“I don’t think you should leave this easily,” Alexei muttered.
The man paused his packing. “Do you think I want navy ships to come here and fire cannonballs into our village like they did in Angoon?”
Alexei winced. The bombardment of Angoon haunted the tribes of southeast Alaska. Several years ago, the navy had rained cannon fire on Angoon after a dispute in which a man had died and the government had refused to compensate the village. While no one had been killed, the village had burned, and the food stores the clan had saved for winter had been destroyed. The clan had survived, but barely, and only by relying on help from other Tlingit villages.
“Do you think I want to watch our homes burned and our food stores destroyed?” Tlákwsháa pulled the Chilkat blanket into his lap, smoothing a ripple in its fringe. “We will leave.”
“But where will you go? Did you sign a treaty giving you land somewhere else?”
The elder stiffened, his hands tightening around the blanket. “Your government won’t offer us a treaty. They say we have no right to the land. And even if they did offer, we wouldn’t take it. The other elders and I have seen what your American treaties did to the tribes to our south. And if we were to sign a treaty, we would have to leave our home and go somewhere far away, never to return. Your government says we will be paid for our troubles, but maybe we will and maybe we won’t.”
Alexei couldn’t argue. The Russians had maintained a good relationship with the tribes of Alaska, viewing them as equal trading partners and often intermarrying. But the US government had a far different Indian policy, and the tribes of Alaska were well aware of how the Americans had treated other tribes in the past. But unlike its treatment of the tribes from other regions in the United States, the government didn’t even acknowledge that the native Alaskans had any right to the land. The government’s official position was that since the United States had purchased the land from Russia, the Alaskan Indians had no claim to any of it.
“It’s not my government,” Alexei muttered.
Tlákwsháa’s gaze held steady, his teeth working slowly on the hemlock gum. “Isn’t it? You live here. You follow its laws, register your ships, submit yourself to its regulations. It is your government, and it is your country, but it is not mine.”
Alexei’s chest tightened. “Russia was my country.”
Tlákwsháa finally set the folded blanket atop the cedar box and looked him full in the face. “Then maybe you should consider returning to Russia.”
“I can’t do that.”
Tlákwsháa studied him for a long moment, his cloudy eyes once again seeming to see too much. “If it is your country, why not?”
Alexei opened his mouth, then closed it. How could he explain? He had been a boy when Russia sold Alaska. And his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had lived in Alaska for nearly a century before that. He had no ties to Russia, not when his family had built a life here. Even if the government did not belong to him, the land did.
“Perhaps I don’t consider myself American or Russian,” he rasped. “Perhaps I consider myself Alaskan.”
Tlákwsháa placed the folded blanket in another box. “One day, you will have to decide where you stand too, as an Alaskan. Now I need to pack.”
The elder shifted on the mat, showing Alexei his back. It was just as well. There wasn’t anything more he could say, and certainly not anything he could do.
He turned back to the small boat he’d sailed down from Sitka for the sole purpose of checking on Klawock. He’d send a letter to the secretary of the interior the moment he returned to Sitka.
The wind off the water pummeled his face as he retraced his steps to his boat. The ocean was awful choppy for sailing, but he didn’t care. He’d sailed rougher seas, and he needed to get back to Sitka and start asking questions, because he fully intended to find out why the governor had given an order to clear this island. Then he would put a stop to it.
5
Sitka; One Day Later
She was a fool for coming.
Rosalind stared at the sound, the waves wild and gray, frothed with tips of white from the raging ocean. She couldn’t see the ocean from where she sat on the log just inside the edge of the trees where she usually met Yuri. The mountains shielded the small cove in this part of the sound from any views of the open water, but the ocean would have to be roaring and angry to push such large waves into the sound.
In the summer, seals would often gather here, and she sometimes came early to watch them play. But there had been fewer and fewer seals of late. Her family’s company, the Alaska Commercial Company, hunted them on islands far to the north of Sitka, and the number of seals they were allowed to legally harvest each summer was rather controversial. Many sailors felt as though too many seals were being hunted and were lobbying Washington, DC, to have the quotas reduced.
A gust of wind whipped down the mountain to her west, driving rain into her face and causing her to shiver, even beneathher fur coat. The mountains surrounding her were covered with snow that started about a third of the way up, but other than the week of Christmas, when it had snowed three times, most of the winter had brought icy rain to the valleys and waterfront that quickly turned to snow at higher elevations.
She probably shouldn’t have come. Not given the rain and wind. Not given the fact that there was no way for her to be remotely comfortable as she sat atop the damp wood.
Not given the fact that Yuri would not be coming to meet her, seeing how he was over a thousand miles away.
Fifteen hundred, to be exact.
Though she wasn’t going to admit to looking it up.
And that just made her an even bigger fool for coming to a meeting place where she had nothing to think about other than the fact she was sitting in the rain missing someone she wasn’t supposed to be missing.
