The Real Fire

The Kilway Festival Celebrating the Birth of the Fawns Maria told me a story that illustrated the significance of fawns to the Koryak."Long ago, when a wolfwas looking for something toeat, he fbund a female reindeer with her fawn.The wolf stalked this reindeer for half a day.When the night's darkness came, the wolf decided to go for the big mother reindeer.It attacked the mother reindeer and killed her.-Then the wolf decided to say hello to the fawn to become friends with him.The fawn was a little male fawn.The wolf said to the fawn, My young friend, I am thinking about how to stay friends over the fbur to five years to come, which is a long period of time.'After that, the fawn continued to grow.He stayed near his mother's grave.He became big and strong, and firm antlers grew on him.He waited to kill the wolf When the fourth year carne, the reindeer had grown strong' and he waited fbr the wolf to come.He was supposed to appear anytime after the promised four years had passed.It happened in the breeding season.The reindeer's antlers were sharp and he was out of his mind.They began to fight, The wolf bit the reindeer.With his antlers the reindeer tried to kill the wolf near his mother's grave, because the mother reindeer would be happy if her son were to kill it.In the end, the reindeer finally killed the wol Then he made a song for humans and the reindeer, which went like this: May everyone be blessed with a son so that they may all Iive happily."'' Then Maria went on and said, "It doesn't matter whether the son is born to a reindeer, or to a human being.Both reindeer and human beings are always relying on their sons."People celebrate the birth of fawns.It is the festival to begin the spring, as well as the first festival of the yearly reindeer cycle.Two years earlier, when I had first heard about the Kilway -in which they make a new fire with the Gichigi, circle around the yanana and throw the offerings on the roof-I feltI wanted to see this festival with my own eyes.This was one of the reasons why I visited the Srednie-Pakhachi Village for the second time.After Vakhtangov's son's funeral had finished, Alekseev and Slava came back from the tundra in their snowmobile, they told me to go immediately to a yanana on the tundra since a Chukchee family was about to start the Kilway.Bazarov, the Russian linguist, andIgot our things together in a rush, and left fbr the tundra with Nina.It was early May when the temperature was just zero degrees Celsius; we walked up the hill behind the village underneath the cloudy sky as our feet sank into the snow that had just started to soften.After an hour's walk, a dome-shaped yanana standing on the tundra plateau came into sight.It was 8:50 in the moming.It was still covered with snow around the yanana.A pair of snowshoes about a meter Iong leaned against the tent beside the entrance.Two long pieces ofwood arejoined together at either end, forming a long leafshape; this is called the Athapaskan type,