When Maria, Ovchinnikov, and I reach the top of the hill, Nikolai Isaakovich is waiting.
“Is everything all right?” he asks.
“Yes.” I smile. “Just—that was a devil of a hill.”
He smiles back, and falls into line behind me. We follow flat terrain for some distance, then we descend. Toward nightfall, as we squeeze out the final minutes before it becomes too dark to continue, Timofei Osipovich shouts from far ahead, “Navigator Bulygin! Hurry!”
“Coming!” he cries and leaps over the roots and mud, leaving us alone again.
Long before we reach them, I hear their voices—loud and laughing, bubbling over with a joy I don’t expect. I can’t distinguish the words, but I know they’re happy. When we arrive, I see a tiny fire in a clearing. It throws light on a hut that sits on a riverbank. The crew is inside the hut.
The grounds are deserted, but the people who belong here can’t have gone very far. In the river, a net stretches from bank to bank. It shivers in the water current.
This place makes me think of the Baba Yaga. She would keep a dwelling like this—a wooden hut in the middle of a clearing with a small fire to lure unexpected visitors inside. My mother told me all the Baba stories, too. I don’t believe in the old hag or her power. Still, something about this place, a kind of eeriness, makes me wonder if perhaps I’m foolish to ignore our lore.
The apprentice Kotelnikov comes out of the hut, laughing, and waving an object dull and flat.
“Kizhuch!” cries Ovchinnikov. His beard opens up to reveal a broad smile and a rarely shown row of uneven teeth.
Maria grins, and her eyes become slits in her wrinkled skin. “Ryba,” she says. It’s fish.
Hanging from the rafters of the little hut are many more fish. They’re dry, dusty orange, and they’ve been split. I touch one—it’s hard and unappetizing, but still my mouth waters. It smells like warm honey in the hut. There are fish heads, too, grotesquely pierced on stakes, as though confirming the Baba’s presence. The crew pull the salmon from the rafters, stack them up, and cradle them against their chests. Some are taking two, even three entire fish.
I leave the hut empty-handed.
Outside, Maria says, “Aren’t you hungry?” Her arms are wrapped around two salmon. Nikolai Isaakovich has one flattened salmon.
“Whose fish are these?” I ask.
“Whose? No one’s. There’s no one here,” my husband says.
But before we leave, he instructs Kotelnikov to leave behind a small heap of korolki and the blue nankeen robe we brought from the brig. He sets them alongside the wall near the entrance, so that whoever comes back won’t fail to find them right away. In return, we’ve taken twenty-seven pieces of fish.
“As the old saying goes—God is on high and the Tsar is far away,” Timofei Osipovich says to me and smirks. My hunger is stronger than my need to respond.
We must leave before anybody returns. So, with our stolen fish, we head back into the forest, following no trail. We ascend, then find a hollow surrounded by thick brush. Here we set up for what’s going to be another cold, damp night. I wish we were back in the cave, but at least we have food. What Maria does to the kizhuch smells miraculous, and despite the weight of my moral unease, I accept the portion offered. I drink the broth, and eat the fish, sharing little bits with Zhuchka. Not once does anybody complain about the little bones.
“Commander! The koliuzhi are back!” cries Kotelnikov.
In the middle of the forest, we’re surrounded. They stand silently as though they’re shadows attached to the trees. They’re armed with spears, bows, and arrows. I stop and wait. How did they manage to get so close? John Williams’s hair is a beacon in this dim forest. We must have been too distracted—tearing down last night’s camp, packing our bundles, getting ready for another day of marching through the wild. Why didn’t Zhuchka bark? Is it possible that she didn’t notice them?
The koliuzhi watch us watching them. There’s an old man with a harpoon on his shoulder who looks like he’s a peasant with a long-handled hoe. His harpoon has slender prongs better suited to fishing than battle. Another man carries a tiny bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, but neither is raised. The man closest to Kotelnikov, the one who must have startled him, has a dagger with a long, carved shaft. The sheath droops from a cord around his waist. He holds his dagger at his hip.
“Hold your fire,” says Nikolai Isaakovich.
But Timofei Osipovich raises his gun and fires a shot into the air.
It thunders, the sound coming from everywhere at once. The koliuzhi scatter into the forest.
“Why did you do that?” my husband says. “I told you not to shoot.”
“I didn’t shoot. I was just scaring them away. It worked, didn’t it?” To me, he says softly, “Distraction. It works every time. I told you, didn’t I?”
Zhuchka comes running from deep in the bush.
“What kind of people are these?” drawls the American. “You said they’d be looting the ship and would leave us alone.”
“Ah, the ship’s probably gone by now,” says Timofei Osipovich. “You can bet once they finished plundering it, they burned it to ashes.”
I picture the brig, its graceful hull, its towering masts, the line of the bowsprit pointing us forward. The beautiful wheel carved from mahogany. The deck the promyshlenniki mopped every day. The place beside the skiff where I often stood when I watched the stars because it was sheltered from the wind. Gone to ashes. It seems impossible.
“As for you—you could try covering your head. Where’s your cap?”
John Williams reddens and touches his head, as though he’d just noticed the absence of his hat.
“Hurry up and finish your packing. We need to get as far away from here as possible,” Nikolai Isaakovich instructs. I turn back to my bundle. I rewrap and reposition my telescope and the star log, whose pages are becoming wavy in the damp. It’s going to be difficult to keep them safe and dry until we reach the Kad’iak.
We leave the grove where we spent the night and trudge back down to the river, then head upstream, plodding along through the mire until we find a shallow place to cross. The stones in the river’s bed are smooth and round, so I take care. My husband waits on the other side and offers me his hand. I take it, and he pulls me up onto the bank.
The trail disappears again, and though we search, no one, not even John Williams, can find it. So we head into the forest once more. Without a trail, our progress is slow. Every once in a while, the brush rustles, and a shadow flits by and vanishes. I’m sure we’re being followed, though no one says a word about it.
What do they want? Why are they following us? I knew nothing good would come from looting their fish. Perhaps we should offer them what remains of our beads and cloth. Would they leave us alone if we did?
When we finally stop for the night, my husband increases the number of sentries. Seven men guard us, forming a tight ring not far from the fire. A mist settles over the camp, making it impossible to see much beyond the trees that circle us. I look up, searching for the last of the day’s light, but the trunks just fade into the grey. It’s impossible to see the canopy. It will be another night without the stars, without my beloved Polaris, another night for my telescope to stay wrapped safely in my sailcloth bundle.
Maria cooks another proper and satisfying meal with the fish. The flavour infuses the broth, and there’s the thinnest shimmer of oil on top. It surprises me to see it; the fish was so dry when we took it from the rafters.
For a long time after the meal, the promyshlenniki sit around the fire without saying much. There are no stories tonight, no jokes. They drink desultorily from their flasks. Considering how easily we were surprised this morning, everyone is nervous about going to sleep, even with all the guards. Timofei Osipovich half-heartedly stirs the coals every once in a while and a few sparks rise. Finally, it can be delayed no longer. It’s time to sleep.