Dogsong (2 page)

“But I don't know what it is.”

“I know that, too. It is part that you are fourteen and have thirteen winters and there are things that happen then which are hard to understand. But the other part that is bothering you I cannot say because I lack knowledge. You must get help from some other place.”

Russel nodded, then thought. “But where?”

His father looked at the ceiling, back down, thinking. “When I have trouble that I do not understand I sometimes get help from Jesus Christ.”

Russel hesitated. He did not want to sound discourteous but he was sure Jesus wouldn't help.

“But you do not have Jesus so that may not work for you. If you do not have Jesus I think you should go and talk to Oogruk. He is old and sometimes wise and he also tells good stories.”

“Oogruk? For help?”

His father laughed. “I know. You think he is old and just babbles. But there are two things there, there are Oogruk's words and there is Oogruk's song. Songs and words are not always the same. They do not always say the same thing. Sometimes words lie—but the song is always true. If you listen to Oogruk's words, sometimes they don't make sense. But if you listen to his song, there is much to learn from Oogruk.”

“All right. I will go. But will Oogruk give a song to me?”

Russel had heard about the songs his father spoke of. They were private and belonged only to the person who owned them. Now almost no one had a song.

“That is for him to know. Now go and get more meat. You did not bring in enough.” His father thought a moment.
“And bring in two of the heads so they will begin to thaw.”

“You want the heads?”

“Not for me. For Oogruk. Take the heads when you go, as a gift. He loves the eyes.”

Russel nodded and went out into the dark again.

There was a time when I was young. It was a bad time when there was not meat anywhere you looked and we had eaten of all the dogs.

We asked our old mother if we could kill her and eat of her until the deer came back and we would have done that thing. We would have done that thing. But that morning a deer came and my uncle took it with an arrow in the right manner and we did not have to do that thing. More deer came and we did not have to eat our old mother.

 

—an old Eskimo telling of his youth.

R
ussel had been in Oogruk's house many times but he always stopped before he went in. The dogs always drew him, drew his eyes over and he stopped. They were tied near the elevated food cache—a rough log hut up on stilts—and they watched him with interested eyes, slanted, deep eyes, watched him as he threw the caribou heads on the ledge surrounding the food cache.

The dogs.

There were five of them. Great red beasts with blue eyes, a cross between wolf and Mackenzie River huskies with some Coppermine River village blood mixed in. They were shy, aloof dogs who did not want people to touch them except to harness them or feed them. Russel knew little of dogs, but a man who knew dogs said they were good.

They were the only team in the village and never worked, so they were fat. But the fat hid muscle that could go forever.

Russel turned away from them and went to the door of Oogruk's house. Again he stopped, hesitating. It wasn't that he was afraid to go in. Everybody was welcome at Oogruk's. The old man loved company. It was more that Oogruk lived differently and inside the house—which outside looked like any government box—you had to change. The mind had to change, and the nose—Russel thought, grimacing—because Oogruk lived the old way. He would not allow electricity, used a seal-oil lamp and had skins on the floor. Some of the skins, all from caribou, were green tanned and they smelled when they grew warm. It was not a bad smell but it was strong and took some getting used to.

As did Oogruk. The way of Oogruk, the way he looked and was; it took a different thinking.

Russel opened the door without knocking, as was the custom, and went in and closed the door. Outside there had been bright-light and sea-wind off the frozen sea ice, salt-wind. Inside it was almost pitch-dark. The windows were covered with smoke grime, and the room was full of smoke from the lamp on a box in the corner, a seal-oil lamp with a moss wick that threw a tiny yellow glow around the room.

Leaning against the wall were harpoons and lances, hanging on nails were arrow-bags and bows and small ivory carvings. On other nails were skin clothes, squirrel-skin undergarments and caribou-skin parkas, some old and some not so old, all hanging loosely and thick with the smoke.

Against the far wall sat Oogruk. At first it was hard to know where the smoke ended and Oogruk began. Except for a small breechclout he was nude, and his skin was the same color as the smoke, a tan-brown, rich and oily. His hair had gone white, or would have been white, but it had taken the smoke, too, seemed to have flown into the smoke and become part of the smoke from the lamp.

“Hello. Hello. You sit down and we'll talk for a while.” The voice was strong—it always amazed Russel to hear Oogruk's voice. He was so old but the voice moved like strong music. “I will talk for you.”

Russel nodded and sat near the right wall, glad that nobody else was there. Often children would come in to listen—with respect, but out of curiosity more than anything—and Russel was glad that they were not there now. “I brought some deer heads for you,” he said when he'd settled on the hides. “With the eyes. They are out on the platform.”

Oogruk swiveled his head to face Russel. The eyes were opaque, a milk blindness over them, but Russel never thought of him as blind.

“I eat of the eyes when I can but people don't save them anymore,” Oogruk said.

“Should I bring them in?”

“Later. Later. Did you see my dogs when you came in?”

Russel nodded, then remembered the blindness and said aloud, “Yes. They are well. They are fat.”

“Good. I don't drive them anymore but they are good dogs and I worry that they don't get fed enough.”

“They are being taken care of by every-body—they are all right.”

Oogruk said nothing for a time. The eyes moved back to the flame from the lamp so the thick-white caught the yellow of the light and glowed for a second.

“Dogs are like white people,” Oogruk said, looking at the flame. “They do not
know how to get a settled mind. They are always turning, looking for a better way to lie down. And if things go wrong they have anger and frustration. They are not like us. It is said that dogs and white people come from the same place.” He snorted—a nasal sound, a kind of
chaa
sound through his nose that could have meant anything from scorn to anger to humor. “I do not know how true that is because white people are clearly not dogs. But they have many of the same ways and so one wonders.”

Russel nodded but said nothing. One time he had seen a bushpilot who had crashed his plane near the village. The plane was broken in the middle and the pilot had stood screaming at it and kicking it for failing him and falling from the sky. He treated the plane like a living animal until he got tired, then he walked away as a dog would walk away from a stick he'd been tearing at.

Oogruk sighed. “I will tell you about something. We used to have songs for everything, and nobody knows the songs anymore. There were songs for dogs, for good dogs or bad dogs, and songs to make them work or track bear. There were songs for all of everything. I used to know a song that would make the deer come to me so that I could kill it. And I knew a man who could sing a song for whales and make them come to his harpoon.”

The flame guttered in the lamp and Russel saw Oogruk use a small ivory tool to brush the burned moss away to clean the flame. A new-yellow filled the room, cut through the smoke, then paled down as the twisted moss burned on the end.

Russel shifted and stuck his legs out straight in front of him—Eskimo fashion—and relaxed. He leaned back against the wall. There were things he wanted to ask but he did not know what they were. Part of his mind was turning over, but another part was full of a strange patience and so he waited. Sometimes it was better to wait.

“Mebbe you could bring in those eyes and put some snow in the pot and we'll warm them up. Cold eyes are bad to eat.”

Russel got up and went outside. The wind was stronger now, bringing cold off the ice, but he didn't wear a coat and liked the tightness the cold caused when it worked inside his light shirt. He used his belt knife to pop the caribou eyes out of the two skulls—they levered out with surprising difficulty—and stopped by the door to take down the pan hanging on the wall and fill it with snow.

He put the eyes on top and took the pan and snow inside and handed them to Oogruk, who held the pan over the lamp.

“One misses women,” the old man said. “I had some good wives but they are gone.
Two died back before the white men came, died bearing children, and the last one just left. She went up to the mining town to a party and didn't come back. One misses women.”

Russel said nothing. He was seated again, leaning against the wall, and as with dogs he knew nothing of women. The girls smiled at him with round faces and merry eyes but he was not ready for women yet and so knew nothing of them.

“They cooked and sewed for me. Eyes and meat taste better when cooked by women. That's the truth.”

Russel had never eaten eyes. He knew the fluid in them would be too salty. He smiled. “Were there songs for the women, too?” He wanted Oogruk to talk of the songs again.

Oogruk grinned, the teeth worn down to the gums, the hair hanging down past his cheeks. As the memory grew so did the grin until finally, after a couple of minutes, he laughed openly. “They always shined in the snow houses, shined with fat and oil. It was a thing to be young then—it was everything to be young then. It wasn't that there were songs for women,” he said, coming back to the subject, “it's that the women
were
the songs.”

Russel reached over. The pot was tipping in Oogruk's hand and the melted snow
was about to spill into the lamp and douse the flame.

Oogruk stuck a finger in the water and found it to be warm. He reached into the pan and took out an eye and popped it in his mouth, using his gums to crush it and swallow the juice noisily.

“Have one.” He held the pan out. “They are good.”

“I brought them for you. Besides, I ate before I left our house. I had meat.”

Oogruk nodded and slowly, one by one, ate the other three eyes, smacking his lips with the joy of it. When he was done he slapped his stomach. “They are good. Later, when you are gone for the long time, you will wish you had eaten of them.”

Russel almost missed it. Then it hit him. “What do you mean, ‘gone for the long time'?”

But Oogruk was again in his memories. “I saw a thing once that was hard to understand. We were talking of songs and this man lived when I was young and he was very old and he had a song for the small birds. They would fly in flocks that moved this way and that and would flick the light of the sun off their breasts. Snowbirds. So this man was named Ulgavik and he had a song to make the birds dance. When he sang it one way they would fly that way and when he wanted them to change he would sing it
another way and they would take the light and go the new way.

“It was a thing of beauty.”

But Russel was fixed on the earlier comment.

“What did you mean about being gone for the long time?”

“This man Ulgavik knew dogs. He knew birds, but he knew dogs, too, so that when he got old and his eyes went to milk it did not matter. He would run his team blind and knew the dogs so well that what the dogs saw came back up through the sled and he saw that, too. The dogs were his eyes. Maybe if Ulgavik were alive he would tell you how to know dogs and birds.”

Russel closed his eyes and thought of Ulgavik running blind out across the sea ice, blind into the white—but such a thing couldn't be.

“What we need is some
muktuk,”
Oogruk said. “I haven't had any for a long time. Do you know where there is some
muktuk?”

“No. Everybody is out of it.” Russel thought of the delicate little squares of whale blubber that had been fermented all summer in rancid seal oil. They had a nutty, sweetstink taste. But the village had not taken a whale that year, which was considered very bad luck. Russel thought it was because of the snowmachines, because they scared the
seals and whales away by sending their ugly noise down through the ice. But he didn't say what he thought. “There will be no whales until the ice is gone and then I don't think they will come.”

Oogruk was quiet for a time. Then he sighed. “Because of the machines.”

Russel started. “Is that what you think?”

“No. That is what you think. I think they will not come because we are wrong now and don't deserve them and they know that. We don't have the songs anymore and they don't hear us singing and so they know we don't deserve
muktuk.
Of course I could be wrong and it could be the machines.”

“How did you know I felt that way about the snowmachines?”

Again the flame sputtered and again Oogruk trimmed it to bring the light up and Russel only then realized with a start that if Oogruk was blind, truly blind, he could not see the flame sputter.

“It is the way one thinks,” Oogruk said. “I know the way you think and so I know what you feel about the machines and the whales.”

“How can you tell when the lamp goes down if you can't see?” Russel blurted.

“Questions. Questions. Did you come here to ask questions or did you come here to find the way it was?”

And Russel knew he was right. In truth he had not known why he came to Oogruk's
house, just that he had to come, that something had been bothering him. Just as his father had known that something had been bothering him, and that Jesus probably wouldn't be able to help him, even though he helped Russel's father quit drinking.