Legends

In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences. It would suddenly come alive and what people wanted to happen could happen all you had to do was say it. Nobody can explain this: That's the way it was.

- after Nalungiaq "Magic Words"

The next morning he got into his killer whale form and set out into the sea along with his war party. He said to his war party, "not along the surface of the sea, not along the bottom of the sea, travel only by the subsurface of the sea!" And all of them got into their killer whale forms and set out. . .

- Aleut legend from "Tanax-Amix"

Changing to Orcas
Changing to Men
A Novel of the Bering Sea (Chapters 1-2)
by Michael Harris © 2009

Gray.

Silence.

Silence so dense thoughts trickle loud as streams of the island. The sea is the color of mercury ash under gray clouds, and under the skiff the bay is calm. It dreams. The whales are near.

"I feel them," whispers Ulatka. "In a while I will call them. Maybe they will come again." Slowly, the sun peels away the clouds from the volcano that sits like a great beast; its belly shows white under its gray blanket. Ulatka watches seaward fixedly; black eyes gleam in the mist. The hush is soon slit by a high wind and the gray lifts to show long white clouds swimming off the peak of the volcano. Then blue. Startling deep blue. "Not yet, not yet," whispers Ulatka under his seal skin cloak. His kayak rocks in the bay. "Wait. Wait for the blue to spill on the water. They will want to play in the sun." A shock of black hair falls over his eyes.

"There!" he breathes, "sun. Best if all the clouds break off like crab shell."