The Great Alone

by Janet Dailey

  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.

  But it was more than his appearance that made this Cossack, Andrei Nikolaivich Tolstykh, different from the others who had landed at the place now called Massacre Bay. He treated the Aleuts fairly and punished any of his men who tried to cheat them. He paid for the services of those natives who hunted for him, and traded iron for otter skins. Among the children who were placed in his care were Walks Straight and his half sister, Tasha. They were treated kindly and taught to speak the Cossack tongue. Leaders had promised others before them that they would teach them their language, yet rarely had anyone learned more than a smattering of words.

  From Andrei Nikolaivich Tolstykh, the Aleuts of Massacre Bay learned that the great woman ruler of his country had been greatly displeased when she heard about the murders committed by the first Cossacks to land on Attu, and that the guilty ones had been punished for their crimes against the Aleuts. He instructed the Aleuts to come to him if any of his men abused them or treated them unfairly, and he would see that they were punished.

  The Aleuts did much hunting for him because of this. And there was peace on the island. They were sad when his boat left the following summer, loaded with more than five thousand sea otter pelts. Tasha was sorry to see him leave, too, but the Cossacks always left. Many said they’d come back, but few did.

  As always, more Cossacks arrived to take the place of those who left. So it went.

  For as long as Tasha could remember, there had been Cossacks on the island, although her mother had told her of the days when it was not so. She’d heard the story of Strong Man’s death many times, the man who was the father of her half brother, Walks Straight. Somehow she thought the Cossacks who had killed Strong Man must have been very different from many of the ones she knew. She admitted that some cheated the Aleut hunters and some beat the women, but they had always been kind to her and fascinated by her round black eyes that slanted ever so slightly. She remembered them playing and laughing with her, letting her chase them or pretend to serve them food. And her memory was colored by
the man Andrei.

  They said she was Creole—half Cossack and half Aleut. Now, at fifteen summers, she was tall like her mother, and she had her mother’s strong cheekbones and smooth skin. But her face was more slender and her features not so broad. Near the corners of her lips, there were two faint scars where labrets had been inserted when she was a child. Long, long ago a Cossack had insisted that her mother, Winter Swan, remove them and let the skin grow shut.

  Tasha entered the village carrying a basket of sea urchins she’d gathered on the tideflats. A group of Cossacks lounged outside a barabara they’d built, with an opening in the side instead of the top. They saw her coming and turned to watch.

  “What do you have in your basket, Tasha?” one of them called.

  “Sea urchins. Young, tender ones, too,” she answered.

  “Is that the way you like them, Fedor Petrovich? Young and tender?” Another laughed and poked the Cossack who stared at her so intently. The one called Fedor lashed out with a swing of his arm.

  Tasha walked on to her own barabara. She was aware of the interest Fedor showed in her. So far he hadn’t offered any presents for her, but she expected he would soon. She was of the age to take a husband.

  “Why do you speak to those Cossacks?” The sudden demand from her half brother, Walks Straight, took her by surprise. She hadn’t noticed him sprawled on the lee slope of the barabara.

  “They asked me a question and I answered it,” she replied.

  Walks Straight rolled to his feet in a quick fluid movement. The proud, erect carriage that had marked him as a youngster characterized him as a full-grown man of twenty-one summers. Beneath the bird-skin parka, his chest and shoulder muscles were highly developed, the result of a hunter’s long hours paddling his bidarka at sea. Straight black hair, shiny as a raven’s wing, hung to the standing collar of his parka and framed his tanned flat-boned face. He had the keen eyes of a hunter, too, observant of every detail, including the greedy way the Cossacks looked at his sister. It was one more reason to resent them. They were always taking from the Aleut. Filled with a young man’s pride, he was offended by their actions and could not understand why his people accepted it so meekly.

  “You talk to them too much, Tasha.” He followed as she walked past the salmon-drying racks.

  “They are my friends.” She stopped near their mother and the old white-haired Weaver Woman. The two women were busy smoothing the inner skins of cormorants with an abrader, taking care not to damage the feathers on the other side. The skins were for a new parka, and the garment would belong to a Cossack. The knowledge further irritated Walks Straight.

  “They are not our friends. Look how our mother labors for them.” He was conscious of his mother’s glance, but he avoided the admonishing look.

  “They pay her for it.” Tasha sat down on the ground near the working pair to begin cleaning the sea urchins to remove the tender meat inside.

  “Maybe they will. They told me they would give me a piece of iron for ten sea otter pelts. All week I have hunted. But when I bring them the ten skins today, they refused to give me the iron. They say they wanted twelve.” His jaws clenched as he recalled the incident. “They took my ten pelts, then told me I must bring twelve more to have the iron. When I tried to say I must only bring them two more, they laughed at me. They said I must have twelve all at once. They have my skins and the iron. They cheated me and I could do nothing.”

  “Not all Cossacks are like that,” Tasha asserted. “Remember Andrei Tolstykh. He was honest.”

  “He collected tribute,” Walks Straight retorted. “Why should we give pelts to some woman ruler who lives far away across the waters? They say if we do, she will protect us. I say it is another trick to cheat us out of our furs.”

  “It is the way they live,” his mother, Winter Swan, inserted quietly, attempting to calm him. “We must respect that.”

  Walks Straight swung on her, then paused to stare for an instant at the strands of gray in her hair. It pained him sometimes that she could not understand his resentment of the Cossacks. Yet always in his mind the words of the storyteller sang, recalling his father’s great strength and the day of the great battle when Strong Man had bent the Cossack’s iron thunderstick with the power of his bare hands. His father had died resisting the Cossacks. Walks Straight was proud of that. Yet his mother thought of that time only with sorrow. He did not wish to hurt her more with his anger at the Cossacks, but he must say what he believed if he was to honor his father’s memory.

  For her sake, he tempered his words. “Can we respect their ways and still respect ourselves? Our people lived on this island long before they came. We should make them leave.”

  “We have always made visitors welcome,” she reminded him.

  “Even visitors who steal from us?” Walks Straight challenged. “Dancing Boy took a necklace of beads and they whipped him until his back was raw. Why do we allow them to take what is ours?”

  “It does no good to punish someone for a wrong.” She shook her head firmly. “It does not restore peace.”

  “I know it isn’t the way of our people to punish a man for a single wrong act. But if he continues to repeat the offense, then something is done to stop him.” He observed his mother faintly lowering her head, a silent admission that he was right. “We should punish the Cossacks for their wrongs.”

  Winter Swan paused in her labors, holding the pumice abrader in her hand. “The Cossacks are too many. They are too strong. We have no weapon to match the thunderstick they call a musket. We must maintain peace.”

  “If we had their muskets, we could fight them. I know how to make it shoot the round balls. I have watched them many times and have seen how much black powder they use to make the musket go off.”

  “They will never let you have one,” Tasha declared. “No matter how many sea otter pelts you offered, they would not trade one of their muskets for them. I have seen others try.”

  Walks Straight knew this was so. “Someday I will have one.”

  “Do nothing foolish, my son.” Winter Swan looked at him worriedly.

  It was useless to argue, he realized. A woman did not feel the things in her heart that he did. “No,” he said at last.

  His hunter’s eye was drawn to the sea. A pair of sails broke the flatness of the horizon. Walks Straight stiffened, resenting the presence of yet another Cossack boat in his waters. He watched the ship turn into the bay.

  “More come. When will they stop?” he wondered.

  Others in the village observed the shitik sailing into the bay. Curiosity and the custom of greeting visitors to the island drew Cossack and Aleut alike to the beach. The cormorant skins and sea urchins were set aside for the time being as Tasha hurried ahead while Walks Straight hung back with his mother and the old, slow-moving Weaver Woman.

  Tasha watched the sails come down and saw the splash of an anchor being dropped into the water. Soon a yawl was lowered into the water and several Cossacks climbed into it and rowed toward shore. The man seated at the prow looked vaguely familiar to Tasha. She stared intently at him as the boat drew nearer to the beach. There was something about his angular features and the beardless, slanted jawline that jogged her memory, but the silver wings in his brown hair were distinctive, and she couldn’t recall having seen a man with hair like that before.

  When the boat nosed into shallow water, two Cossacks hopped out to haul it onto the sand with the aid of two Aleuts. People kept getting in her way, making it difficult for Tasha to have a clear look at the man. He stood up, briefly towering over the heads of others, and Tasha noticed his eyes—blue like the sky.

  “Look!” she cried and moved quickly through the crowd to her mother’s side. “Look who it is! Andrei Tolstykh. He comes back!”

  Barely able to contain her excitement, she hurried forward and worked through the crowd until she reached the inner circle of onlookers. Except for the silver-gray of a gull’s wings in his hair, Andrei Tolstykh had changed little
in the five summers since she’d last seen him. His build was tall and lean, not nearly as muscled as an Aleut’s. He dressed differently. Instead of the mantles, hooded hats, and trousers of the other Cossack hunters, he wore a black square-tailed coat that buttoned at the waist and tight-fitting knee breeches that showed the muscles in his legs. There was a quiet vigor about him, and a calmness—as now when he stepped forward to greet the villagers.

  “Where is your chief?” he inquired in Aleut.

  “He died two summers ago,” Many Whiskers replied. “I am Many Whiskers, the headman of the village now.”

  Tolstykh switched to the Cossack tongue. “He was a good friend to me. I regret to hear that he is no longer with us. Five years ago he gave me permission to hunt on Attu. We knew peace together.”

  “I remember you, Andrei Tolstykh.” Many Whiskers nodded his head. “You lived in peace with us and traded fairly for our skins.”

  “I have come again to your island to seek permission to hunt so that we may live together once again in peace and fellowship.”

  Many Whiskers slowly shook his head. “I cannot give you permission to hunt. Already there are three boats of Cossacks on Attu. We have room for no more. You must go to another island.”

  Tasha reacted with dismay to the pronouncement. She knew that Walks Straight had often complained how much more difficult it had become to find and kill the dwindling number of sea otter. More hunters would mean there would be even more competition. Yet knowing it didn’t lessen her disappointment that Many Whiskers was sending away the Cossack who had once been so kind to her.

  Although Andrei Tolstykh appealed the decision, Many Whiskers remained adamant. “Would you permit us to anchor in your bay for several days?” Andrei then asked. “My men are tired after our long sea voyage and are in need of rest. Our supply of food and fresh water is low. If we are to continue to another island, we will need to replenish them.”