In the Empire of Ice Read Online Free Page B

head, then looks at me: “We were pretty much the same people as on Little Diomede. And we were all the same people as on the Russian side. Some Little Diomeders came from Big Diomede the night before the Iron Curtain closed them off from each other. For 40 years they didn’t see or hear from their relatives. Two generations passed before they met each other again. That’s how stupid wars are.”
    He fidgets, nervously twirling a cookie on the plate. Then he tells us that he’d been drafted and sent to Vietnam. “My brothers went too. They sat on the beach, but I was in the middle of things. A day doesn’t go by without my thinking of it,” he says.
    His wife brings in fresh coffee as Herb continues: “There were 11 in our family. Our house is still standing in the village. It’s not very big, but it didn’t have to be, because we were outside all the time. When we were born, we were named for the people who graced the lives of others, even if they weren’t in the family. One of my boys has eight names. When a person dies, you take that name and give it to one of your own and hope he lives in a way that would please them.
    “Spring in Kingetkin [the name for Wales in Inupiat, an Inuit dialect] was beautiful. There was always a northwesterly wind about five to ten knots. It played well with the migration of marine mammals. There’s a timeline for when the animals show up. The sea and the seasons have special laws, specific signs that are looked for, that tell you whether to go out hunting or not, and words for when the sea is moving into a new season.”
    He says that the walruses always came in about June 10 but that now they come earlier. Walruses, he says, usually eat mollusks found on the shallow ocean bottom, but some walruses were seal eaters. “I found a headless seal once floating on the water, all its insides sucked out by a walrus. Now they predate on seals even more because their ice for diving, resting on, and for hunting is gone. The drift ice is almost gone and the pack ice goes out beyond the continental shelf where it’s too deep for them to dive for food.
    “Walrus use their whiskers to rake the sandy ocean bottoms for scallops, clams, and other little shellfish. Once you try eating those clams from inside the walrus stomach, you’re hooked! It’s perfect food!”
    Joe reminds Herb that their fathers grew up eating seagulls whenever there was a food shortage. Herb recalls that the best eating were the young ones with brown feathers. “Up the coast in Shishmaref, they make ‘aged’ fish,” he says. “They put the fish they catch in a sealskin ‘poke’ in a pit lined with branches to age for a few months. They do the same with walrus meat, sew it up and leave it to rot. It’s called ussok. It sounds bad, but once you eat it…ah…that’s real food.”
    We look at drawings of walruses and seals, belugas and bowheads on his wall. “The names we give animals at different times of the year are very specific,” Herb says. “The walrus and the whale have multiple names. Like if one whale has a brother, or one was a yearling, or one is a bull, or a calf, or a mother with a calf. There is a name for each of them. What makes our culture special is that we have very articulate ways of describing the resources that are important to us. We knew the sea and the seasons and how the sea moved into new seasons. We knew the signs that told us when to go out hunting and whether we would die.”
     
    JANUARY 20. Anchorage to Nome. Nome to Wales. Pointed hills, curving valleys, and the sawtooth Kigluaik Range with oxbow rivers unwinding their white coils toward the sea. Joe and I are flying in a six-passenger Bering Air plane northwest from Nome to Joe’s home village of Kingetkin, population 150. This will be his first visit in 17 years.
    He looks out the tiny window nervously. Ahead is a cerulean wedge, the color of blue cheese—the almost dark sky into which we will be swallowed.
    Joe recalls