Further, and additional balm to my conscience, these Oongpekmut sang or prayed to the creatures they hunted, using them with the utmost esteem, if not actual reverence, and so ritually abstracted their meat-eating from the profane practises of Europeans.
As I had early sworn to do, I dedicated myself to the welfare of Oongpek and strove diligently on its behalf as hunter, fisherman, kayak wright, net mender, arrow fletcher, and guardian, I thereby obtained the respect and admiration of my adoptive villagers. With them I knew a contentment that had once seemed as ungraspable as frostfire.
Owing to my size, the people called me Takooka, grizzly bear. Because I religiously declined to shew myself either to Innuit visitors or to any white-skinned trader or surveyor, they also called me Inyookootuk, the Hiding Man. And because I reminded some villagers of a mythical creature, the worm man, that had lived when beasts could change at will into people, others addressed me as Tisikpook. Takooka was by far the most common of my appellatives, but I answered to them all. Indeed, I delighted in the fact that I, a creature once either nameless or marked out exclusively by deprecatory epithets, now had more names than any of my fellows.
In time I became such a stalwart Oongpekmut that no one complained of or saw as improper my dalliance with one of the village’s unattached women, a small, sturdy person with strong hands and eyes like sparkling stars. Owing to the redness agleam in her hair, the people called her Kariak, or red fox, and she never shied from my attentions. I lay with her, took her to wife, and established with her in a sod house with whalebone roof joists our own domicile. My brother-in-law had wanted us to move into a house with his family, but his wife had argued with considerable justice that a man of my size needed more room. Kariak concurred, and I excavated our new house, with the aid of many other Oongpekmut, to accommodate just the two of us, with room for additional sleeping benches for the children we purposed. I loved this woman, and she in turn loved me, taking a perverse joy in the fact that to make me a parka, or a set of leggings, or a pair of boots, required twice as many caribou skins as any other male Oongpekmut needed for those items. Our great love notwithstanding, my union with Kariak proved the groundlessness of one of my creator’s bleakest fears. His chief ethical concern in crofting me a bride-indeed, his rationale for tearing my intended companion to pieces before animating her-was that together we might propagate a race of “devils.” This conjectural species, Frankenstein believed, would turn its perfidious energies to the indiscriminate elimination of humanity. He need not have feared. Kariak and I conceived no children. Our clanspeople at first attributed this failure to her, for the Innuit suppose infertility a female imperfection-unless someone can shew that a malignant shaman has thrown a spell or that the seed of another man could quicken the childless woman’s womb. Kariak and I had no conspicuous ill-wishers, however, and although Esquimaux husbands sometimes invite male visitors to enjoy, as a form of hospitality, the bodies of their wives, never did I consent to this custom, so possessive was my love and so vehement my uxoriousness. In truth, only in these traits did I offend the Oongpekmut, but they overlooked my shortcomings on account of the services I daily rendered. Further, Oongpik had acquired a reputation as impervious to attack, evil spells, and famine. If anyone begrudged my possessive behaviour, it was Kariak.
Saying so, I acknowledge, may appear to convict my wife of a fickle heart, perhaps even of faithlessness, but the charge dies aborning. Among the Innuit, children confer status and security. They greatly bless their parents, at first with the flattering exactions of their dependency and later with the active succour of their hands. In hunting, fishing, cooking, sewing, bow-making, and a hundred other enterprises, they make their value plain. It therefore bruised Kariak’s heart to continue childless, and the gibes of her distaff kindred, as perfunctory and mild as they were, grew ever more difficult to bear. She had already suffered many jocose insults, a few of which had nonetheless stung, for marrying so grotesque an interloper, even if I had proved a beneficent influence on the community as a whole. Abruptly, then, Kariak began to badger me to offer her to kinsmen visiting from elsewhere, as a sign of my full adoption of Innuit ways and of my unimpeachable cordiality.
Again and again, I declined. Instead, I carved from ivory a doll-child only slightly bigger than my hand, as a petition to the inyua, or spirits, and as a charm. This doll Kariak and I dressed and tended as if it were a living infant, feeding it forest celery, wild potatoes, and even a delicacy of porcupine, crushed salmonberries, and seal oil known as agoutak. None of these ministrations served to impregnate Kariak, however, and her unhappiness grew. Once I arrived home from an expedition for snowshoe hare (during which these creatures had moved about as thick as tomcod in the brush) to find that she had broken our doll-child and thrown it onto a midden. I bent to nuzzle her red-tinged hair, but she pushed me away and wept copiously.
A few days later, three seal hunters from Shishmaref, one a kinsman of Asvek, came to Oongpekfor a visit. Kariak asked me to permit at least one of them to lodge with us during their stay. I refused. I did not wish to share my wife with anyone, much less any of these laughing strangers; further, I intended to absent myself from the village for the whole of their visit. I would play Inyookootuk, the Hiding Man, by retreating to the woods. It would mock propriety for Kariak to entertain a male visitor in our house during my absence, which Asvek or Kegloonek, a respected elder, would impute to my desire to lay out a pattern of game snares.
As soon as she understood my intentions, Kariak moved out of our lodge, dry-eyed in her leaving, and crossed the Oongpek commons to the house of her sister’s husband. Here, I learned upon my return, she entertained the most dashing member of the Shishmaref party, a full-faced young hunter with happy-dancing eyes. She then departed with him for the coast. Nine moons later, on a night of popping ice sleeves and wolf-cry winds, Kariak brought into the circle of another clan a baby boy with eyes greatly like his father’s. Weeks later this news reached my brother-in-law, and everyone in Oongpek understood what it signified: I, Takooka, was sterile, and Kariak, my erstwhile wife, had endured the malediction “barren,” even if often hurled in jest, for my pride’s sake.
Oddly, the happiness that her kinspeople now felt for Kariak overrode any resentment of me for the injustice-in which, in fact, many of them had conspired-that I had done her. No one sought either to punish me for humiliating her or to taunt me for my infecundity.
I remained among the Oongpekmut as a bachelor in the clan of my departed wife. Another in my place might have suffered a diminishment of status, but I had qualities that offset my shame. No other local woman wanted me for a husband, but I did not lack for willing lovers.
Two years later, Kariak returned with her new husband and her bright-eyed son for a visit. At the urging of Kasgoolik, the husband, I lay again with my first and last heartmate, and, at the moment of our little dying, laughed heartily in her small embrace. The bittersweetness of this possession without possession prevented me from accepting any further invitations from Kasgoolik during their visit; and when Kariak and her family, after a week’s sojourn, returned to his village, I never saw her more.
Oh, Frankenstein (I often thereafter lamented), for this you destroyed my first bride, that I might not sire upon her a race of Titanic murderers.