“Our brig passed this coast about two weeks ago.”
He smiles. “We have much to discuss. Welcome to Tsoo-yess.”
He has a complicated name crowded with hard consonants and long vowels. I attempt it, but he laughs and tells me to call him Makee. Now I want to laugh—poppy seed!—but it would be unkind and rude to laugh at his name. He mangles Anna Petrovna Bulygina—such a simple name!—and we end with agreement that he’ll just call me Anna, like the others. He pronounces it “Anna,” in the Russian way.
He invites me to sit beside him on a bench and lays his rattle between us. His is carved in the shape of a fish and there’s a person clutched in its jaws. Four men, including the moustached toyon who came here with me, sit alongside us. Others—including women and children—either sit or stand in a semicircle before us. A baby nearby fusses until its mother pulls it to her breast. I can hear the sucking, gulping, and a happy chirping sound coming from the baby.
“I wish I could offer you tea,” Makee says. “Your people are quite obsessed with it, aren’t you? But this will have to do.” A woman with her hair tightly tied back offers me a small wooden bowl of warm liquid that smells like tree needles. There’s a white, crescent-shaped scar on the back of her right hand. I sip the drink—it’s hot and bitter—and cradle the bowl to my chest. After the journey, the drink and the hospitality are comforting.
“Thank you,” I say to Makee. “That’s very kind. Now—if you would allow me to speak bluntly for a moment—where am I?”
He smiles sympathetically. “You’re in Tsoo-yess.”
“And why am I here?”
“The Chalats have brought you.” He points with his chin toward the men who were in my canoe.
“But why? The others—the people I’m with—they’ll be wondering where I am.”
Makee smiles again. “The people you’re with, so I am told, are quite hopelessly lost in the forest.”
“We’re not lost. We’re trying to get down the coast to meet a ship that’s expecting us. But… we’ve run into some… unfortunate difficulties.”
Makee peers at me, his brow furrowed. “If you will now allow me to speak bluntly—what are you doing in our territory? What do you want?”
“We’re on a mission—with the Russian-American Company. We’re here to trade with you; we’re also looking for an empty place where we might be able to build a settlement.”
“I see.” Makee’s smile disappears.
“We’re here in the name of the Tsar.”
Makee turns to the four men sitting around him and speaks to them in his language. They look at me, then him, then back at me again.
When he finishes, Makee turns to me once more and says, “Did your Tsar tell you to take all their salmon?”
It takes me a moment to figure out what he means. He means the dried slabs of fish we took from the little abandoned hut we discovered that day on the riverbank. “We didn’t.” It wasn’t all the salmon. “We were hungry. We didn’t know it belonged to anybody.”
“They were going to eat that fish this winter. Do you understand what will happen to them now?”
“I’m sorry. We didn’t know,” I stammer. “We left them some beads. And a robe. Didn’t they tell you about the beads?” I remember the inadequate piles we left behind. How I said nothing.
“Did your Tsar also tell you to shoot at them with your muskets? And before that, what you did to the Quileutes on the beach?” He doesn’t allow me to respond. He speaks again to the four men and while he does, everyone listens.
I think again about the dead boy with the ragged hole that opened his chest. Sand lay on his cheek and in his hair like dust. We left him there so the koliuzhi could come back for him.
Makee finally turns back to me. “There have been so many problems since your ship arrived.”
I open my hands and plead to Makee. “Then let us go. If you let me go, I’ll tell the others what you said, and we’ll leave. We won’t cause you any more difficulties if you’ll just take me back to the others.”
“But Anna—I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“The Chalats need food for the winter. To replace what you took.”
“We have no food!” I cry. “We have nothing to eat ourselves!”
“They know that. They’ve come to us for food.”
“Then why can’t you tell them to take me back?”
“You’ve misunderstood.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“You’re staying here now. This is a trade. You’re what they’ve brought in exchange for this food.”
Makee explains the terms of the trade. The Chalat Tsar has two problems: he needs food for his people, and he wants to stop the stealing and the attacks. He thought the easiest way would be to trade us back to our own people, and to encourage us to leave. So, starting with me, the Tsar tried to exchange us for muskets and powder. According to Makee, the muskets would solve both the Tsar’s problems. They’d make it easier to hunt through the winter—and help the Chalats to protect themselves from any further attacks we might launch.
When the crew refused to trade, Makee says, the Tsar had no choice.
“The lady doctor is staying with the Chalats. One man has gone to the Cathlamets and the other will stay with the Quileutes. And you’re here.”
By dividing us up, Makee says, the Tsar ensures no village is the sole subject of endless attacks. And no single village will have to trade away much of its winter supplies to make up for what we stole.
“You can’t do this!” I say. “It’s wrong.”
Makee turns to the four men and speaks. An old man whose sunken, bony chest is visible from beneath his cedar vest says something and pauses. Makee replies at length.
When he finishes, he says, “Anna, it’s better you stay here. Besides—I’ll get you home. Maybe even Russia, if that’s what you want.”
“How?”
“The next time we see a ship,” he says, “we’ll go out to meet it. If they’re willing, I’ll trade you and they’ll take you to your home.”
Home. Maybe even Russia. There might be a way out of here that doesn’t depend on the Kad’iak. I’d never dreamed such a thing could be possible. But at what cost? Trading in human life is wrong. People are born free and equal. Our Tsar has embraced this and many other principles of enlightened thought. Slavery was abolished before my parents were born. And though the condition of serfs has improved with reforms for the state’s peasants and the free agriculturalists, I’ve heard my father’s friends arguing long and hard over how much further the Tsar must go.
Even Timofei Osipovich knows about egalitarianism, though he’d use a simpler word for it. He said on the riverbank that a person’s freedom is the most precious thing on earth.
Still, regardless of the lofty principles debated around my parents’ dinner table, Makee offers what may be the only realistic way out of this horrible predicament. My father would see the practicality of the arguments right away. I think I know what he would say.
“I want to go home,” I say, “but…”
Makee bristles. “You have no choice. Anyway, you wouldn’t be the first stranger whose passage home I arranged. Too-te-yoo-hannis Yoo-ett—you must have heard about him.”
I can hardly understand. “Who?”
“Too-te-yoo-hannis Yoo-ett. He was with the Mowachahts for many years. Mokwinna wouldn’t allow him to leave. But I helped him.”
Makee speaks to one of the four men and the man disappears. When he returns a moment later, he hands something to Makee. Makee holds it out to me.