The Great Alone

by Janet Dailey

  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 th
at 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.

  How he’d railed against the unfairness of it that night, knowing that it meant he couldn’t be a member of any of the three expeditions Baranov was sending out that fall to locate sites for future settlements—one to Hawaii, one to California, and one to the mouth of the Columbia River in New Albion, the latter despite a report brought back by Rezanov two years earlier that an expedition headed by two men named Lewis and Clark was at the Columbia. His dreams of traveling to faraway shores had died that night, buried forever by the burden of his family—a burden that rested solely on his shoulders.

  For ten long years he’d listened to the stories told by people who had been to the places he’d dreamed of seeing, and heard the reports brought back from the settlements that had been established on the island of Kauai in Hawaii and at Fort Ross in northern California. For ten long years he’d resented the responsibility that had chained him to Sitka like an anchor around his neck. And for ten long years he’d lived with the guilt of that resentment.

  He loved his mother. He truly loved her, which made him all the more ashamed that he could look at her coming death as a means of setting him free.

  Wolf stared at the face of his dying grandmother, then slowly and gently lifted her hand from beneath the covers. It was all bones, skin, and nails with little flesh to soften it. Yet as he held it, he remembered the many times it had stroked him with affection. The love his father had shown him was a dim memory, kept alive by the stories his babushka had told him about Zachar.

  In the last few weeks, though, she had talked more and more frequently about the Aleutian island of Attu, where she’d been born, wishing she could go there before she died. As her thoughts turned back to the past and her childhood on that far island, she remembered in detail the baskets Weaver Woman had made, her mother sewing the fine bird-skin parkas, her uncle, Many Whiskers, sitting on the lee side of the barabara watching the sea, the festive dances, the story-telling times. It was as if she could see more clearly into yesterday than the shadows of tomorrow.

  He held tightly to her hand, not wanting death to steal her from him as it had taken away his father. But the whiteness of her hand reminded him of the fog that day on the seal island. The blurred image of the wild-eyed, smelly-clothed man with the pistol swam before his mind’s eye, and the voice, that Yankee voice: “He’s dead, son.”

  On the heels of that memory came another. He’d been seven or eight when his mother had come for him. Babushka had argued with her, refusing to let him go with her, and Raven had declared, “I never say Zachar his father. Zachar say it.”

  In the end, he had gone with his mother, sometimes living in the log houses of her people, sometimes in Sitka, where Babushka’s cabin became a refuge from his confusion. Many times he had asked his mother whether Zachar was his father. Usually he received no answer. Once when she was drunk on the Yankee firewater, she had claimed his father was the Boston man Caleb. In all his life, he’d heard of only one man with that name.

  Three years ago, when he was twelve, his mother had contracted syphilis, the white man’s great pox, and no Russian or Yankee would give presents to lie with her any more. Mikhail had treated her with mercury and made her well, but still men shunned her. Mikhail had helped him and arranged for him to learn the smithy trade because he was Zachar’s son.

  Zachar’s son was how Babushka thought of him. Raven often lied, but Wolf had never known his babushka to lie. Slowly over the years he had come to think of himself as Zachar’s son, too, and pushed aside the doubts Raven had raised in his mind.

  Suddenly the rhythm of Tasha’s breathing changed, slowing from its fast, wheezing pace to a calmer rate. It sounded so peaceful that Wolf turned eagerly toward Mikhail, certain his uncle was wrong, that Babushka was not going to die—not this day.

  “She is better.” He spoke quickly and softly, directing his uncle’s attention to his dear babushka. “See how she rests.”

  Mikhail hesitated, then walked over to the bed. As he stood beside Wolf’s chair, old Tasha took a deep breath and released it in a long sigh. Then, there was only silence. So calmly, so quietly, she had died.

  Wolf stared at her motionless body in disbelief, mentally straining, trying to will her to breathe again. She had left him, as his father had left him. Anger and pain flashed hotly through him as he clenched his jaws together so tightly that his teeth hurt.

  Unbidden came the words he’d once heard her say: “They always leave.”

  The anger drained from him. He knelt beside the bed, then made the sign of the cross and tried to pray. He heard Mikhail turn away and stagger to the table. There he collapsed on a chair and buried his face in his arms to smother the slobbering sounds of the sobs that racked his body.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Sitka

  Spring 1836

  A young man of twenty-five, dressed in the clothes of a Yankee first mate, walked slowly up the street taking in everything that went on around him with an interest that was more than c
uriosity. The noise of hammers and saws used by the carpenters building the new three-story mansion on the knoll overlooking the bay, made a steady din in the background. From the smithy came the ring of hammer on iron as plowshares and spades were shaped, bound for the Russian settlement of Fort Ross near Bodega Bay in California.

  The Russian Orthodox Church stood on the south side of the street. Twenty years before, Baranov had ordered an old ship hauled on land and remodeled into a church, the first to be built at New Archangel. The seaman paused opposite the square and gazed at the flame-shaped steeple topped by the distinctive Greek cross with its crooked lower bar. Then he continued up the street.

  As he passed the shop of a silversmith, his eye was caught by the sign overhead. He stopped and turned back to read it, frowning at the Russian script as if he was having trouble deciphering it. His expression cleared. After hesitating momentarily, he went inside.

  Seated at his workbench by the window, Wolf Tarakanov glanced up as the man entered his shop. His coarse black hair and light bronze skin indicated his Indian ancestry, but the gray-blue eyes and Slavic features revealed the mixture of Russian blood. He set aside the silver bracelet and etching tool, then straightened from his stool, absently brushing his hands on the front of his leather apron. A frown flickered across his forehead as he gazed curiously at the seaman. The man’s black hair and blue eyes and his facial features were vaguely familiar.

  In bad Russian, the man asked, “I look for Tasha or Mikhail Tarakanov. The shop sign say your name Tarakanov is. Can you tell where find I them?”

  Wolf stared at him intently and responded in English, “You are Yankee.”

  “Yes.” The man appeared relieved that Wolf could speak his language.

  “Mikhail Tarakanov lives in California at our settlement there. Tasha Tarakanova died nearly twenty years ago. She is buried in the cemetery.” Wolf hesitated, still trying to identify the reason the Yankee seaman looked so familiar to him. “I am her grandson, Wolf Tarakanov.”