Alaska (36 page)

These cruel traditions were in no way exceptional, for all Russia was governed in this manner, and the superior officials who reached Kodiak saw nothing wrong in this pattern of endless serfdom, for that was how their family estates had been run in the homeland and that is how they expected things Russian to continue perpetually.

Life on Kodiak was hell, for as Cidaq was discovering, there was insufficient food, no medicine, no needles for sewing and no sealskins to be sewed. To her surprise, she saw that the Russians had adjusted to their surroundings on Kodiak far less intelligently than her Aleuts had done on Lapak. She existed outside official channels by hiding with one impoverished family after another and, close to starvation, 226

watching as the strange life on Kodiak unfolded. She was spying, for example, one morning when Russian officials, supported by a pitiful ragtag of soldiers, rounded up most of the new fur traders who had shared the Tsar Ivan

with her and forced them at bayonet point into a fleet of small boats which, with much commotion and cursing, was about to set forth on what an Aleut whispered to her was going to be the 'world's worst sea trip,' the seven hundred and eighty miles to the two remote Seal Islands, later to be known as the Pribilofs, where fur seals abounded in numbers that were unbelievable.

'Will they come back?' she asked, and the man whispered: 'They never come back.'

And then she gasped, for at the rear of the line filing into the boats she spotted three of the men who had abused her, and she was tempted to call out to them in derision, but she did not, for at a short distance behind them, his hands in manacles, came Yermak Rudenko, hair awry as if he had been fighting, clothes torn, eyes flashing fire. He had apparently been warned of what life was going to be like on the Seal Islands, a sentence from which there would be no reprieve, and he was still refusing to comply.

'March tidy!' Cidaq heard the soldiers growl in Russian as they prodded at him, and for just a flashing second she thought: Aren't they glad he's in chains! And she amused herself by wondering what Rudenko would do to these skinny, undernourished men if his hands were unbound. But then she remembered him as the animal he had been and smiled to think that he was about to endure some of the punishment he had visited upon her.

A whistle blew. Rudenko and the other stragglers were shoved aboard, and the file of eleven small boats sailed forth on a voyage that would have been a test for one large, well built one. Cidaq, watching the boats disappear, found herself alternately hoping that they would sink to give her revenge and praying that they would survive because of the poor Aleuts who were also being taken to lifelong imprisonment on the Seal Islands.

She had no such ambivalence about her own position, for each day she survived caused her to give more thanks that she had escaped the lonely terror of Lapak Island. Kodiak was vital; its people might be caught up in storms of hatred and frustrated vengeance, and its managers might be distraught over the decline in sea otters and the necessity to sail so far for seals, but there was energy in the air and the excitement of building a new world. She loved Kodiak, and even though she lived far more precariously than she ever

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had on Lapak, she constantly reminded herself that she was living.

And because she was now fifteen, with an intense interest in everything about her, she saw that things were not going well for the Russians, who faced open warfare with the Koniags and rebellion from natives on other islands to the east. Scores of men from Moscow and Kiev who had considered themselves superior in every way to the primitive islanders now died at the hands of those who showed that they had mastered night ambush and daytime surprise attack.

But what saddened Cidaq was the obvious deterioration of the Aleuts, who were being strangled by malnutrition, disease and abuse; their death rate was shocking, and the Russians did not seem to care. On all sides she saw signs that her people faced inexorable extermination.

For a brief while she lived with an Aleut man and a native woman not married, for there was no Aleut community to arrange or give benediction to marriages who strove to maintain a decent life. He obeyed the rules of The Company, going out day after day in search of otters, and he hunted with superior skills, conducting himself properly and living on what meager food The Company provided. He complained to no one lest he be sentenced to the Seal Islands, and his woman was equally obedient.

But then disaster of the most arbitrary and cruel dimension struck. The man was taken from his job of otter hunting and sent without warning to exile in the Seal Islands.

One of the worst traders from the Tsar Ivan

raged into the hut one night looking for Cidaq, and not finding her, beat the woman about the head, hauled her off to where four of his companions were roistering, and all abused her through three nights, strangling her at the end of their celebration.

After two weeks of hiding alone in the hut, Cidaq was captured by the same five fur traders and raped repeatedly. They might eventually have slain her, too, at the conclusion of their sport had not an extraordinary man arrived quietly in Three Saints with a fiery determination to halt the slow death of his people.

He had appeared mysteriously one morning, a gaunt figure emerging from the forested area to the north as if he were a creature accustomed to woods and high mountains, and had the Russians seen him coming, they would surely have turned him back, for he was too old to be of service to them and too wasted to be of much use to anyone else. He was in his sixties, unkempt, wild-eyed, and brought with him only an outrageous collection of odds and ends at whose utility no Russian could have guessed: a pouch of agatelike stones polished by long residence in some riverbed, another pouch of 228

bones; seven sticks of various lengths; six or seven bits of ivory, half from long-dead mammoths, half from walruses slain in the north; and a fairly large sealskin which covered a squarish bundle that gave him his unusual powers. It contained the well-preserved mummy of a woman who had died thousands of years ago and been buried in a cave on Lapak Island.

Slipping quietly into the northern edge of the village, he headed by instinct for the tall spruce whose spacious roots had been partly exposed by erosion. There he laid aside his precious bundle and started to dig among the roots like an animal burrowing. When he had produced a sizable excavation, he erected around and above it a kind of hut, and when it was finished he took residence inside, installing his bundle in a place of honor. For three days he did nothing, then quietly he began circulating among the Aleuts, informing them with funereal gravity: 'I have come to save you!'

He was the shaman Lunasaq, with experience on various islands where he had never accomplished much or attained real stature, for he had preferred living apart, communing with the spirits that govern mankind and the forests, the mountains and the whales, and helping where needed. He had never married, felt uncomfortable with the noises made by children, and did his best to avoid contact with the Russian masters, whose odd behavior bewildered him. He could not, for example, conceive how anyone in power could separate men from women, as the Russians had done in stealing all the men from Lapak Island and leaving the women behind to d
ie.
'How,' he asked, 'can they expect to produce new workers for their boats?' Nor could he comprehend how they could kill all the otters in the sea, when by restraint they could ensure all they required, year after year to the end of time. Above all, he could not understand the crime of older men debauching the very young girls whom they must later marry if either the men or the girls were to survive in any meaningful existence.

In fact, he had seen so many things evil in the conduct of Russians on the various islands they occupied that he knew of no sensible thing to do but come to Kodiak, where The Company headquartered, to see if he could not bring some kind of relief to his people, for it grieved him to think that he must soon be leaving them in the sad conditions under which they now suffered. Like Thomas Aquinas, Muhammad and Saint Augustine, he felt driven to leave his world a little better than it was when he inherited it, and as he settled down amid the roots of the great tree that protected him, he realized that compared to the might of the Russian 229

invaders with their boats and guns, he was almost powerless, except for one asset which he had and they did not. In his sealskin bundle he had the old woman, thirteen thousand years old and more formidable each year she existed. With her help he would save the Aleuts from their oppressors.

Quietly, like the stormless southern wind that sometimes blew in from the restless Pacific, he began to move among the little Aleut men who served so obediently the dictates of the Russians, always reminding them that he brought messages from the spirits: 'They're still the ones who rule the world, Russians or no, and you must listen to them, for they will guide you through these ugly days just as they guided your ancestors when storms tormented them.' He let it be known that among the tree roots at his hut he had the magical instruments which enabled him to communicate with those ever-present spirits, and he was reassured when men in twos and threes came to consult with him. Always he delivered the same message: 'The spirits know you must obey the Russians, no matter what insane orders they give, but they also want you to protect yourselves. Save bits of food for those days when none is issued.

Eat some seaweed every day, for strength lies there. Allow the baby seals and baby otters to escape. You'll know how that can be done without the Russians' seeing.

And abide by the old rules, for they are best.'

He helped when illness struck, placing the sick man on a proper mat and surrounding his head with shells so that the sea could talk with him, enclosing his feet with his sacred stones so that he might remain stable. And on those occasions when faced with problems for which he could find no answers, he produced the mummy, this withered creature whose sunken eyes in her blackened face stared out to give reassurance and counsel: 'She says that you will have to go to the Seal Islands, no escaping. But there you will find a trusted friend who will support you through life.' He never lied to the men sentenced to the islands, or assured them that they would find wives and have children, for he knew that this was impossible, but he did tell them that friendships of the kind that sustain life were possible, and that men of good sense sought them out, regardless of the terror in which they otherwise lived: 'You will find a friend, Anasuk, and a kind of work that only you can do. And the years will pass.'

Now when boats set out for the Seal Islands he appeared openly on shore to bid the Aleuts farewell, and during the latter part of the year 1790 the Russian officials became accustomed to this spectral figure, wondering occasionally where he had come from and who exactly he was. They never suspected that he was restoring a tiny shred of decency and

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integrity to their establishment, for from what they could see of their own people Russian officials and trader-serfs alike everything was going pretty much to hell.

In due course the shaman Lunasaq heard of one of the saddest cases of Aleut despair, the girl Cidaq, who was being passed from one criminal to another despite Company rules forbidding this, and one day while her current trader-serf was absent unloading a kayak filled with furs, he presented himself at the hut in which she was temporarily living, and when he saw -her bedraggled hair, her wan face and the labret almost slipping from her lip, so emaciated had she become, he grasped her hands and pulled her toward him: 'Child! The good spirits have not abandoned you. They have sent me to help you.' And he insisted she accompany him immediately, and leave the moral squalor in which she had been living. Defying Company rules and the possibility that her Russian trader might beat him to death to recover his woman, he led her to his hut among the roots, and once they were inside, he uncovered his most precious treasure, the mummy.

Placing Cidaq before the wizened old face, he chanted: 'Girl, this old one knew far more terror than you ever have. Volcanoes in the night, floods, the raging of the wind, death, the endless trials that assail us all. And she fought on.' He continued in this way for some minutes, not aware that little Cidaq was trying hard not to laugh at him. Finally she put out both hands, one to touch his, the other to touch gently the lips of the mummy.

'Shaman, I don't need her help. Look at this labret. Whalebone. I helped kill this whale. The day will come when I'll kill every one of the Russians who have abused me. I am like you, old man, I am fighting every day.'

And then, in the dark hut, the connection of Cidaq and the mummy began, because the long-dead old woman from Lapak spoke to the young girl from her island. Yes, the mummy

spoke.

Through decades of practice Lunasaq had perfected his gift for ventriloquism until he could not only throw his voice a considerable distance but also make it resemble the speech of different characters. He could be a child appealing for help, or an angry spirit admonishing an evildoer, or, especially, the mummy with her vast accumulation of knowledge.

In the first of their many discussions these three spoke of Russian tyrants and sea otters and men sentenced to the Seal Islands, and particularly of the revenge that Cidaq was planning to visit on her oppressors: 'I can wait. Four of them, including the worst, are in the Seal Islands already. We'll never see them again. But three remain here in Kodiak.'

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'What will you do to them?' the mummy asked, and Cidaq replied: 'I am willing to risk death, but punish them I will.'

'How?' the ancient one wanted to know, and 'Cidaq said: 'I could cut them when they're asleep,' but the mummy said: 'Cut one, and they cut you. Forever.'

'Did you face such problems?' Cidaq asked, and the old one said: 'Everyone does.'

'Did you get your revenge?'

'Yes. I outlived them. I laughed at their graves. And here I still am. But they?