From this perch, I had a hidden view of the harem and of the sultanic male treading a young female, lie bellowed his triumphant ecstasy. His lovemaking impressed me with both its ardour and its violence, for it hardly seemed that the pinned sultana could derive any pleasure from her paramour’s coercive affections. On the other hand, she may have relished her role as his and the other females’ cynosure; thus, she periodically barked her doubtful rapture. The females unoccupied with either procreation or the establishment of a pecking hierarchy tended their wet-eyed pups.
All this I absorbed with the greatest curiosity, irritation, and excitement. Shamefacedly, I confess that I considered attempting to cuckold the bull with one of his concubines. The feat struck me as possible but riskfuclass="underline" I might incur a tusk wound. If his massiveness were any trustworthy measure, however, the king walrus must weigh five times as much as I. Thus, he had not my nimbleness or speed, and the rookery was large. An ingenious rogue might well swyve a lady or two at sufficient distance from him to escape either interruption or injury.
I seriously entertained this notion, unnatural as my maker or his murdered bride would have adjudged it, because the yearning in my loins had produced a persistent tumidity; I ached with bittersweet excruciations impossible to describe. At last (appalled by the image of myself in coitus with a bewhiskered, legless, fish-eating sloth), I foreswore the temptation and spilled my lavalike seed on a rock.
Call me Onan.
My lust momentarily deflected, I took more acute note of the walrus society apart from the rutting couple. It charmed and enchanted me. The mothers and their pups displayed a sweet, reciprocal affection, the beholding of which retrieved and intensified the rage I had felt in the Orkney Islands at my creator’s destruction of the female companion he had promised to make for me. Like nearly every other sentient being, I had known loneliness well ahead of lust. My desire for friendship, the consoling warmth of a propinquitous body, antedated and so took precedence over the mating urge. With the mothers and pups of this rookery at least, a kindred longing had found at once its natural outlet and its satisfaction. I envied the affectionate creatures.
In my envy, my rage subsided. Frankenstein was dead. How, then, expect him to build me a wife? Furthermore, as I must soon or late acknowledge, no one else could accomplish that same miracle. I must abandon by degrees my self-exile and seek a female companion among the children of men. Or, given the vast unlikelihood of success in that endeavour, I must embrace self-control and reform my character. These changes, I hoped, would lubricate my introduction into the human community. As part of it, my gentleness and honesty established, I might draw to me the companion of all my longings’. Or I might not. In either event, I had determined to quit the wilds and to embark upon a career as a devout philanthropist.
I owed this turnabout to a revelation on the edge of a breeding pround of walruses. Perhaps I had shamed myself there, but I had also come into harmony with the repressed aspirations of my higher natre. Who can condemn me? Who can demand more?
The sequent era of my life became the happiest I have yet known. As it unfolded, I lacked the inclination to chronicle even its chief events. Thus, I seldom wrote here of either the people or the quotidian occupations that persuaded me I had found my niche in human society. In truth, what I did write I long ago ripped from this log and sank in a polarbear skull in Kotzebue Sound, as latter-day Alaskans now call the inlet. I here reprise this part of my earthly career, in an abridgement painful to indite, to shew the connection between my early resurrection self and the semireclusive citizen I later became.
For sixty or seventy years, I dwelt with a small population of alternately maritime and inland Innuit, a people whom the Cossacks and other Europeans call Esquimaux. I reached them by stealing an oomiak, or whaleboat, from a trading outpost on the easternmost tip of the Chukchi Peninsula and sailing it across miles of open water in the Bering Strait to an icy spit near present-day Shishmaref. My creator, exhumed from his grotto on the eastern side, sailed with me, but his limited contributions to our crossing scarcely warrant inscribing him on the manifest as a crewman.
Once across, I hiked westward, dragging my maker on yet another travois, until chancing upon a village near a river southeast of a vast inlet. I had skirted many such villages, but this one recommended itself to me by the cleanliness and symmetry of its houses, fish-drying stands, and sled racks, and by the animation and good humour of its people.
Let me call the village Oongpek for the snowy-owl totem displayed on its chief kazgi, or men’s lodge, and the people themselves the Oongpekmut after the name of their village. I have no wish to identify more specifically either the place or its inhabitants, who numbered about forty persons and comprised five or six families related by consanguinity or marriage. Oongpek, I determined, would well serve as my adoptive homeplace, and after many a careful survey of the village, I strove to insinuate myself into it as an ally and denizen.
The Oogpekmut at first regarded me with a suspicion as relentless as that of the Chukchi hunters who had wounded me in Siberia. Dread commingled with this suspicion. The villagers beheld me as if I were an evil spirit given form and substance. I had appeared to them with my travois behind me, and the corpse upon it little advanced my cause. Although I addressed them in Yoopik, their own tongue, pledging to add to their food stores and to protect them from enemies, whether animal or human, my friendly overtures foundered on their startlement and disbelief. I wanted companions, and a place of only moderate esteem in their collective. At length, however, my evident docility and their mounting impatience with my presence gave them courage, and they chased me away with harpoons and clubs.
Insofar as I could do so, I altered my appearance to approximate more closely their own. I cut my hair at the nape and around the ears to resemble the bowl-like coiffures of the men. I perforated my lower face at each lip corner to make possible the insertion of labrets, stone or ivory ornaments curiously evocative of walrus tusks. I made my labrets of creek stones and wore them daily until I could tolerate their chaffing and pull. I retailored my overshirt, leggings, and boots after the local masculine fashion. I made toys of spruce or willow wood for the village children, storyknives for the girls and carven animals for the boys.
On my next visit to Oongpek, I left my dead creator in a tree and appeared to the villagers gift-laden and familiarly dressed. I placed my gifts at Oongpek’s edge and danced in the succulent summer grass a modest dance of appeasement and petition. I meantime chanted the conciliatory words of a song of my own authorship. The children greatly desired to collect their bribes, and some of the younger adults seemed to look upon my renewed overtures with favour, if not with unmitigated delight. The village angalgook, or medicine man, who wore as an amulet the mummified remains of a human infant, reviled me as a trickster, an evil bear in the guise of a deranged giant. Two well-respected hunters concurred in supposing it unsafe to allow me any nearer approach. Indeed, the Oongpekmut hectically debated the nature of my identity, agreeing only that trusting my words might invite general destruction.