Alaska (63 page)

casks of rum and molasses and pushing them on natives who had little or no experience with alcohol. The consequences in the lands bordering the Bering were disastrous; natives developed such a craving for rum or the hoochinoo rotgut they distilled from the molasses named after the local tribe that first made the stuff and quickly abbreviated to hooch that sometimes entire villages were wiped out because men, women and children destroyed themselves with incessant drinking.

It seemed that everyone in the arctic with good sense was opposed to this traffic: the Russians had outlawed it early and policed their shores vigorously; missionaries preached against it; and New England moralists deplored the sinful transactions in which these crews were involved. But captains like Schransky found the great wealth to be derived from the trade irresistible, so gradually, village by village, in both Siberia and Alaska, the natives were corrupted.

With the change of national ownership in 1867, the tough Russian captains who had maintained some kind of order in the Bering Sea turned over the responsibility to poorly trained American seamen in the Treasury's revenue cutter service, whose cumbersome ships, the

Rush and Corwin, proved incapable of disciplining the Erebus.

So for nearly eight years, 1867-75, Captain Schransky enjoyed unchallenged mastery of the northern waters, slaughtering seals as he wished and purveying hooch wherever he anchored. He had become dictator of the oceans, obedient only to his own law.

This year, 1875, he was only forty-eight, and it was while laying to off Cape Krigugon on the Chukotsk Peninsula in Siberia that he summarized the future as he perceived it: Three more returns to New Bedford, that could take maybe eighteen years. I'll be sixty-six. One grand final sweep ... all the seals in the Pribilofs ... all the rum our ship can hold. Then buy a home by the sea . .. maybe New Bedford, maybe near Hamburg. In his speculations it never occurred to him that a man might be coming into these waters almost as tall as he, almost as brave, almost as good a fighter and, because of his exceptional personal history, many times more determined.

IF IN THE WHALING SEASON OF 1875, CAPTAIN SCHRANSKY

had chanced to put in to the little settlement at Desolation Point on the Alaskan side of the Chukchi Sea, he would probably have prevented a murder, but since the summer was waning fast, he required none of the goods that Desolation 388

could provide. Also, his inner compass-thermometer-ship's wheel warned him that the freeze was going to strike rather sooner than it had in previous years when he had stopped there. So, keeping well out into the Chukchi, he hurried south.

As he disappeared, taking with him the last group of white men the region would see for nearly a year, the vengeful Eskimo Agulaak understandably felt that perhaps the time for retaliation had come, and he began to lay plans for the undoing of the missionary Father Fyodor, the Orthodox priest who had come north from the Yukon to open a mission here in 1868.

The priest was appreciated by the Desolation Eskimos, for he was a generous, understanding soul who lived in the Eskimo manner, using a timber-roofed underground dwelling until he and his wife and their young son had collected enough driftwood to build themselves a proper cabin;

proper

meaning a lean-to, with a stout wall facing the frozen sea and the great blasts of cold air coming out of Siberia, a crude fireplace with an improvised chimney, and a whole southern wall more or less open to the elements but protected in part by three Caribou hides that served as flaps to be pushed aside, one after the other, when one wanted to enter.

The cabin was warm, well insulated with packets of moss stuffed in cracks, and a lively center for the informal meetings which occupied so much of Eskimo life. Here the young people of the village gathered for their informal courtships, and along its warm walls sat the older Eskimos, listening as one of their members told of heroic adventures in the olden days. It was a satisfying life, and when Father Fyodor's wife produced another child, a girl this time, the little cabin echoed with singing, for the priest and his wife had made themselves a central part of the community.

If the priest, forty-seven years old and one who never looked at another man's wife, had become the target of the would-be murderer Agulaak, what evil force had begun to prowl the Point, bringing Agulaak under its malevolent spell? It would have been fruitless to argue with the tormented Eskimo that no force was assailing him, for evidence to the contrary was overwhelming. On each of his last two walrus hunts, far out on the ice, he'd had a beast under his magic control, only to lose him at the critical moment: Something spoke to the walrus, warning him that I was there.

I didn't hear the voice but I know it was whispering. Last spring, when the caribou came down from the northeast, as they so often did when making their rounds of the north, he had trailed the herd as always, had selected his spot where 389

the bigger animals must pass, and had watched in despair as one after another of the sleek beasts came almost within range of his spears, then veered away. On a later hunt, when he took the rifle that he had acquired from the Erebus

two years before when it came to trade, almost the same thing happened: the caribou appeared on the horizon in great quantity, came right down the slough they always followed, then swung away when someone or something warned them that Agulaak was waiting.

From a series of unprecedented defeats like this, it was easy for him to deduce that someone at Desolation Point was casting a spell upon him, and since the area had at this time no shaman whose incantations would solve the mystery, Agulaak was left to stew in his own twisted imaginings, and the more he brooded about the magic that had been directed against him, the more clear it became to him that this intruder, Father Fyodor, must be the man responsible.

He was, first of all, a Russian, which of itself awarded him unusual powers. Then he was a priest, which involved incantations, the burning of incense and behavior of the most suspicious kind. Most condemnatory was the fact that the man had an Athapascan wife, for it looked to Agulaak as if the priest had married her for the specific purpose of insinuating her into the Eskimo community at Desolation for its ultimate destruction. As a boy he had heard endless tales of how the Athapascans connived to cast spells upon Eskimos, and these recent events involving himself proved that some malefic force was operating in the village and on the hunting grounds.

At this point, when he had convinced himself that it was Father Fyodor's Indian wife, who had taken the Biblical name Esther, who was working against him, a curious transferral of guilt took place, for as a self-respecting Inupiat Eskimo trained in the rigors of hunting and warfare, he could not in decency direct his ire against a woman, regardless of how malevolent her spells, but he certainly could strike out at the misguided man who had brought her into the community. So his anger now focused on the priest, and the more he pondered the wrongs done him by this white man, the more embittered he became.

Agulaak decided that since Father Fyodor had to be the activating cause of everything bad that had befallen him, he must be destroyed. And once he had reached this verdict, he never looked back: his only problem was when and how.

He was a canny fellow, rather superior in his hunting skills when evil forces were not working against him, and while he did not try to contrive anything clever which would deceive

390

the other villagers as to who had done the killing, for it was essential that everyone know that he, Agulaak, had cleansed the village of its evil agency, it was imperative that he find a time and a situation appropriate for the deed and one in which the priest's unquestioned powers would be at a disadvantage or perhaps totally neutralized.

This required artful plotting.

Agulaak's twisted mind suggested a variety of actions which he dismissed, and then a maneuver which seemed positively brilliant when he weighed it. What he did was get his gun, load it heavily, march to the hut in which the mission church met on Wednesday evenings, and wait until Father Fyodor appeared with six parishioners at the close of service. Moving to within eight feet of his enemy, he suddenly produced his gun, took careful aim, and in the presence of six witnesses, shot the priest through the chest. Death was immediate, as Agulaak saw, for he remained at the murder site grinning vacuously at the witnesses.

And now the absurdity of Alaska in these lawless years manifested itself, for there was no governmental agency in the entire district that had authority to move into Desolation Point, apprehend the murderer, and carry him off to trial in an established court before a legally impaneled jury. The people living in or near Desolation did not feel qualified even to arrest Agulaak, let alone try him, and as for placing him in jail to prevent further outrage, there was none within almost a thousand miles.

So this madman was allowed to roam free, and citizens took precautions to prevent his attacking them while they prayed that with the coming of spring thaw next year, some American ship might put in to Desolation with an officer aboard to exercise the rudiments of governmental authority.

This inability to handle an ordinary civic problem placed an unusually heavy burden on Father Fyodor's widow, for she was now an Athapascan intruder in the midst of an Inupiat Eskimo community, with two children, a boy, Dmitri, of nine and a girl, Lena, of two. A devout Russian Orthodox Christian, she continued to offer her hut for informal religious services, but in doing so, she intensified Agulaak's suspicions and animosity. Neighbors warned her of threats the madman was making against her as he wandered aimlessly about the village, but there was nothing she could do to protect herself against him.

Her son, however, had access to his dead father's Russian rifle, and he was old enough to appreciate the danger Agulaak presented, so one wintry day when there was a wisp of gray dawn for about an hour at noon, and he saw Agulaak 391

approaching his mother's hut, Dmitri suddenly jumped in front of him, gun pointed at his chest, and cried: 'Agulaak! If you ever come one step closer to my mother, I'll shoot!'

The demented fellow, convinced that the dead spirit of the priest had come back to earth in the person of his son, was terrified of the lad, drew back from the Russian gun, and fled.

He was seen thereafter wandering about the edges of the village and sleeping sometimes in the wind-shadow of this hut or that. On the occasions when he spoke with villagers, he warned them about the ghost of Father Fyodor who had returned to seek vengeance, but he seemed unable to comprehend that if this were true, it would be himself, Agulaak, who would be in danger. He had never really understood that he had murdered the priest, but he continued to be terrified of little Dmitri, who rarely appeared in public without his gun.

In such sad, broken ways the remote villages of Alaska stumbled on without a government.

LIKE SOME DARK RAVEN SCAVENGING THE NORTHERN

seas, looking for the latest disaster upon which to feed, the Erebus coasted along the shore of Siberia, seeking some Chukchi village whose citizens it could defraud of their pelts trapped during the last winter, but the Siberians had become accustomed to Captain Schransky's harsh ways and remained indoors, hiding their furry riches until his sinister ship departed, with him standing, white-crowned and bareheaded, peering for an advantage.

Disappointed in this portion of his expedition, he coasted north to that cape which brought Asia closest to America, and there he headed east for the big, well-populated St. Lawrence Island, whose northern three villages had provided him with good pelts in the past. But he approached the towns with mixed feelings, because in recent years men of the villages had become aware of the value of their furs and demanded high prices in barter goods like cloth for their wives and saws and hammers for themselves.

Determined to put a stop to this sophisticated trading, Captain Schransky had decided long before sighting St. Lawrence that this time he would use less expensive tactics, so when he anchored off Kookoolik, principal settlement on the northern rim, he took ashore not the customary items of hardware and cloth, but a keg of rum, and with it he taught the people of St. Lawrence how barters were going to be conducted in the future.

Dispensing the rum liberally, he ingratiated himself with the natives, until there was nightly dancing and singing, then 392

men and women lying inert till dawn. Swift affairs developed between the sailors and the village maidens while the girls' customary suitors lay drunk in corners.

However, the salient outcome of the induced debauchery was that the islanders, always hungry for the alcohol, brought forth their carefully hoarded stores of sealskins and ivory tusks, which they traded for abominably low prices as calculated in rum.

At

the end of three weeks, when Schransky had pretty well denuded Kookoolik of its treasures, he brought ashore two barrels of dark West Indian molasses, but after tasting the bittersweet fluid the islanders said that they did not care for it and wanted rum instead. Now Schransky initiated them into a new pleasure that would guarantee the destruction of their village: he taught two of the older men how to transform molasses into rum, and when the first heady distillate appeared, the islanders were lost.

In the season when they should have been at sea catching seals and storing both the pelts and the meat, they were reveling on the beach, and in the more arduous months when they should have been tracking the walrus for its ivory tusks and again for the meat which, when dried, would sustain them through the coming winter, they were drunk and happy and heedless of the passing season. There had never been so much unmindful happiness in Kookoolik as there was that long summer when they learned how to drink rum and then make more from the treasured kegs of molasses. Of course, when the

Erebus

sailed, all the valuables of the village went with it, and one old woman who did not like the taste of rum was already asking, vainly: 'When are you men going to go out and catch the food we'll need for winter?' No one paid any attention to the problem she raised or to its solution.