The Great Alone (52 page)

All morning and all afternoon the killing, skinning, and castrating continued unabated. Through the night they skinned, scraped, and salted hides by torchlight. Come morning, Caleb detailed a party of men to begin transporting the pelts to the
Sea Gypsy.
A morning meal of salt beef and sea biscuit was distributed among the crew with a mug of rum-laced, molasses-sweetened coffee to wash it down. Caleb ate as they ate, worked as they worked, lending a hand wherever one was short, and roved constantly back and forth among the various operations. As the furs piled up, he drove the men harder, ignoring his fatigue and theirs.

His clothes were blood-caked, blubber-greased, and sweat-stiffened. The shadow of a beard darkened his cheeks. The stench of the bloody carcasses strewn in piles along the beach was all around him, but he was oblivious to everything but filling his hold with the thick glossy pelts.

The killing was amazingly easy. Already he was considering the possibility of letting his men rest in shifts and extending the operation another twenty-four hours. Why leave with five thousand pelts when he could take ten or twenty thousand? There were more than a million seals on this island. Why should he let the Russians have all of them?

Zachar walked, holding on to the legs of the boy who straddled his neck. Every now and then, he’d hold his hand up high so Wolf could take a few more crowberries from the pile cupped in his palm. The tundra grass came to his knees, and he waded through the lush tangle of stalks. The island was abloom with wildflowers, blue lupine, and white gentian.

A patchy, swirling fog drifted over the treeless island, here and there obscuring a hill or blanketing a hollow as he headed toward the beach with his son. The pandemonium grew louder with the scream of the seabirds—the red-legged kittiwakes, tufted sea parrots, red-faced murres, and seagulls by the thousands—the pounding of the surf on the rocky shores, and the deafening roar of the fur-seal masses.

Zachar wanted his son to see this awesome sight of the seething mass of fur seals—to see it and remember it always. That’s why they repeatedly made the long trek to this spot away from the encampment where they wouldn’t be disturbed by the others. He longed to tell Wolf the way it had been when he’d first seen it, to explain that the numbers had been reduced by ninety percent in his lifetime. He wished he could tell him about Walks Straight.

Quickly he shook off the melancholy that tried to claim him and stepped up his pace. It wasn’t good to look into the past. Today he had his son with him.

Wolf leaned over his right shoulder, laughing as he grabbed at the berries clutched in Zachar’s fist. “More, Papa.”

Zachar opened his hand. “There are only a few left”

“I will eat them all.” With both hands, Wolf plucked the berries from his palm and stuffed them into his mouth until his cheeks bulged, then chomped happily on their sweetness.

“You have the fat cheeks of a pig,” Zachar teased him, and gripped the boy’s ankles to hold him securely in place as they neared the rocky terrain of the beach.

“Seals,” Wolf said, spitting berry juice from his full mouth, and pointed to a boulder-strewn area ahead of them.

Out of the mist came a half dozen seals, propelling themselves forward with their flippers in their awkward, humping gait. Zachar sensed their panic and halted, half expecting to see a huge harem bull lumbering after them, but none came. The young bachelor males stampeded into the tundra in obvious confusion; the sea was their natural refuge.

Alerted by their display of fear, Zachar heard the whistles and loud cries—sounds, he realized, that didn’t belong to any bird or beast on the island. Reaching up, he lifted Wolf off his shoulders and swung him astraddle of his hip, then walked swiftly to the boulders where the land sloped away to the beach.

Suddenly he noticed the tainted smell on the mist. When he breathed in the stench of blood, Zachar knew what he would find on the beach. Seal carcasses, piled three and four deep, littered the surf-washed rocks along the shore. The obscuring fog hid the end of them.

“Walks Straight,” he moaned, aching inside.

This was the place they’d come ashore. Here, the friendly sea otter had sniffed them curiously. No more sea otter lived in these waters; all of them had been killed or driven off by the carnage. Now the teeming swell of fur seals—bulls, cows, and pups—lay lifeless, grotesque piles of bloody blubber.

Then he heard the shouts—the Yankee voices. He turned and looked up the beach. Two boats with furs stacked higher than their gunwales breasted a wave’s curl. On the beach were more men, their faces, hands, and clothes dark with blood, some busy making the slices to free a pelt from its body, others pulling the ropes clamped onto the hide and stripping it off.

A promyshlenik at the Russian outpost on the island had described the procedure to Zachar, boasting of the numbers that could be killed and processed. The images hadn’t repulsed him. He was a hunter. But this carnage wasn’t hunting.

Not far from him, three men with clubs waded into a herd of young bulls milling in confusion. He watched them swing their wooden sticks, felling the nearest ones while the others barked in fear. One brave young seal tried to attack, charging as ferociously as any beachmaster, but a blow to the head ended his valiant defense.

Zachar set Wolf on the ground next to a large boulder. “Stay here.”

Trembling with rage, he walked swiftly toward the Yankee raiders. The only thought in his mind was to stop them. “Look what you do here!” he shouted.

Suddenly a figure stepped out from behind a boulder and leveled a pistol at him. Zachar halted. The Yankee was only five steps from him, close enough for Zachar to make out his features despite his failing vision. The man’s eyes had a wild, glazed look, as if he was possessed by a madness for killing. A scraggly beard covered his gaunt cheeks and darkened the hollows under his eyes. Zachar waited for the flash of gunpowder and the impact of the ball. Instead the muzzle dipped toward the ground.

“Zachar.” The man took a step closer, his mouth crooking in a smile.

“Caleb Stone.” Shock flattened all feeling from Zachar. “You.”

“I hope you weren’t expecting someone else.”

Numbly Zachar looked around at the bloody scene. “How could you do this?”

“You sound surprised. You knew when you told me the Pribilofs were virtually unmanned—”

“I told you?” The conversation came back to him. “I told you.” Groaning, he turned and staggered blindly into the fog. Tears rushed into his eyes. “Not for this. No.”

“Zachar!” Caleb instinctively tightened his grip on the pistol butt and frowned as he looked behind him at his sealing crew, debating whether to order them to abandon the operation and return to the brig or to pursue Zachar. The man was crazy.

His side vision detected movement. Turning, he saw the young boy Wolf plowing through the tall tundra grass in the direction Zachar had taken, his short legs stepping high in an effort to avoid the tangling stalks. Caleb hesitated, then gave chase.

Instead of fleeing inland, Zachar was taking an erratic track that paralleled the shore. Wisps of fog swirled in his wake. Caleb shouted to him again, but he knew he couldn’t be heard above the bawl of the seals. As Zachar swung drunkenly toward the rocks, a large boulder appeared to move. Then Caleb realized it was a harem bull, one that his men had blinded. Enraged to the point of charging any sound, it went for Zachar, moving with amazing swiftness.

Caleb shouted a futile warning as the massive bull struck Zachar broadside, knocking him to the ground. Caleb tried to run faster, but his legs felt strangely leaden and unresponsive. The bull fell on Zachar, seizing hold of the body with his large canines and shaking it ferociously as he would do with any male seal caught trespassing on his territory. No resistance was offered by Zachar.

The little boy stopped and started picking up rocks and throwing them at the bull seal, trying to drive him away from the body. His aim was poor and the rocks were small. Those that did hit the seal, bounced off the thick cushion of fur and blubber with no more effect than a raindrop.

Five yards from the seal, Caleb stopped and took aim with his pistol. Suddenly the little boy ran into his line of fire, armed with a piece of driftwood. “Get away, son!” Caleb yelled.

The beachmaster swung its small head toward the sound of his voice, bloody gaping holes where its eyes had been. As the boy backed up, Caleb stepped forward and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, yanking him backwards. The roaring seal made a lumbering move toward them. Caleb sighted quickly and fired. The bull collapsed with a thud.

The boy dashed past him to Zachar’s motionless body and knelt beside him. Caleb walked slowly to them and crouched down. Zachar’s left shoulder was mangled, blood flooding from the ripped flesh. Caleb noticed the bloodstained rock near Zachar’s head and guessed the Russian had been knocked unconscious when he fell. He felt for a pulse in the man’s neck but could find none. Warm, sticky blood was on his fingers when he took his hand away. He tried to wipe them clean with the fog-wet grass.

The boy put his hand on the peppered gray head, nudging it as if to waken Zachar. He said something in Russian, which Caleb didn’t understand, but it sounded like another attempt to rouse him.

Caleb took him gently by the shoulders and pulled him away from the body. “He’s dead, son.” The boy glared at him, then with a sudden twist jerked free and ran, disappearing almost instantly in a wall of thick fog.

After making a brief attempt to locate the boy, he gave up the search. It was time to leave the island. Already he had been here a day and a half longer than he’d originally planned.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Sitka

January 1818

Mikhail listened to the muffled peal of the church bell as it proclaimed the news of the marriage that had taken place between Baranov’s Creole daughter Irina and the naval lieutenant Semyon Ivanovich Yanovskii, the man named to succeed Baranov as governor of Russian America. He concentrated on the rhythmic clangor, trying to use it to block out the sound of the quick, labored breathing of the old woman lying on the bed—his mother, Tasha. But it was no use. Nothing could mask the desperate attempts she made to suck air into her congested lungs.

He hunched forward in the chair positioned by her bed and stared helplessly at her. She had grown so thin and frail that it was difficult to distinguish the outline of her body beneath the layers of blankets covering her. Consumption had ravaged her body, leaving it vulnerable to the pneumonia that now claimed her.

Her face looked sunken and hollow, her skin a sickly gray. Her eyes were closed. Mikhail wanted to believe she was asleep, resting peacefully, but those rapid wheezing gasps for air told him of her struggle for life. He remembered how much she had wanted to attend the wedding of the daughter of her old friend Baranov, and to see the eucharistic vessels that, as an apprentice to the smithy, her grandson Wolf had helped fashion out of Spanish silver. Instead she lay on her deathbed while the church bell tolled.

A hand touched his shoulder, and Mikhail glanced up, looking straight into a pair of eyes as blue as his brother Zachar’s had been. But they belonged to a strapping youth of fifteen who had Raven’s black hair and strong-boned features.

“The tea is hot,” Wolf said. “I will sit with Babushka if you would like some.”

Mikhail nodded and pushed to his feet, glad to relinquish his vigil despite the pang of guilt it brought. As Wolf took his place in the chair by the bed, he walked over to the samovar and half filled a cup with tea, then poured in some rum to fill it within a centimeter of the rim. He took a long sip of the hot, potent brew, then glanced toward the bed.

But Wolf claimed his attention, Wolf and the memories of that rainy night nearly ten years ago when he’d piloted the mail boat from Kodiak into the harbor, the mail boat that had brought the word of Zachar’s death—and his son, Wolf. He’d had no choice but to bring the boy to the cabin.

When he’d broken the news to Tasha about Zachar, she hadn’t seemed surprised, only emotionally drained. “I think I knew he would not return from the seal islands,” she’d said. “I begged him not to go, but he said it was in God’s hands.”

Then disguising his bitter frustration so well, Mikhail had drawn the five-year-old Wolf out of the shadows where he’d been hiding like some frightened and wary animal. “Zachar left someone in our care.” He’d nearly choked on the words, then pushed the boy toward her. “Go to your babushka.”

After some cajoling, she had persuaded the small boy to climb onto her lap. Her long, thin fingers had touched his rain-flattened black hair, glistening in the lamplight. “We will get along, you and I,” she’d said. “I wish only that I were a little younger that I might live to see you grow up.”

Mikhail remembered how he had protested that statement. “You have many years ahead of you, Babushka.”

Then she had started coughing from the consumption that had now so completely depleted her strength. He’d helped her to bed, insisting she must rest.

That night, too, he’d drunk tea heavily laced with rum and tried to drown the angry resentment he felt that he alone was responsible for the care of his sick and aging mother and young nephew. Zachar was dead; never would he return to shoulder any of the burden. Larissa was gone, banished forever from Sitka with her Boston captain. He, Mikhail, was the only one left.