The Great Alone Read Free

first. He learned all he could about the craggy, treeless islands that rose from the sea and arched across it like a gigantic boom, and the surrounding waters teeming with fur-bearing sea mammals.
     
    That winter, he hunted the sable in the Siberian steppes and, on the odd clear days, observed the three mock suns that formed an arc over the real one. He had time to reflect on the stories and visualize in his mind the multitude of pelts that had been stacked on that wharf. The faraway land called to him. During his young years, he had wandered the length and breadth of Kamchatka, and now his soul ached for the land beyond the horizon. He would go there, he vowed. It was his destiny. The fur wealth that had eluded him here in Kamchatka, he would find in those islands off America.
     
     

 
    PART ONE
    The Aleutians
     
     

 
    CHAPTER I
    September 1745
     
     
    Bellied by the wind, the square sails of softened reindeer hides pulled at the leather straps that tied them to the spars of the double-masted vessel. Little water seeped through the moss-caulked cracks of the green-timbered craft as the bow nosed first toward the sky, then dipped toward the bottom of a wave trough. Modeled after a boat designed for the river trade on the Volga, the flatboat had almost no keel, which allowed it to be easily beached yet remain remarkably stable in the water. Because of the chronic shortage of iron, its green-timbered planks were lashed—or “sewn”—together with leather thongs, giving rise to its name shitik from the Russian verb shi-it which means “to sew.”
    In any compass direction all that could be seen from the crowded deck of the river vessel was the sullen Bering Sea heaving and rising. Luka Ivanovich Kharakov stood on the crowded deck, his feet slightly spread against the roll of the shitik, watching the flat horizon to the southeast.
    He was unconcerned that the shitik had never been intended for ocean waters. Two years before, a similar vessel commanded by a Cossack sergeant from a Kamchatka garrison had set out on an expedition to the Komandorskie island group, where Bering had died. It had returned safely last summer with a rich cargo of furs, proving to any doubters the seaworthiness of the craft. Luka had not been among the skeptics. He had been refused the chance to join the company of men who sailed aboard the shitik Kapiton, rejected in favor of the surviving sailors from Bering’s crew.
    Nor did it bother him that this shitik had been constructed by men with no knowledge of shipbuilding. He had been one of them, whose experience was limited to the building of smaller boats to navigate Siberian rivers or traverse the lakes. The only one among them who could claim an acquaintance with the sea was the shitik’s navigator and commander. A silversmith by trade, Mikhail Nevodchikov had come to Siberia in search of fortune. At Kamchatka, it was discovered he had no passport and he was pressed into government service as a crew member aboard Bering’s ship, the Sv Petr. Despite the man’s dubious credentials, it was claimed by some that Nevodchikov discovered the near islands of America, the group Bering had called the Delusive Islands.
    It was for these the shitik steered its southeasterly course. Six days before, the boat had sailed from the mouth of the Kamchatka River and bypassed the Komandorskie Islands, where the garrison sergeant had taken a second expedition. Favoring winds had steadily pushed the vessel toward their destination, the virgin hunting grounds they wouldn’t have to share with another hunting party.
    With timbers groaning, the shitik climbed another swell. After six days at sea, the craft’s shuddering moans had become a companionable sound, not a cause for alarm. Many times during those first days, Luka had expected the watery canyons between the ocean swells to close and swallow the sailing vessel, but each time the boat had scaled the wall of a wave, then plunged sickeningly into the next