All afternoon we’ve been like sitting ducks
All afternoon we’ve been like sitting ducks as Joe’s friends and relatives appear. Davis Ongtowasrok comes to take us to his mother’s house for dinner. He’s gaunt and toothless – testimony to the non-existent American health-care system – and dutifully moved in with his elderly mother after his father died. “Mom used to be the bi-lingual teacher,” he tells us. Her education went to the 4th grade, Dad’s to the 8th. Now the only time we hear Inupiat is when the elders come around with visiting dance groups. I can only understand the basics. No one young talks our language anymore.”
The ride to Faye’s house is snow-blasted. I ride behind Davis and Joe rides in the sled. “How can you see where you’re going?” I ask. A toothless smile: “I can’t, but the “snow-go” knows the way.” We flail through a deep snowdrift that hides the entryway. Blowing snow blasts my face. Impossible to see. I fall a couple of times, yelping and gulping snow. So does Joe. We’re like newborn children with no feet, no eyes.
Davis waits patiently, then jerks open the first entry door to his mother’s house. At age 78 she is bent but vigorous. She has an impish smile and scuttles around her cramped kitchen cutting up piles of reindeer meat and fermented walrus with her ulu: “I still get ice from the lagoon and driftwood from out on the beach with my sled,” she says, dropping the curved blade to shove a few more sticks into the ancient wood stove.
She serves platefuls of boiled reindeer meat and next to these, black bits of fermented bearded seal on squares of cardboard. Meltwater is scooped into plastic cups. “Before we had glass nursing bottles we used bearded seal intestines and squeezed the milk out of one end,” she says, remembering too, that Davis, now in his 40’s, was born in their summer camp up the coast about 20 miles, a place that has since been wrecked by brown bears.
The reindeer is chewy. She sprinkles soy sauce on the meat. “When we’re not eating reindeer, there’s some good flounder at this time of year - we lie on the ground at a lead in the ice and spear them. All the time, though, we are eating walrus, seal and polar bear. I boil the claws. They’re good. But if you eat the bear’s liver your hair will fall out!” She says, laughing, touching her thinning hair.
Davis is so gaunt and pale he looks ghostlike. But he’s kind-hearted and thoughtful: “I used to hunt walrus at night on the pack ice. We could hear them barking. Must have been a big herd. I miss that sound. Now the ice pack is so far out we can barely see it. Our family herds reindeer. They were brought in by…….in…….. They’re free ranging. We have three satellite collars and I used 4-wheelers or snowmobiles to find them. The rest of the time I track them on the computer.”
Faye brings more meat and we all chew in silence. She looks at Joe and smiles. “I remember your father, Willy,” she says. Joe’s parents moved the family to Nome when Joe was ten. This is the first time he’s been back to his village for 17 years. He and Faye look at family pictures hung around the room. There’s a picture of Wales’ orphans. “The whites brought religion and sickness and not much else,” he says. We had good lives. We had ice and lots of food. We didn’t need anything. My grandparents died of the flu. An old woman named Attoq lived at our house. My mother was sucking the milk of a dead woman when a neighbor found her.”
Faye says her father always took one teaspoon of seal oil every night before he went to bed because there were no medicines then. He died when Faye was a teenager in the 1943 flu epidemic. But the influenza epidemic of 1918 decimated the adult population of Wales. Faye says: “Many times the flu has taken the people of Wales away.”
