Kinsalgaria 2

Kisngalria still carried the sockeyed salmon, even though it had begun to stink. He passed the old graveyard and continued down the sand dunes. He turned to watch the few boats out fishing the river mouth. Rye grass used to make baskets remained unpicked.  Boats that sat squat in the low sun, made out of some substance he didn’t recognise and which made strange noises as they cut across the channels at speed in a headwind. Not even slowing to negotiate the hazards of submerged logs that fouled the boats and nets of the unwary.      

He wrinkled his nose and hunkered on a washed-up log. The air was warm, yellow poppy in bloom at his feet. Dark clouds gathered, threatening rain. He kept an eye out for bear in the willow in the willow scrub in the banks opposite. Usually, he smelled them before they got a scent of his presence, but not always.

There was talk at home about the daughter of the elder shaman who went out into the cottonwoods, at the leftover bend to their camp, near beaver lodges. Young men huddled together, bent over the fire, barely speaking, because they didn’t have to.  They whittled the wands of willow until they were sharp, fire-hardened. Many hands would be needed to dig a pit big enough.

Kisngalria’s voice wavered as he touched the back of a boy, a head bigger than himself, but thinner. ‘Are you scared?’

Tunitteleck, breathed in wood smoke, and made a soft, but arresting sound like the crane. When he looked back at Kisngalria, he smiled, in complicity.

Two barking dogs came out from the camp to meet him. He hadn’t recognised them as working dogs, or of any type of dogs he’d seen before. They were yappy little things, with googly eyes, perhaps good to eat. He guessed they belonged to the church wardens that owned the church and the graveyard and, in perpetuity, all the land in between the two and the river.

Kinsgalria’s people had no notion of owning land, or the river, but only of belonging to it. He kicked out a dog and sent it flying as it jumped in the air and grabbed for the fish tail. The other circled, trying to nip his leg. He stood on its back, mashing it into the shingle.

A plump woman wearing a bright floral hat shrieked at Kinsgalria, or the dogs. They scampered back to her. He stayed put. He was more taken with her appearance. She wore trousers—and missionary ladies never wore trousers—but overly large trousers woven with shiny material, like metal, but not metal, with three banded white stripes. Her feet also had three stripes to mark out her tribe.

‘You little bastard.’ she squinted at him, as if trying to place him. ‘Are you with the entertainment? The advance cruise party? ... I could have you fucking arrested.’

The googly-eyed dogs became bolder with her words and barked louder. They looped sideways, advanced and circled once more.

‘I am Kinsgalria,’ he spoke to her in the church language of her people. Son of the son of Quattak, the tribal elder.’  

He crouched down and dropped the fish at his feet. As he watched the dogs and he watched her face. A knife with an ivory blade, a handle fashioned and carved with seal faces, and the concentric circles of the all-seeing eye was in his hand as he wheeled to confront the lead dog.  

‘Bobo and Gigi,’ the plump woman called her dogs back.

She spat out other words that ran together and Quattak couldn’t understand. Her pink face was blotched red and her mouth twisted in a long howl. Kinsgalria wondered if she too was a shaman, filled with spiteful animal spirits, ready to turn into a walrus or other watery animal.  But she didn’t come closer.  

The two dogs sat quietly at Kisngalria’s heels. He’d looked into their eyes and spoke to them in the old language of dogs, and explained, although he might eat them later, but he didn’t mean them any harm now.

The church woman turned and hollered, ‘Help! Help!’ She tried to run towards the village, but was too broad and stumbled in the shale incline.

Kinsgalria imagined with her bulk, she would be better and faster in the deep cold water of the channels. He waved a hand and sent the two dogs, skittering after their ungainly mistress.

But when Kingarlia climbed over the lip of the hill, the fish a present for his mother’s mother, still in his arms, he stood transfixed with his mouth open. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The huts with the mud roofs, dotted like the all-seeing eyes around the old church grounds, were gone.

In their place was a long metal shed and houses on stilts. Kisngalria had been uprooted and bewitched. He began to cry, looking around for markers and guides to find his way home.