Russian Amerika

“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 Haimish 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 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 campsite, 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.