THE GHOSTS OF ESKIMO PAST

There was an Eskimo man, Kiviak, had a strange dream. He woke up to find his wife lying dead next to him. He wrapped her body in a sealskin and carried it tenderly on his knees outside the igloo. Buried it under a pile of stones near the river. Then he crawled back into his bed, hoping that sleep would ease his sadness. But he couldn’t sleep. And the sadness became unbearable.

He packed a few possessions into a sack, crawled back outside and into his kayak. He was about to paddle away when his young son appeared, who had just found his mother lying in bed with a strange man. Kiviak leapt back onto shore, crawled back into the igloo and sure enough his wife was lying in bed with a stranger. He grabbed an oil-lamp and beat the man till his skull caved in. Then he dragged the corpse outside and cast it off into the tundra for wild dogs to gnaw on. Then he climbed back into his kayak and paddled away, oblivious to his young son’s desperate cries from the shore.

He paddled all night, next morning emerged out into the ocean. Suddenly he was attacked by a giant sea-bird which swooped down and clawed at his eyes. He fought off the bird with his paddle. But now he found himself being sucked into a whirlpool. Half-blind, he paddled furiously, escaped the vortex by a walrus-whisker, only to find himself in the direct path of two converging ice-floes. He paddled furiously, slipped free by a seal’s breath. Exhausted, he lay back in his kayak and fell into a deep sleep.

When he woke up he had drifted onto an island beach. Half-blinded and still deafened by the crashing of those ice-floes, dizzy with hunger, he crawled inland in search of food and shelter. A young woman gathering firewood found him collapsed in a stupor, helped him back to a cabin in which she lived with her mother, a wizened old hag with breast sagging down to her navel. She fed him a bowl of stew which tasted like nectar. “Of course it does”, cackled the old hag, “it was made from the juices of a handsome young hunter!”

Kiviak lay on a cot neither asleep nor awake. He overheard the two women arguing. “We should kill him now while he’s still fresh!” said the old hag. But her daughter insisted they should wait until he was well enough to make love. If he was a good lover, she insisted, his genitals would be worth a small fortune at the island market!” “So long as I get to eat his face”, said the old woman, “he has such sweet eyes!”

Kiviak leapt to his feet and ran out of the cabin as fast as his kaminucks would carry him, stopped only when he came to a distant whale-skin lodge. He crawled inside. In the center of the lodge a monstrous baby with saucer-like eyes and blood dripping from its’ chin squatted amongst sundry skulls and bones and ravaged flesh. “Yum yum!!” salivated the baby. Kiviak didn't linger to find out what was whetting the baby’s appetite, he scuttled off as fast as his kaminucks could carry him. For hours and hours, running around in circles, lost on that island. It was getting dark when he finally saw his kayak still parked up on the beach. He leapt aboard and paddled off back into the ocean.

But no sooner had he lost sight of land a huge sea-monster rose up from the depths and began shaking him by the ears. Kiviak thrust the paddle-haft into one of the monster’s eyes. With a terrifying scream the monster sank back down into its’ blood-curdling depths, taking Kiviak’s ears with it. Half-blind and now totally deaf poor Kiviak was utterly at the mercy of the ocean.. As these luminous fingers began to grip the sides of his kayak, rocking it gently from side to side, then almost tipping it over as a ghostly figure hoisted itself silently aboard. It was Kiviak’s wife, he knew it was his wife. She sat silently in the prow staring into her husband’s soul. Then another phantom, the stranger, her lover, his skull ripped open..Then another and another..Some he recognized, others who seemed to recognize him and bore him an eternal grudge. He was terrified the kayak would sink under the weight of all these phantoms. But the boat drifted on, now shrouded in mist…

Then as if out of the bowels of nowhere a flotilla of kayaks appeared, sweeping silently past, a giant white whale towed behind in the wake. On the head of the whale a magnificent young hunter stood proudly his harpoon shimmering in the unearthly twilight. Kiviak recognized his son. He called out, though his voice seemed to carry no further than his own mouth, “my son, my son, it is I, it is your father!!!” But the mighty hunter passed him by with barely a second glance.. “You are not my father, my father was murdered by a stranger as he slept. You’re just an old man in a kayak full of ghosts!”

The flotilla swept on, vanished into the future mists of nowhere. Kiviak swayed in its’ wake, as if drunk on the poison of a lifetime’s regrets/ But all his phantoms had vanished. The old man was alone, lost in the middle of the great ocean. the sadness was unbearable. He sank to his knees and wept. He never dreamed he would end up like this. He wept and he wept, till he realized he was drowning in his own tears.. As the flooded kayak slipped slowly silently down beneath the waves, the first shimmering of a new dawn sent a shiver through his whole body that finally broke his bones and his heart apart….