Lost Face | Page 5

whole villages that refused to furnish the
fur-tribute; and they, in turn, had been massacred by ships' companies.
He, with one Finn, had been the sole survivor of such a company. They
had spent a winter of solitude and starvation on a lonely Aleutian isle,
and their rescue in the spring by another fur-ship had been one chance
in a thousand.
But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in. Passing from ship
to ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that
explored south. All down the Alaska coast they had encountered
nothing but hosts of savages. Every anchorage among the beetling
islands or under the frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a battle
or a storm. Either the gales blew, threatening destruction, or the war

canoes came off, manned by howling natives with the war- paint on
their faces, who came to learn the bloody virtues of the sea-rovers'
gunpowder. South, south they had coasted, clear to the myth-land of
California. Here, it was said, were Spanish adventurers who had fought
their way up from Mexico. He had had hopes of those Spanish
adventurers. Escaping to them, the rest would have been easy--a year or
two, what did it matter more or less--and he would win to Mexico, then
a ship, and Europe would be his. But they had met no Spaniards. Only
had they encountered the same impregnable wall of savagery. The
denizens of the confines of the world, painted for war, had driven them
back from the shores. At last, when one boat was cut off and every man
killed, the commander had abandoned the quest and sailed back to the
north.
The years had passed. He had served under Tebenkoff when
Michaelovski Redoubt was built. He had spent two years in the
Kuskokwim country. Two summers, in the month of June, he had
managed to be at the head of Kotzebue Sound. Here, at this time, the
tribes assembled for barter; here were to be found spotted deerskins
from Siberia, ivory from the Diomedes, walrus skins from the shores of
the Arctic, strange stone lamps, passing in trade from tribe to tribe, no
one knew whence, and, once, a hunting-knife of English make; and
here, Subienkow knew, was the school in which to learn geography.
For he met Eskimos from Norton Sound, from King Island and St.
Lawrence Island, from Cape Prince of Wales, and Point Barrow. Such
places had other names, and their distances were measured in days.
It was a vast region these trading savages came from, and a vaster
region from which, by repeated trade, their stone lamps and that steel
knife had come. Subienkow bullied, and cajoled, and bribed. Every
far-journeyer or strange tribesman was brought before him. Perils
unaccountable and unthinkable were mentioned, as well as wild beasts,
hostile tribes, impenetrable forests, and mighty mountain ranges; but
always from beyond came the rumour and the tale of white- skinned
men, blue of eye and fair of hair, who fought like devils and who
sought always for furs. They were to the east--far, far to the east. No
one had seen them. It was the word that had been passed along.

It was a hard school. One could not learn geography very well through
the medium of strange dialects, from dark minds that mingled fact and
fable and that measured distances by "sleeps" that varied according to
the difficulty of the going. But at last came the whisper that gave
Subienkow courage. In the east lay a great river where were these
blue-eyed men. The river was called the Yukon. South of Michaelovski
Redoubt emptied another great river which the Russians knew as the
Kwikpak. These two rivers were one, ran the whisper.
Subienkow returned to Michaelovski. For a year he urged an expedition
up the Kwikpak. Then arose Malakoff, the Russian half- breed, to lead
the wildest and most ferocious of the hell's broth of mongrel
adventurers who had crossed from Kamtchatka. Subienkow was his
lieutenant. They threaded the mazes of the great delta of the Kwikpak,
picked up the first low hills on the northern bank, and for half a
thousand miles, in skin canoes loaded to the gunwales with trade-goods
and ammunition, fought their way against the five-knot current of a
river that ran from two to ten miles wide in a channel many fathoms
deep. Malakoff decided to build the fort at Nulato. Subienkow urged to
go farther. But he quickly reconciled himself to Nulato. The long
winter was coming on. It would be better to wait. Early the following
summer, when the ice was gone, he would disappear up the Kwikpak
and work his way to the Hudson Bay Company's posts. Malakoff had
never heard the whisper that the Kwikpak was the Yukon,