The Great Alone (12 page)

Suddenly the bidarka started to right itself—or so it seemed, until a pair of hands grabbed him and pushed him up with the boat. Coughing and choking on the water he’d accidentally swallowed, he managed to focus his gaze on the two men who saved him and were now pushing the bidarka into shallower water.

“I damned near drowned,” he said between gulps of air.

“Are you not man enough to handle that little boat, Luka Ivanovich?” Belyaev taunted from shore.

Luka glared at him and told his two rescuers, “I’ll try it again as soon as I catch my breath.”

The second time, he wasn’t so quick with the oar, waiting to get a feel of the craft’s balance. The first few were tentative dips of the blade, but when he dug the oar into the water, his center of gravity shifted, overbalancing the bidarka, and it capsized again. Again the promyshleniki had to come to his rescue. On his third try, he went farther—into deep water—and turned over. This time he managed to right himself, but not before swallowing a large quantity of water and feeling the cold terror of a watery grave surround him.

As he sat slumped in the snug hatch, coughing up water and vomit, afraid to move lest the bidarka flip over again, the outgoing tide threatened to carry him into the open sea. Luka heard laughter coming from the shore and looked up to see a ten-year-old Aleut boy paddling out in a bidarka. Skillfully, the boy maneuvered his slender boat alongside Luka’s and lashed them together. Although there wasn’t a glimmer of a smile on the boy’s face, Luka could have sworn the child was laughing at him. In a sullen silence, he suffered through the ignominy of being rowed to shore by a child.

When the long pointed bow touched the sandy bottom of shallow water, Luka wasted no time climbing out and wading to shore. He ignored the ribbing from his comrades. At the moment, he felt nothing could induce him to venture out again in that deathtrap.

From the tideflats where she gathered sea urchins and clams, Winter Swan had witnessed the debacle. She had strained with the effort to will the sea to fill the man’s lungs with its saltwater. But the man to whom she had become a slave walked on the beach, safe. Her hope died. Nothing could free her—or the rest of her village. The thundersticks gave the strangers too much power. She had learned the bitter lesson that her people could not fight and win.

Something caught her eye near the mouth of the bay. The clouds came together, shutting out the sunlight. Without its glare in her eyes, she could see two bidarkas heading for the beach. She had feared this day when Strong Man’s brother, Many Whiskers, returned with the remaining hunters from the village. The strangers had killed all the other men. They would kill them, too. Winter Swan shouted to warn them, but the wind carried her cry to the strangers. They saw the bidarkas and picked up their thundersticks. Winter Swan watched helplessly as Many Whiskers and the others approached the shore, unaware of the danger.

Luka studied the way the natives in the bidarkas positioned their craft to ride the wave, backpaddling slightly to keep from shooting the crest. He experienced a reluctant admiration for their skill, appreciating the difficulties involved. When he saw the carcasses of sea lion and otter lashed to the decks, their ability rose another notch in his estimation. The gleaming fur was one thing that could get him back into a bidarka.

“Shall we kill them?” someone asked Belyaev.

“No,” Luka said. “Let them teach us how to handle their boats.”

Belyaev opened his mouth to contradict him, then considered the suggestion and slowly nodded his agreement. “You are right. They can be useful to us in many ways. After all, what can four hunters do against all of us? We do have their women and children. They will do what we tell them.”

When the Aleut hunters came ashore expecting the same friendly relations they’d shared previously with the strangers, they were taken by surprise, stripped of their weapons, and made prisoners by the promyshleniki. They herded the natives to the village, their arrival coinciding with the return of Shekhurdin and the other two hunters from the artel’s headquarters.

“Well?” Belyaev challenged the stern-lipped Cossack when he reported to him. “What did Chuprov say?”

“Nothing,” Shekhurdin replied, baring his teeth.

“He sent more powder and lead,” another of the returning party said, smiling faintly at the Cossack.

“What did I tell you?” Belyaev gloated.

Winter Swan didn’t have an opportunity to speak to Many Whiskers until evening when she brought him his food. By then, he’d already learned about the deaths of the others. There was grief in his eyes when he looked at her, grief and despair.

“What should we do?” he wondered bewilderedly. “I ask myself what Strong Man would do. Would he escape and go to the other villages on the island and gather their hunters to make war on these strangers? Is that what we should do?”

“No.” She had wanted fighting before. Now she saw the futility of it. “They would defeat us with their thundersticks. They would kill us all. See.” She showed him the partially flattened ball of lead. “This is what kills. I dug this out of the hole in Strong Man’s skull. I think it was thrown by the thunderstick. I have seen them put these into the hollow end.”

“My heart rages against them,” Many Whiskers declared.

“As does mine. But Strong Man was wise to counsel peace.” Winter Swan struggled to think as her husband had and to abide by his beliefs. Hers had brought anguish to the whole village and the pain of enslavement. “You did not resist them. And they did not kill you. If the others had not fought, the strangers may not have killed them. Strong Man would be alive if I had not urged him to use his strength against them. I must bear the weight of that.”

Luka saw the two of them huddled together plotting some conspiracy, and he crossed over to them. He grabbed the arm of the woman he’d made his concubine and shoved her to the other side of the room. “You are wrong if you think to murder me in my sleep, woman!” His voice rumbled with the threat. She kept her head bowed in submission.

CHAPTER VII

The incident singled out the unusually thick-whiskered native for Luka’s notice. He chose the Aleut to teach him the mastery of the bidarka. If any treachery was planned, he wanted the native in his sight. Yet the man seemed placid by nature. No matter how much Luka goaded him, the hunter never displayed anger, and never once did he lose patience with Luka’s ineptitude in a bidarka.

By a month’s end, Luka had successfully negotiated the length and breadth of the bay and ventured into the open sea. In addition, he had picked up a modicum of Aleut, and the native had learned a smattering of Russian words. They communicated with each other in a convoluted combination of sign language, Russian, and Aleut.

During that length of time, the promyshleniki had familiarized themselves with their particular section of the island and stockpiled a supply of food. The latter was something the Aleuts weren’t accustomed to doing. The sea was their farm, which they harvested as they needed, and their lean times rarely lasted long. They had known hunger but never starvation. The biggest chore for the Russians was convincing the native women they preferred their food cooked instead of raw.

Eager to collect the fur bounty of the ocean, Luka set out with high expectations only to have them come crashing down. First he discovered the limitations of hunting in the large, open skin-boat. While the baidar was capable of holding a party of hunters, its size made it difficult to approach the sea otter, and unwieldy in pursuit. Rarely were they able to get close enough to throw a harpoon. They tried shooting the otter with muskets only to learn that a dead sea mammal sinks almost immediately. Luka watched too many of the prize animals slip out of sight in the dark waters.

The long, sleek bidarka was best suited for hunting his quarry. Again, Luka enlisted the services of the Aleut whose name, he had learned, was Many Whiskers. This time he wanted him as a guide. At first they went hunting in a two-man bidarka, with Luka occupying the rear seat so he could keep an eye on the native.

Luka had always prided himself on his skill as a hunter. But there was a vast difference between hunting on land and hunting at sea. Land is solid. A man can walk on it. If he gets tired, he can lie down and rest. An animal leaves its spoor on it. When it storms, a man can take shelter and wait till it’s over.

But the sea, the sea was constantly moving, flexing its muscles, heaving and falling and rising in mighty waves. Rarely was its surface calm, especially in the winter when the winds blew with gale force, lashing the sea into a froth of spindrift and driving snow and ice sideways. The sea was dangerous as well because it lulled one’s senses, and the unwary one was always at risk of being engulfed. Luka was ever conscious that a plunge into its icy waters meant death within minutes.

And there were no landmarks on the open ocean. Countless times Luka became totally disoriented, with no idea in which direction the island lay. At first, he thought Many Whiskers had deliberately gotten him lost, that it was all part of some trick to kill him. But the Aleut was never lost, and always brought him back to the island safely. When he questioned the native, he was told he “remembered” the way—the direction he’d taken, for how long, when he’d turned, which way—then compensating for wind change, he reversed the steps.

Hunting a sea otter was first a matter of sighting it, then getting close enough to spear it. Neither was a simple task. The first involved constantly scanning the undulating waters, and the second sometimes involved hours of patient stalking. According to Many Whiskers, it was best if there were a half dozen bidarkas so the mammal could be surrounded each time it surfaced from a dive. That way it would tire more quickly.

Also Luka discovered that the Aleut’s weaponry was superior to his own. The native’s harpoon launched from a throwing board had a greater range than his javelin-style harpoon. But his bitterest discovery was his inability to handle a single-hatch bidarka and hunt at the same time. He was only successful when he hunted in tandem with the Aleut.

Outside the barabara, a February blizzard howled, but it was snug and warm inside the native dwelling. A half dozen promyshleniki sat on the grass-covered floor playing cards, a mixture of grumbles and triumphant chortles coming from their midst. Other hunters idled around the perimeter watching the game or playing with Aleut children, while a few stood beside a copper caldron and its supply of raka, a strong liquor distilled from steeped sweet grass whose natural fermentation process had been hastened by the addition of some precious sourdough starter.

Sitting off by himself sucking on a dead pipe, Luka absently studied the musket barrel sticking out of the caldron’s crude wooden cover. It was a mark of the peace and security they enjoyed in the village that one of their weapons could be broken down and used for the drawing off of spirits. They had nothing to fear from the natives. His glance strayed to Many Whiskers, who was busy carving some design on a new harpoon head. The Aleut had a weapon in his hand, yet Luka had no impulse to reach for his own. There had been too many opportunities over these past months for Many Whiskers to kill him and throw his body into the sea, if that had been his desire. Luka didn’t understand these natives who seemed to have no passion for hating. They had killed their people and taken their women, yet the Aleuts displayed no malice.

He rubbed the scar on his cheek and stared at the growing stack of bundled otter pelts stored along a wall of the barabara. He’d brought back his share this winter, equal to any other promyshlenik, but the overwhelming percentage came from the four Aleuts forced into hunting with them. Frustrated, he bit down hard on the pipestem.

The rustle of dried grass alerted him to the approach of another as the Cossack Shekhurdin wandered over, a cup in his hand. Luka glanced up briefly, then took the pipe from his mouth and knocked the bowl against a wooden support, scattering cold ashes.

“Why aren’t you over there drinking and gambling away a part of your share of the season’s catch, Luka Ivanovich?” Shekhurdin crouched down, sitting on his heels. “Or are you too busy counting up your share?” He indicated the bundles of glossy pelts that so absorbed Luka’s interest.

“Perhaps.” Luka chose to ignore the Cossack’s baiting tone.

“You came only for furs, you and the others. You must be feeling very satisfied.” He lifted the cup and slogged down another swallow of the home-brewed liquor.

The Cossack’s comment aggravated the frustration Luka already felt, because he wasn’t satisfied. “The Aleuts call the sea otter their brother. They, too, are at home on this wild sea. They eat the things that live in its waters, make their clothes, weapons, and boats from its creatures. They live off the sea, not the island. Sometimes I think they only crawl onto it to rest. They know the sea and its creatures, the way I know the land.”

“I never expected to hear you singing the praises of a bunch of native sea hunters when you are sitting here looking at a fortune in furs,” Shekhurdin mocked.

“There is wealth there, but I keep wondering how many more pelts we could have had if those Aleuts were still alive. With fifteen more to hunt for us, we would have had to build another hut just for the skins.” Luka looked back on the massacre with bitter regret. The means to a fortune bigger than he had ever dreamed had been destroyed that day. Knowing what he’d lost, he could never be content with what he had.