The Great Alone (23 page)

Pausing in her sewing, she scanned the horizon in the direction of the village, a horizon dominated by the snow-covered volcano on Unalaska Island towering into the clouds. She sighed and resumed her stitching. Little Zachar stirred. For an instant she saw something of Andrei’s features in her son’s face and she felt a sharp stab of pain that quickly fled.

Someone called out in distress. Looking up, Tasha saw a group of hobbling, staggering warriors approaching the camp. There were nine in all, most of them half carrying or half supporting each other. Quickly she laid her sewing aside and joined the other women rushing to help the wounded, bloodied men. Her gaze searched the faces for her brother. Her relief was mixed when she saw he wasn’t among them. The expression on the faces of the injured gave her hope; there was the light of victory in their eyes.

But this wasn’t the time to be asking questions. Tasha set about tending the wounds of the battle’s victims. Like the other Aleut women, her skill in treating wounds came from a variety of sources. The almost daily butchering of sea otter whose anatomy compared to a human’s gave her a knowledge of the body’s bones, muscles, and organs. The dexterity of her fingers came from weaving fine grasses, and the deftness of her suturing came from constantly sewing garments and skin covers for baidars and bidarkas. From her elders, she had learned the means of blocking pain by sticking needles into certain sites on the body.

While she worked, she learned that some of the casualties came from the attack on the Cossacks in the village and that four had been hurt in the ambush of the ones checking traps. One man was also able to tell her that Walks Straight survived and stayed to watch the four Cossacks trapped in their hut.

Little Zachar awakened and cried to nurse, but his need wasn’t as great as these men’s, so she let him cry. Carefully she cut open a man’s belly where the musket ball had made a round hole. As she probed for the lead ball, she saw the juices from the man’s stomach and knew the organ had been pierced. She knew the man would surely die, yet she went ahead and retrieved the musket ball, sewed shut the hole in his stomach, then sutured the wound closed. She moved away from him, briefly consoled that the needle would block much of his death pain.

Now her breasts ached with the milk they held, and Tasha went to her wailing son and relieved the discomforts of both of them. Her body rocked gently while he nursed.

As long as the threat of fighting remained, the young, the old, the women, and the wounded stayed at the summer camp, while the warriors continued their siege of the Cossacks’ dwelling.

After four days, word came that it was safe to return. The four Cossacks had slipped away from the island during the night, reaching their baidar under the cover of darkness and leaving the bay.

“We made no attempt to stop them,” Walks Straight admitted to Tasha. “We dared not charge their muskets in the darkness. There were not enough of us.”

“They escaped. Now they will warn others.” She knew surprise was the Aleut’s best weapon.

“There is no one to warn.” Satisfaction curved the line of his mouth. “The Cossacks living in the camp on the next island have all been killed. And their boat anchored in the bay is no more, and the men who were on it are dead. There is nowhere for them to hide. We have sent word to the other villages to watch for the four Cossacks.”

“What of the other Cossacks and the other four boats?” Her fear was that if any Cossacks should escape, they would carry the word of the uprising to their comrades on other islands. She worried that Andrei would come to Unalaska. If he found her here after she’d run away from him, he would surely take Zachar from her.

“Some have already been attacked. The rest will be soon.” He hesitated before continuing. “I am going to Makushin village on Unalaska, where they gather warriors to attack the Cossack dwelling on the shore of the bay.”

She saw that he intended for her to remain here. But these Aleuts, while they had been kind to her, were strangers. Walks Straight was her brother. She could rely on him in time of need.

“We will go with you, Zachar and I.”

“There will be danger,” he warned.

“As long as there are Cossacks on the islands, there will be danger. If any get away, there will be more danger.” It was strange to hear those words coming from her mouth.

Once she had wished all Cossacks could be as fair and good as Andrei Nikolaivich Tolstykh. But it was not fair and good to steal a woman’s child. Walks Straight had warned her that Andrei would take what he wanted and leave her to cry. Tasha wished she had listened to him then. Now the hurt she felt made her cold inside and she wanted to lash out. But her heart longed for the thing she had lost.

“We will leave with the morning sun,” Walks Straight said.

A war party of seventy Aleuts gathered to advance on the dwelling where their scouts had told them fifteen Cossacks lived. In the bay, the Cossack boat rode at anchor. All of the warriors carried bundles of sea otter skins so the Cossacks would think they came to trade. But the headman of the Cossacks acted suspicious of them.

“He said if we came to trade, then ten could approach his dwelling at one time, no more,” Walks Straight told Tasha as they sat close together in the crowded barabara that evening. He was frustrated and angry. “Ten—against fifteen Cossacks with muskets and pistols and sabers. We could do nothing. There was no chance to surprise them, no chance to fall on them with our superior numbers. We had to trade and leave.”

“What will you do now?” She watched him straighten his back, then wince with pain from the wound in his side, but he had refused to let her look at it.

“A hunter who stayed to watch the dwelling returned to the village a short time ago and reported that three men who hunt with the Cossacks but are not Cossacks came to the dwelling.” Tasha suspected her brother referred to the people Andrei called Kamchadals, who were a tribe like the Aleuts but lived in Russia. “He said they showed great fear and he believed maybe they escaped from one of the boats we destroyed.”

“They have warned the Cossacks. You will have no chance to surprise them,” Tasha said. “They will be ready for you.”

“Word has been sent to other villages. We will need more warriors if we are to beat them,” he admitted.

It required two days for the Aleuts to assemble a larger force and make their attack on the Cossack village. Armed with spears and bows and arrows, they launched their assault, but the musketfire from the hut repelled them. Again they were forced to lay siege to the camp, occasionally exchanging arrows and lead balls with the Cossacks and carrying their wounded to the rear. Again the Cossacks slipped away and reached the safety of their shitik in the bay, but they didn’t set sail.

Returning to the barabara of the village that had taken them in, Walks Straight knew the taste of disappointment. He walked past his sister without speaking and sat down on the sleeping mat where his sprightly nephew lay on his stomach, arms and legs waving. He listened to the baby’s happy gurgles and watched him push up on his little hands to test the strength of his small arms. Walks Straight caught one of the hands and squeezed the four fingers until the joints turned pale. It was an exercise to be done regularly if the child was to have warm hands as an adult. Walks Straight squeezed the fingers of the other hand, conscious that Tasha watched and waited for him to speak.

“Most of the warriors have returned to their villages,” he told her. “Their families are hungry and they must hunt for food.”

“The Cossacks only have to worry about themselves. They have no families to feed.” Tasha acknowledged the burden of women and children in times of war.

“They also say that while the Cossacks are on their boat it is too dangerous to attack them from the water. They can kill too many of us with their muskets before we can reach their boat.”

Tasha nodded. “Why have the Cossacks not sailed from here? Why do they stay?”

Walks Straight shook his head, then reconsidered the question. “Maybe they believe others of their party live. Maybe they think we have not killed the rest, so they wait for them to come.”

Through the rest of the winter and into early spring the shitik remained in the harbor anchored near shore. The Aleuts kept a constant watch on the boat, firing arrows at any Cossack foolish enough to expose himself for long. At the time when the adult male fur seals swim through the island passes heading to their unknown rookery to the north, the Cossacks raised the boat’s sails and left the bay. Walks Straight watched it go and derived some satisfaction from the storm signs in the sky. The following day a gale struck Unalaska, its fierce wind whipping up the sea and driving the rain sideways against the island.

Word later came from Umnak Island that the boat had wrecked on their shore, and local warriors had attacked the survivors, killing five and inflicting wounds on all the rest before they were finally driven off. The Cossacks hadn’t been able to prevent the warriors from looting the wreck of their boat. Now their plunder was available for trade. From them Walks Straight obtained a musket and a small amount of powder and lead balls in exchange for the baidar in which he and Tasha had fled from Adak. Countless evenings during the summer Tasha watched him cleaning his prized possession, as he’d seen the Cossacks do.

Throughout the summer, reports of isolated skirmishes between the Aleuts and the handful of Cossack survivors holed up on Umnak Island reached their village. But a sense of peace pervaded the islands as they resumed their old way of life, rid of the Cossack oppression.

When the berries were ripe and the whales were coming into the bays, more than once Tasha looked at her small son and remembered this was the time when the Cossacks usually left to return to their land across the sea.

The sails of a Cossack boat were sighted off Unalaska Island. Apprehensive that the boat might belong to Andrei, Tasha urged her brother to learn who these Cossacks were and where they landed. Walks Straight went with the small scouting party sent to observe the strength of the Cossacks.

Many of the Cossacks’ firearms were in Aleut hands; but the hundred or so muskets and pistols were widely scattered among the warriors on the various islands in the group, and their supply of ammunition was low. Even though they possessed some Cossack weapons, the Aleuts weren’t able to mount an offensive against a large body of them. They realized they would have to allow the Cossacks to land on their island if that was their intention.

The scouting party located the Cossack vessel at anchor in one of the bays. “Look.” Killer Whale directed their attention to some men moving around on deck. “There is Solovey.”

“Who is Solovey?” Walks Straight questioned.

“A Cossack who brought his men to our island once before to hunt and collect tribute.”

After studying the vessel and its men a while longer, Walks Straight announced, “We should talk to them.”

They went down to the beach and waved to the Cossacks on board to come ashore. Soon men were dispatched to the beach in a wooden boat. Killer Whale pointed out Solovey to Walks Straight. The tall, bulky dark-bearded man with the big hooked nose sat in the front of the boat. His eyes appeared hard and wise. When he stepped onto the sand, the Cossack Solovey greeted Killer Whale first, then gave them all gifts of tobacco.

“You are brave to come to this island, Solovey.” When Walks Straight spoke to him in the Cossacks’ tongue, the man turned sharply to face him.

“Brave?” One thick brush eyebrow was arched higher than the other. “Why do you say that?”

“Have you seen any Cossack boats?”

“No.”

“You will find none here,” Walks Straight informed him. “We have destroyed all the Cossack boats on Unalaska, Umnak, and the Islands of Four Mountains.” He observed the blood drain from Solovey’s face, then rush back to redden it.

“How have you destroyed them?” he demanded.

“Some were cast onto the shore and broken on the rocks. Others we burned.”

“Where are the men from these ships?”

“We killed them.”

Solovey stared at him in disbelief. “How did you kill them?”

Walks Straight detailed the accounts of the ambushes, telling the Cossack how the Aleuts lured his comrades into the hills, then fell on them with their knives, slicing their hamstrings so they couldn’t run, then killing them. He described the ruses used, bringing pelts to trade with strips of leather tied tightly around them so the Cossacks would have to use their knives or swords to cut them and how the warriors used that moment to slit a Cossack’s throat.

Although Solovey’s face became more red with anger and he trembled, he continued to look at Walks Straight with doubt in his eyes. “Where are the bodies of the ones you claim you killed?”

Pointing to the sea, Walks Straight said, “We cut their arms and legs into pieces and threw them in the waters so there would be no more danger from them.”

Solovey swore so rapidly in the Cossack tongue that Walks Straight couldn’t understand him. Immediately, Solovey questioned the other Aleuts to verify that what Walks Straight had said was true. When they confirmed it, Walks Straight observed the man’s sudden wariness. A pistol was tucked inside his belt and the Cossacks around him were all armed with muskets, while Walks Straight and the Aleuts carried only knives. They numbered four and the Cossacks were seven. Yet Solovey looked at them like an otter assessing the closeness of danger, then he swung his glance to the rolling hills beyond the beach as if expecting to find more Aleuts hiding.