First Communion

At first, I was just Iqalutaq, a girl living on the shores of the great water in a sheltered cove opposite the big island. We were fisherfolk, and unlike most of the tribes we knew, we rarely wandered, because our cove and the hills gave us nearly all of what we needed.

It was in my ninth summer, as I would lie in my hammock between the whisper of the sea and the lively snap of the fire, when I was still and calm that I would hear it. It was the sound of someone’s heart beating… like your own when you run, or that of a friend when you put your ear to his chest. But it was there, hanging above me in the darkness where no one was. As the days passed, it grew louder, until at last I could hear it even in the day. It would come and go, as though in and out of sleep. It worried me and I spoke to my mother, who in turn took it up with the wise ones. They confirmed it was a spirit, and I should listen for more.

There were other things, murmurings in the darkness, but nothing I could understand. Then one day in the autumn came the pain. I felt as though I were being crushed, though nothing afflicted my body. I cried in pain, alarming those around me, and for hours I rocked in agony as they soothed me. One of the women said it were as though I were giving birth to myself. Then there came the sensation of coldness, a struggle for breath, and I heard the sounds of my own cries. But they did not come from my own mouth. And there were voices, words that I did not understand, that came from nowhere, but were all around me.

“She is in touch with the spirit world,” the women whispered to one another, casting their eyes out across the water to the big island where the dead were said to dwell.

At first I was frightened, hearing voices. But they were calming, soothing, and there were gentle caresses. Strange to be touched without being touched. And then I saw light, even in the night, and things like faces before me, though unfocused and barely recognizable as such. And I suddenly came to realize I was seeing through a second set of eyes. I was someone else, somewhere else. Even then I was old enough to know that this was exceptional.

The wise ones were curious, and each day I would tell them more and more of the spirit world I seem to partially inhabit. It was a cold place, and in it, I was a boy whose name, I came to understand, was Denat. He lived in a world surrounded by people with skin the colour of birch bark, hair the colour of the sun through the mists, and eyes the colour of the sky just before the sun crests the trees. Day there was night here, and night there happened when it was day here. The wise ones were sure this was the abode of the dead, full of our ancestors, and they tried to guess which of our recently lost, having just been ‘born’ in the spirit world, I was in contact with.

But I wasn’t so sure. As the months passed, and I could test my new limbs, I found the world I inhabited as Denat not at all like a spirit world. There was breast milk, pain, blood when men fought, laughter and song, all the things I knew the dead must leave behind. Even the stars were the same. When I had mastered their strange new words enough to question the world, I learned such strange things. For instance, the stars in the sky were the same, but the people there saw very different things among them. Where we saw whales and otters, salmon and rivers, they saw bears, wolves, elk, and the tongues of glaciers.

There was more. Denat lived in a cold place, a plain amid hills, with no great sea at its bounds. High summer was brief; the rest of the time, as Denat, I was obliged to wear a garment made of tough hides roughly sewn together. It was poorly made, and chafed until my neck and shoulders ran with sores. I dispensed with it as much as I dared, preferring the discomfort of the wind to the agony of the wounds. The men said it was a sign I would grow strong and tough. The cove people only bothered with such things when the cold rains came in the short days, when we would don tightly-woven cloaks of reed grass for going outside. Truly, the cove was a better place to live. The cove people’s word for ice was so rarely spoken that I could barely remember it to relate it to that of the plains people, but there was said far more often, and in relation to a long mountain that climbed into the sky all along the horizon. It was a sheer cliff made of ice, and we kept well away from it. It was as though I were living at opposite ends of the world… at one, the water was soft, flowing, full of life, and right there at our feet; at the other, the water was hard, sharp, full of death, a malevolent presence in the distance.

Among the plains people ran wolves, but they were not enemies or competitors. They were of the people. They lived among us, ate with us, helped in the hunt and even understood some of our words and obeyed. Some even had names. When I would tell these things to the cove people, they could scarcely believe me. They came to call my other tribe, the one in the spirit world, the Wolf-Brothers.

What was it like, they would ask me, to be of two worlds, two people, but one soul? I found it hard to explain. There was Iqalutaq… there was Denat… but there was union of thought and decision above them. There was just enough difference to know one from the other, but we, the parts of myself, were never ‘other’. Sometimes one part of me felt or thought one thing, and the other part of me something else, but it was like when part of me wanted to disobey my mother and sneak into the valley to eat the luscious strawberries there, and part of me wanted to obey her because I knew she loved me and only wanted me to be safe from the dangers there. Between the two, I must decide, and it was like that even between the Iqalutaq part and the Denat part.

When I spoke as Denat to the plains folk – the “Wolf-Brothers” – of such things, they had a much harder time believing me. I had always been a strange boy to them, who acted oddly and had long resisted their words and used strange ones of his own, and who told of visions of wood-coloured people with hair and eyes the colour of charcoal, living beside, on, and in a boundless lake of undrinkable water as salty as blood. Among them, I had never gone through the rigors of second-birth as Iqalutaq had among the cove people, preparing them for the wonders to come. As Denat, I came to keep my stories to myself, but I did not learn well enough.

There came a day, in the cove, when a new star appeared in the sky, out over the big island. It could be seen in daylight, bright as the moon, and we were full of wonder. I was so enthralled that I even awoke as Denat, crying out excitedly in the night that in the morning we would see a new star. The plains people told me I was dreaming but I was so insistent that they grew uneasy, and then frightened. Few of them slept the rest of the night, and in the morning, sure enough, a new star came over the hills in mid-morning. I was delighted; I felt as though I were sharing ‘my’ star with my other tribe.

But quickly there were nervous discussions of the portent. How could the boy have known this? I had always told stories of a strange other world. Was I to be worshipped, punished, treasured, destroyed…? My mother hurried me away, but it was no use; the consensus finally was that the new star meant Denat was being sent for, and had to be delivered. They tore me from her grasp and led me struggling up a precipice, and Denat was thrown screaming onto the rocks below.

As Iqalutaq, I screamed too.

I was in mourning, and the cove people seemed to understand. I had lost half of what I was, and it was less as though I had died, and more like all those people and places and things I had grown to love in that other world had died instead. I was still here, but they were gone from my life. Once again, for the first time in many years, I was only Iqalutaq. Alone.

It continued like that for perhaps two years, during which time I had a son of my own. I called him Odenaq, in remembrance of what I had lost.

But then one night as I cradled him in my arms came the sound. The sound of the heartbeat. Not mine, not his, but the one above my head. The sound, I knew, of my next mother’s heart. I held my son in my arms, weeping in joy, waiting again to be born. This time, I was a girl named Umali, born in a hot, dry land among people as dark as the rich soil of the forest.

And so it went, millennium upon millennium. Births and deaths, joys and sorrows. Minds joined to minds. The fire of my existence has blazed wide and brightly, and at times been just a pale ember… but always, there has been a spark to light the next flame. And there were new eyes to see with, new words to learn, new people to love. I have lived long enough to see a world in which I know where every part of me lives, relative to every other. I have had occasion to meet other aspects of myself… the redcoat corporal on the African shore looking into the crowd, meeting eyes with myself, a bare-breasted mother holding her daughter with her son at her skirt, already understanding the pronouncement of a protectorate in defiance of the slave trade though not a word of English had ever been spoken before in that place.

I have been as few as one; as many as thirteen. I am currently eleven in number. Iqalutaq’s bones are long dust now, but what she truly was, I am, and more besides. My story is the story of mankind. Let me tell you of what I’ve seen…