by Ray Hudson
The first leg of the trip was short. The sun was out, and I was glad I had that baseball hat from the attic. We passed the hillside where we had filled buckets with blueberries before we landed at the end of a long bay and started hiking. Men carried the kayaks, but Vasilii and I handled our own supplies. The trek was less strenuous once we were above the thick entangling grass. Still, it lasted several hours, and I was exhausted by the time we descended from the summit and camped along the shore of an immense bay.
The next morning we were back on the water. I think Anna was relieved when we bypassed the village she said her relatives were from. The priest told us we’d stop on the way back.
“While the weather holds,” he said, “we should press on.”
The second evening, after kayaking along steep bluffs and across awesome fjords, we arrived at a village called Kashega. We had passed a lot of high mountains, but this village was tucked in among low folded hills. Word must have spread that the priest was arriving, because people started showing up. Soon skin boats lined the grassy rim of the beach. Father Shaiashnikoff had service in a small chapel that I learned was named in honor of the Transfiguration of Christ. The priest had insisted we bring our own provisions so as not to be a burden on local people, but the village insisted on hosting us to tea and a light supper.
“Did you see the icon above the iconostasis?” Vasilii asked.
“The what?” I took another slice of smoked salmon.
“The screen or wall separating the people from the altar,” Anna said with her own mouth full of the fragrant fish.
“My godfather sent that icon,” the priest said, a note of pride in his voice. “It has his signature on the back.”
“Father Veniaminov,” Vasilii added. “He also sent the portrait of Czar Alexander that you saw in our home.”
“Metropolitan Innocent,” his father corrected. “He was the Metropolitan of Moscow. I used to get letters from him—even in Aleut, but he died last year. We had services in his memory for forty days.”
“Saint Innocent?” Anna exclaimed. “I’ve read about him.”
“Some people called him a saint,” the priest nodded and looked impressed that Anna knew about this guy. “He was famous. He had a terrific laugh. And his eyes—” The priest sat quietly as he remembered. “Such kindness, such intelligence.”
“He traveled all over in a baidarka,” Vasilii said. The conversation turned to scary trips in skin boats. A few older men were looking uncomfortable, and Vasilii whispered, “We’re getting close to criticizing the weather, and that’s a taboo with these old guys.” He added with a wink at Anna, “Just another old wives’ tale.”
He was good at irritating her.
“I was caught here once for six days,” the priest said, gesturing around him. “It was so stormy the roof of the church blew off and my tent was torn into shreds. The people, however, were so kind to us. They gave us shelter and food when ours ran low. Even though they didn’t have much, that is what they did.”
The third day, our baidarkas brought us to a larger village nestled along a bay among low hills. The church was a lot like one of those semi-underground homes. It was dedicated to the Epiphany of Our Lord. These people must really know their Bible, I thought on hearing yet another intriguing name for a church. After church services the next morning, we headed away from the island. By now I was pretty confident that the wooden frame of my boat wouldn’t disintegrate into floating pick-up-sticks. We arrived off another island and followed the coast. I was enjoying myself thanks to calm seas and a light breeze.
“It won’t be long now,” Vasilii said as two men rowed out to us in their own kayaks. The closer we got to the village of Nikolski, the more baidarkas joined us. As we neared the shallow bay facing the village, the men broke into rhythmic singing.
What a great omen, I said to myself, as voices from the shore joined in.
It was soon clear that the villagers’ joy centered on the priest. Vasilii, Anna, and I melted into the crowd and set about exploring while he visited his parishioners and caught up on news. We hiked outside the village where the hills were low and rolling. The jagged peaks that surrounded Unalaska were missing, but I saw a steep mountain in the distance. A stream meandered into the sea from a small lake on the north side of the village. The lake looked very flat, but then I realized all lakes are flat. We walked south of the settlement for about a mile.
“Appreciate this spot, Booker,” Anna said.
“Why?”
“Look to your left.”
I did.
“That’s the Pacific Ocean.”
There was water as far as I could see.
“Now look right.” Anna pointed and said, “The Bering Sea. Two of the world’s greatest bodies of water at your fingertips.”
I was impressed, I admit. “Where are those Four Mountain islands?”
Vasilii pointed west, but all I made out was a smudge on the horizon.
His arm dipped a bit, and all three of us felt the ground quiver.
“Did you feel that?” he asked.
“An earthquake, Booker,” Anna said. “Better get used to them. They happen all the time.”
11. Booker
We returned to the village where we learned Anna and I would be staying with the chief’s aunt while Vasilii would be with the second chief and his family. We had a couple of hours before he was to assist his father with services. Anna offered to help the chief’s aunt get a room ready, so Vasilii and I went looking for somebody who could tell us where Peter’s sister lived. In a village the size of Nikolski, that would have been anybody. A woman was removing clothes from a line that stretched from her barabara to an upright post. Being careful not to appear like the nosey outsiders we were, we came up to her from the side. Vasilii said quietly, “Aang, aang.”
Anna had used those words before. Some kind of hello.
The woman frowned over a towel she had started to remove. When he repeated the greeting, she grunted back and tossed it onto the lid of a wooden barrel. We watched her, somewhat embarrassed at being deliberately ignored. She removed the last piece of clothing, gathered the dry laundry into her arms, and turned to enter her home. She saw us still there and demanded, “What you want? What you looking at?”
“Do you know where Fevronia lives?” Vasilii asked. “Her brother is Peter at Unalaska.”
“I know who her brother is,” she said aggressively, and then she shrugged. “What you want that Old Lady for? She’s got no time for you.”
“Her brother asked us to say hello,” Vasilii said.
“Agh!” The woman snorted in disbelief. “What do you want?”
“Peter said she could tell us about those old-time charms,” he said, “and about those Islands of Four Mountains people.”
“I can do that,” she said. “Haqada!” and she ordered us to follow her inside.
I bet she wasn’t singing when we came ashore, I thought.
Like Peter’s house, this one consisted of a small room that led into the main living area where light came through two small windows. These were far cleaner than in Peter’s home. Still, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. I saw that every surface that could be polished was polished and everything that could be cleaned was spotless. I instinctively checked my shoes for dirt. The woman directed us to a table and two wooden chairs whose backs were protected with red-and-white gingham slipcovers. The table was covered with a white oilcloth, crisscrossed with pale-yellow lines. A vase held a bouquet of dark-blue violets. The woman went to a counter where she poured dark tea from a teapot into two china cups. She added hot water from the spout of a fancy brass container with an oval body. A samovar, I recalled from somewhere, probably some book I had read. She placed the cups on matching saucers and set one before each of us. She was being surprisingly nice after the grumpy way she had greeted us. She even brought two plates, one with sliced bread and the other with smoked salmon.
“Thank you,” I sa
id.
Vasilii crossed himself before he took a sip of tea. Then he began by telling how Peter had relayed the story of the boy who had drowned when his boat capsized. He had barely started when the woman interrupted. “He lost his magic charm,” she said. “That’s why he died. Why he was killed that way, poor thing. It was that woman who wanted that thing, you know.”
“What woman?”
“Volcano Woman. Chuginada.” She pronounced it something like Choo-gee-náh-thaxh. “Old Lady Fevronia can tell you. People say she saw her.”
Who saw whom? I wondered.
“She knows a lot of those old-time things, that lady, she does. You don’t know where she lives?” And the woman cackled as though this was the funniest thing in the world.
“No,” said Vasilii, “we don’t,” and he drank more of his tea and waited.
He seemed to take the long pauses of silence in stride. I found them uncomfortable. I was getting antsy and almost suggested we leave when a curtain covering a doorframe was pulled back and I was looking at the oldest woman I had ever seen in my life. There were deep lines all over her face, like the ground had dried and left all these cracks. When I looked into her eyes, I instinctively stood up. The Elder Cousin might have remarked that this was simply good manners, but it was more. Vasilii also got to his feet as the tiny hunched woman made her way toward us. She was dressed entirely in black, with a knitted shawl draped across her shoulders. She placed a hand on the back of Vasilii’s chair. He turned it slightly and stepped to one side. She looked at him. Her eyes widened.
“Chief,” she said with certainty in her voice, “not priest.”
Vasilii stared at her. He snapped to as she started to sit down. He pushed the chair in for her.
“Sit down,” she said softly, and he brought another chair to the table. I was still gaping a bit when the grouchy woman asked, “Chai, mother?”
Mother? I thought. She’s her mother? What a fake!
“Aang, aang, Galena.”
Galena set a cup of tea in front of her mother. The old woman lifted it and took a sip. She stared at me over the rim. I felt exposed and vulnerable. Then she looked away and put her cup down.
What had she seen? What did she know about me? Time traveler? Mouse? Sparrow? Something else?
The three of us drank tea in silence. Fevronia’s daughter never sat down but stationed herself on the opposite side of the room where she tended the hot water and tea. We just sat there drinking tea forever. Finally Galena suggested in a voice that sounded like an order, “Ask her!”
But before either of us could speak, the old woman turned in her seat and took a sack from a nearby shelf. She removed what looked like most of a dead bird and started chewing on it. I jerked and splashed tea on the table. The elderly woman smiled slightly while Galena scolded, “Mother! Ayaqaa! Such a show-off!”
While Galena quickly wiped up the spilled tea with a clean cloth, Vasilii explained. “It’s a puffin skin. She’s softening it with her teeth after it’s been cured. It will be used in a bird-skin parka. You don’t see many of them anymore. There are very few people who can make them.”
Fevronia placed the bird skin on her lap, turned, and took another cloth sack from the shelf. From it she withdrew what looked like the dark feathered skin of an enormous bird. But then I saw arms and cuffs, and a neck opening with a collar. The whole thing shimmered the way feathers do in sunlight.
“Cormorant skins,” Vasilii said. “It’s a bird skin parka. It’s reversible. Feathers inside when it’s cold and outside when it’s raining.”
And when it’s both? I wondered. Fevronia carefully folded the bird skin parka and returned it to the shelf in his sack.
“They’re wondering about that boy,” Galena said to her mother. “The one from Kagamil. Him and his daddy, poor things.”
Fevronia didn’t say anything. She just looked at Vasilii.
“They called him Chakna, that boy,” Galena said. “It means “Stink” or “Stinky.”
“Little Wren,” Fevronia whispered. “That was his name. He was my grandfather’s brother.”
“The boy?” I asked.
“His father,” Fevronia answered. “He was called Little Wren because he was small.”
“You never told me he was your relative!” her daughter said.
Her mother gave a quiet shrug. She looked at me. “If you go there, tell him his brother’s granddaughter sends him greetings. I would like that.”
“What do you mean?” her daughter protested. “Nobody lives out there anymore. Crazy lady, what are you telling them?”
“How do we get there?” Vasilii asked.
She looked directly into his eyes as though she was measuring his readiness.
“Go to Chuginadak,” the Old Woman said finally. “They’ll be at Chuginadak picking berries.”
“Crazy lady!” her daughter interrupted. “Fox trappers go there sometimes, that Chuginadak, but that volcano is always busy. People don’t go there to pick berries. It’s too dangerous.”
Fevronia rattled her empty teacup on the saucer and Galena took it to the samovar for refilling. With her daughter on the other side of the room, she asked, “Where is she at?”
“Who?” Vasilii asked.
“I heard you were traveling with that girl.”
12. Anna
The chief’s aunt in whose house Booker and I were to stay was a friendly woman who made me feel right at home. Her husband and son were away on a sea otter hunt and wouldn’t be back for a month or more. She said she had everything under control, so I walked down to the beach and looked out over the water. The Islands of Four Mountains were like pale-blue shadows in the distance.
Was it possible, I wondered, that somewhere among them there was a boy waiting for what I could bring him?
I remembered the man by the creek at Unalaska, Chris Hansen. Hansen was a common name. Dad owned a very old framed photograph of a thin man leaning against the hull of an upturned skiff and smiling. I wished I had studied it more closely.
Even if I don’t know Norwegian, I might be more like him than like any of my Unanga ancestors, I thought. I would talk with him when we got back, see if he was who I thought he might be. See what he said.
Thinking of that photo reminded me of my mother’s photograph. It was strange to think of that photo without being in trouble. I had always used it to make myself feel better when I got bawled out at school. I could still see it in my mind’s eye, but now that other woman floated in front of it. Maybe she was off to Akutan and her husband. Out of my life. Again. Or maybe she was still there at Gram’s, waiting, if what Booker had said about time was true. Had Gram really driven her away? Then why had she come back? Mrs. Skagit had lied, I was sure of that, but I still wondered why she had returned.
I took out the pouch and poured the fox onto my hand. The carving had always been warm but now it was almost hot. Holding it was one thing that felt real. I held it up close and stared into its eyes.
“We’ll get you home,” I said as a seagull swept overhead and let out a cry like a sharp knife. The fox slipped through my fingers. I caught it in the air and felt it twist toward the Four Mountains.
By midmorning the three of us were back at the church for another service. I didn’t need the carved fox acting up, so I had hidden the pouch beside some heavy grass. All the villagers had dressed in their finest clothing. As Vasilii slipped his robe over his head, I realized that everybody involved in the service somehow changed into somebody else. They weren’t the same people I saw every day on the street. I thought of our ancestors putting on masks for special occasions. Maybe what they did and what we did in church weren’t so different. I kept my eyes on Vasilii, but not once did I get a smile or a wink. Twice, in fact, he seemed to forget where he was and had to be prodded by one of the older robed attendants.
“That old lady was asking for you,” he said to me when we stood outside as the last of the parishioners returned home or left to join Vasilii�
��s father and his primary attendants at the chief’s home for tea and refreshments. Us “kids” were expected to follow shortly.
“Fevronia?”
“Yes, and she said something else. That boy who drowned, his father was some sort of great uncle to her.”
Booker joined us and added, “She was in the front row, dressed all in black. She looked like a raven.”
Vasilii smiled. “She made me nervous, like she knew I was about to make a mistake or something. I’ll be right back.” He walked over to a young man standing by himself.
“When we were at her house,” Booker said, “she talked like this uncle was still alive and living out on that island. Weird.”
Vasilii gave the young man a friendly slap on his back and returned to us.
“Do you have the fox, Anna?”
I walked to where I had tucked it safely away. I handed the carving to Vasilii. He nodded at the young man who came forward.
