The Great Alone (30 page)

Zachar paddled furiously toward the spot where he’d last seen them. Nothing. There was no sign of his uncle or the bidarka. Certain that he was very near the spot, he stopped paddling. Breathing hard from the exertion, he let his bidarka drift, dipping a blade into the water now and then to maintain his position.

“Walks Straight!” he shouted, not believing his call would be heard.

Then he saw the bubbles breaking the surface of the water a boat’s length to his right, a small eruption but enough to indicate where his uncle had gone down. He stared at the steadily diminishing stream of bubbles, transfixed by the sight, unaware of the tears running down his face.

“Why?” he murmured, his voice breaking.

A gamboling sea otter swam close to his bidarka, gliding effortlessly through the waves, its sleek fur glistening. It circled his boat, as close to him as the first one had been. Zachar turned the impotent rage he felt over his uncle’s death on the creature. Somehow the otter was to blame for Walks Straight going crazy. But as he reached for his harpoon, Zachar could hear again his uncle’s voice calling out to stop him. “No! No!”

And he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill the otter. Half blinded by tears, he turned his bidarka to point it toward the cacophonous bedlam of the giant seal rookery.

“Why?” he shouted, but there was no answer in the deafening roar.

With leaden arms, Zachar paddled back to the strip of vacant beach and hauled his bidarka high on the sand. He gathered some driftwood and built a small fire to drive the chill of death from his bones. Eventually the embers died. Still he sat beside the blackened ash. Night came and a heavy fog drifted in, so thick he couldn’t see all of his bidarka. It intensified the feeling that he was utterly alone.

Somewhere to the south was home. Zachar stared in that direction, wondering if he’d ever see it again and knowing that he couldn’t stay here. If he did, he’d become as crazy as Walks Straight. In the morning he’d have to leave. Having made that decision, Zachar lay down next to his bidarka and shut his eyes. But his sleep was haunted by the vision of his white-haired uncle repeatedly driving his harpoon through the hide-covered sides of his boat to sink it.

After an absence of seven days, Ismailov sailed his sloop, the
Sv Pavel,
back to its anchorage in the bay. Again Tasha was busy, this time returning his land quarters to their former order. Always garrulous, particularly when he was the subject, Ismailov was especially talkative that evening, his tongue further loosened by a bottle of liquor from the British.

During the time Tasha had been with him, she had learned that listening to him was a vital part of what Ismailov expected from her. It didn’t matter whether she understood all of what he said. Once he had attempted to explain to her that a sailing master did not drink or talk with common men. He was too important, even for the Cossack officers. But it was all right to tell her things, which only confused Tasha, but she accepted that being a woman somehow made a difference.

“I had a difficult time making myself understood,” Ismailov declared and sipped at the liquor in a glass tumbler, then blotted the moisture left on his mustache. A vain man, he kept his full beard and curly hair neatly trimmed and was rarely out of uniform. “I do not speak English and they did not know Russian. No one knew German, and that
Capitaine
Cook’s French was wretched. Did I tell you what a fool’s errand his King George has sent Cook on?” Tasha nodded, but Ismailov told her again anyway. “He’s searching for a northwest passage so British ships will not have to take that long route around Cape Horn to get to China. Bering and Chirikov have already proved it does not exist. Those English think they know more than a Russian about navigation and exploration.”

As he paused to take another swig of liquor, Tasha cast a furtive glance at the small sleeping area that was partitioned off with hanging mats. She could hear Mikhail jabbering behind it.

“I managed to obtain a good deal of information from Cook, but I was careful what I told him, although I must admit I enjoyed pointing out to him that he had incorrectly shown Unimak Island as being a part of the mainland peninsula,” he bragged, then stared at his glass. “He has mapped a lot of the mainland coast to the south. Should be helpful.” Ismailov laughed suddenly. “He let his crew trade with some natives for sea otter skins, but nobody seems to know how valuable they are. Maybe they will never find out,” he mused. “With their American colonies in revolt, the English might forget about this futile voyage of Cook’s.”

After drinking the last of the liquor from his glass, Ismailov picked up the bottle and drained the last of its contents into the tumbler. As he set the bottle down, his hand brushed the bundle of papers lying on the table. Tasha had noticed them earlier. The markings on them bore no resemblance to the writings of the Cossacks.

“Dispatches from Cook,” he said. “I am supposed to send them to Okhotsk in the spring so they can be forwarded to the British Admiralty.”

The letters were forgotten as she became the object of his scrutiny—and his suspicion that she hadn’t been listening. “Where is Cook?” she asked.

“He is still at the north bay. As soon as the repairs on his ships are complete and the reprovisions on board, he will leave. He plans to spend the winter at some tropical islands he discovered in the Pacific. The Sandwich Isles, he called them. Then he intends to come back next spring and search again for the northwest passage—that does not exist.”

Ismailov rambled endlessly, talking long after the last of the liquor had been consumed. Finally he staggered over to his cot, and Tasha helped him out of his uniform. He barely gave her enough time to remove her own garment before he dragged her onto the blanket with him. Many Cossacks couldn’t perform after drinking so much, but liquor never seemed to affect Ismailov’s potency. It was a source of pride to him. Tasha submitted to his demands, but he was too drunk to notice her lack of response. Copulation was an act that held little meaning for her any more. It was merely another part of life’s routine.

Sometime in the night, she was awakened by a noise. She listened, wondering if it was Mikhail, then Ismailov rolled over and started snoring loudly in her ear. Moving his entrapping arm, she slipped out of bed and wrapped one of the blankets around her. As she made her way across the darkened room to check on her young son, the door was opened. Startled, Tasha halted to stare at the black figure coming through the opening.

“Zach,” she murmured in recognition and hurried to his side. But he made no response. She touched his arm and strained to see his face in the shadows. “I am glad you are home. But … why do you arrive so late?”

There was a vague shake of his head. “I was lost,” he murmured, and Tasha detected the troubled note in his voice and sensed something was wrong. “When I recognized a part of the island, I … I did not stop until I reached here.”

“Where is Walks Straight?”

As he finally looked at her, his lips moved, but no sound came from his mouth. Again he shook his head, then let it droop. “He’s dead.”

Quickly she covered her mouth with her hand to smother the cry of grief so she wouldn’t awaken her sleeping son. Pain gripped her chest until her throat ached with it and even breathing hurt. She turned away, lowering her hand to grasp the edge of the blanket and draw it more tightly around her.

“How? What happened?” she whispered.

Haltingly, Zachar told her about finding the legendary island of the seals. “He would not let me kill any of the otter. He kept saying this was what it was like before the Cossacks came. Then he … he went crazy and started saying strange things … saying that they would make him tell.”

“Oh, no,” Tasha moaned.

“Then he went out in his bidarka and took his harpoon—” A sob broke through his voice. He wiped a hand over his face, then insisted, “I tried to reach him. I tried!” She could feel his gaze on her. “Why? Why did he do it?”

“He was afraid.” She felt very empty and very alone. And part of her felt relieved that her brother’s torment was finally over.

“Why?” Zachar still didn’t understand.

For the first time, Tasha told him the truth about his birth, how she and Walks Straight had taken Zachar and fled from Adak and what a strong, proud man her brother had been. She told him about the uprising and her brother’s part in it—about the coming of Solovey and Tolstykh, the way they had tortured Walks Straight and all but destroyed him.

“He feared the Cossacks would find out that he knew the location of the seal island and would torture him again for the information.” She turned to gaze into her son’s eyes. “He died to keep that secret. You must keep it, too. No one can know where you have been or what you have seen.”

“They will ask about Walks Straight.”

“Tell them he drowned. He is not the first hunter the sea has swallowed.” Tasha moved away, retracing her steps to the cot.

A sadness washed over her as she lay down once more on the cot with the snoring man, but it wasn’t the kind of sadness that caused tears. It was a deep regret that it had to happen this way.

CHAPTER XVII

Summer 1784

The hardness of her life began to show on Tasha’s face. Exposure to the relentless wind had weathered her skin, wrinkled the soft flesh under her eyes, and deepened the grooves near the corners of her mouth. After having lived for thirty-eight of the Cossack years, she no longer attracted the interest of the Cossacks who came to Unalaska. They preferred younger women—ones the age of the girl Zachar had taken to be his wife this past winter.

Tasha slipped her needle through another blue bead and glanced at her new daughter-in-law, a Creole like herself called Katya. She was barely seventeen summers old—a good age for her son of twenty-two. Yet Katya was not the mate Tasha would have chosen for Zachar, even though she was a good worker and deft with a needle. She would have picked a girl whose mind was a little quicker, one who wasn’t so quiet and plain-looking. But with Zachar away so much on hunting parties, maybe it was just as well that he hadn’t chosen a wife the Cossacks in the village would covet. Suppressing a sigh, Tasha returned to her beadwork.

“A ship! A ship!” Mikhail came running toward them, shouting excitedly. He stopped beside Tasha and pointed toward the bay. Although he was out of breath, words tumbled from his mouth between pants for air. “I saw them first. Zachar let me take the bidarka out on the bay. That is when I saw them. Come.” He started back toward the beach, afraid of missing something. “They will be sending a boat ashore soon.”

Tasha laid aside her beadwork sewing and pushed to her feet, her joints slightly stiff from prolonged sitting. Her daughter-in-law followed suit and accompanied Tasha while Mikhail ran ahead. The arrival of any ship was a cause for celebration by the island inhabitants—Cossack, Creole, and Aleut alike.

The arrival of these ships was more momentous than Tasha realized.

One was the
Trekh Sviatiteli,
the Three Saints, a vessel developed in the shipbuilding yards at Okhotsk in Siberia. It was termed a galiot, although there was little resemblance between it and the Mediterranean vessel of the same name. Broad of beam, almost as keelless as the shitik, it had a single square gaff mainsail with an auxiliary jib and a rudder two fathoms long. There were openings for sweeps, the long oars operated from below deck and used in tacking or in heavy seas. In its large hold were domestic cattle, sheep, fowl, and lumber, metal, and tools of every kind. The ship’s master was Tasha’s former consort, Ismailov—older, stouter, with strands of gray appearing in his hair and beard, but still vain and arrogant and fond of women and liquor.

But the most important passengers aboard the vessel were Grigori Ivanovich Shelekhov, a wealthy merchant from Irkutsk and a partner in this colonizing expedition, and his wife, the noblewoman Natalia Alexyevna Shelekhova. The couple quickly became the center of attention when they came ashore.

Grigori “Grisha” Shelekhov was a large man in his middle years. Clean-shaven, after the European fashion of the day, he possessed a commanding presence. He moved with deliberation, yet that surface calm failed to mask his boundless ambition and restless energies. The quickness of his narrow eyes, which took in everything that went on around him, revealed these traits.

Several years before, Shelekhov had heard about the Cook exploration and the subsequent sale of a few hundred sea otter skins to the Chinese at Canton for ten thousand dollars, a sum that had ignited a near-mutiny by Cook’s crew. Shelekhov was also aware that the reports written by the English captain before his death at the hands of natives on some tropical island in the Pacific had called the Russian presence in the Aleutians and the northwest insignificant.

As soon as the knowledge of the area’s fur wealth had spread, there had been an immediate incursion of British and the newly independent American ships. The appeals for government intervention made by the Russian merchants engaged in the fur trade, which included Shelekhov, were ignored by Catherine the Great. She adopted the position of laissez-faire. Shelekhov was well aware that the Russian claim on the new lands in the north was weak, since they had only established temporary bases from which the promyshleniki operated. It was his shrewd and handsome wife who suggested they use the freedom Catherine had given the merchants to establish a permanent settlement.