The Great Alone (14 page)

Moving quickly, Luka crossed to the cradle and knelt down to look upon his son for the first time. The little mite looked so small lying there making faces in his sleep. He didn’t look at all as Luka had expected. As a matter of fact, he was rather ugly. Tentatively, Luka brushed his fingertips over the mass of hair covering his head, black as midnight and soft as eiderdown. The baby’s forehead puckered in a frown.

“How does it feel to be a papa, Luka Ivanovich?” Belyaev’s lips split in a grin that showed the gaping space between his front teeth.

Luka straightened to tower above the cradle. “He will make a fine hunter someday.” He spoke gruffly so he wouldn’t appear soft, then stepped back so his comrades could view his son.

“No hunter,” Winter Swan said and lifted aside the covering to expose the baby’s smooth pubes. “Girl.”

Sharp disappointment followed the initial shock of the discovery. He had never considered the child would be other than a son. The mocking laughter from the promyshleniki added to his chagrin. What good was a girl, he thought in disgust.

“What are you going to name your daughter?” a taunting Belyaev wanted to know. When Luka flashed him an irritated look, the man grinned. “Come now, Luka Ivanovich. The babe must have a name.”

He hesitated, but if he didn’t call her something, the men would never let him hear the end of it. “Tasha.” It was a common enough name. “Tasha Lukyevna,” he said, giving the girl child the status of his daughter.

“Tasha.” Winter Swan tried out the sound of the name, then gazed at her daughter and gently tucked the soft cover around her. “Tasha,” she murmured.

CHAPTER VIII

Continued good weather and good hunting prompted a second postponement of the shitik’s departure from the island of Attu. Not until the end of August did the promyshleniki begin loading their catch of furs into the large baidar to be transported to the base camp.

All week, Winter Swan had listened to their talk of leaving, and then she watched them tote the bundles of fur pelts to the baidar. She stood amid the noise and confusion in the barabara, clutching her daughter, Tasha, in her arms and holding her son’s hand to keep him at her side. All around her, the men rummaged through the cubicles, gathering their belongings and rolling them into bundles.

She watched as Luka tied his bundle, and she waited uncertainly for some directive from him. She was his slave. Surely he was going to take her to his village across the waters. But he hadn’t told her to pack. Winter Swan was suddenly afraid that he’d put her on the baidar without any of her property. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving everything behind. Acting quickly, she laid Tasha in her cradle and began collecting essential items—her tiny basket of needles, her crescent-shaped knives for cleaning and skinning, a root digger, and a few other articles.

When she reached past Luka for her best parka and pouch of valuables, he grabbed her arm. “What are you doing?”

“We go to your village,” she said, then saw his frown of surprise. “You take us?”

“No.” He bent his head, avoiding her gaze, while he quickly finished tying his bundle. “You will stay here. There isn’t room for you.”

She sat back on her heels, bewildered.

Later she stood on the beach with the other women and children and watched Many Whiskers and the other three Aleuts, the only adult males left in the village, push the heavily laden baidar into deeper water. The wind whipped the misting rain against her face, obscuring her view of the boatload of men.

When the baidar headed out to sea, Winter Swan realized the village was free. Their masters were leaving. But the exultant lift of her spirits didn’t last, dashed by a sense of abandonment. They were free, but how would they live with only four men to hunt and provide sustenance for the entire village? She clutched the baby closer to her breast.

By the time the promyshleniki gathered at the base camp, repaired the winter damage to the shitik, recaulked its seams, collected provisions for the return voyage, launched the vessel, and loaded their valuable cargo of furs, two weeks had passed. In the middle of September, they hauled the new wooden anchor from the water, unfurled the reindeer-hide sails from the spars of the shitik’s twin masts, and sailed for Russia. Their young orphaned hostage accompanied them, now the ward of the navigator Nevodchikov, who had become very attached to the native boy over the past year.

Heavy gray clouds hid the volcanic peaks of the island, and angry waves lashed its rocky coast. Luka stood near the stern of the flat-bottomed vessel and watched the island grow smaller and smaller. With his feet spread for balance, he swayed with the roll of the shitik as it bucked the ocean swells.

Belyaev made his way across the heaving deck to the stern. “How much do you think our cargo is worth, Luka Ivanovich?” The sum was a constant source of speculation among the company.

“I say a hundred thousand rubles.” He doubted that the price of a pelt had changed very much during the year they’d been gone.

“What are you going to do with your share?” Everyone was making plans for the ways they were going to spend their fortune, ranging from the practical to the wasteful. It was a way to pass the time. Most of them, Luka suspected, would end up drinking and gambling it away. There were few luxuries for a man to spend his money on in the dreary, isolated towns of Siberia. The man who achieved riches usually left. Those who stayed rarely kept theirs.

“I am not going to lose it playing cards in some tavern,” Luka stated.

Belyaev laughed. They all said that. “Then what will you do?”

As he stared at the island, Luka noticed a sea otter watching the shitik from a safe distance, its head bobbing above the water like a cork. “Maybe I’ll come back,” he said. “Maybe I will use my share to build a vessel of my own and finance another expedition to these islands.” The profit from such a venture would be staggering, he realized. So many sea otter lived in these waters he could come again and again.

“It was good on the island—plenty of fur animals. And the women were not bad either, eh?” Belyaev grinned and heartily slapped Luka on the back.

His mouth crooked in response as Luka thought of the tall and stately Winter Swan. Again he regretted that the infant had not been a boy.

Everyone had known from the beginning of the voyage that their delayed departure meant they would encounter adverse conditions. The second day out, the seas became rough and the weather turned bad, rain and wind thrashing the boat. And the conditions never improved for long.

By the fourth week, their water supply was reduced to the rain they could catch, and the food was nearly gone. Gums began to bleed and breaths turned foul as men grew weak from scurvy. The men began to fear that they had left too late.

The shitik battled the waves and the contrary winds for two more weeks, taking a beating while the men struggled to keep her afloat, mending her torn sails, shoring her masts, repairing her cracks and praying their luck had not run out. No one labored any harder than Luka.

Lurching with the boat’s violent motion, he made his way to the two hunters manning the pump and tapped the shoulder of the nearest to take his turn at the pump. Although the men were relieved frequently, they were barely able to stay ahead of the steady seepage.

A muffled shout came from above deck. A moment later a man yelled down the hatchway, his voice rising on a hysterical note of joy. “Land! Land!”

Until that instant, Luka had not realized how close he had been to giving up hope. Now it soared through him, giving him the strength of ten men and making him forget the pain of his bleeding mouth. He abandoned his post and the pump and scrambled up the hatchway to see the sight for himself.

A wave inundated the shitik’s deck, nearly washing Luka overboard as he emerged topside. He gripped the railing, water running down his body and dripping from his hair and beard. A corner of a sail flapped loosely, the leather thong that once secured it flailing the air. Blinking away the stinging saltwater, Luka peered at the horizon. At first he saw nothing except a black bank of clouds. The shitik shuddered ominously as the next wave crashed onto her decks, drenching him again. That was land, not clouds, he realized.

“Kamchatka! That must be Kamchatka! We’re going to make it!” he shouted exuberantly and threw back his head to cackle wildly, mindless of the next engulfing wave.

The forward sail broke its line and whipped out from its spar, flopping uselessly like a broken wing. There was a mad scramble to secure the sail before the wind tore it off completely. Luka came to his senses and joined the struggle to capture the heavy wet hide and tie it down. They had yet to make land, although the storm was driving the weltering shitik toward it.

With its square-rigged sails, the shitik was not highly maneuverable in good weather; in a storm, it was all but unmanageable. As the boat neared the coastline, Luka could hear the thundering crash of the breakers. Now and then he could see the plumelike spray of foam where jagged rocks offshore prematurely broke a wave’s force and turned it back on itself. The flat-bottomed boat strained to hold a course off the coast, but it was no match for the power of the sea. It was driven closer and closer to shore.

Luka saw the pointed tip of the shiny black rock looming ahead of the bow and shouted a warning to the navigator. The shitik groaned as she tried to answer the rudder’s command, her bow veering slightly away from the rock, but not enough. A second later came a deadly scrape, followed by the grinding splintering of wood. Then the shitik shuddered violently, jolting to a stop as timbers cracked open. The impact threw Luka to his knees.

“Get the boat over the side! She’s going to break up!” someone shouted.

There was a mad scramble to abandon the vessel as sea water poured into the rip in her belly. Luka fought his way through the tide of men. When Shekhurdin attempted to shove past him to reach the boat, Luka grabbed him. “The furs. We have to save the furs!”

“You save the furs, Kharakov,” the Cossack snarled. “I choose to save myself.”

Letting him pass, Luka looked at the panicked mass scurrying for the rail. “Belyaev!” he shouted to the black-bearded promyshlenik. “The furs! We must get them into the boat!”

The stocky hunter hesitated by the rail, then moved away from it to join Luka. “Quickly. We must move quickly,” he urged.

They broke open the cargo hatch. Luka swung into the flooding hold and began tossing the bundled pelts through the hatch hole to Belyaev. They worked feverishly, conscious of each shuddering groan of the dying shitik. Each bundle that landed on deck, Belyaev grabbed and tossed to the boat lying alongside while men scrambled over the rail or jumped into the churning waters to swim for the shore thirty yards away. Waves continuously hammered the snagged shitik against the black rock.

In the hold, Luka waded through the cold saltwater and hefted another bundle of pelts from a stack, then moved back toward the hatch. He heard the loud, ominous crack of the timbers and felt the boat shift under his feet as he heaved the furs through the opening.

Belyaev appeared at the hatch. “No more! Come now!” He urgently motioned for Luka to leave the rest of the furs. “The boat is casting off. They won’t wait.” Belyaev disappeared from view.

Luka took a step to follow, then hesitated and turned back for one more bundle of furs. A powerful wave struck the shitik, snapping it in two like a branch broken over a man’s knee.

Belyaev jumped from the rail, diving into the water. He surfaced quickly and swam for the longboat. Someone threw a line to him. He grabbed it, wrapping it around his arm, then held on as they pulled him to the boat.

After they had hauled him on board, a promyshlenik asked, “Where is Kharakov?”

“There.” Panting, Belyaev pointed to where the shitik had been, but nothing remained, only some floating bits of wreckage torn loose from the vessel before it went under.

CHAPTER IX

For five summers, no more strange boats came to the island of Attu, and the Aleuts lived as they always had, while their brother the sea otter frolicked in the waters, rarely molested. Sometimes on a long winter evening, a storyteller would recount the time when the bearded men stayed on their island. And in nearly every barabara there was a round-eyed child as evidence of their visit.

Then another boat came to Attu, filled with men who spoke the same tongue as the first visitors. Cossacks, they called themselves. They told the Aleut hunters they had to pay tribute to their great and powerful woman ruler across the waters, and the tribute was to be in the form of so many sea otter pelts. They also promised to trade pieces of iron for otter skins. But when the Aleuts went hunting, the Cossacks made free with their women.

Soon more boats came. One would leave and another arrive to take its place. Some treated the Aleuts fairly, others did not, but any opposition was quickly and brutally suppressed.

Ten summers after the first boat came, one which looked like all the others landed on the island. But the man who commanded it was different. His name was Andrei Nikolaivich Tolstykh. He had eyes the color of the sky when the clouds didn’t cover it. He didn’t wear the usual rough garb of the Cossacks; his clothes were a different style and made from a finer cloth. On his finger was a ring with the design of a two-headed bird.