like an empty cup, and still he got no relief.
The hollowness in his chest grew and grew, fed by his loneliness, and soon it became a dark cavern that swallowed his days. All the songs he composed were songs of home. Sad and forlorn songs filled the eagles’ hall with the helplessness of the boy’s predicament. He could see the Eagle Mother and her brood watching him as he became more and more sullen, as he began sleeping in later and later into the day. He noticed his body became physically thinner and hunched over, but he couldn’t really muster the energy to care about that very much. He could hear the eagles whisper about him from the darkness; they whispered to each other their guesses of what human ailment this could be, but after a while Piŋa figured that they left him to either recover on his own or die of whatever malady he might have. But even the whispering stopped after a while.
Savik assigned Isiġnaq to fly out and find plants for the boy, since he had exhausted the area around their home and it was bare from the change in seasons. Piŋa did his best to show her what to look for, but she was less than happy about it, so she went searching infrequently and avoided him whenever she could.
Now that the eagles left him mostly alone, he became even more desolate. At least before, his interactions with them gave him something to focus his energy on. Without them, Piŋa was like a fireweed seed tossed into the air, untethered and falling, not knowing where he was going to land.
12
LEMMING
There are many aspects of a sod building that contribute to its character: which direction the doorway faces, the size and placement of the window if there is one, how many rooms are built around the central space, the carvings on the arches or ivory carvings of protective animals buried into the sod itself. But one aspect is present in every single sod house in the Arctic: the lemmings.
The tiny, mouselike creatures are found in every sod house. They are the lowest on the food chain. Millions, billions of them feed the foxes, birds, wolves, and anything else with beak or bite. Sod houses provide protection against predators that are afraid of humans. And sod houses are always warm and cozy, with plenty of opportunities for lemmings to dig their burrows of tunnels and nests.
So when Piŋa first saw the lemming in the great hall, he didn’t pay it much attention. He had had another tedious day of nothing except music practice while the eagles avoided him. The days cut at him like obsidian against grass with their slow emptiness.
The lemming sat just out of the boy’s reach, watching Piŋa in his misery. Little dark eyes glittered in the half-light from the oil lamp. When the boy finally took notice and lifted his head to look at the little beast, anger burned across his face. His sadness was not a spectacle to be watched, especially by such a lowly creature. The boy wiped his tears and turned to look at the lemming directly, growling a bit under his breath, expecting the lemming to run when it realized it had been spotted.
But the lemming didn’t run. It held its ground, small body trembling, as though it was fighting the instinct to flee. Odd. The boy stared directly into those tiny, dark eyes. The lemming was normal-looking for the most part. Its body was almost comically round, with tiny little brown limbs and a short tail, the usual dark stripe down its back, and small ears almost invisible against its dense fur. But this one had a patch of pure white fur on its chest that glowed a little in the lamplight. Piŋa could see it clearly as the lemming sat on its hind legs.
The lemming squeaked at the boy. Not in fear or surprise. It was more of a question. Or at least what the boy thought a question would sound like if it was squeaked. The lemming turned its head a bit so that its other eye could get a better look.
Piŋa reached over, picked up one of his fur socks, and threw it as hard as he could at the lemming. His aim was true, and he hit the spot dead on where the lemming stood. Only, the lemming had guessed his move and jumped to the side. It still didn’t run. Instead, the tiny beast took a few steps forward and sniffed the air, short whiskers waving at the boy as it leaned closer, as if perplexed by this boy and his particular scent, if lemmings could be perplexed. Could lemmings be perplexed?
“Get out of here,” the boy said. He leaned forward and waved his hands in front of him.
The lemming snorted a tiny puff of air and turned its body. Making sure Piŋa was watching, the lemming closed its eyes and cocked its head. It was dismissive and oddly insulting. The boy was left staring at the slowly receding rear end of the lemming as it made its way down the hall.
Soon the lemming started showing up at Piŋa’s workspace in the morning, sitting just at the edge of the lamplight. The boy could tell it was the same lemming by the white patch of fur on its chest. It would move around the room in stealthy silence from hiding place to hiding place, finding safe spots to observe the boy. At first the boy took some pleasure in chucking whatever item was close at hand at the lemming, and even got close to hitting it directly a few times. But eventually, curiosity won Piŋa over as the days went on and it continued to return. It was very unusual behavior for a lemming, who were normally shy and simple creatures.
One day the boy saved some food from his midmorning meal, a hand’s length of masu, a sweet root that Isiġnaq had found for him during one of her flights somewhere off the mountain. He tossed it in the direction of the hiding lemming. The masu landed a short distance away from its twitching whiskers. The lemming slowly made its way to the offering, tiny furry nose sniffing the air as its dark eyes squinted at the boy. When it reached the root, it cautiously nibbled a piece off and ran back to the safety of the shadows, a brown blur streaking to the wall. A few minutes later the lemming came back, and this time it grabbed ahold of the entire root and awkwardly dragged it back to its hiding space, its tiny legs scrambling and flopping as it tried to move the giant root.
A small smile pulled at the corners of the boy’s mouth. From that point on, the lemming followed Piŋa as soon as he was awake, always sticking to the shadows but hopeful for scraps. The boy tried his best to save food for the lemming, but what he received was scarce as it was, and the area around the hall was still bare from his own gathering. He decided to try to work toward getting more food for the lemming. After all, he was a good provider.
