Alaska (59 page)

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skin, the attractive way she wore her hair in braids, and she thought: That one was meant to be the mother of children, the custodian of a house.

So when the time came to leave the village, she went to Father Fyodor and said: 'That girl, the smiling one, she'd make a fine wife,' and the priest blushed, looked to where Praskovia pointed, and said, as if he had never seen the woman before: 'Yes.

Yes, it's about time she was finding herself a husband,' and he nodded to Praskovia as if thanking her for her sensible suggestion.

The journey up the Yukon to Nulato required three days, and they were days the Voronovs would never forget, for as they progressed northward the river broadened out until it reached a mile and a half from bank to bank, a massive stretch of water pressing always toward the distant ocean, which now lay nearly five hundred miles away, counting all the twists and turns. On the bosom of the river, which seemed to move past the boat with rugged determination, the Voronovs felt themselves to be entering the heartland of a great continent, a feeling totally different from any they had previously experienced in their gentler part of Alaska where islands and stretches of open sea predominated.

'Look at those empty fields!' Praskovia cried, pointing to the land that reached down to the river's edge and seemed to stretch off to infinity.

'A field,' her husband said reflectively, 'makes you think of orderliness, as if someone had fenced in an area and tended it. The land up here goes on forever.' It did, and across much of it no human being had ever moved, and as they contemplated its awesome immensity the Voronovs began to comprehend the terrain they governed.

For long stretches there would be no trees, no hills, no animals moving, not even any snow, just the boundless emptiness, so lonely and forbidding that Praskovia whispered: 'I'll wager there aren't even any mosquitoes out there,' and Arkady asked: 'You want us to let you off? Test your theory?' and she cried: 'No! No!'

Yet in a perverse way it was the brutal nothingness of this trip up the Yukon that enchanted the Voronovs. 'This isn't a garden along the Neva,' Arkady said, anticipating the sentiments of those thousands of men from all corners of the world who would soon be crowding into the empty spaces of Alaska. They would deplore the loneliness, the difficulties of travel and the dreadful experience of fifty-five degrees below zero, but they would also revel in the fact that they had been able to withstand and conquer this gigantic, forbidding land, and fifty years later, as their lives drew to conclusion, they

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would cherish above all their other accomplishments the fact that 'I traveled the Yukon.'

Toward the close of their third day on the river the Voronovs saw around a bend a sight which caused them to cheer: the tight little fort of Nulato, its two wooden towers defying the world, a Russian flag flying from a central pole. As they drew close and men ashore began firing salutes from rusty guns and an ancient cannon, Arkady felt a surge of emotion: 'This is the last outpost of empire. My God, I'm glad we came.'

The garrison, some twenty Russian traders and soldiers, were as delighted to see their old friend Father Fyodor as the people at Kaltag had been and ran to the shore to embrace him, but when they did so, they stared in amazement to find that a woman, and a pretty one at that, had come so far up the Yukon, and when Praskovia tried to debark, four men reached for her, lifted her high in the air, and with shouts and imitated bugle calls carried her into the fort, while her husband trailed behind, informing the garrison commander of his official position in the government and his interest in their fort.

It was a rough, frontier stronghold perched well back from the right bank of the Yukon, but so located as to command far reaches of the river in all directions. Built in the classic form of four lengths of long buildings joined to enclose a rather spacious central square, it was dominated by the two stalwart towers and protected by a double-strength palisade which surrounded the entire structure. Having been overrun three times in the past, with considerable loss of Russian lives, it was not going to be an easy target in the future, for during daylight hours one soldier manned each tower; two at night.

After samovars bubbled with hot tea, and toasts were drunk, and garrison members reported on their experiences with the surrounding Athapascans, a fierce lot according to them, the commanding officer, an energetic clean-shaven young lieutenant named Greko, signaled one of his men, who blushed, stepped forward, bowed to the Voronovs, and said: 'Gracious visitors, this humble fort at the edge of the world is honored by your presence. As a token of our respect, Lieutenant Greko and his men have prepared a special treat.' At this point he broke into uncontrollable laughter, which left the visitors bewildered, but now Greko took over.

'It was that rascal's idea, not mine,' he said, pointing to the young fellow, whom he now punched in the arm: 'Go ahead, Pekarsky, tell them what you and those others did,' and Pekarsky, after holding his hand over his mouth to stop his 363

laughter, straightened up, bit his lower lip, and announced in a butler's manner: 'Come this way, monsieur et

madame,' but the French, proving too much to handle under the circumstances, threw him into such convulsions that Lieutenant Greko had to intervene.

'The men have paid you a great honor, Excellency. I'm proud of them,' and he led the way out of the meeting and into the square, where soldiers, still hungry for a glimpse of the beautiful woman from Moscow, stared and nudged one another as she passed, her golden hair glowing in the darkness. They went to a low building outside of which lay stacked a huge pile of logs, which had been cut far upstream and floated here.

'Voild!'

the young officer cried, and when he pulled open the door the Voronovs found themselves entering a typical thick-walled Russian bath, with an outer room in which to undress, a very small middle area nearly filled with logs, and an inner room lined with low benches facing a collection of red-hot rocks heated by wood piled on from below.

There were also six buckets of water to be thrown on the rocks to provide clouds of steam, so that within minutes of starting a bath, one would be engulfed in a cleansing, relaxing vapor.

'We could not maintain a fort here without this,' Greko said, and he bowed to his distinguished guests and departed.

The promise of a good steam bath was so inviting that the two Voronovs almost raced to see who would reach it first, and when Praskovia won, for she had no high boots to unlace, she cried: 'Heaven at the end of an aretic trip!' and her husband replied with that accuracy which can be so infuriating: 'We're a hundred and twenty-one miles south of the Circle. I checked,' but as the steam rose about them she replied: 'It's arctic to me. I could feel the river preparing to freeze,' and without warning she burst into tears.

'Darling?'

'It's been so wonderful, Arkady. There we were, all those years at Sitka Sound with our beautiful volcano thinking we were in Alaska. I'm so glad you brought me.' She wept for some moments, then took her husband's hand: 'When we were on the river I had the feeling that we were heading into eternity. But then I saw the soldiers come running down to embrace Father Fyodor, and I realized that people lived here and that eternity was somewhere far beyond.' Her tears stopped, and she said: 'Quite far beyond, I think.'

SHE HAD BEEN CORRECT ABOUT THE COMING OF WINTER, for after they had explored this part of the Yukon, going 364

some twenty miles farther on to where a large river debouched from the north, and after they had met with members of various Athapascan tribes coming to the fort to trade, Arkady announced one morning: 'I think we're ready to head downstream,' and he supposed that because they would be drifting with the current rather than poling against it, the five-hundred-mile trip could be made speedily, but Lieutenant Greko corrected him.

'You'd be right if this were the beginning of summer. Easy ride. Pleasant, really.

But this is autumn.'

'If we started right away?'

'Fine. River's open here and it remains open for some time. But at the mouth it freezes early. The cold winds coming in from Asia hit there first.' Allowing time for these facts to register, he then said: 'Excellency, if you and Madame were to leave here now, you might very well be frozen in halfway down, and there you'd be, eight months in an arctic winter with no possible chance of escape.'

Arkady called for his wife to join him so that she could hear the lieutenant's warning, and long before Greko finished, she blurted out: 'We'll stay till the river freezes.

Then return the way we came,' and Greko, hoping to forestall any reconsiderations, jumped at the suggestion: 'Good! You'll be most welcome here and we'll have time to find you a first-class dog team for the return.'

So the Voronovs, he the son of the Metropolitan of All the Russias, she the daughter of a socially prominent family in Moscow, dug in for the opening days of a real Alaskan winter, and they watched with fascination as the thermometer began its steady and sometimes precipitous descent. One morning Praskovia wakened her husband with a rough shake: 'The Yukon's freezing!' and they spent that whole day watching as ice formed along the shores, then broke away, then formed again, then vanished. That day it would not freeze.

But three days later, in mid-October when the thermometer suddenly plunged to three degrees above zero, the mighty river surrendered and ice began to rush across from shore to shore as if it operated under directions of its own, and two days later the Yukon was frozen.

Then came the exacting days of testing to see how thick the ice was, and Lieutenant Greko explained that no matter how cold it became, the bottom of the Yukon never froze: 'The current below and the protection of the snow on top prevent the cold from taking command. In mid-January it'll still be flowing down there.'

When various teams of dogs were brought in, Praskovia 365

found delight in making their acquaintance: big gray-brown malamutes, white Eskimo dogs, mongrels with powerful bodies and inexhaustible energy, and others the Russians called huskies. They were dogs unlike any she had known in Russia, and although some snarled when she approached, others recognized her as a friend and showed their appreciation for her attention. But none became pets, nor did she try to make them so; these were noble animals bred for a particular purpose, and without them life in the arctic would have been difficult.

She found that she was loving the experience of extreme cold, but one night when the mercury thermometer dropped to minus-forty-two and quit, she was stunned by the force of weather at such temperatures, the way icy air sped down into the lungs, almost freezing them, and the curious manner in which a face could be fairly comfortable one minute and frozen the next. When she realized that the thermometer could not register below the low forties, she asked Greko what the actual temperature was, and he consulted his spirit thermometer and said: 'Minus-fifty-three,' and when she asked: 'Why don't I feel it to be that cold?' he said: 'No wind. No humidity. Just this heavy, heavy cold weighting everything down.'

It did not weigh her down. Every day she ran and leaped outside the fort, and not until she had exhausted herself, and felt the cold threaten her very bones, did she hurry inside. 'If I stayed out there,' she asked Greko, 'how long before I'd freeze?'

and he called to a soldier, who showed her his wrecked ears and a big white scarlike place on his right cheek.

'How long did that take?' Greko asked, and the man said: 'Twenty minutes, about as cold as this.'

'Is your face permanently damaged?' she asked, and the man answered: 'The ears are gone, the face will be all right, maybe a brown spot later on.'

That night, in the heart of Alaska that few Russians would ever know, she had the most exciting experience of all, for over the fort at Nulato, where twenty-two Russians huddled against the bitter cold, the northern lights began their heaven-encompassing dance. The Voronovs joined Lieutenant Greko in the center of the frozen square, inside the protection of the wooden barracks and the double palisade, and there they watched the great ebb and flow of the colored lights as they pranced across the midnight-darkened sky. 'How cold is it now?' Praskovia asked, and Greko said: 'Maybe sixty-below,'

but the Voronovs only huddled deeper 366

within their furs, for they did not want to move inside while this fantastic performance filled the heavens.

Later, as they drank tea and precious brandy with Greko, Praskovia said: 'We've seen Alaska. Without your help we might never have known it existed,' and he said: 'There's three times as much that none of us has seen,' and he agreed that on the day after tomorrow they could safely begin their journey back toward Sitka Sound.

THERE WAS AN ABRUPT CHANGE IN PLANS ON THE RETURN journey, but it had only happy consequences. When they reached the village of Kaltag, where they would have to leave the frozen river in order to take the hill route to Unalakleet, Father Fyodor informed them, with embarrassment: 'I'll be staying here. They need a priest.' Arkady, although distressed at the prospect of continuing what was a dangerous journey without Father Fyodor's help, had witnessed the admirable manner in which this scarecrow of a man fitted into Yukon life, and he had to consent.

'Will you explain to the religious authorities at the capital?' the priest asked, and Arkady said: 'I can see this village needs you,' and was about to express his appreciation for the help he had given the party, when Praskovia marched up, holding by the hand the attractive Indian girl she had noticed on the earlier visit. Going to the priest, she said: 'You proved yourself to be a dear, good man, Father. But you'd be twice as effective with a wife,' and she placed the young woman's hand in his.

When it was understood by everyone, even the children, that Father Fyodor was taking a wife and staying in their village, the young bride said firmly: 'It would be wrong to make the Russian couple cross the mountains by themselves!' And with the help of her father she arranged for a team of dogsled men to carry the Voronovs and the priest and his bride across snow and ice to where the Voronovs would wait for the thaw and a ship that would take them back to New Archangel.