The Story of Light

Think of the woman who first touched fire to a hollow stone filled with seal oil, how she fiddled with fuel and flame until blue shadows before and after her filled her house, crowded the underground, then fled like sky-captains chasing the aurora’s whale tale green beyond the earth’s curve. Her tenth summer, the elders let her raise her issum, seal pup orphaned when hunters brought in her mother, their grins of plenty broad, red. The women slit the hard belly. Plopped among the ruby innards steaming on rough-cut planks blinked a new sea-child whose first sound came out a question in the old language, a question that in one throaty bark asked who, meaning What family is this? What comfort do you provide for guests? Do you let strangers remain strangers? The women rinsed the slick pup in cool water, crafted a pouch for her to suck. Then the young girl whose hands held light even when the room did not brought this new being beside her bed, let it scatter babiche and split birch gathered for snowshoes, let it nose the caribou neck hairs bearding her dance fans. They held up the fans to their foreheads, playing white hair, playing old. In the time when women do not sew the seal danced at her first potlatch. And when the lamps burned down, no one could see any difference between waves in rock, waves in sea. The pup lifted her nose, licked salt from seven stars, and slipped light back among silvers and chum light among the ghostly belugas swimming far north to offer themselves.