Hearing all the stories, it seemed that no one remembered on the hilltop outside Yanrakynnot died peacefully of natural causes. They plunged through holes in the ice. They fell off cliffs while gathering puffin eggs. They were torn apart by bears. They froze to death in blizzards. They vanished by the boatloads in the Mechigmen Bay.
Sitting cross-legged by one mound, Leonard Kutylin, 52, told the story of watching the five men whose pictures fluttered in the wind beside him die when a gray whale turned the tables. It happened two summers ago. The six hunters left Yanrakynnot in two classic, wide-bottomed, wood-plank whaleboats. They harpooned a ferocious gray in the rough waters of the Senyavin Strait and the whale destroyed them. First it flipped over the harpooners' boat, tossing the three men on it overboard, then whipped around and rammed the empty craft, breaking it into two pieces. The three men in the second whaleboat were desperately trying to fish their friends out of the water when the whale struck from behind, taking out their motor and ripping a hole in their boat's bottom. Powerless, they sank. Kutylin was the only man in the water wearing a traditional hunting suit made of a watertight, insular layer of seal skin blanketed beneath pants and a parka made of furry reindeer hide. He clung to wreckage, and watched helplessly while his friends succumbed to the cold and slipped beneath the waves, one by one. Hours later, a search party miraculously found Kutylin, still holding on, blue-lipped and near death. The whale won that day, and Kutylin hasn't been hunting since.
Robert King
The bullet-riddled head of the dead gray whale in the shallows of Lavrentiya.
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Kutylin finished his story as he scraped the last bits of reindeer meat off a leg bone with his knife. It is bad form in Chukotka to leave meat on a bone. Animals eaten there are eaten totally. Amidst the burial grounds, a huge metal pot hung by its handle from a tripod erected over a roaring fire. Inside the pot, reindeer fat and flesh, boiled off the bone, bobbed in a thick yellowish stew. The reindeer's heart, liver, kidneys, and intestines baked in coals. The eyeballs, tongue, and lips were broiling on hot rocks. One of the herders scraped the felt off its antlers and held it over the blaze to cook the hair into a crispy finger food. The reindeer's penis was speared on a stick and roasted. Like the whale in Lavrentiya, the reindeer was stripped to its skeleton by nightfall.
The abundance of the feast was deceptive. Last winter, the reindeer herders lost 2,000 of their 3,000 reindeer to cold and wolves. The 400 villagers of Yanrakynnot were in even more desperate straits. At a bare minimum, they need to kill four whales a summer to make it through the next winter. Five whales require less strict rationing. Six and they're well off. By mid-August, with less than two months of hunting to go, Yanrakynnot had no whales. The loss of five hunters two summers ago from such a small population -- six, counting Kutylin -- is taking a heavy toll, though the villagers believe the dearth of whales is also because of supernatural forces working against them. Over the winter, one of their whaling captains converted to Christianity. This spring he denounced the village's rock-sculpture shrine to gray whales as pagan and destroyed it. The villagers say they are cursed as a result.
"The whales are angry," says Natasha Ashkamakin, 50, who has lived in Yanrakynnot all her life.
Facing a crisis, the village's elders in August dispatched emissaries to Lorino, Lavrentiya, and Novoe Chaplino to request those villages release a few hunters each to harvest whales for the imperiled village.
Two hunters from Novoe Chaplino -- Igor Macotrik and Maxim Agnagisyak -- arrived in Yanrakynnot through the same storm that besieged Tanko. The next night, they warmed their bones in the village's wood-heated sauna. These men said the storm's 7-foot waves and the shrieking wind of the gale were bad omens. They suggested that the villagers from Yanrakynnot should rebuild the whaling shrine and make offerings of vodka to the sea. They also agreed to return the following week with more men and boats to help.
"We are always ready to help the people in another village who are in trouble," said Agnagisyak. "And this village is in trouble. They have no whales. So we will come back and we will try to hunt quickly. If we are lucky, we will be able to harvest enough whales for them to last the winter."
And if they are not lucky?
Agnagisyak pointed, silently, toward the burial mounds in the hills outside.
Natasha Ashkamakin was optimistic. "I believe they will be successful. We will make it."
That is what people do in Chukotka. They make it. Last winter, the worst on record in 50 years, Yanrakynnot ran low on gasoline and heating oil. In February, Ashkamakin decided to chance a snow machine run to the nearest village, Novoe Chaplino, to borrow fuel from friends to ferry back to her family across 50 miles of winter-bitten wilderness. She had only a half-tank of gas. She thought it would be enough. It wasn't. "There were too many drifts of snow," she said. "The wind kept blowing them in front of me, and it took all my gas to power through them." The snow machine sputtered out 10 miles from Novoe Chaplino. But Ashkamakin made it. She walked the rest of the way.
Her feet froze, and a doctor cut both of them off. At the memorial service, she hobbled around on stumps laced tightly into tennis shoes.
"I think I'm very lucky," she said. "I'm not beneath the rocks."
