Alaska: A Novel

Nadia Karimoff

(Small-Lake-Underneath)

1. NEW ARCHANGEL SETTLEMENT

Russian Alaska

Spring 1867

How much did you pay for me? I yelled at Noah York as he paddled the dugout across Sitka Bay. How much did you pay for me and what do you want me for? I screamed, feeling the muscles of my stomach go rigid underneath the heavy starched gathers of my black muslin dress.

With silent deliberation, the American pointed the bow of his canoe away from New Archangel’s familiar shipyards, and the trappers’ sealskin boats grew smaller in the distance.

What do you want me for? I yelled again. But he was like a deaf-mute. Behind me I saw the cedar-plank castle of Prince Dimitri Maksoutov begin to disappear, along with the gold onion domes of the Church of Saint Michael.

You’re as bad as the Russian priests! I screamed at the Yankee, remembering the Mission Fathers who had stolen me from my Indian mother when I was a little girl of ten. But my new American owner never even looked in my direction. "Bozhe moi," oh, my God, I moaned, thinking that by now I should be accustomed to being owned by people. For the last eight years my Russian guardians had treated me like a serf. And as I looked back where New Archangel stockade had vanished into the fog and the steep green mountains of Baranof Island, I wondered if this new servitude could be any worse.

What do you want me for? I asked again, my voice cracking as I stifled a sob.

Noah York lifted his paddle from the calm water. Never end a sentence with a preposition, Little Nadia, he said, and spoke no more.

The first time I saw this Noah York, he was walking down the gangplank of the Calafia, an ice ship just in from San Francisco via a lumber camp all the Americans call Seattle. I noticed him right away, because of his sunset-red hair and his clothes, which weren’t rank-smelling peasant trousers and a baggy shirt like the promyshlenniki, the Russian trappers, wore. He was dressed in city clothes like they must wear in Saint Petersburg or Moscow. But I had no time to contemplate the redheaded stranger, because that had been the day after my master, old Professor Karimoff, died; and since I was the smartest pupil in the Russian church’s Mission School I had been ordered to give the lessons in my dead master’s place.

Later that afternoon this same stranger passed by me on the Governor’s Walk, his white teeth grinning down into my face. So it didn’t surprise me when he came to Gospozha Karimoff’s door the next day and began to bargain with my mistress to purchase me.

At first he offered only a few rubles, saying that I was undersized and probably weak. Couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds wet and with her pockets full of silver dollars.

My mistress frowned, her broad forehead wrinkled in lines that ran into her thick black-graying hair. My husband die, she said, crossing herself with two fingers. Six armed and black-booted Cossacks marched by, one of them smashing a vodka bottle on the graveled pathway. I not so good feelingk, Gospozha mumbled as she eyed the soldiers, then gave the American a cold stare. "Nadia, she tiny little thingk, but she is strongk like vwild boar. Listen, I tell you how to get much vwork out of her. Always, once, twice a day, vwack her mouth, is only vway. Da. Nadia, she little, but vwack her hard. Get much vwork out of her." Gospozha shook her finger in the American’s long thin face.

Mr. York reached out his arm to touch my red-black hair. A half-breed, he said, stroking my head and looking at me as if he were measuring my height and breadth with some invisible ruler. Can’t be more than five feet tall. She doesn’t look like the other Indians I’ve seen around here, not with that dark auburn hair. His vowels came out like sharp noises, not at all the way Professor Karimoff had taught me to speak English, and I almost had to bite my tongue to keep from correcting him.

Nadia is Haida Indian. My mistress rested one hand on her skirt-layered hip as she shifted her weight nervously from one foot to the other. Then, for once, she began to recite good things about me. "She best student in Russian Fathers’ colonist school. She experiment of Professor Karimoff. Da, is true. It had been her dead husband’s dream, she said, to educate the Indian savages, but since the tall, war-loving Tlingits refused to learn European ways, Professor Karimoff had given up on them and concentrated on just teaching me. Nadia, she speak three languages, Gospozha told Mr. York, as if she were proud of me for once. English, French, and Roossian, she speak."

I wanted to tell the stranger that my mother had also taught me the Indian tongues before I was taller than a deer’s leg, but Gospozha forbade any mention of Indian cultures in her house, or even under the hand-hewn lintel of her doorway. And since she was grieving for her husband, I remained silent to spare her the added trouble of having to slap my mouth.

"Da, Meester York, said Gospozha, as the American stared at the black bodice of my dress, making me feel as if he were unbuttoning it with the dark pupils of his gray eyes. Professor Karimoff used to tell me that vwhen fur business got better, he take us back to Roossia, show Nadia to university in Saint Petersburg—savage servant girl readingk three languages."

I stood beside her, remembering the day Professor Karimoff had told me that if I were good and did all my lessons, perhaps the chamberlain of Prince Maksoutov, Governor of all the Alaskas, would ask for my hand in marriage. How excited I felt when the professor described my wedding at the Church of Saint Michael and my chambers up in the Castle, with their grand rooms, ceilings carved in angel’s faces and walls painted red and gold. Yes, I would live in the Castle, where huge chandeliers hung in a giant mirrored ballroom and rows of Cossacks in silver-buttoned uniforms danced with Russian noblewomen dressed in purple Chinese silks to the music of clavichords and balalaikas. Late at night, when I wasn’t doing chores or language lessons, I would sit at my tiny upstairs window, dreaming of my noble husband and watching the brilliant seal-oil light that burned in the Castle’s cupola to guide the Russian-American Company’s fur ships back from Canton. With all its rum- and cognac-drinking celebrations, the Castle was so grand a place that Professor Karimoff called it the Paris of the Pacific. I never asked my Russian master if this noble husband of mine would come with us when he took me back to the old country to show me off. But now the professor was dead, Gospozha was going to sell me to a Yankee American, and I would have to forget all my hopes of living in Maksoutov’s castle, studying at Russian universities, and finding my mother, whom I hadn’t seen since the Russian priests stole me from her eight years ago.

Does she speak the Tlingit language? asked Noah York.

"Da, said Gospozha, blushing. Awful heathen vwords."

The American smiled as if she had just told him that I could make shrimps whistle. What’s your Indian name? he asked, addressing me for the first time.

Small-Lake-Underneath, I said in English so that he could understand. The last time I had spoken of Indian ways in Gospozha’s presence she had washed my mouth out with soap every morning for a week, saying that it was the only way to get rid of the Indian pigment and the devil inside my mouth.

My mistress scowled but didn’t strike me. How much you give me for servant girl? she asked the American in a voice surprisingly loud for a widow in mourning.

I cringed, remembering the awful rumors I’d heard about Americans. In camp Seattle, the promyshlenniki said, lumbermen hired Indians to drag felled trees from the hills down to the harbor, where boats towed logs to San Francisco. When the Indians finished a week’s work and demanded their wages, the lumbermen herded them into the bay, drowning hundreds.

And her parents? Noah York was concerned whether there were other claims on my head.

"Nyet, nyet. Father die long time ago. Vwoman-Always-Vwonderingk is Nadia’s mother. Vwoman put hex on father; she was vwitch, always makingk the evil eye. Priests always vwanted to burn her from vwitch tree." Her voice was shrill as she pointed a narrow finger up the graveled walkway, past the wooded Russian tea gardens, to an old hemlock where the mission priests hung and then burned Indian shamans who refused to be converted.

Vwoman-Always-Vwonderingk, one day she disappear. Gospozha spoke with a note of disappointment, as if she might have enjoyed seeing my mother sacrificed to the golden Madonna of Kazan at the altar of the Church of Saint Michael. "One day after priests take Nadia to be servant of my house and servant of the Lord, Vwoman-Always-Vwonderingk go off vwith promyshlennik."

Gospozha clutched her handkerchief to the high collar of her black mourning dress. I flinched at her lies about my mother but said nothing.

"Nyet, nyet, Gospozha continued, reassuring the stranger. Nadia, she not bootiful, eyes too small, too slanted, but is nothingk she vwill not do."

No, Gospozha didn’t tell the Yankee American the bad things. She didn’t say that my father, a Russian convict I’d never met, had bought my mother for ten rubles from a Spanish clipper captain who’d stolen her from her Haida tribe in the British islands north of the Oregon Territories. My mother, the Russians said, was ungrateful to the white men for saving her from the heathen world. She wanted no part of my father, Ilya Ovechkin, wouldn’t even marry him, and when I was born she took me to live in the Tlingit Village of the Raven, the nearest Indian village to the New Archangel stockade. I can still remember the Russian Fathers stroking their pointed black beards as they told my mother that she should be punished for not marrying Ovechkin and that she should punish me as well by leaving me alone in the woods with no food, the same way so many other half-breed children had died.

"Nyet." Gospozha was beginning to haggle with Mr. York over my price. As I listened to them argue—would payment be in rubles or in pieces of silver?—I shuddered at the thought of being sold like the squat, docile, half-starved Aleuts whom Prince Maksoutov brought in boatloads from the old Alaska capital at Three Saints Settlement, or Kodiak, as the Indians called it. I looked squarely at the American. He even had hair the color of Gospozha’s orange dahlias on his large-knuckled hands. Perhaps he had this same hair all over his arms and chest. Was he alone, this Noah York, or did he have a wife? I felt ill as I imagined his naked figure, with long red hairs growing even out of his backside, coming toward me, moving his lips and wagging his tongue. Gospozha had only tolerated me in her house because I had been her husband’s experiment. I hated chopping wood for her and cooking pirozhki and cabbage in her tiny kitchen, but the thought of being sold to this man whose face reminded me of schoolbook pictures of Ivan the Terrible brought a dizziness to my head and a nausea throughout my body.

You do this awful thingk to vwidow? Take her servant girl for pennies? Gospozha continued to bargain. I took a deep breath, embracing myself with my own arms to try to calm my shaking body. Once I knew the number of rubles I was sold for, then I’d know how many blue-fox pelts I’d have to tan to buy my freedom so that I could go in search of my mother and her Haida tribe. But just as the two were about to agree on an amount in silver, my mistress sent me into the kitchen to stoke the dinner fire.

Later, when Gospozha helped me pack my few belongings into a trunk, she told me that Noah York was from a place called Massachusetts. She had found me a good master, she said, a rich one. Mr. York’s grandfather had made a fortune selling railroad land, and his father had made another fortune selling munitions during the civil war they’d just had in America. But Mr. York was both an abolitionist and something called a Unitarian, who didn’t believe in going to war.

The constant southeast Alaska fog dripped on the roof above us. There’s more to this Noah York than meets the eye, I told myself. If he’s an abolitionist, why has he just bought a slave girl? Perhaps he thinks he’s saving me from a fate worse than slavery—that of being turned out by my mistress into the woods to starve and die. Perhaps in his eyes he is doing me a favor by purchasing me and giving me a home to work in and a man to serve, since no one in New Archangel has offered me a proposal of marriage. Whatever his reason, I thought, taking a breath of damp cedar-scented air, certainly an abolitionist who journeys five thousand miles from his homeland to buy a slave girl is a very queer sort indeed.

Mr. York’s father was a world traveler, continued Gospozha smugly; Paris, London, Athens—he went wherever he could buy gunpowder for the lowest price. But Mr. York’s poor mother had been bedridden with arthritis and a diseased hip since his birth. The American, Gospozha Karimoff said in a haughty voice, had gone to some school called Harvard, where an American czar’s children, if there were such people, would attend classes. All during his studies, she said—crossing herself with two fingers and making a half bow to the icon in the corner of the room—Mr. York had been a good son, living at home to see that his mother got proper care. When his mother died, he had become so grief-stricken, like herself, that he had decided to leave home. So he had booked passage for New Archangel on Baranof Island, Alaska, to live in a cabin among the Indians and Eskimos, or as Gospozha always called them, the people with the tails of dogs.

As my mistress’s broad hand closed the lid of the trunk, I eyed her with distaste. At last I was free from the Russian colonists. Free from the stench of their cabbage-smelling kitchens, free from the relentless criticism and dour faces of the Russian priests.

How much did you pay for me? I wanted to scream it loudly enough for the Sea Spirits to hear me, but I knew by now that the American wouldn’t answer. As he paddled the canoe, Noah York looked across the island-dotted water of Sitka Bay toward a rock-strewn shore where some Tlingits clad in deerskin were gathering seaweed from tide pools, standing on the same large flat rocks that my mother and I used to sit on before the Russian Fathers took me to live with the Karimoffs. Woman-Always-Wondering and I would come to this bay every day during the spring and summer, awaiting a message. I remember how we sat for hours on the largest rock—the Wishing Stone, the Russians called it, because of us—watching the tide move in and out. Then my mother, wearing her necklace of salmon vertebrae and wolf-fang amulets, her long black-red Haida hair tied in a topknot and a jade labret in her lower lip, would point to a sea gull on a floating log. Good omen, she’d say. Sea bird riding log that floats against tide. Thoughts of Haida people are with us, Small-Lake.

My mother’s grandmother was the head of her tribe, and she’d prepared my mother to succeed her. My mother knew that her Haida people would come for her in a canoe someday. I wanted to tell the American that my mother’s people had found her; she hadn’t run off with promyshlennik, as Gospozha had told him. I wanted to tell him that if I waited long enough my mother’s people would one day come for me.

I turned to look across the water at the sea gulls floating on the tide. Mr. York pointed his canoe toward Indian River, near where the Raven tribe of the Tlingits lived. Dark hemlocks and spruce lined the shore, but the sun burning through the Alaska fog shone so brightly on the snowcapped crater of Mount Saint Lazaria and the white tips of Three Sisters Peaks that my eyes squinted in the glaring light. Perhaps the old ones in the Village of the Raven will have news of my mother, I thought, avoiding Mr. York’s intense gray eyes. Even though the Tlingits were usually at war with the Haidas before the Russian colonists came, they had welcomed us into their village, knowing that my mother was a shaman. They gave us food and baskets and asked Woman-Always-Wondering to tell them what she knew of the salmon runs in her islands to the south. For days my mother told them about lives of her ancestors. Each one had a story, and each year of my mother’s life she had learned about another ancestor until she had seen sixteen salmon runs and learned sixteen stories. I remembered hearing her tell each one several times with not a word altered. When my mother had seen sixteen salmon runs and learned sixteen stories, she said, she was stolen from her people by a man with yellow hair and gold teeth.

I sat erect in the canoe, suddenly filled with the memory of my mother. I was being stolen just as she had been. She had also felt this fear of a strange, chalk-faced wordless man, this fear that made my small red, work-swollen hands lie numb in my lap.

All at once I knew that the thoughts of Woman-Always-Wondering were with me, and I stood up in the canoe, rocking it dangerously from side to side. You bastard, I screamed, tell me how much you paid for me and what the hell you want me to do or I’ll dump us both overboard!

Noah York’s paddle arm stopped in mid-stroke and his eyes filled with a new light as they leaped back and forth from my waist to the top of my head. A bag of silver, he said, sitting perfectly still in the rocking canoe.

2.

My new master maneuvered between the rocks of Indian River, past low-hanging alder branches and vines. At a sandbar below a salmonberry bush heavy with moss, he beached the canoe and wordlessly carried my trunk into a cabin built back among the trees. Noah York’s house was an old, decaying log building, probably abandoned by a promyshlennik who had gone to Fort Wrangell in search of better trapping, as so many others had done now that the fur animals were getting scarce.

My new home was only about twelve by twelve feet, the roof covered with new sealskins and the north wall built of stone with a hole for a fire. Inside, the cabin was dark; a skin covered the one window. As I looked around, I noticed that there were maps in frames on the walls, all badly in need of dusting. In the center of the room was a plank table where I could roll pastry dough and chop vegetables. A frying pan and the cooking kettle I needed for boiling water hung on pegs near the fire hole. The wall opposite was crowded with shelves full of food supplies. And in one corner was a cot heaped with red and green Hudson’s Bay blankets, a carved wooden chest at its foot. Not much of a house to clean, I thought, as Mr. York put my trunk down next to the shelf wall and walked back outside to the boat.

I sat erect in one of the two chairs at the table, nervously awaiting my first instructions. Would he want me to dust the shelves or make up his bed? I wasn’t at all acquainted with the domestic habits of Americans. Slowly my muscles began to relax and I slumped down in the chair. It was a dingy cabin. Only yesterday I had been dreaming of being a fine lady married to a Russian Cossack officer who would take me on his ship to find my mother and her Haida tribe on the islands to the south, where, she said, the winters were warmer and it seldom snowed. Now, here I was with this strange fire-headed American who would not tell me what he wanted from me. I sat in the damp room for an hour, awaiting instructions, then got up and went to search outside for my new owner, but he was gone and so was the canoe.

I looked up into the spruce trees near the cabin and there four bald-headed eagles sat watching me. They were as tall as an eight-year-old child, and their wings spread wider than my five-foot height. The one white-headed male eagle tilted his beak and eyed me benevolently. The others, two black females and an immature bird, sat unmoving, as if they were sentries sent to guard my safety. Yes, the spirit of my mother is with me, I thought, remembering that the eagle was the crest of her Haida tribe.

Near the cabin were large rocks the same craggy granite color as the giant kekoor rock where Alexander Baranov had built his castle, overlooking Sitka Bay. Unlike the rocks near Mr. York’s cabin, the kekoor site was sacred to the Tlingits: Home-of-Spirits, they called it. The Indians had been furious when Baranov violated the Sea Spirits’ home and retaliated by massacring all but two of the first Sitka Bay Russian settlers—cutting off their heads and eating some of them, the Mission Fathers said. But more Russians came, mainly priests and convict workers like my father. The newcomers made the kekoor rock so angry that all the hair seals and fur otters finally disappeared from Sitka Bay just as they had done in Kodiak. Perhaps, I hoped, the Sea Spirits in the kekoor rock will become angry with Mr. York and make him disappear as well.

Exhausted even though I’d done no work, I went inside, lay down on the cot, and fell asleep for a while. After several hours I awoke, opened my trunk, and put my few belongings—my three black muslin dresses, my comb and brush, my winter shawl, and my fox hat—on one of the kitchen shelves. Then I built a fire and sorted through the American’s dry foodstuffs, thinking to prepare some sustenance for my new owner. Keep his hands busy eating, I told myself.

There were boxes of tea and spices and chocolate, canisters of dried meat, and sacks of onions. What kind of a man was this Noah York? I wondered. He had a larder better than Gospozha Karimoff’s, maybe as grand as the Castle’s itself. Perhaps this American simply wanted me to cook these fine foods for him. Yet I doubted he’d come all the way to Alaska just to while away the long winters doing nothing but grieving for his mother and eating the pounds of plump dried figs he kept in the largest canister. Other than wild game and fish, food was rare in Alaska, and this American had a fortune in edibles alone. Perhaps Noah York was a chamberlain of the American President, sent to the Russian colonies on some secret mission. Perhaps, I hoped, he had bought me to be his secretary.

I boiled water for tea, or chai, as Gospozha would have called it. And then, since the drizzling spring rain persisted outside, I lay on the cot, listening to the sounds of the woods, the sounds of the giant yellow and red cedars and of the ravens. I had not lived in the forest since the Russian priests had taken me away from my mother, and I had forgotten the voices of the animals. So I listened closely to each of them, remembering my mother’s stories. Small-Lake, never kill a squirrel or an otter. If you do this, the soul of the creature will enter the body of a woman, who will kill you the same way you killed it. I remembered my mother’s stories and listened for the sounds of a squirrel in the trees above the cabin.

Then I thought of Mr. York. His was a small house, and I had no room of my own here, as I’d had at the Karimoffs. There was only this one cot, no other separate bed for me to sleep on. My muscles froze when I thought of becoming Noah York’s concubine, and I imagined the terror that must have overtaken my mother each time the convict Ilya Ovechkin forced himself upon her. But surely, I told myself, a woman as religious as Gospozha Karimoff would not have sold me for such purposes—Gospozha, who had locked me in my room for a week because the son of a Russian sentry touched my breast by accident as he brushed by me on the Governor’s Walk; Gospozha, who always told me that such touchings would soil me and that I should abstain from them if I ever hoped to marry. What if he gave me a child, this Noah York? Would the Mission Fathers steal it from me as they had stolen me from my mother?

It was late when the American returned, without even a lantern on the bow of his canoe. I had boiled some dried fish with the parsnips and potatoes that I found in barrels under the table, deciding that since he had given me no instructions, I would act as if he had bought me to cook for him and be his chore girl, just as I had done for the Karimoffs.

Mr. York entered the cabin, took off his black-tarred rain cape, and ate what I had cooked for him without a word or even an acknowledgment of my presence. After an hour had passed he asked, Nadia, when do the berries get ripe?

What? I was shocked at finally hearing his voice again.

You’re part Indian, aren’t you? When do the berries get ripe?

I didn’t know what to say—this wasn’t what I’d been brought up by the Karimoffs to discuss with my betters—but I answered obediently. At the end of the summer, when the night comes back. First the salmonberries, the yellow ones, then the elderberries and the huckleberries, and higher up, near the glacier on Mount Saint Lazaria, the blueberries.

And this drizzling rain, he said. It’s enough to drive a man into a fit of gloom. There hasn’t been a dry day since I arrived. When does it stop?

The rain? I asked. The rain is always with us. In the winter it turns to snow for a month or two, and in the summer perhaps for a week there will be no dampness falling from the sky. I began to wonder what it would be like to live in a place which did not always have rain. Hadn’t Mr. York noticed that once a day the ravens parted the clouds and brought in the sun? The Indians had countless words to describe the rain—falling-like-pine-needles, with-the-force-of-war-arrows, lake-that-falls-from-the-sky. If it weren’t for the rain, I wanted to tell him, the cranberries and huckleberries wouldn’t grow so thickly in the woods and bogs. The small animal people would have nothing to eat, and the fish would have no rivers to swim in.

Ah, well, he muttered, as if resigning himself to a seasonless climate, it’s magnificent country, so densely green—even in winter, I’m told.

Then he took a leather-bound notebook from the chest at the foot of the cot and wrote down everything that I had just said, as if he were one of the small children at the Mission School where I had taught the day after Professor Karimoff’s death. I was amazed. Why would anyone write down such things about berries and rain? Couldn’t he remember them?

When they get ripe I want a red elderberry pie, he said. Remember that.

The red ones are poison, they’ll make you sick, I said, eager to show off my Indian knowledge.

I want a red elderberry pie, he said again, as if I had not spoken.

A strange feeling ran down my spine. Did Mr. York not believe that the berries were poison, because I was a simple servant girl whose knowledge was always to be tested and verified? Or was it that he truly wanted to make himself ill—and not by his own hand, but mine? For a moment I stood as motionless as a deer frightened by a hunter. But no, I told myself, surely Mr. York wasn’t a lunatic. He was just eccentric in his ways, a foreigner who wanted to test these new Alaskan elements.

He cleared off the table, took the Hudson’s Bay blankets from the cot, and arranged them on the cabin floor. We sleep here, he said. He took off his boots and all his clothes except for the long woolen underwear and lay down under the blankets next to the fire hole. I stood in the corner and watched him, my body shaking. All the blankets were on the floor and none left for me to sleep under … unless I slept with him.

We sleep here, he said again and turned his head away from me.

So, I thought hopelessly, he did buy me to be his concubine. Slowly I removed part of my clothes, my black muslin overdress and shoes, and quietly crept under the blankets, lying as far away from him as I could and still be under the covers.

Take more off, he said. Not everything, you’ll catch cold.

I took off two of my slips, but not my long underwear. As he put his hand over my breast, my muscles tightened to his touch, but he never looked at me. Then the American unbuttoned the lower part of his long underwear and put his hand inside, moving it back and forth, up and down.

Touch yourself, he commanded, taking his hand off my breast. Touch yourself, he said again.

But I could not. The Mission Fathers had told us about touching in religious class. They said that being a toucher was sinful and that we should never touch ourselves in those places, especially if we were girls. If we were girls we would ruin ourselves for our husbands. We would become tools of the devil, they said; the devil possessed our fingers when we did this, and we would grow to love it, and to want nothing else all during our lives. In extreme cases we would be able to do nothing else all day. Witches did this touching, they said. Whenever they talked about touchers, the priests would look at me for a long time, probably because they thought my mother was a witch. Perhaps I was the child of a union with the devil, they said, and that would explain why I was the most clever student in the Mission Fathers’ school.

Slowly I began unbuttoning the lower buttons of my underwear, thinking that the Russian priests god would strike me dead before each button. Mr. York’s hand was moving up and down, faster and faster now, and he was breathing hard.

Touch yourself, he commanded.

3.

I cried for hours, not just about becoming a toucher but about Professor Karimoff dying and leaving me alone in New Archangel Settlement without my mother, and about Gospozha selling me to this strange foreigner whose body was covered with red hair. I hadn’t grieved the day the professor died in the drafty Russian hospital-morgue at the back end of the Baranov fur company warehouse, where, in winter, the priests kept dead bodies until spring, when the ground thawed enough for a Christian burial. I hadn’t even grieved as the bishop of the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel lowered the professor’s cedar coffin into his grave at the cemetery up on the hill near the eight-sided blockhouses. As the bishop read the final eulogy, Gospozha had whimpered under her heavy black veil and I had watched the blockhouse sentries aim their long-barreled rifles toward the Tlingit Village of the Raven, prepared against a surprise Indian attack.

Now Professor Karimoff had been in his grave five days and I lay on the cold floor of an old promyshlennik cabin trying to cry in whispers so that my new master wouldn’t awaken and begin to touch himself again. Finally I couldn’t be quiet and the American awoke, but he neither spoke a word of annoyance nor reached out his hand to console me.

Professor, Professor, I sobbed. My Russian master had wronged me by dying, and he had lied in telling me about all the fine things that would happen to me if I did well in my lessons, if I mastered my calculus and declined all my irregular Latin verbs. How would I ever buy my freedom from this foreigner? I had no money, no jewelry or furs, and I couldn’t buy freedom with well-done lessons. How would I find my mother and my Haida people? Surely now none of those young Russian nobles in New Archangel would ever ask for my hand in marriage as Professor Karimoff had promised. I was a mere servant girl, living in a dingy cabin, and even though I was still a virgin, I was soiled with touching. The Russian priests had taught me that it was a sin not to forgive the dead, but still I felt that Professor Karimoff had truly wronged me and that I would never be able to forgive him.

As I cried over the loss of my Russian master, I began to contemplate this foreigner who lay under the blankets next to me. Did he have a wife somewhere, I wondered, a woman that he was saving himself for? He had only made me commit the sin of touching and had not pried my legs apart, forcing himself into me as Ilya Ovechkin had done to my mother. But if this Noah York had a wife, why had he purchased me? Perhaps I was to help him with his work. But what was this American’s work? He was much too high-bred to be a promyshlennik; what did he plan to do here in the Russian colonies? And—I shuddered—what was it, other than touching, that he would want from me?

Finally, my nose was so stopped up and my lungs gasping so hard that I knew I would have to stop crying or choke. As I grew quiet I began to hear the noises of the forest. A wolf howled, maybe only a quarter of a mile away. They were big, those wolves, two hundred pounds with a five-inch spread to their paws. The promyshlenniki were terrified of them, because shooting a wolf only made her go mad enough to rip a hunter apart before she had time to bleed to death from her wound. I listened to the wolf howl again, making the same noise that my crying had made. In one of my mother’s stories, she had told me that wolves don’t bother adult Indians, that even though I was part European I had come from the body of an Indian, and the wolves could smell this and wouldn’t harm me. The wolf is very smart, my mother once told me. The wolf knows which people are her enemy. They hunt the same land, the wolf and the Indian, but they do not hunt each other. I turned my face toward Mr. York, who had fallen asleep again and was snoring loudly. Perhaps, I thought, this foreigner would meet the she wolf of this forest and then I would have my freedom.

One early summer day when the sun was high above Mount Saint Lazaria and wouldn’t set until after midnight, I was washing blankets in a big cast-iron pot over a fire I’d built down by the river. Up-creek, Mr. York suddenly began screaming loud enough to chase the ravens away. At first I thought he’d been stung by the hornets who had recently built a nest in the ground near our cabin. But when I walked over to find out what was the matter, he just pointed to the silver fish in the white water of the river rapids. So, the salmon have started to run, I thought to myself. But doesn’t this American know that the salmon run every summer? Doesn’t everyone know such things?

He was beside himself as he ran into the cabin for his feather quill pen and leather-bound notebook. Get that laundry done and out to dry on the rocks, he yelled. We’ve got work to do! Obediently I began spreading the wet blankets across the warm, flat rocks along the riverbank, contemplating these first few months I’d spent in his service.

Other than questions about the elements, Mr. York seldom spoke to me and never mentioned the touching of that first night or commanded me to do it again. About a week later he’d gone into New Archangel—or Sitka, in this place, as the Tlingits called the settlement and the bay it was built on—bringing back another cot and more blankets. From then on he slept on one side of the fire hole and I slept on the other. Often I could hear him touching himself across the room, his breath coming harder and harder.

How will I get away from this strange man? I would think each time his moanings filled the one-room cabin. Sometimes I would reach down into my long underwear and touch myself but then remember the Russian bishop. Since I didn’t believe that any man would take me as his bride, I no longer cared about ruining myself for my husband. But I was afraid that the priests would be able to look me in the eye and see that I was a toucher. I was afraid that someday they would call me a witch, just as they had called my mother a witch, and the touching that they saw in my eyes would be part of their proof.

How do we catch the salmon? Mr. York asked in a high, excited voice as he ran toward me, stepping all over the wash.

With a club, of course, I answered, sighing at his dirty footprints on the blankets. Could it be that Mr. York had never had to do daily labor? That he had no regard or reverence for the labor of others, because he had never done any? Possibly he had never had to hunt his own food to stay alive either. Perhaps his journey to Russian Alaska was to him a great adventure, a lark, and I, Nadia Karimoff—Small-Lake-Underneath—would have to show him how to hunt and gather food for the winter. It was I who was responsible for keeping us both alive. Suddenly I began to feel the weight of my new servitude, and my shoulders drooped like tree limbs heavy with ice.

Mr. York followed me into the woods, where I wearily chopped each of us a club. I told him that we would have to walk upriver, to where it branched out into a shallow creek, then club the fish as they leaped over the rocks. I handed him a pair of flour sacks in which to carry the fish back to the cabin, and he followed me for half an hour as I walked upriver through the high ferns and low-hanging moss.

The humpback salmon plunged up an Indian River tributary, climbing toward their spawning grounds in the mountains behind the Tlingit Village of the Raven. My arms ached from washing the heavy woolen blankets. We should start catching fish tomorrow, I said in a tired voice, after we’ve built alder-wood fires for the smoke-curing. But it was as if I had not spoken. Mr. York was already wading knee-deep into the water trying to catch a fish with his hands.

I shook my head despairingly. Daily labor and the gathering of food was just a game to this man. What a useless person he seemed to be! Perhaps that’s why he left his home in Massachusetts. He was probably just as useless to his family as he was trying to help me gather food.

Red thimbleberries and huckleberries were ripening on bushes near the bank and I ate handfuls of them, knowing that Noah York wouldn’t stop for us to eat once we’d started to catch the salmon. He was so odd, this man. Indeed, he was capable of hard work—splitting logs for four hours straight—but he had not yet learned to stop for sustenance and rest until he was too exhausted to care for himself.

I walked into the glacier-cold water and began to club the salmon on the head, being careful not to damage what was left of the meat on their bodies. My new master never hesitated; he went on clubbing fish as the sun traveled across the sky. When we had filled the flour sacks with salmon, we harnessed them to our backs and around our waists and started back to our cabin. I led the way down the trail toward Indian River, my head bent to keep the wet hemlock limbs from lashing at my face. Then, in front of me, instead of a tree stump or a fallen branch, were the two legs of an Indian.

At first I shuddered from the surprise, but Mr. York never flinched, just studied the Indian’s skin and his woven cedar-bark clothes decorated with white-tipped eagle feathers. I could tell by the black tar markings painted on his red face and his exceptional height that he was from the Tlingit Village of the Raven. The Indian stood directly in front of me, but he didn’t grip my shoulders in friendship, and from the stern expression on his high young forehead I knew he had been watching us for most of the day.

As the Indian spoke, the Tlingit language sounded strange to me, because the Russian Fathers had for eight years forbidden me to speak the language of heathens. But slowly I found the words and spoke to the tall man, telling him that my mother was a Haida and that I had once lived in his village with her. I asked after the old ones of his tribe and knew from his relaxed posture that he would not harm me.

Fish of my people, he said, eyeing the salmon-filled sacks. I began to undo my harnessings to return his fish. No, he said in a deep, throaty voice, take fish, make Sea Spirit happy. Then he asked why I had come to live on his river and had not come to visit his people. I told him that the Russians who had taken me from my mother had sold me to this Boston man—the Indian term for Americans because of the Boston whalers who fished in Tlingit waters at Yakutat Bay—and that although he was not my husband I must do his bidding. The Boston man, I told the Indian, had not given me permission to go to the Village of the Raven.

The Indian smiled. Big wolf hunt Indian River, he said, his white teeth, which had been filed into points, smiling down at me as he gestured to Mr. York. I bowed my head so that the Tlingit wouldn’t see into my eyes. It was as if he knew just by looking at me that from the first night of my servitude I had hoped Noah York would be eaten by the wolves. I go, said the Indian and gently touched the top of my head.

As he passed me on the trail, I knew that we had an understanding, this tall Tlingit man and I: The people of his tribe would let me pass over their land unharmed. I must, I decided, go to their village to speak with the old ones, even if Mr. York denied me permission. Perhaps they would have news of my mother.

What’s your name? I suddenly remembered to ask the Tlingit, calling over my shoulder in a loud voice that echoed across the narrow canyon of the creek below.

Kat-lee-an, he said, the words of his name coming down upon me like a sudden Alaskan summer rain.

Kat-lee-an, I whispered to myself. The young chief of the Tlingit Village of the Raven, the warrior who had led the last attack against New Archangel Settlement, massacring a group of unsuspecting mourners at a funeral in the Russian cemetery. It had been Kat-lee-an, disguised as a giant raven, brandishing a promyshlennik rifle and swinging a blacksmith’s hammer, who’d led a band of Indian warriors to another victory over the New Archangel settlers. Kat-lee-an, I whispered again, rolling the power of his name across my tongue.

Mr. York acted as if meeting the Tlingit were of little consequence, though he did make me tell him exactly what the Indian had said so he could enter it in his leather book when we returned to the cabin. He was like a schoolboy, this man, and seemed to be pleased with me for talking with the Indian.

Good, little Nadia, he said. Very good. While Mr. York wrote in his notebook, I began to cut and gut the salmon, saving the pink-orange roe in a large canister to be eaten with the unleavened bread I’d baked over the fire hole the day before.

After he’d put his notebook safely inside the hand-carved chest at the foot of his cot, the American built