Books: By Northern Lights

THE WHITE DAWN, AN ESKIMO SAGA by James Houston. 275 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $6.95.

Waist-deep in a pile of their own empties, 20th century technological men keep casting wistful second glances at “barbaric” societies that have lived harmoniously and respectfully with the earth. James Houston’s particular over-the-shoulder look picks out an imagined Eskimo community at the moment of its intersection with Western life. A painter who spent twelve years in the Canadian Arctic, Houston was intrigued by an oldtimer’s yarn of a lost whaleboat crew found wandering on the ice floes by Eskimos in 1896. The three men lived a year among their rescuers, only to be killed by them in the end. The White Dawn is Houston’s crisp and delicate reconstruction of that tale.

The story is told through the mind of Avinga, a kind of Eskimo Ishmael who finally finds himself alone after the disintegration of his community. To Avinga and his fellow Eskimos, the rescued white men are almost fascinatingly ugly. They refer to them as kalunait (literally, “people with the heavy eyebrows”), the legendary offspring of a wayward Eskimo girl and a sled dog. Yet they tolerate the white men’s minor barbarities and breaches of courtesy with indulgent understanding.

The white men soon start to meld with the nomadic Eskimo commune. But even as the whalers learn to eat meat raw instead of “disgustingly” burning it, forget the calendar and acquire their hosts’ language, they also begin to commit offenses born less of malice than of cultural differences.

Instead of enjoying the freely offered sexual services of borrowed wives—as Eskimos do—they sleep with unmarried daughters, something that Eskimos regard as ill-mannered. They teach the Eskimos to play soccer with curious results. “When my people understood this new game, they were shocked,” Avinga thinks, “for it was not a game of pleasure. It was more like men fighting against each other in anger. But still they continued, for everyone wished to be polite to the strangers.”

Final Tragedy. Over the whole story broods Houston’s larger protagonist: nature in the Arctic, the violent rhythm of storms and seasons. There is an almost Homeric hunt for walrus, and a winter dance of exquisite magic and sexuality. Eventually a moment comes in the long winter when the whalers, ugly but not serious, threaten an Eskimo with knives. In his code, it is a disastrous challenge: he must either kill the kalunait or exile himself. “But killing men was not our custom,” says Avinga, “and it had not been done in living memory.” With no reasonable solution possible, the Eskimo simply withdraws. He is never seen again. Soon afterward, the whalers ferment some berry wine, ply the remaining Eskimos with it and so produce a drunken dance that becomes a bewildered travesty of the first. When the final tragedy comes, it is clear that something as fragile as a principle of civilization—the Eskimos’, not the whites’ —has been shattered.

· Lance Morrow