Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

"But her stories always make sense, Auntie," Becky protested. "Somehow, they always do. You just have to figure them out."

"Thunderbird," Sasha said clearly. "Men. Kayak. Men.

Home."

"See? She knows what we're talking about."

Olga looked at Becky. "The storyknife is just a toy, Becky. It makes Sasha happy to play with it. That's all."

Becky's mouth closed and she bent back over her basket, a tinge of red creeping up into her cheeks.

"Tell me about the storyknife, Auntie," Kate suggested into the uncomfortable silence that followed. "I've never seen one before. It's beautiful."

Olga looked down at the ivory knife she held in her hands. "My grandmother gave it to me. My great-uncle made it for her when she was a little girl. It's a toy. A girl's toy. We use it to draw stories in the sand, and in the snow."

"Where did it come from? The custom, I mean?

Olga shrugged. "Some people say it used to be a real knife. That the Eskimos used it to cut snow into blocks for igloos. All I know is I got this one from my mother.

My mother got it from her mother. Other girls had them when I was a child. It was a custom." She handed the storyknife to Kate.

Kate accepted it in reverent hands. The handle was carved with the stylized likeness of a sea otter floating on his back. In spite of the wear and tear caused by at minimum four pairs of grubby little hands, each individual whisker stood out on his tiny face. He stared up at Kate, expectant. The ivory seemed to grow heavier in her hand. Kate cleared her throat. "Are they always made from ivory?"

"No. Some are made from bone or wood."

"It's a beautiful thing, Auntie," Kate said, handing it back. "And valuable. It should be in a museum."

"And would a museum take it out and play with it?"

Olga demanded, and gave a snort. "Its spirit would die, locked up in a place where it was never touched. Here the girls play with it, and it tells them stories."

Which made it something more than just a toy, Kate thought. She looked down at the rapidly shredding beginning of her basket, and said ruefully, "I don't seem to be doing very well at this, Auntie. I guess I'm just a cultural illiterate."

"Nonsense," Olga said briskly. "It takes practice, like anything else. You will take some grass with you when you leave, so you can work at it on your own."

Wonderful, Kate thought, but said meekly, "Thank you, Auntie."

"And now more tea? And some alodiks?"

"Alodiks?" Kate said.

The old woman looked at her reprovingly. "You have no Aleut?"

Kate shook her head.

"Because your grandmother wanted you to?" Olga guessed shrewdly, and laughed, a loud, cackling laugh, at Kate's expression. Kate was relieved when Olga turned to the stove, and even more relieved when alodiks proved to be nothing more than fried bread.

A few minutes later Olga put a plateful of the stuff in the middle of the table, puffed up and golden brown.

Everyone around the table made a concerted grab, not excepting Kate.

"There were killer whales in the bay this morning, Auntie," one of the girls said around a mouthful of fried bread.

"Ahhhhh," Olga said. "Killer whales in the bay." The smile faded from her face and she shook her head gravely.

"What does it mean?"

"Killer whales in the bay?"

"Yes. Do you know what it means?"

"I know only what everyone knows." Olga worked her next few stitches without speaking. The girls ceased their giggling and whispering, and as the silence gathered and grew, Kate had the feeling of a curtain about to go up.

When she spoke again, Olga's voice fell again into a kind of singsong, with a full-stop pause at the end of each sentence. It was subtle but clear. It wasn't as if Olga banged a drum on the downbeat at the end of every line, but Becky and her sister began nodding their heads slightly to the beat. Kate had noticed a similar kind of cadence to Olga's story of the Aleuts' exile and repatriation during and after World War II, and now consciously scanned the old woman's words for rhythm. She found it, and repetition, and internal rhymes, and alliteration.

Without moving, the girls seemed to draw tighter together in their circle, intent, absorbed, almost hypnotized, acolytes hanging on the words of their priestess.

"When killer whales come to a bay with a village,"

Olga chanted, "they come hungry for someone's spirit.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"Someone is going to die.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"The people know.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"It won't be long.

"Maybe one month.

"Maybe two.

"When the killer whales come

"Someone dies in that bay.

"When the killer whales come.

"That's all.'"

As she spoke the last words, Olga looked straight at Kate. She held her gaze for a long moment, before her eyes dropped to the scar on Kate's throat. The skin there began to itch beneath that intent gaze. Kate held perfectly still. "That was a beautiful story, Auntie," she said. "You're a poet."

Olga laughed, a loud robust laugh, and the priestess was gone and her acolytes, too, on the gust of merriment.

"It's just an old legend," she said, dropping back into prose. "I'm a good Christian missionary's daughter, myself. I don't believe any of that stuff."

Kate burst out laughing, and the girls joined in again.

As she rose to leave, Kate hesitated, not wanting to trespass but the memory of those graceful, swooping sand drawings haunting her. "About Sasha."

Olga's face was expressionless. "What about her?"

"Has she seen a doctor? There might be-"

"There is nothing," Olga said flatly. "Her mother drank too much."

"Where does Sasha live?" Kate asked Becky outside.

"With family, parents, what?" She was determined to do something, anything. Anyone who could draw like Sasha was not, could not be entirely beyond help, fetal alcohol syndrome baby or not.

She turned her head to find Becky looking at her with surprise. "What?"

Becky jerked a thumb over her shoulder, at the house behind them. "Sasha lives right here, Kate, Auntie is Sasha's mom."

THE harbor's dock space was so limited that the Avilda was again third in a row of boats rafted four deep. The next morning the tide was at slack and it was a long way down to the first boat tied to the dock. There are worse things in life than hanging in the pitch-dark from a forty-foot ladder, trying to find a foothold on the icy railing of a boat being tossed up and down in the enthusiastic embrace of a spirited groundswell. Offhand, Kate couldn't think of one.

She shut her ears to the rush of water, the smack of the swell on the bottom of a hundred hulls, the murmur of idling engines, the shout of impatient skippers. Moving one limb at a time, she felt her cautious way down to the next rung on the ladder and extended a foot in what she prayed was the general direction of the boat. A barnacle crunched beneath the foot still on the ladder, the sole of her boot slid across the rung, her balance shifted and one hand pulled free. She made a wild grab for the ladder and by a miracle caught it.

She pressed her forehead against cold metal and scratchy barnacle, her heart pounding in her ears, gasping for breath. Water rushed in among the pilings with a chuckling sound. Her mouth tightened into an unseen snarl and she swiveled on the rung, bent her knees, let go and jumped blind. For a moment she was suspended in midair, and then she hit the deck awkwardly. Instinct took over and she tucked her head and rolled forward in a somersault. Her butt hit something hard and she stopped rolling, her feet failing forward with a thump.

For a moment she just lay there, panting. She heard a noise from the boat's cabin like someone was about to come on deck and she shot to her feet and made for the opposite railing. The rest of the journey was by comparison a piece of cake; all she had to do was straddle the tied-together railings of the two boats with one leg and swing her other leg over. Always supposing the boats were of equal size, which they often weren't, in which case she had to either climb up or jump down or both. When she slithered onto the Avilda's heaving deck she knew a moment of pure triumph.