Russian Amerika: Chapter Eighteen

18 - Toklat

    "Often we send out two-man reconnaissance parties," Chan explained. "So for your final field test, you two are to go across the Toklat and follow the big game trail to the East Fork of the Toklat River. Go north up the East Fork until you come to a wide valley.

    "Turn west there and follow the trail through the mountains until you hit the Toklat again. Then follow it home. This is about 35 to 40 kilometers and will be an excellent exercise for you."

    "How long do we have?" Nik asked.

    "If we don't see you after two weeks have passed, we'll send out search parties."

    "Looks simple enough to me," Grisha said.

    "It always does, on a map," Hamish said.

    "When do we leave?" Grisha asked.

    "Within the hour."

    "Can we use skis rather than snowshoes?" Nik asked.

    "Whatever you wish," Chan said.

    Cora sat off to one side of the small group, her eyes fastened on Nik.

    "Good. If we had to use snowshoes, it would take Grisha a month to make the trip."

    A few people chuckled. Grisha went into the main hall to get food for the journey. The tension generated by the meeting didn't dissipate. He wondered at it.

    Wing stepped out of the kitchen and gave him a bulky bag made from soft moose hide. He stared at her face. Over the past few weeks they had fallen into conversation many times, on many subjects.

    He found her intelligence impressive, but her courage awed him. At this point there existed a palpable tension between them, which both chafed and titillated him. He felt good whenever he saw her.

    "There's jerked moose, squaw candy, and trail mix." Her eyes moved over his face. "Be careful, okay? I'll miss you." She leaned forward and quickly kissed him on the mouth.

    Before he could say anything, she hurried back into the kitchen.

    It took most of an hour to get their gear arranged. Finally, burdened with backpacks and bows, they skied off across the frozen Kantishna into the November afternoon. Grisha hoped the tension would vanish once they cleared the village. It didn't.

    After an hour passed, he pulled off the game trail they followed and waited for Nik to stop beside him.

    "Are you worried because they made us take bows rather than rifles?" Grisha asked.

    "No. I'm not worried at all." Nik's eyes constantly swept the land around them, his right cheek had developed a tic, and he chewed at his bottom lip.

    "Okay, if you don't want to talk about it, that's all right with me."

    "Good," Nik said, pushing off down the trail. Grisha stepped into the ski tracks and followed.

    A man could come to love this sort of life. He thought back to his previous apprehension of the forest, of thinking himself unable to survive in it, and smiled.

    It had all turned out like some fantastic hunting trip. His health had improved beyond previous experience. Not an ounce of fat could be found on his body, despite obvious weight gain.

    He liked his new beard, but the things he missed most were his razor and beer. These people were worse than priests about alcohol. Wing told him once that vodka was liquid chains in a bottle.

    "The promyshlenniks would get our men drunk before trading and then steal their furs and gold with more bottles." Her voice rang with intensity in his mind.

    "Wait a minute," he said aloud to himself, faltering in his long, sliding stride. "She said gold! Why the hell didn't I ask her more about that?"

    He picked up his stride, remembering back to the afternoon. After snowshoeing all day he had been more interested in the immediate gratification of dinner than the acquisition of Athabascan Indian history. Gold?

    Until this moment he hadn't given the Dena' Republic decent odds of becoming reality. But if they had gold reserves they could eventually obtain anything else in the world. In Japan and the California Republic there existed things that to him were nearly unimaginable.

    Radio that told stories and played music, not just weather reports and military communications. More than that, they could get electricity up here. He wondered if electrical power could be had outside the redoubts, or if it was only for Russians.

    If you had gold, you could buy helicopters. He wondered if Hamish knew the Dena' had gold. Probably, despite his philosophy there had to be a compelling reason for the small man's presence.

    Ahead of him, Nik came to the base of a ridge and began to fishbone up the steep side. Why was Nik so nervous? Did he fear being away from towns or villages? He had said he was raised in the city of St. Nicholas on Cook's Inlet.

    The farther they moved away from Toklat, the more agitated Nik became. Light began to ebb in the subarctic afternoon. They needed to make camp soon. Maybe tomorrow they'd try to make camp in the dark.

    Grisha skied to the bottom of the ridge trail and shouted,

    "Nik! Hey, Nik!"

    Working doggedly sixty meters higher, Nik hesitated and then stopped, looked back.

    "You ruined my momentum. What do you want?"

    "Are you in that big a hurry to get back to Cora?" Grisha manufactured a grin. "We can go a little slower. Besides, it's gonna be dark soon, we need to make camp."

    "Already?" He glared at the sky as if to intimidate it. "Okay. We'll camp on the other side of the ridge."

    "Agreed." Grisha started awkwardly up the hill. After flailing about on the skis for a few steps he stopped and took them off. The wind-packed snow easily supported his booted feet.

    They were excellent boots. The Russian Army captain from whose corpse he had removed them had had possessed excellent taste. The Russian Army did not issue hand made boots to anyone below the rank of colonel.

    Life is strange.

    Nik beat him to the top and glided off into the trees. Grisha plodded along until he found his companion's skis jammed down into the snow. The tall Russian was scrounging wood for a fire.

    Grisha checked the sky. Royal blue sliding into purple, no clouds. Tonight the temperature could drop again, but probably no wind. He pulled the shelter half out of his pack and rigged it to reflect the fire's warmth onto his back.

    After stowing his gear, he went looking for firewood. No matter how much they collected, it would not be enough to last the night. In this part of Alaska the temperature dropped to minus-sixty Celsius in the winter and climbed to plus-forty Celsius in the summer. The extreme temperatures dried wood to tinder. In Southeast Alaska wood never dried, it rotted.

    The Dena' Republic is an extreme place, he thought, and so are the people. Other than his military service, being treated as an equal had not been a part of his life in Russian Amerika. A few Russians paid lip service to the Czar's Equality Ukase, but only the priests took it seriously.

    In the Dena' Republic he not only commanded equal status, he was prized, needed, all due to reasons for which the Czar's government had thrown him away. He stuffed one more fragment of tree limb into the wad of branches clutched in his left arm.

    But I still want my boat back. I want my life back - I know how to live it now.

    He struggled back to the camp site where a light plume of smoke already drifted above Nik's head. He dropped the load next to the strange, educated, taciturn man who had become his friend. Grabbing his hatchet, he cut fir boughs to put under their sleeping bags for insulation.

    Nik rigged a holder and hung a pot of water up to boil. Tea would warm them up. As soon as he pissed, Grisha would turn in for the night. After putting down two layers of boughs he rolled out his sleeping bag, sat down carefully, and sighed.

    "Starting out late today was a good thing," he said with a yawn. "Tomorrow it won't be as hard to get started as it would have been after a full day." He stared at the back of Nik, who prodded at an already blazing fire.

    "What are you scared of?" Grisha asked in a vague tone designed to suggest indifference.

    Nik stopped poking the fire. He didn't move. Grisha pulled out a piece of squaw candy and chewed the lightly smoked strand of salmon. He could live on this stuff.

    Nik moved over to his pile of fir boughs and began to weave them into a mattress. He didn't speak or look at Grisha.

    "I wasn't trying to be insulting," Grisha said. "You're getting me worried. You've gotten stranger and stranger since you took up with Cora."

    Nik looked across at him, his eyes dancing through the curtain of heat.

    "Don't you understand that this is a real war?" His voice rang hollow, as if bouncing off a rock wall. "People out there want to kill us, and we want to kill them."

    "I don't particularly want to kill anybody," Grisha said.

    "But you're expected to kill. Sabotage, prison breaks, raids on warehouses, and attacking cossacks all lead inevitably to killing or being killed." Nik's face became more distorted through the rising heat.

    Grisha stared back in consternation.

    "Well of course people are going to get killed. But if we do it right most of them will be Russians."

    "Exactly. And then they will retaliate and slaughter a village or two and everything will be over. Hundreds of Russians and Dena' dead for what, a principle? An impossible idea?"

    "I don't think it's impossible," Grisha said staunchly.

    "That's because you're a Creole."

    Grisha's confusion instantly condensed into anger.

    "And white Russians know more than everybody else!"

    "No," Nik said, nearly moaning. "We're just more treacherous. They're all going to die, you know."

    "Who, the Russians?"

    "No, the Dena'. Once their camp is identified with cadre training, they're doomed."

    "The Russians don't even come into Dena' country, especially in the winter."

    "Grisha, the Goddamned RustyCan runs right through the Dena' country!"

    "So what? That means the Russians own a three-hundred-meter-wide ribbon across a country that they couldn't hold if anyone tried to take it away from them."

    "Not all their planes are helicopters. They have Yak fighters, too."

    "Nik, the Indians own the forest."

    "For the time being, yes." Nik crawled into his sleeping bag and turned his back to the fire.

    Grisha fed the fire, deep in thought. The sub-arctic night settled. The temperature dropped, and the aurora borealis flickered teasingly before scrolling across the sky from horizon to horizon. The lights fascinated him.

    The northern lights were not unknown in Akku. But the phenomena in Southeast skies, when the clouds cleared, were usually subdued compared to this, even at their best. Above him they bent and circled in scrolls that had to be a thousand kilometers high. Bands of light winked on, broadening from a pinpoint to a swath of unimaginable width in the space of three breaths. Great sections of sky would suddenly present a mist of pink, green, or even yellow.

    He wondered about Nik. What ate at the man so voraciously? What aspect of their current life could cripple him like that?

    "You must be livin' a different life than me," Grisha mumbled through the flames at the sleeping form. "I really don't think it's so bad."

    They're all going to die, you know.

    That tone wasn't what Nik called rhetorical. He said it like he knew it for fact. Grisha frowned, tried to remember how the other guards had treated Nik.

    They had left him alone. But to be fair, he was always reading and writing in little notebooks, maybe the other soldiers just thought Nik pretentious and avoided him, most of them couldn't read anyway. Grisha scratched his head and yawned.

    He pushed himself up with a grunt and walked to the edge of the camp before urinating. The temperature had dropped for sure; his urine froze with a crackle in the air before hitting the snow with soft thuds. After piling more wood on the fire, leaving some for the morning, he crawled into his bag and closed the heavy zipper.

    Moments later someone shook his shoulder, hard. He pried open one eye and peered at Nik's face.

    "Let me sleep, okay?"

    "It's time to get up. You've been asleep for hours." Nik stood and laid wood on the coals of the fire. Coals.

    Grisha didn't feel like he'd slept at all, but he pulled himself out of the warm bag anyway. His full bladder added proof he had slept. As he relieved himself he noticed the overnight temperature had risen slightly.

    "Nik?" he said, walking back to the fire, suddenly chilled.

    "Yeah?" He was packing his bag.

    "Why didn't the other guards talk to you?"

    Nik froze for a long moment then continued stowing his gear.

    "Because I could read. Because I attended school for more than three or two years. Because my English is as good as my Russian even if I didn't come from Southeast."

    "That's what I thought," Grisha said with finality. "But I wanted to hear you say it."

    "Why? Do you think me incapable of lying?"

    "I think I could tell if you were lying, and I don't think you are."

    Nik shook his head. "Are the Kolosh a perceptive people?"

    "Sure, most peoples are or they wouldn't have lasted long enough to become a race. My mother's people can tell by a person's name who they are related to, where they fit in the house where they live, and even where they fit into the village."

    "My God, that's even more stratified than Russian life!" Nik said.

    "It's more complete, I think. It's also a clan culture, not something that would work in St. Petersburg and maybe not even St. Nicholas."

    "Does anybody ever pretend to be something they are not in your mother's culture?"

    "Why would they bother, to make a joke? Everyone would know they weren't telling the truth."

    "But you're part Russian, too, Grisha. Did your father know where he fit in Russian society?"

    "Yeah. At the bottom," Grisha said, his voice revealing the bleakness he suddenly felt. "I started from the bottom and worked my way to major's flashes in the Troika Guard. Then I was sacrificed for political reasons and had to start over, got back to where I owned a boat and was master of my life."

    "What happened?" Nik asked, his face rapt.

    "I'm not sure, and I've thought about it a lot. I took a charter job where the customer wasn't what he said he was, went places we weren't supposed to go, and did things we weren't supposed to do."

    "Sounds like smuggling to me."

    "No, at first I thought that's what was going on, too. But, we picked up a woman who knew the man and on the way back they talked about the other North American countries. You know, the U.S.A, the Confederacy, all them."

    Nik nodded.

    "Then Karpov, the guy, got drunk and tried to snag the woman, got real direct about it. So there was a fight and we killed him."

    "We?"

    "Da. While he was choking me, she hit him in the back of the head with a halibut club, the spiked kind."

    "So why did you end up in Tetlin Redoubt? Did they only hang her for murder?"

    "She told them I did it. They were going to hang me, but then they changed their minds and sentenced me to thirty years hard labor instead."

    "You wouldn't have lasted another thirty days," Nik said with professional disdain.

    "I thought I was going to die that day. If the Dena' had waited another minute before attacking, I'd be dead. Life is strange."

    "It's getting light. We need to go."

    "Nik, I'm not going anywhere until you tell me why you've turned into a moody bear."

    "I don't think you'd understand."

    Grisha swallowed the anger that immediately flared through him. It left a bad taste in his mouth.

    "Why not, because I don't have enough education?"

    "You wouldn't like me any more, take my word for it." Nik strapped on his skis and pushed off down the trail, heading for the cut that dropped into the next valley.

    "Nik!" Grisha yelled. "I want a real answer, a real reason!"

    The Russian stopped and looked back.

    "I'm a traitor. I'm a traitor and I can't stand to live with myself."

    Then he skied away and Grisha scrambled to follow.