Alaska (56 page)

But if she helped the confused Tlingits find a balance between old and new, she could not do the same for herself. At night, in the darkness of her room, she experienced a profound longing to be with the people of her childhood. At times her mind wandered, and she believed that she was once more on Lapak Island, or in the kayak with her mother and great-grandmother chasing the whale, and her yearning for the old days became so persistent that one morning she passed through the gate to speak with two Tlingit men she had come to know during the aftermath of the battle.

'Could you take me to the hot baths?' she asked, pointing south toward that congenial spot where she and her husband and Baranov and Zhdanko had so often gone for relaxation and restoration.

'The Russians will take you,' the men protested, afraid that any unusual act on their part might be interpreted as a renewal of hostilities, but she brushed aside their fears: 'No, I want to go with my own people,' and with those words she made the last important decision of her life. She was not Russian; she was not of their society; she was what she had always been, an Aleut girl of enormous courage, an Indian like the Tlingits, cousin to their leaders Kot-le-an and Ravenheart. If she journeyed to the springs which the Indians had 344

.been using for a thousand years, she wanted to go in the company of these gallant Tlingits of the coastal islands.

But to protect these men who would take her south, she instructed several women: 'When we're gone, go to the gate, ask for Voronov, and tell him: ”Your mother has gone to the hot springs. She's all right and will be back by nightfall. If not, in the morning.”' And off she set for one of the finest parts of the Sitka region.

Picking their way through the myriad islands, keeping the great volcano well to the west, they wove in and out of narrow channels, with the mountains guarding them on the east and the placid Pacific smiling at them from beyond the little islands. It was a voyage as wonderful this day as it had been when she had first gone with her husband and Baranov, and she caught herself thinking: I wish it would never end.

And then the more painful wish: When we get there, I'd like to see Vasili and Baranov and Zhdanko waiting. And with such thoughts she lowered her head, ignoring the rim of mountains that welcomed her to the ancient springs.

When the two Tlingits deposited her on the shore, she told them: 'I'll not stay long,'

then she added hopefully: 'I'm very tired, you know, and maybe the springs will help.'

Slowly she climbed the easy hill to where the hot sulfuric waters bubbled from the earth, and when she entered the low wooden structure erected by the tireless Baranov, she threw off her clothes and eagerly immersed herself in the soothing water, which at first she found almost too hot to manage, but as she became accustomed to the heat, she luxuriated in its comfort.

After she had lain thus for some time, the waters reaching up to her chin and bringing their therapeutic smell as close as it could possibly come, she lapsed into a kind of dream world in which she heard a ghostly voice whispering her real name: 'Cidaq!'

Amazed, she opened her eyes and looked about, but there was no one else in the bath, so she dozed again, and once more from the arched ceiling came the shadowy voice: 'Cidaq!'

Now she wakened, splashed her face with water, and chuckled, remembering the day when her husband and Baranov had taken her to the hut beneath the big tree at Three Saints to convince her that the clever shaman Lunasaq had been able, by ventriloquism, to make his mummy talk. 'It was a trick, Sofia,' chubby Baranov had explained. 'I can't do it very well. No practice. But look at my lips,' and he had astonished her by keeping them almost closed while words poured out, seeming to come from a root which he kept tapping with a stick.

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How they had laughed that day, the two men careful not to deride her for having believed in spirits, she exulting in the joy she felt in the brotherhood of her new faith.

Now she laughed again at the thought of how she had been deceived. But then, with the hot water reaching almost to her lips, she drifted again, and desirous of communing once more with the old woman of Lapak, she spoke in a kind of hypnotic daze, talking alternately for herself and the mummy: 'Have you heard that they took my husband from me?'

'Young Voronov?'

'He's not so young anymore.' Then proudly she added: 'Metropolitan of All the Russias, that's something.'

'And now he's gone. And Lunasaq is gone. But you had a good life on Kodiak and Sitka, didn't you?' The mummy used the old names for these locations, not the new Russian ones.

'Yes, but at first, when I thought of losing you and Lunasaq, I could not be happy.'

'Does it really matter? Don't you suppose that he and I were mournful too, having lost you for a while?'

'I am not unhappy in my new religion.'

'Who said you were?'

'You just said you were mournful to have lost me.'

'As a friend. What do I care how you pray? What really counts, in the very old days and in all the days to come . . .' The dome became filled with the ancient one's voice: 'To live on this earth as a bride lives with her husband. To know the whales as brothers. To find joy in the frolics of a mother sea otter and her babe. To find refuge from the storm and a place to enjoy the sunshine. And to treat children with respect and love, for with the passing years they become us.'

'I've tried to do those things,' Cidaq said, and the old woman agreed: 'You did try, little girl, the way I tried and your great-grandmother. And now you're very tired from so much trying, aren't you?'

'I am,' Cidaq confessed, and the old one asked gently: 'Does it really matter?' and she was gone.

In the silence that followed, Cidaq lay back, allowing the water to grow increasingly hot and sulfurous, and as she stared upward, she thought: Her religion is of the earth, the sea, the storms, and it's necessary to a good life. Voronov's religion was of the heavens and the stars and the northern lights, and it's necessary too.

Images from her two lives filled the walls of the bath: the great tsunami knocking down Vasili's church but allowing the shaman's lone spruce to stand; shadows on Vasili's crucifix at dusk; that first whale that terrified the women sliding 346

past, enormous even now; the cluster of children she had cared for after the tsunami; Baranov with his wig drifting to one side; the joy with which Praskovia Kostilevskaya from a noble family in Moscow stepped ashore to marry Arkady in distant New Archangel; and dominating everything else, the stately white volcano lifting its perfect cone into the sunset.

She knew she had been blessed to have been privileged to share these two worlds equally, and although she had lost both, for she had rejected the Russian way, she did retain the best of each, and for that she was grateful. The heat increased; the images became a kaleidoscope of the years from 1775 to 1837; and the voice sounded no more, for her final question had summarized it all: Does it really matter?

It does matter! Cidaq concluded. It matters enormously. But you mustn't take it too seriously.

After waiting on the beach for more than two hours, one of the Tlingit boatmen said: 'I wonder if something's happened to the old woman?' and he insisted that his partner accompany him up the hill so that an honest story could be told if things had gone wrong. When they reached the bath they found Sofia floating free upon the surface of the water, facedown, and the cautious one began to wail: 'I knew we'd get into trouble.' They wrapped her in her clothes, carried her down the hill and perched her in the center of the canoe, then started paddling home.

When they neared the landing at the foot of the castle they began waving their paddles, and people on the shore saw only the two men fore and aft and their priest's former wife sitting upright in the middle seat, but as the canoe neared the shore they realized that she was dead, and men began running toward the castle, shouting: 'Voronov!'

IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF SOFIA VORO-nova, the thriving town of New Archangel discovered, as had so many settlements in the past, that its destiny was being decided by events which occurred in locations far distant and over which it had no control. In 1848 gold was discovered in California; in 1853 war broke out in the Crimea between Turkey, France and England on one side, Russia on the other; and in 1861 a much bigger civil war erupted in the United States between North and South.

Gold in California excited people in all parts of the world, sent a jumble of them crowding-into San Francisco, and altered alliances throughout the eastern Pacific.

A totally unexpected development occurred in New Archangel, where 347

the chief administrator sent his assistant on a scouting trip to Hawaii and California to ascertain what the influx of Americans to the west might mean to Russia's interests.

Placing their children in the care of two Aleut nurses, Arkady invited his wife to accompany him, and under palm trees in the familiar town of Honolulu they heard for the first time a rumor which astonished them. An English sea captain, fresh from a trip to Singapore, Australia and Tahiti, asked casually, as if all Russians knew of the matter: 'I say, what will men like you elect to do if the deal goes through?'

'What deal?' Voronov asked, his interest piqued by any suggestion that trade involving Great Britain and Russia might eventuate.

'I mean, if Russia goes ahead and sells your Alaska to the Yankees?'

Arkady gasped, leaned back, and looked with consternation at his wife: 'But we have heard nothing about such a sale.'

'We heard talk of it more than once when we put into port,' the Englishman said, and Voronov asked pertinently: 'By English interests?' and the captain said: 'Nothing substantial, you understand, but those discussing it were from various nations.'

'But were there any Russians?' Voronov persisted, and the man replied without equivocation: 'Indeed there were. Usually they were the ones who broached the subject.'

Voronov leaned back and said quietly: 'I don't intend to boast, but for some years I've been second-in-command in New Archangel. My father was a leading force in the islands before he was promoted, and I can assure you from all of us that we have no intention of disposing of what is becoming a jewel in the Russian crown.'

'I'm told it's a splendid place, Sitka Sound,' the Englishman said quickly.

In Honolulu no more was said about the possible sale of Russia's American holdings, and after arranging for the continued shipment of Hawaiian fruit and beef to New Archangel, the Voronovs moved on to San Francisco, where on the third night at anchor in that glorious bay behind the headlands, a Russian ship captain had his men row him over to Arkady's ship, and within minutes of their greeting he was asking for details about the possible sale of Alaska to the United States.

'Nothing to it,' Voronov assured the worried man, but then he corrected himself: 'At least not in Alaska, and I think we'd be the first to know.'

So the matter was dropped, and next day Voronov went 348

ashore to inspect the burgeoning city for himself, and as he sat sweltering in a waterfront saloon where sailors gathered, he heard one of the bartenders saying: 'What a place like this needs is someone to haul ice down from those mountains out there.'

'None forms that could be used,' a veteran of the high country explained. 'Snow falls, but it don't form ice.'

'Well, it ought to,' the sweating bartender said. Then he added the words which led to Voronov's enhanced reputation in the Russian colony: 'Somebody ought to bring ice down here from up north,' and that night, back on his ship, Arkady told his wife: 'I heard the strangest idea this afternoon.'

'That we're really going to sell Alaska?'

'No, that's dead. But this man in the bar, it was very hot, we were sweltering, he said: ”Someone ought to bring ice down here.”'

Praskovia, fanning herself with a palm frond brought from Honolulu, studied her husband for a moment, then cried enthusiastically: 'Arkady! It could be done. We have the ships, and God knows we have the ice.'

When they returned to New Archangel in early October they hurried to the rather large lake inside the palisade, and after asking a score of questions, learned that ice formed in late November, very thick, and lasted until well into March. 'Properly protected,' he asked the men advising him, 'how long into the summer would it stay frozen?'

'Look up there,' and on the mountains surrounding the sound, in nests protected from the sun, and even in gullies where the drifts had packed down, he saw ample supplies of snow which had lasted through a warm summer. 'Properly packed so air don't hit it, and kept in a barn so the sun don't strike, we keep ice around here through July.'

'Could you do that on a ship?'

'Better. Easier to keep it from the wind and sun.'

He spent three tingling days discussing his mad project with all the knowing men he could locate, and on the fourth he instructed the captain of a ship heading for San Francisco: 'Tell them that on the fifteenth of December, this year, I'll be sending down a shipload of the best ice they ever saw. Arrange for a buyer.'

The cold came early that year, and when the ice was thick on the big lake he and some clever Aleut workmen devised a system for cutting out perfect rectangles of ice, edges square, four feet long, two feet wide and eight inches thick. What these men did was build a horse-drawn gouger, not a cutter, with the left-hand drag merely a marker to keep the rows straight, the right-hand a sharp metal point which 349

scored the ice in a long unbroken line. That done, the gouger was reversed, with the marker now retracing the line already cut while the metal point scored a parallel line two feet distant from the first. Then, moving the gouger to a position so that it could cut across the two scored lines, the outline of the rectangle was completed.

This done, pairs of men with huge trunks of spruce moved along the rectangles, dropping the trunks heavily upon them and breaking them loose into handsome blue-green blocks of ice, which were speedily hauled to the harbor and stacked into the waiting ship.