Alaska (45 page)

IN THE PROTRACTED BATTLE BETWEEN SHAMANISM AND

Christianity, the latter won, but it was a murderous victory, for when Vitus Bering's men first stepped ashore on the Aleutians in 1741, the islands contained eighteen thousand, five hundred healthy men and women who had adapted masterfully to their treeless but sea-rich environment. When the Russians departed, the total population was less than twelve hundred. Ninety-four percent had been starved, drowned, forced into slavery, murdered, or otherwise disposed of in the Bering Sea. And even those few who survived, like Cidaq, did so only by merging themselves into the victorious civilization.

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VI

LOST WORLDS

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%Jk/ ith in the shadow of the lovely volcano that guarded The Sitka Sound, the Great Toion lay dying. He had for thirty years dominated the multitude of mountainous islands which comprised his domain and had brought order among the headstrong, sometime mutinous Tlingit Indians, who were reluctant to follow the lead of anyone. They were a powerful lot, these Tlingits, resembling in no way the more placid Eskimos of the far north or the gentle Aleuts of the island chain. They loved warfare, enslaved their enemies when possible, and were afraid of no man, so that after the Great Toion died, relinquishing the power he had accumulated so craftily, the Tlingits knew that there might be a period of confusion, warfare and sudden death before the next toion proclaimed and established himself.

When the big slave known as Ravenheart became aware that his master was dying, panic captured him, for he realized that the very strengths which had made him the prime slave of the toionhis bravery in war, his alertness in defending his master would condemn him to death, for when a toion died, it was the custom among the Tlingits to kill almost at that instant three of his finest slaves so that they could attend him properly in the world beyond the mountains. And since Ravenheart was by any judgment supreme among the toion's slaves, he would be awarded the honor of being the first to have the back of his neck stretched across the ceremo-279

nial log, while a smaller log, held by four men, was pressed down upon the front of his neck until life was crushed out strangling him without marring his body for use in the next world.

The big fellow had never before been afraid. His history was one of constant struggle against odds, and in the mainland valley which his clan occupied he had been a principal defender against enemies who tried to invade from the higher lands to the east. He became known as a champion, the one on whom the valley Tlingits depended for their protection and their freedom, and even when the more powerful Tlingits from Sitka Island, led by the Great Toion, invaded in their canoes, sweeping all before them, when they came up against Ravenheart and his nine companions, they were halted, and it required two dozen of the invaders four bruising days to overcome Ravenheart's men. Three of his companions died in the battle, and he would have been among the dead except that the toion himself commanded: 'Save that one!' and he was entangled in vines cleverly thrown about him, immobilized, and hauled before the victorious chief, who asked: 'Your name?'

'Seet-yeil-teix,' he replied in a surly manner, using three Tlingit words that meant spruce-raven-heart,

and when the toion heard that his conspicuous captive was a Raven he smiled, for he himself was an Eagle, and although this implied natural competition against the Ravens, he had to acknowledge that a warrior, if he was a good Raven, could be exceptionally clever and formidable.

'How did you win your name?' he asked, and his captive replied: 'I was trying to jump from this rock to that, fell into the stream. Wet and angry, tried again. Fell again. This time very angry, tried again. Just then a raven tried to pull loose something from a spruce limb. Slipped backward, tried again. And my father shouted: ”You're the raven.”'

'The third time, did you make the jump?'

'No. And the raven failed too. When I was bigger I jumped, and my name remained.'

Because of his unusual persistence, he had been valuable to his tribe when unusual tasks confronted them, and he succeeded so often that he acquired a daring approach to everything, whether in battling other clans in actual warfare, or in building a house, or decorating it with the proper totems when it was completed. It was this daring which had led to his capture, for when the Great Toion's army moved against Ravenheart's clan, the latter led the defensive sorties and raced so far ahead of his supporters that he was easily surrounded.

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Now, as the toion gasped away his final moments, making death for Ravenheart inevitable, the captive made his boldest move. Slipping away from the wood-and-wattle big house in which the toion had lived since gaining ascendancy, Ravenheart moved carefully among the six tall totem poles that marked the place and edged toward the heavily forested area to the south. Cautiously he endeavored to slip into the deeper part of the forest, but was prevented by the noisy arrival of sixteen mourners coming from that direction. Jumping nimbly behind a large spruce, he heard them pass, lamenting the approaching death of their leader, but when they were gone, he leaped onto the path they had been following and dashed headlong into the saving comfort of the tall trees and the shady glens they protected. Once safe among the spruce, he began to run with an almost demonic fury, for his strategy required that he be removed as far as possible when the old man died.

He reasoned: If they can't find me at that moment, they can't kill me then. Of course, if they catch me later, they will kill me for having run away. But I have one good chance. If I can find an American ship and get aboard, I can tell them I was busy bartering, and they'll have to believe that. This strategy was not irresponsible or ill-founded, because he was one of the Tlingits who had learned enough rudimentary English to conduct trade negotiations with the Americans, whose ships stopped in Sitka Sound with considerable frequency.

So as he ran, he began calling silently upon those ships he remembered servicing with deer meat and fresh water when the Americans had come for peltries: White-Dove, come flying.

J.B. Kenton, help me. Evening Star, shine to guide me.

But now the bad weather for which Sitka was famous descended like a feathery blanket, gray, thick and hanging but a few feet above the earth and the surface of the bay.

It quickly became impenetrable, and any chance Ravenheart might have had of saving his life by attaching himself to some trader vanished, and for three agonizing days he hid among the spruce trees along the edge of the bay, waiting for the fog to lift.

On the evening of the third day, when he was hurting from hunger, he heard a muffled sound which electrified him. It seemed to be the firing of a cannon such as mariners used to create echoes from which they could deduce their approximate distance from the looming peril of rocky shores, but it was not repeated as would have been the case had this been such a probing shot. On the other hand, the cannon fire might have been so effective that only one shot was required, and 281

with this hope to feed on he fell asleep in the lee of a fallen spruce.

In the early dawn he was awakened by the raucous voice of a raven, and no better signal from the other world could have been devised, because all Tlingits, from the beginning, had been divided into two moieties, the Eagle Clan and the Raven, and every human being on earth belonged to one or the other. Ravenheart was of course a Raven, which meant that he must defend that moiety in games between the two clans and in contests of a more serious kind, such as the providing of totem poles for the village commons or the bringing in offish. As a Raven, he must marry only an Eagle, a provision established thousands of years earlier to protect the cleanliness of the race, but the child of a Raven man and a woman Eagle was an Eagle, and as such, was dedicated to the furtherance of that clan.

There was a belief among the Tlingits, and he subscribed to it, that although Eagles were apt to be more powerful, Ravens were by far the wisest, the wittiest and the cleverest in utilizing nature or in winning advantages over adversaries without recourse to fighting. It was known that mankind received water, fire and animals to feed upon through the cleverness of the First Raven, who outsmarted the primordial protectors of those boons to mankind. 'All the good things were kept apart,' his mother's brother had told him, 'and we lived in darkness, cold and hunger until the First Raven, seeing our sorrow, tricked the others into letting us share these good things.'

Now, when the raven cawed in the early dawn, he knew it was a signal that some rescue ship lay in the bay, and he ran to the water's edge expecting to see the vessel which might have fired the cannon the night before, if that was indeed the sound he had heard. But when he stared into the fog he saw nothing, and in his disappointment he could feel the crushing log upon his throat. Disconsolate and starving, he leaned against a spruce and glared at the invisible bay, still shrouded in gray, and in his extremity, very close to death, he again pleaded silently with the American ships to show themselves:

Nathanael Parker, help me. Jared Harper, come close to save my life.

Silence, then the sound of iron against wood, and the arrival of a vagrant breeze which moved the fog a little; then, mysteriously, as if some powerful hand were drawing aside a curtain, the revelation of a shiplike form, followed by its quick submersion in the shifting mist. But the ship was there! And in desperation, ignoring the danger he placed himself in by revealing his position to searchers who might be trailing 282

him, he ran to the shore and knee-deep into the water, crying in English: 'Ship!

Ship! Skins!'

If anything could lure the Americans, assuming they were Americans, to shore, it would be the promise of otter skins, but there was no response. Edging deeper into the water, in which he could not swim, he cried again: 'Good Americans! Otter skins!'

Again there was no response, but now a stronger gust of wind swept aside the fog, and there, not two hundred yards away, miraculously safe amid the dozen tree-studded islands that protected Sitka Sound, lay the Boston trader Evening Star, with which he had traded in the past.

'Captain Corey!' he shouted, dashing into the waves and flailing his arms, and making such a commotion that someone on the brig had to see him. An officer put a glass upon him and called to the bridge: 'Native signaling, sir!' and a boat was lowered and four sailors rowed it hesitantly shoreward. When Ravenheart, overjoyed at being saved, waded forward to meet it, he found himself facing two rifles pointed right at his chest and heard the stern command: 'Stand, or we fire!' Captain Miles Corey of the trader

Evening Star,

fifty-three years old and Pacific-hardened, having known too many commanders who had lost their ships, did not take any risks, anywhere, at any time. Before leaving the

Evening Star

in the skiff, the sailors had been warned: 'It's one Indian. But there could be fifty lurking in those trees.'

'Stand, or we fire!' the men repeated, and as Ravenheart froze, waist-deep in water, one of the four shouted: 'My God, it's Ravenheart,' and he reached out his paddle so that the Tlingit with whom he had traded before could make his way into the boat.

It was a gala reception that Captain Corey and First Mate Kane arranged for their old friend, and they listened attentively as he explained the predicament which had sent him alone into the forest. 'You mean,' Captain Corey asked, 'that you'd have been killed? Just because the old man died?'

In his broken English, Ravenheart pleaded with them: 'You say me on ship four days, eh? You say fog too much, eh? Four days.'

'Why is four days so important?' Kane asked, and Ravenheart turned to explain. The two men were of about the same size, each a muscular, fearless brawler, and for that reason Kane, the former harpooner, was attracted to the Tlingit, who explained: 'I suppose to be killed three days ago. Suppose run away, catched, killed now. But if I on ship, trading with you ...”By lifting his hands as if relieving them of bonds, he indicated that with such an excuse he might be spared.

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The omnipresent Sitka fog had once more descended upon the Evening Star, this time so heavily that even the tips of the two masts were invisible from the deck, so Corey and Kane assured the endangered slave: 'We'll probably be in this soup two more days. You're safe.' And to celebrate they broke out a bottle of good Jamaican rum, and there, in Sitka Sound, protected by the volcano and the circle of unseen mountains, they reveled. When Ravenheart felt the fine dark liquid exciting his throat, he relaxed and told the Americans of the many pelts he had helped assemble for them, and they were so pleased by this intelligence that they in turn showed him the goods that they had brought from Boston to enrich his Tlingits.

'These are the casks of rum,' Captain Corey said, indicating the eighteen barrels stowed in safety below decks, 'and what do you suppose these are?' Ravenheart, with a copper ring through the septum of his nose, studied the dozen squared-off rectangular wooden cases, and said: 'Me not know,' whereupon Corey ordered a sailor to draw the nails 'And save them from one of the lids, and there, nestled in oil-soaked rags, lay nine beautiful rifles, and below them, in similar ranks of nine, twenty-seven others. These twelve boxes, packed in orderly manner by the gunsmiths of Boston, contained four hundred and thirty-two first-class long-barreled rifles, and the kegs stowed behind had enough powder to last two years, along with supplies of lead for bullets and molds in which to make them.

Ravenheart, satisfied that no one could order him killed if he brought such power to his captors, smiled, grasped Captain Corey's hands, and thanked him profusely for the tremendous boon the Bostonians were bringing the Tlingits: rum and guns.

A MINOR OFFSHOOT FROM THE POWERFUL ATHAPASCANS

who populated interior Alaska, northern Canada and much of the western United States, the Tlingits were a collection of about twelve thousand unique Indians who had moved far south into what would later be Canada and then fish hooked back north into Alaska, with their own language and customs. Divided into various clans, they occupied the southern littoral of Alaska and especially the big offshore islands, their principal location being the excellent land surrounding Sitka Sound on the island of that name.

The people of the dead toion had chosen for their center a conspicuous promontory in the sound, one which rose to a small hill that dominated everything. It was an excellent

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site, surrounded by at least a dozen rude mountains that formed a protective semicircle to the east, with the majestic cone of the volcano standing as beacon to the west.