Brother Wind by Sue Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

and pulled the woman to her feet. Samiq stood, but his father’s hand held him back.
    “Wait,” Kayugh said to Samiq, the word a quietness in the ulaq.
    Blue Shell grabbed her husband’s wrist, twisted the hand down to her mouth, and bit. Waxtal jerked his hand away and drew it back to slap her, but Blue Shell blocked the blow with her arm.
    “Do not touch me,” she hissed. “You cannot stop me. I will tell Samiq what he needs to know.” She turned to Samiq and said, “Besides the fish I caught today, we have four sealskins of fat and two sea lion bellies of rendered oil. We have three bellies of dried fish and a sealskin of puffins, whole. I have three baskets of bitterroot bulbs and one, not large, of dried seal meat.”
    Samiq closed his eyes in despair. Waxtal had only enough oil for one, perhaps two moons. Did the man think he could live forever on other men’s hunting? He glanced at his father, but Kayugh’s eyes were lowered.
    “Well then,” Big Teeth said, “we must hunt.”
    “I hunt,” Waxtal said. “I would have as much in my food cache as any man if my wife did not waste what I bring in.”
    Blue Shell began to laugh. Waxtal lifted his walking stick, but she brushed past him and left the ulaq without looking back.
    The next day, Samiq sent First Snow and Small Knife to hunt seals and otters—whatever they could find in the inlets of the bay. He asked Kayugh and Big Teeth if they would be willing to go inland to hunt caribou. “Last summer, traders said there were caribou living on the tundra, one, two days’ walk from this beach,” Samiq said to the men. “We have never hunted caribou before, but …” He paused when he saw light come into his father’s eyes.
    “Once when I was a boy, my father took me caribou hunting,” Kayugh said. “I am willing to try again.”
    “If you want, take Waxtal,” said Samiq and smiled at his father’s grimace.
    But that morning as all the men left the village, Waxtal was with Kayugh and Big Teeth, the three with throwing spears and seal flipper boots, walking inland toward the mountains.
    The women went out in Chagak’s ik to fish for cod with handlines. After they left, Samiq went to his ulaq and painted his face red with ocher and seal fat, in the manner of the Whale Hunters. He did not go out to hunt. How could he hunt whales with his hand as it was? Perhaps someday he would hunt seals or sea lions, but even with Three. Fish’s birdbone straightening his finger, he would never have the quickness to hunt whales. He would be a retriever—one who followed the whale once it was harpooned, and helped bring it back to the village after it died. But first he must ask the whale spirits to choose another alananasika, a man to be chief whale hunter of the village, someone for Samiq to teach what he had learned from the Whale Hunters.
    He took his ikyak out into the bay and began a Whale Hunters’ song, a song he had learned from his grandfather Many Whales, once alananasika of the Whale Hunter tribe. When the song was finished, Samiq sang his own words, a plea to the whale spirits. “We do not hunt so men will honor us with songs. We do not hunt so women will praise us. We hunt to live. If you choose a hunter from our village, we will treat you with honor. Any whale who gives himself to us, we will honor. We will fill his mouth with fresh water. We will give his heart back to the sea. We will do all those things that honor whales.”
    He waited then, hoping to feel the power of the whale spirits, to know in his heart that the whale spirits understood his people’s needs. But he felt only emptiness under the high gray dome of the sky, and in his heart the same emptiness.
    He looked down for a moment at his right hand, clamped tightly around the paddle, and as he turned his ikyak back toward the village, he asked himself why he had thought the whale spirits would listen to him. He was no hunter.
    “You knew,” some spirit voice told him. “You knew. Why