A Woman There was no visible threat in the mountains, only the unnerving shrieks of birds, howling of monkeys and cawing of chachalacas, and the occasional roar of jaguars and cougars. Far to the north, tiny black dots described spirals in the sky—vultures. I was weary from the waiting, and my head snapped at any sound or flicker of movement. The mountains were a deep green. The forest appeared impenetrable. As we climbed, the searing heat dissipated. Huge rubber trees, mahogany and West Indian cedars gave much needed shade during the day. Abundant lianas hung from their boughs, and climbing plants—many thorny—crept up any vertical thing that could help them reach the light. Often they crawled along the ground, creating a tangle that could trip any man. My hands had browned since I left Spain. My toes were reddened and thick, grazed by stones and swollen from the chigoes that had settled between my skin and nails. A collective, unspoken effort to keep calm had come over us. For the conquistadors, this was natural. Many of them had been chasing, or been chased by, Indians for a good part of their lives, and, before that, they had trampled much of the world in a variety of battles: against the French, the Berbers, the Turks, the Pope. I supposed that when you find yourself in constant danger, you begin to disregard it.
n Memoriam You were the holy silence white as rice though the shivering leave always returns you took the whirl centrifugal soul that leaves us in a lonely grief. When night comes I gaze in the foliage the shut eyes of our friends
On shore, Ken’s friend took out a sharp knife and slit open the belly of one of the big fish exposing a white strip of pure fat. He peeled it off, put the end in his mouth and cut it off with his ulu. He passed Ken a piece of the precious fat that melted deliciously on one’s tongue. Ken became mesmerized by the minutiae of Inuit life. Everything they did was alien to his previous experience. He watched one of the men make a drum from the hide of a young caribou. Only the skin of a young animal would do, the man explained. It was shaved clean, soaked with water and spread out in the hot sun where it bleached white. It was then stretched over several pieces of wood that had also been soaked, bent to make a circle and bound together with strips of leather. The skin was sewn on to the hoop and left out in the sun again, this time to shrink. Watching the process, Ken understood how important each piece of wood was to these people. Where he came from people would have used just one piece of wood to form the hoop. Here, the circle was made of many small pieces of wood. Trees didn’t grow on the tundra. There might be the occasional knee-high shrub and very rarely, willows that grew waist high in protected gullies. Every scrap of wood was hoarded and used with care and precision. The Inuit had to obtain additional wood from the south where the sub-Arctic Indians lived. The old woman told Ken that there had been an uneasy truce between the Indians and the Inuit, which was often not honoured. Raids and massacres had taken place for years. When the woman told stories through her son, she often said words that she asked Ken to repeat. When he learned a new Inuktitut word, she smiled and when he began to put words together to form a sentence, she beamed. It was the most difficult language he had ever learned, but then the people were like no others he had ever encountered. They didn’t make eye contact when they spoke and they had no word for me, mine or I. Raising your voice, particularly to children, was taboo. Children were expected to learn by the example others set. They ate when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, and played when they wanted to. Adult displeasure was shown in the smallest facial expressions – the wrinkling of a nose or a slightly raised eyebrow. One day a young man named John joined the camp. He was about sixteen years old and he spoke excellent English. He told Ken that he was on holiday from the residential school in the south but he had decided not to return. They had cut off his hair and had beaten him for speaking his language. The old woman was his grandmother, and John told Ken that she and others were trying to get their children back. But this was not easy. While they needed to be stationary so that they could be contacted, they also needed to keep moving …
Manolis Aligizakis 