Alaska (17 page)

All marveled at its softness, its shimmering beauty and unequaled thickness. Trade in seaotter skins had begun, and so had the rivalry between Azazruk the benevolent shaman and Shugnak the master hunter.

The latter saw from the beginning that the fur of the sea otter was going to be treasured by men, and even though trade to far places was still thousands of years in the future, each adult on Lapak wanted an otter skin, or two or three. They could have all the sealskins they wanted, and they made admirable clothing, but it was the sea otter that the islanders craved, and Shugnak was the man who could provide them.

He quickly saw that to chase these otters in a six-man umiak was wasteful, and drawing upon tribal memories, he directed his men to build approximations of the ancient kayaks, and when these proved seaworthy, he taught his sailors how to hunt with him in groups. Silently they would prowl the sea until they came upon a family of otters, with

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some fat fellow cracking clams. On some lucky days his men would bring home as many as six, and the time came when the islanders discarded the flesh and kept only the pelts. Then the massacre of the otters became appalling.

Azazruk had to intervene. 'It is wrong to kill the otters,' he said, but Shugnak, a good man and in things other than hunting a gentle one, resisted: 'We need the pelts.' It was obvious that no one really needed

the pelts, for seals were plentiful and the otter meat was found to be tough, but those who already had otter-skin garments reveled in them while those who lacked them kept urging Shugnak to bring them skins.

The hunter's view was simplicity itself: 'The otters are out there and they do no one any good, just swimming about and cracking clamshells on their bellies.' But Azazruk had a deeper understanding: 'The animals of land and sea are brought to earth by the great spirits so that man can live.' And he became so obsessed with this concept that one morning he climbed to the cave of the mummified old woman, where he sat for a long time in her presence as if consulting with her.

'Am I foolish in thinking that the sea otters are my brothers?' he asked, but only the reverberation of his voice responded.

'Could it be that Shugnak is right to hunt them as he does?”Again there was silence.

'Suppose we are both right, Azazruk to love the animals, Shugnak to kill them?' He paused, then asked a question which would perplex subsequent philosophers: 'How can two things so different both be right?'

Then, like all men and women throughout history who would consult oracles, he found the answer within himself. Projecting his own voice toward the mummy, he heard her speak back with warm assurance: 'Azazruk must love and Shugnak must kill, and you are both right.'

She said no more, but there in the silent cave Azazruk fashioned the phrase that would sing in his islanders' minds: We live off the animals, but we also live with them. And as he elaborated his perception of what the spirits intended, many listened, but most still yearned for their otter skins, and these began a whispering campaign against their shaman, alleging that he did not want the otters to be killed because they looked like human beings, whereas everyone knew they were only big fish covered with fur of great worth.

The island community split down the middle, with some supporting their shaman, others backing their hunter, and in thousands of these early communities in Asia and Alaska 103

there were similar fractures, the dreamers versus the pragmatists, the shamans responsible for the spiritual well-being of their people versus the great hunters responsible for feeding them, and throughout all ensuing eons this unavoidable struggle would continue, for on this issue men of good will could divide.

On Lapak Island the conflict came to a focus one summer morning as Shugnak was preparing to take his one-man kayak out to catch sea otters and the shaman halted him at the shore: 'We do not need any more dead otters. Let the creatures live.' He was an ascetic, with a mystical quality which set him apart from other men. He was a quiet man, but on the infrequent times when he did speak, others had to listen.

Shugnak was entirely different: stocky, broad of shoulder and heavy of hand, but it was the savage look of his face that marked him as a great hunter. It was reddish rather than the yellow or dark brown of the typical islander and distinguished by three powerful lines parallel to his eyes. The first was a huge length of whalebone stuck through the septum of his nose and protruding past each nostril. The second was a fierce, bristly jet-black mustache. And the third, most impressive of all, was a pair of rather small labrets set in the two corners of his mouth and connected across his chin by three links of a chain intricately carved from walrus ivory. He was dressed in skins from sea lions he had caught, and when he stood erect, his powerful arms broadening his torso, he was formidable.

On this morning he did not propose to have the shaman interrupt his hunt, and when Azazruk tried to do so, he gently put him aside. Azazruk realized that Shugnak could knock him down with only a push, but his responsibility for the welfare of animals could not be surrendered, and he moved back to obstruct Shugnak's passage. This time the hunter grew impatient, and without intending any irreverence, for he liked the shaman so long as the latter tended his own affairs, he shoved Azazruk so sharply that he fell, whereupon Shugnak strode to his kayak, paddled angrily to sea, and continued his hunting.

A tenseness fell over the island, and when Shugnak returned, Azazruk was waiting for him, and for several days the two men argued. The shaman pleaded against what he feared might be the extermination of the sea otters, while Shugnak countered with hardheaded realism that since the creatures had obviously been brought to these waters to be used, he intended using them.

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Azazruk, for the first time in his long years of leadership, lost his composure and inveighed rather ridiculously against all hunters and their prowling kayaks, and he became so offensive that the people started to turn away from him. And he realized that he had made himself so foolish in their eyes, had so alienated them, that he had no recourse but to relinquish his leadership. So one morning before the others were awake he gathered his fetishes, left his hut by the sea, and walked mournfully to the headwaters of a distant bay, where he built himself a mud-walled hut. Like a thousand shamans before him, he was learning that the spiritual adviser of a people had best remain aloof from their political and economic quarrels.

He was an old man now, nearly fifty, and although his people still gave him credit for having led them to this island, they no longer wanted him meddling in their affairs; they wanted a more sensible leader like Shugnak, who could, if he put his mind to it, learn to consult with spirits and placate them.

In his sequestered hut Azazruk would end his days in exile. From the shores of the bay he could collect enough shellfish and slugs and seaweed to survive, and after some days bighearted Shugnak provided him with a kayak, and although he had not paddled much before, he now became reasonably skillful. Often he would venture far from shore, always to the north toward those waters which had perpetually lured his people, and there, deep in the waves, he would talk with the seals and converse with the great whales as they drifted by. Occasionally he might see a group of walruses plowing northward, and he would call to them, and sometimes in the warm days of summer he would spend the entire night only a few hours long under the pale stars, at one with the vast ocean, at peace with the sea.

But the times he treasured were those in which he found himself in the kelp close to some family of sea otters and he could see the mother floating on her back with her baby on her bosom, the pup's wide eyes gleaming at the new world it was discovering, or greet the happy old man with whiskers as he floated past with a rock on his belly and two clams in his fat paws.

Of all the animals Azazruk had known, and his friends were legion, from the towering mammoth to the crafty lion, he prized most highly these sea otters, for they were creatures of distinction, and as his years drew to a close he conceived the idea for which he had no reasonable justification that it was the sea otter who best represented the spirits that had guided him through his honorable and productive life: It was 105

they who called me when we lived on those arid steppes to the east. It was they who came at night to remind me of the ocean where I and my people belonged. And one morning when he returned from a night voyage on that maternal ocean and sat among his fetishes and took them from their pouches so they could breathe and talk to him, he realized with joyous surprise that the headless ivory piece he had cherished had never been a man, but a sea otter lazing along on its back, and in that moment he discovered the oneness of the world, the unity of spirit among mammoth, whale, bird and man, and his soul exulted in this knowledge.

They did not find him until some days later. Two pregnant women made the long journey to his hut to enlist his aid in ensuring healthy babies, and when they stood near his door and called him without receiving an answer, they supposed that he was once more out on the ocean, but then one of them spotted his empty kayak well up on the shore, and she deduced that he must still be within his hut. When the women entered they found him seated on the earth, his body fallen forward over his collection of fetishes.

THE CHAIN OF ISLANDS TO WHICH AZAZRUK LED HIS CLAN

would later be known as the Aleutians and their residents as Aleuts (Ahl-ay-oots) and a stranger, more complex collection of people would rarely exist on this earth.

Isolated, they developed a unique way of life. Men and women of the sea, they derived their entire subsistence from it. Each group self-contained on its own island, they felt no necessity in these early days to invent war. Secure within the world governed by their benevolent spirits, they achieved a satisfactory life. Tragedy they knew, for at times starvation threatened, and most families lost fathers and husbands and sons when sudden storms swept the great seas upon which they depended. They had no trees, nor any of the alluring animals they had known on the mainland, and no contact with either the Eskimos of the north or Athapascans of the center, but they did live in close contact with the spirit of the sea, the mystery of the little volcano that sputtered off their shore and the vivid life of whales, walruses, seals and sea otters.

Later experts, looking at the inviting way in which the chain of islands reached out for Asia, constituting almost a land bridge of its own, would conclude that a particular tribe of Mongolians from Asia must have walked across this supposed bridge to the far western group of islands, populating each of the more easterly ones in turn. It did not happen that way. The Aleutians were settled east to west by Eskimos like

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Azazruk and his people, who, if they had turned north when they crossed the real land bridge, would have become indistinguishable from the Eskimos of the Arctic Ocean.

Having turned south, they became Aleuts.

Azazruk, who would be revered in island legend as the Great Shaman, left two heritages of importance. For his trips on the ocean in the closing years of his life he devised an Aleut hat which would become perhaps the most distinctive head covering in the world. It was carved of wood, although baleen from a whale could also be used, and it came straight up in the back to a fairly high level. There it sloped downward in a broad sweep forward, stretching gracefully in front of the eyes and at a beautifully dropping angle, so that the sailor's eyes had a long visor to shade them from the glare of the sun. In this form alone the hat would have been distinctive, for it provided a lovely artistic form, but from the point where the erect back joined the long slope forward, Azazruk had fastened five or six graceful arching feathers or stems of dead flowers or bits of decorated baleen, so positioned that they arched forward above the visor. This wooden hat was a work of art, perfect in every proportion.

When a group of six or seven Aleuts, each in his own kayak, each with his Azazruk hat, visors sloping forward, feathers atilt, swept across the ocean, they were memorable; and in later days when European artists traveling with explorers sketched them, the hats became a symbol of the arctic.

The shaman's other contribution was more lasting. When children born on Lapak had pestered him to tell the exciting legends about the other land from which the clan had come, he always referred to it and its glaciers and fascinating collection of animals as the Great Land, for it had been great, and to leave it had been a sad defeat. In time those words came to represent the lost heritage. The Great Land lay back to the east, beyond the chain of islands, and it was a noble memory.

The Aleutian word for Great Land was Alaxsxaq, and when Europeans reached the Aleutian Islands, their first stopping point in this portion of the arctic, and asked the people what name the lands hereabout had, they replied 'Alaxsxaq,' and in the European tongues this became Alaska.

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IV

THE EXPLORERS

On New Year's Day of 1723 a giant Ukrainian cossack stationed in the remote town of Yakutsk, most easterly of the Siberian posts, became so outraged by the gross tyrannies of the governor that he cut the man's throat. Immediately arrested by six junior officials, for no three could have handled him, he was beaten, manacled, and tied to an exposed pillar on the parade grounds facing the Lena River. There, after nineteen lashes from the knout on his bare back, he heard his sentence: 'Trofim Zhdanko, cossack in the service of Tsar Peter, may heaven preserve his illustrious life, you are to be conveyed in shackles to St. Petersburg and hanged.'

At seven the next morning, hours before the sun would rise in that far northern latitude, a troop of sixteen soldiers set out for the Russian capital, forty-one hundred miles to the west, and after three hundred and twenty days of the most difficult travel across the trackless wastelands of Siberia and central Russia, they reached what passed for civilization at Vologda, where swift messengers galloped ahead to inform the tsar of what had happened to his governor in Yakutsk. Six days later the troop delivered their still-shackled prisoner to a dank prison, where, as he was thrown into a lightless dungeon, the

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guard informed him: 'We know all about you, Prisoner Zhdanko. On Friday morning you hang.'

But at half after ten the next night a man even taller and more formidable than the cossack left an imposing house along the Neva River and hastened to a waiting carriage drawn by two horses. He was bundled in furs but wore no hat, his thick head of hair blowing in the frosty November wind. As soon as he was settled, four men on horseback, heavily armed, took positions before and after his carriage, for he was Peter Romanoff, Tsar of all the Russias, and destined to be remembered in history as The Great.

'To the prison by the docks,' he said, and as the coachman drove down one frozen alleyway after another, the tsar leaned forward and shouted: 'Aren't you glad it isn't spring? These streets would be hub-deep in mud.'

'If it was spring, Sire,' the man shouted back with an obvious touch of familiarity, 'we wouldn't be using these alleys.'

'Don't call them alleys,' the tsar snapped. 'They'll be rock paved next year.'

When the carriage reached the prison, which Peter had prudently placed close to the docks where he knew that sailors from all the shipping nations of Europe would be brawling, he leaped out of his carriage before his guard could form, strode to the tightly barred portal, and banged on it clamorously. It was some moments before the sleepy watchman inside could muster himself and come complainingly to the tiny wicket, set in the center of the heavy gate, to ask: 'What noise at this hour?'

Peter, showing no displeasure at being stopped by such a functionary, said amiably: 'Tsar Peter.'

The watchman, invisible behind his wicket, betraying no surprise at this remarkable answer, for he had long known of the tsar's propensity for surprise visits, replied briskly: 'Open immediately, Sire!' and Peter heard the gates creaking as the watchman pushed them apart. When they were sufficiently ajar for the carriage to enter, the coachman indicated that Peter should jump in behind him and enter the prison courtyard in state, but the giant ruler was already striding forward and calling for the chief jailer.

The noise had awakened the prisoners long before their custodian was roused, and when they saw who it was that was visiting at this late hour, they began to bombard him with petitions: 'Sire, I am here unjustly!' 'Sire, look to your rascal in Tobolsk.

He stole my lands.' 'Tsar Peter, justice!' Ignoring the criminals who did the shouting, but noting their complaints against any specific agent of his government, he 109

proceeded directly to the heavy oaken door guarding the main entrance to the building, where he banged impatiently on the iron knocker, but he had done this only once when the watchman from the gate shuffled up, calling in a loud voice: 'Mitrofan! It's the tsar!' Then Peter heard vigorous activity taking place behind the massive doors constructed of wood he had imported from England.

In less than a minute, Jailer Mitrofan had his door opened and his head bowed low: 'Sire, I am eager to obey your orders.'

'You better be,' the emperor said, clapping his appointee on the shoulder. 'I want you to fetch the cossack Trofim Zhdanko.'

'Fetch him where, Sire?'

'To that red room across the way from yours,' and assuming that his order would be promptly carried out, he marched unguided to the room on which he himself had done the carpentering a few years before. It was not large, for in those first days of his new city Peter had visualized it as being used in exactly the way he now proposed, and it contained only a table and three chairs, for he had supposed that here prisoners would be brought for interrogation: one chair behind the table for the official, one at the side of the table for the clerk taking down the answers, and that one over there for the prisoner, who would sit with light from the window glaring in his face. At night, if such interrogations had to be conducted, the light would come from a whale-oil lamp on the wall behind the official's head. And to give it the solemnity its intended purpose required, Peter had painted the room a sullen red.

While waiting for the prisoner to be produced, Peter rearranged the furniture, for he did not wish to stress the fact that Zhdanko was a prisoner. Without calling for help, he moved the narrow table to the center, set one chair on one side and the other two facing it from the opposite side. Still awaiting the arrival of the jailer, he paced back and forth, as if his energy were so great that it could not be controlled, and as he heard footsteps coming down the stone corridor, he tried to recall the fractious cossack he had once sentenced to prison. He remembered him as a huge mustachioed Ukrainian, tall like himself, who after his release from jail had been dispatched to the city of Yakutsk, where he was to serve as military constable enforcing the orders of the civilian governor. He had been a worthy soldier up to the moment he fell into serious difficulty, and in memory of those better days the tsar now mumbled: 'Good fortune they didn't hang him out there.'

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The latch rattled, the door opened, and there stood Trofim Zhdanko, six feet two, broad-shouldered, black-haired, fierce drooping mustache, huge beard which bristled forward when the owner jutted out his chin to argue a point. On the march to the interrogation room, surrounded by guards, the jailer had warned him who his nocturnal visitor was, so as soon as they entered, the big cossack, still manacled, bowed low and said softly, with no theatrical humility but with sincere respect: 'Sire, you do me honor.”

For just a moment Tsar Peter, who hated beards and had sought to prohibit them in his empire, stared at his hirsute visitor, then smiled: 'Jailer Mitrofan, you may remove the shackles.'

'But, Sire, this man is a murderer!'

'The shackles!' Peter roared, and when they jangled to the stone floor he added gently: 'Now, Mitrofan, take the guards with you as you go.' When one of the guards showed hesitancy at leaving the tsar alone with this notorious criminal, Peter chuckled and moved closer to the cossack, punching him in the arm: 'I've always known how to handle this one,' and the others withdrew.

When they were gone, Peter indicated that the cossack should take one of the two chairs while he, Peter, took the one on the other side. Having done so, he placed his elbows near the middle of the table and said: 'Zhdanko, I need your help.'

'You've always had it, Sire.'

'But this time I don't want you to murder my governor.'

'He was a bad one, Sire. Stole as much from you as he did from me.'

'I know. Reports on his misbehavior were tardy in reaching me. Didn't get here till a month ago.'

Zhdanko winced, then confided: 'If a man is innocent, that trip from Yakutsk to St.

Petersburg in shackles is no Easter outing.'

Peter laughed: 'If anyone could handle it, you could.' Then he grew serious: 'I stationed you in Siberia because I suspected that one day I would need you there.' He smiled at the big man, then said: 'The time has come.'

Zhdanko placed both hands on the table, far apart, looked directly into the eyes of the tsar, and asked: 'What?'

Peter said nothing. Rocking back and forth as if perplexed by some subject too weighty for easy explanation, he kept staring at the cossack, and finally asked the first of his significant questions: 'Can I still trust you?'

'You know the answer,' Zhdanko said with no show of humility or equivocation.

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'Can you keep important secrets?'

'I've never been entrusted with any. But... yes, I suppose.'

'Don't you know?'

'I've never been tested.' Realizing that this might sound impudent, he added firmly: 'Yes, if you warned me to keep my mouth shut. Yes.'

'Swear you'll keep your mouth shut?'

'I swear.'

Peter, nodding his satisfaction with this promise, rose from his chair, strode to the door, opened it, and shouted down the hall: 'Fetch us some beer. German beer.'

And when Jailer Mitrofan entered with a pitcher of the dark stuff and two beakers, he found the cossack and the tsar seated side by side in the middle of the room like two friends, the table behind them.

When the first deep drafts had been drunk, with Zhdanko saying: 'Haven't had that in the past year,' Peter opened the conversation whose subject would dominate much of his life in the next months and all of Zhdanko's: 'I am much worried about Siberia, Trofim.' This was his first use of the prisoner's given name, and both were aware of the significance.

'Those Siberian dogs are difficult to train,' the cossack said, 'but they're puppies compared to the Chukchis out on the peninsula.'

The tsar leaned forward: 'It's the Chukchis I'm interested in. Tell me.'

'I've met up with them twice. Lost twice. But I'm sure they can be handled if you go at them properly.'

'Who are they?' Clearly, the tsar was temporizing. He was not concerned about the fighting qualities of these Chukchis perched on the far end of his empire. Every group his soldiers and administrators had encountered on their irresistible march to the east had been difficult at first, tractable when reliable government and resolute force were applied, and he was sure the Chukchis would prove the same.

'As I told you in my first report, they're closer to the Chinese, I mean in appearance, habits, than to you Russians or us Ukrainians.'

'But not allied to the Chinese, I hope?'

'No Chinese has ever seen them. And not too many Russians, either. Your governor there was a slight hesitation 'the one who died, he was deadly afraid of the Chukchis.'

'But you went among them?'

At this point Zhdanko had an invitation to play the hero, but he refrained: 'Twice, Sire, but not by choice.'

'Tell me about it. If you reported it, I've forgotten the details.'

Ill

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'I didn't report it, because I didn't come off too well.' And there in the quiet room, toward midnight, he told the tsar about his two attempts to sail north from his headquarters in Yakutsk on the left bank of the great Lena River, largest in the east, and of his failure the first time because of opposition from the hostile Siberian tribes that infested the area.

'I'd like to know about the Lena.'

'Majestic river, Sire. Have you ever heard about the Mouths of the Lena? Maybe fifty little rivers all running into the Great North Ocean. A wilderness of water. I got lost there.'

Very gently Peter asked: 'But you certainly never met any Chukchis on the Lena or at its fifty mouths, as you call them.' He hesitated, then said: 'Everything I've heard puts the Chukchis much farther east.'

Zhdanko took the bait: 'Oh yes! They're out on the peninsula. Where the land ends.

Where Russia ends.'

'How do you know that?'

The cossack leaned back and reached behind him for his beer, then, turning to face Peter, he made a confession: 'I've told no one, Sire. Most of the men involved are dead. Your officials in Yakutsk, like that damned governor, never cared, as if what I'd discovered had no value. I doubt if your other officials here in St. Petersburg would have cared, either. You're the first Russian who gave a damn, and I know exactly why you're here tonight.'

Peter showed no displeasure at this intemperate outbreak, this blanket castigation of his officials. Smiling, he said with the greatest conciliation: 'Tell me, Zhdanko, why am I here?'

'Because you think I know something important about those eastern lands.'

Peter smiled and said: 'Yes, I've suspected for some time that when you made that river journey north from Yakutsk, and of that part I was informed, you did much more than sail down the Lena River to its many mouths, as you reported.'

'Where do you think I went?' Zhdanko asked, as if he too were playing a game.

'I think you went out into the northern ocean and sailed east to the Kolyma River.'

'That I did. And I found that it also enters the ocean by many mouths.'

'I was told that by others who had seen the mouths,' the tsar said in a manner which indicated that he might be bored.

'But not by anyone who approached from the sea,' Trofim said sharply, and Peter laughed.

'It was on a second trip, about which I did not bother to inform your despicable governor . . .'

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'You took care of him. Let his soul rest.'

'It was on this trip that I encountered the Chukchis.'

This was a revelation so significant, so pertinent to the hammering questions being asked in learned circles in Paris, Amsterdam and London, let alone Moscow, that Peter's hands began to tremble. He had heard from the greatest geographers in the world, men who dreamed about little else, two versions of what happened at the northeast corner of his empire, there at those capes shrouded in mist and frozen for more than half the year in great cakes of ice. Some in Paris had argued with him: 'Eminent Sire, at the Arctic Circle and just below, your Russia has an unbroken land connection with North America, so that the hope of finding a sea passage from Norway to Japan around the eastern end of Siberia is fruitless. In the far north, Asia and North America become one body of land.'