Alaska (55 page)

Cheres Maman et Soeur,

I have now been on this rain-soaked island for nineteen days and have seen nothing but mist, fog, low clouds and the most gloomy aspect of nature a human being has ever witnessed. Everyone here assures me that when the sun reappears I shall be seeing a glorious congregation of mountains encircling us, with a beautiful volcano off to the west.

Now, I am willing to believe that not all the people here are prevaricators, so I suppose the mountains do exist, but I find that one must take that on faith, for the visitor rarely sees them. One dear lady, hoping to raise my flagging spirits, assured me yesterday: 'Rarely does an entire month go by without the clouds lifting for at least a day,' and with that hope I shall go to bed tonight, praying that tomorrow may be that one day in thirty.

Arkady is even more delightful to be with than we thought in Moscow, and I am divinely happy. We have purchased a small wooden house near the castle, and with imagination and ingenuity we shall transform it into our hidden palace, because on the outside it will not be much.

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I'm not sure whether the exciting news about Arkady's father has circulated in Moscow, but he has been ordained as Bishop of Irkutsk, with every likelihood of becoming, before the year is out, Metropolitan of All the Russias. So you shall be seeing the father in your city while I entertain the son out here in mine.

And now the best news of all. Arkady has been appointed second-in-command to supervise the transfer of power from the temporary chief administrator to the permanent one, and when that's been done, to continue as second-in-command until such time as he becomes chief. For the time being, his mother lives with us, a wonderful Aleut woman under five feet tall and with a kind of ivory earring fixed in a hole at the edge of her lower lip. She smiles like an angel and will allow me to do no work, for she tells me in good Russian: 'When you're young enjoy your husband, for the years pass too quickly.' In a later letter I'll tell you what happened to her marriage, but maybe you can figure it out for yourselves.

When the tantamount widow Sofia Voronova heard her prospective daughter-in-law complaining about Sitka's weather she preferred the Tlingit name for her town she feared that the high-born young woman might prove an unsuitable wife for her son, and she watched carefully as Praskovia made her way about the colony. She knows what she's doing, Sofia said to herself, and when she saw Praskovia go outside the gate to talk with Tlingit market women, she thought: And she's not afraid. But intuitively this elderly Aleut who had witnessed so many dramatic turns in human life feared that any young woman as pretty as Praskovia, and from a city, must lead her husband a difficult life, and she awaited the forthcoming wedding with trepidation.

But then, as if this bright child from the social circles of Moscow had anticipated Sofia's fears, she came to visit her two days before the wedding to say: 'Mother Voronova, I know I must seem strange to you, and I'm not going to try to change your mind. But I also know this. Arkady could not be the fine man he is unless someone had taken charge of him and* taught him manners and how to treat a wife. I'm sure it was you, .and I thank you.'

Then, to Sofia's astonishment, for Russian women in Sitka had never been so bold, Praskovia asked: 'What do you call that thing you wear in your lip?' Sofia, appreciating this

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openness, replied: 'A labret,' and her visitor said pertly: 'All right, now you must tell me what a labret is.'

Sofia did, but Praskovia was still not satisfied: 'I suspect that one must be very special. Could you . . . ?' She let her question hang, and for a very long moment Sofia looked at her, wondering: If I told her, would she understand? And in the end she concluded that it did not matter whether this young stranger understood or not; she was going to be Arkady's wife, and the more she knew of his heritage the better.

So in a quiet voice she began to tell of life 0n Lapak Island, and of the death sentence on her people, and of how she and her mother and her great-grandmother had killed the whale: 'A woman in the village made this from the bone of the whale we killed, and gave it to me as I left the island.' Seeing that Praskovia was transfixed by the story, she added: 'Of all the women on Lapak, I was the only one who escaped, and I shall wear this labret till I die out of my love for my people!'

Praskovia sat silently for a long time, kept her hands over her face, and finally rose and left without uttering a word, but on the following day she came back, laughing in a bright youthful manner, to tell Sofia: 'In Russia the bride wears something her mother wore at her wedding. I wish I could wear that labret of yours for just one day,' and the two women embraced, each assured that there would never be trouble between them.

NOW WHEN THE CITIZENS OF NEW ARCHANGEL USED THE

phrase the Voronovs

they meant the young administrator and his attractive wife, and the older possessors of that name were largely forgotten. Nor was Baranov mentioned very often, and when Kyril Zhdanko was replaced by a permanent chief administrator from Russia, a man with a minor title, he too faded from conversation. A new generation had come in to run what amounted to a new town, and when the American shipbuilder Tom Kane died, the last of the old breed was gone, the arrival of a steam-propelled ship from San Francisco signaling the new day at sea.

Arkady Voronov had been in his position as general manager of Company affairs for only a brief period when his capacity for leadership was tested, because from the islands to the north the Tlingits under a new toion decided that the time was ripe for a renewed attempt to retake Castle Hill, throw down the palisade, and return the settlement to its original Indian owners. With careful planning, the accumulation of many weapons and the stealth for which they were famous, they began infiltrating southward at such a steady

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rate that soon they had a sizable army in the valleys east of the settlement.

With the heroic Kot-le-an dead, they were led by the tested old warrior Ravenheart, who was ardently supported by his implacable wife, Kakeena, and their twenty-year-old son who, because of the spectacular way they had developed, was known as Bigears.

Together the three would form a powerful fighting unit, with Kakeena urging her men.

forward and providing food and hiding places when they were either recuperating from wounds or plotting their next assaults.

Ravenheart decided to position his best men near the palisade gate through which the Tlingit women would enter with their goods for market. At the exact moment, he, Bigears and six others would force their way through the gate and break it off its hinges, allowing a hundred or so warriors to flood the palisade. What happened after that would depend upon the degree of success attained by the first wave, but all were prepared to accept large losses at first in order to subdue the Russians.

At six in the morning the men hiding among the spruce trees north of Castle Hill heard the sound of the morning bugles, and at eight they watched as two Russian soldiers directed a half-dozen Aleut workmen to throw open the wicker gate. One Tlingit woman entered bearing clams. Another came with seaweed. And as the third moved forward with her fish, Ravenheart, his son and their bold companions dashed into the compound, killing one Russian soldier and forcing the other to flee. Within minutes the battle for New Archangel had begun, with the Tlingits enjoying what appeared initially to be a victory.

But Arkady Voronov, commanding from the hill, was the kind of young man who was not afraid to make instant decisions, and at the moment he saw the gate collapse he knew he must wipe out that threat, so without considering the consequence to his own people or the enemy, he shouted to his cannoneers: 'Fire!' and two iron balls of tremendous power ripped into the mass of people struggling at the gate, killing fifteen attacking Tlingits and seven Creoles five men, two women who had come there to barter with the pacified Tlingits.

When Ravenheart saw some of his best men crushed by the cannonballs, he was first enraged, then sobered by the realization that those nine great cannon on the castle walls were going to be used, and he shouted to his men: 'Take cover!'

For three hours the Tlingits remained inside the walls, wrecking whatever they could reach when outside the range

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of the cannon and defending themselves by taking positions in houses and doorways.

It was brutal warfare, which could have continued till nightfall had not Voronov decided upon drastic measures. Dodging from one cover to another, he told his men: 'Engage them. Don't let them escape through the gate. But when you hear the bugle, run back like hell, because I'm going to fire those cannon.'

With that, he ran up the hill to the castle walls, where he trained six of his cannon on the heart of the fighting, that spot near the gate where Russians and Tlingits tangled in one indecipherable mass. 'Bugler!' he cried, and in the next instant the Russians fled the spot, all except one young fellow who tripped, tumbling down among the Tlingits. For a split second Voronov considered holding his fire to allow the fallen lad a chance to get away, but then he saw the milling Tlingits: 'Fire!' and six ricocheting balls swept through the confused mass of Tlingits, killing or maiming two out of three.

Ravenheart, alerted by the bugle call, escaped the fusillade, but as he made for the wall, seeking to follow his son with a giant leap, Voronov directed his cannoneers to fire again, and a huge ball struck the Tlingit leader full in the back, crushing his bones and throwing him against the fence that he had been about to climb. Pinned there by his own flesh and bones and tattered clothes, he hung limp for a moment, after which rifle fire from the windows of a nearby house cut him down.

Thus ended the attack of 1836 and with it the last hopes of the Tlingits . . . during this generation. Of Ravenheart's four hundred and sixty-seven men, fully a third had been slaughtered inside the compound, and he had died with them. The green hills, spruce-covered and lovely in either snow or sun, would know his breed of Tlingit no more.

Kakeena, a widow now, would take her son to a new refuge on an island more distant than Chichagof, and there he would remember this day and plot the manner in which he would lead his expedition for revenge, because no Tlingit like Kot-le-an or Ravenheart could ever accept defeat . . . and Bigears, brooding on his island, would be such a Tlingit.

SOFIA VORONOV A, THE YOUNG COMMANDER'S MOTHER, watched the battle from the castle, and at first she was proud of the manly way in which her son was conducting himself, but when, with victory assured, the big guns continued firing at houses well outside the walls, 'to give the Tlingits a lesson,' she saw that peaceful Indians who had elected to live side by side with the Russians were being slain.

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'Stop it!' she cried, rushing at the gunners. And her cry was so different from what her son and Praskovia were shouting in this moment of victory, that they were astonished.

Turning away from the final salvos of the bombardment, they looked at her in amazement, and saw that she was staring at them as if she had never seen them before. In that moment a wall as high as Denali rose between them.

As soon as the cannons were silent, she turned away from her son, going down the steps to work among the wounded, inside the palisade and without, ministering to those who had lost an arm or a friend or a child, and as she did so she found that she was identifying not with the Russian victors but with the shattered Tlingits, as if she knew that the latter deserved her help while the former did not.

When the Tlingits convinced her that they had been as surprised by Ravenheart's attack as the Russians, she felt a surge of sorrow for these confused people who had surrendered a life of great freedom in order to live in a settled community next door to what her husband had called 'Christian civilization,' only to find themselves trapped in a war not of their own making but in which they suffered most. Recalling her own childhood when similar injustices happened, she concluded that it was the kind of thing that was bound to occur when patterns of life were in collision, and she moved back and forth between Tlingits outside the gate and Russians inside, assuring each that life could proceed as it had in the past and that guilt rested on no one.

She convinced few her son telling her that the Russians might have to expel the Tlingits altogether; the people outside the gate rebuffing her with a threat to leave New Archangel and join up with the rebels in a new assault. Unwilling to accept such disillusionment and remembering how on Kodiak she had been instrumental in bringing Aleuts and Russians together, she persisted in her efforts to bind these two strong-minded groups into one workable whole, and gradually it was her view of the future that prevailed.

'Tell them out there,' her son said one morning, 'that we want them to stay. Tell them that when the gate opens tomorrow they'll be free to bring in their goods as usual.'

'You need them, don't you?' she asked, and he said: 'Yes, and they need us,' and that evening she went to the still apprehensive Tlingits: 'The gate will be opened tomorrow. You must bring your food and fish as before.'

'Can we trust them?' asked a man who had lost a son in the fighting, and she replied: 'You must.'

Reassured, they clustered about her, and in a friendly manner started to question her. One asked: 'Were you an 343

Aleut before the Russians came to your island?' and she laughed to brighten the evening: 'I still am.'

'But in those days you were not of their church?' and she said that she wasn't.

'But you are with them now, aren't you?' an inquisitive woman asked, and when Sofia said that she had been married to the tall man with the beard who had preached in the cathedral, several wanted to know: 'Is your new religion . . . ?' They did not know how to finish their question, until a man blurted out: 'Is there a god, like they say?'

She remained with them a long time that night, telling them of the beauty she had found in Christianity, of its gentle message where children were involved, of the benign role played by the Blessed Virgin and of the promise that God made regarding life eternal. She spoke with such simple conviction that for the first time, in their hours of distress, certain of the Tlingits perceived a religion that was gentler and more worthy than the one they had been following. It was a persuasive description of Christianity that she offered, for despite the fact that this religion had treated her poorly at the close of her life, taking her husband from her, it had still been the glory of those middle years which seemed to count more than the others.