Meridian: Seasons of Want and Plenty, #3

By Kris Farmen

New ways to make a fortune and settle old scores.

 

A lie will travel around the world before the truth reaches your next-door neighbor. So says Ivan Lukin's boss at Fort St. Michael on the Bering Sea. But the rumors have proven true; the United States of America has purchased Russian America from the Czar and renamed it Alaska. Now, as the colony erupts in chaos, everyone has a decision to make: Do I stay, or do I go back to Russia?

 

Lukin, like most colony-born Creoles, has never been to Russia and has no desire to go. So when the young American signalman George Adams comes to him with a business proposition, the way forward is clear.

 

Amid the mayhem caused by Russia's withdrawal, Lukin, Adams, and a band of followers make their way up the Yukon River to establish a fur trading station at the mouth of the Tanana River. The Tanana is virgin ground for the fur trade, but they are not alone in the race for its wealth. Other Americans from the Telegraph Expedition have partnered with Lukin's childhood friend and new adversary Yosif Denisov. Led by the beautiful monster named Zia, they're coming for money, and for blood.

 

Based around real events in Alaska's past, Meridian is Book Three of the series Seasons of Want and Plenty.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blazo House
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215367780

Kris Farmen

KRIS FARMEN is a writer, historian, and recovering journalist whose work has appeared in Alaska magazine, Eater, The Anchorage Press, and the Alaska Dispatch News, among others. He lives in Alaska with his wife, daughter, and rescue dog.

Book preview

1

MOONLIGHT — RUMORS AND SUPPOSITION — ADAMS ASKS PERMISSION — A BUSINESS PROPOSAL — DOG HUSBANDRY — CONFIDENCE FROM STEPANOV — MINOR MANIPULATIONS — THE FINAL WORD — A CHOICE TO MAKE — THE SUNSHINE OF HOPE — TALKING WITH KURILA — CALL TO PRAYER — GIVING NOTICE — HOW NEWS TRAVELS — NIGHT AT KOLTAG — MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT

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What is the sky to a fish? The sun, the stars, the moon? Things look so different when you’re drowning. The girl is fourteen, maybe going on fifteen, with the dark hair and eyes of the mixed race the Russians call Kreoli. The water around her is icy as winter and it grips her chest like she owes it money. Her vision is blurred by the water and obscured by the bubbles of her breath and her thrashing but she can see the gravel bottom of the pool beneath the waterfall, the coho salmon milling about as they gather themselves to make the leap over the cataract. This cove belongs to the Killer Whale clan of the Tlingit, her mother’s people, who the Russians call Kolosh. The hands that hold her—one wrapped into her hair, the other at the base of her neck—belong to her Russian father.

The air is mere inches away; her panicked bare feet scrabble in the wet sand behind her. She screams out the last of her breath. It isn’t much and the few bubbles that shoot to the surface bring no sound. Again she plants her hands on the bottom and tries to push herself up but her father’s weight is a boulder upon her back. Her chest bucks and heaves for breath and the clamped seal of her lips finally fails. The frigid liquid that charges into her lungs feels like fingers, tentacles, spreading into her soul. She shakes her head to and fro, fighting it, but she is weak now.

Just inside the edge of her vision she sees the water’s roiling ceiling, shimmering under the wan gray rainforest sky above. She sees things in its quicksilver surface. She is so much deeper now and the water is dark and the air so very far away as she glides along the bottom.

Up on the surface her father feels his illegitimate daughter finally cease her thrashing. Slowly he releases her and rises to his feet, his expensive boots and trousers soaked from kneeling in the shallows. Fifteen years he has been in this colony on the far side of the world and the ship taking him home to St. Petersburg and back to his wife leaves on the afternoon tide. He has money now, and never again will he have to look at this miserable rain-soaked shithole.

He backs away from the body, drawing his coatsleeve across his mouth, then his forehead. Drowning someone is harder work than he had supposed. The sound of the waterfall fills his head. It was a mercy, in a way. Her life in New Archangel no doubt would have been short, brutish, and alcoholic as she hopped from one man’s bed to another, leaving a trail of bastards until she died of consumption or syphilis. There is a growing understanding that he will have to live with this act for the rest of his days. But then there are so many awful things a man must live with when he comes to Baranov’s colony to make his fortune. What is important is that his wife will never know about this girl. Zia had been eager to go with him, to see the land called Russia she’d heard so much about. And up until moments ago he let her believe she would be leaving with him. He turns and walks away as the tide creeps in to claim her. And the rain, the damnable incessant rain of Russian America, falls once more.

It was night in the winter and Captain Ivan Lukin woke in his bed, shaking as if from a fever and blinking hard to make sense of what he’d been dreaming. For the briefest of moments he was back in the rainforests of the colonial capital, with her, on the beach at that cove. Zia, he whispered. But he was alone in his quarters in the outpost of Fort Nulato. She had shown him many unsettling things in their long, twisted relationship, watching him as she did from the face of the moon. But this was the first time she’d shown him anything about her own past.

There was moonlight in the room, soft and milky through the frosted parchment window, but none of it fell upon him.

* * *

A lie will travel around the world before the truth reaches your next-door neighbor. So said Mikhail Stepanov when his workers came to him to ask about the rumors that Russian America was to be sold to the United States. The bidarshik and regional manager of the St. Michael and Kwifpak districts insisted hands-down that there was no truth to it. Rumors and gossip, along with drinking and adultery, were the primary form of entertainment in the colony. The winter before the Telegraph Expedition arrived from the United States, someone started whispers that a fleet of warships from the island kingdom of Nippon was crossing the Pacific to invade Russian America. The notion was preposterous to anyone who knew that Nippon had neither a navy nor any particular reason to seize the colony. But winters were long, cold, and often excruciatingly dull, especially in the stretch between the New Year and Easter. Folks had to have something to occupy their minds.

Even when word arrived with the ship that came to pick up the Telegraph Expedition’s men in August of 1867 that Washington and St. Petersburg had closed the deal, Stepanov seemed unable to accept it. He tried to keep the intelligence to himself, but with  the news on every pair of Yankee lips there was no way to keep it hidden for long.

This is still Russian soil, Stepanov reminded his workers time and again, showing them the extra Company dispatches that had come with the American vessel by way of the Russian Consulate in San Francisco. The official transfer of possession has not yet happened.

When it would happen was anybody’s guess.

The ship also brought news that crews of sailors had finally succeeded in completing the Transatlantic telegraph cable. The massive effort to string a wire across Siberia, then under the Bering Sea, and thence to California had all been for naught, and all the Telegraph Men were headed home. All except William Dall, the gangly naturalist who elected to stay in the country and pursue his scientific collections from his base at Nulato. George Adams had also expressed a desire to stay, which caused plenty of whispering around the settlement.

Adams had been away for most of the summer of 1867 on another trip up to Fort Youcon and didn’t get the news until his return to the Bering Sea coast. Soon after, he approached Lukin while he was working on the frame for a new bidara.

Captain Lukin, he said, which struck Lukin as unusual, given that they’d been on a first-name basis for some time.

Lukin was seated on an upturned bucket. He looked up from his work, wood shavings piled all around his moccasins. Yes?

You’re building a new boat?

I am. Stepanov wants to add to the fleet. I think he’s going to hire Pamilan to run a crew of oarsmen.

Adams chuckled and shook his head. It still sounds odd to hear you speaking English.

Lukin yawned and stretched his back. Insomnia had been the bane of his existence for years, and he’d been awake much of the night before. It was the usual reason—he couldn’t sleep because he couldn’t sleep.

Is this what you came over here to tell me?

Adams pulled off his battered blue forage cap. After two years in the colony his uniform was threadbare and patched. Lukin’s daughter Anastasia was sweet on him and had made him new moccasins when his big American boots had finally fallen apart.

He seemed at a loss for words, but finally spat it out. I would like to ask Anastasia to marry me.

This came as no great surprise. In fact, Lukin had been halfway expecting it. Anastasia had been in hiding up the River Kwifpak, along with his ladyfriend Anfisa Denisova, ever since Zia had tried to kill Anfisa the previous spring. It just so happened that Anfisa was his old friend Yosif Denisov’s first wife.

He had not shared with Adams the troubles with Denisov and Zia, and his more-or-less constant anxiety about keeping the ladies as far away from these dangers as possible. Denisov was the bidarshik of Fort Nulato, and Lukin had more or less run off with his wife, which had soured things between them, to say the least. In fact, Denisov’s demeanor had grown so intolerable that Lukin had actually been relieved at being sent back out to the coast with the telegraph crew. The problem was that it made it much harder to keep in contact with both Anastasia and Anfisa, beyond the occasional letter they were able to slip past Denisov’s watchful eye. And of course he missed very much the feeling of Anfisa’s fingers running down his body late at night or out in the forest during the day.

Alright, Lukin said.

Adams looked at him sideways. That was far easier than I reckoned it would be.

How do you intend to support my daughter?

I’ve been thinking of going into the fur business.

Lukin lowered his voice. Be careful who you say that to. The Company is still in charge for now, and it doesn’t tolerate private traders like the British do.

Adams sat cross-legged on the ground. The US doesn’t allow foreign companies to do business in American possessions. The Company has no future here at all with the place being sold. As soon as Russian America is handed over, it’s going to be wide open.

Lukin stared down at the boat rib he’d been shaping. He had feared something like this, despite the prevailing opinion on the ground that the Company would find a way to remain if the sale did indeed go through. And if the Company folded, there went both his job and his retirement pension, a sobering thought indeed. He had been a loyal employee, if not a contented one, for nearly thirty years now, and all that time was invested with the expectation of a pleasant retirement someday.

Go on, he said.

Our ship is leaving in a couple days, so here is what I propose. His eyes changed to the sharp cast of the entrepreneur. I go back to San Francisco where I will invest in trade goods. Then when I come back next spring we head upriver. As partners.

Lukin studied him, trying to get his head around all this.

Hell, Adams said, Both Mike Laberge and Jim Bean are already planning on coming back to trade. Mike tells me he’s partnered up with Yosif Denisov at Nulato.

Partnered up? Denisov is still in the Company’s employ.

That’s what Mike told me. I figure Denisov’s cagey enough to know that there’s money to be made here.

Lukin wondered how many of Denisov’s strings were being pulled by Zia. Day by day, the suspicion that she had promised him a child from her womb dogged him and robbed him of what little sleep he got to begin with. And there’s no reason under the sun why he and Mike should get all that money, he said.

One end of Adams’s mouth hooked up. Now you’re talking.

The idiom puzzled Lukin, given that any fool could see he was in fact talking, but this was how it often was with a new language. Where would the capital to buy goods in Frisco come from?

We would need some seed money. I get paid two years of salary when I return, but that’s only about eight hundred dollars.

Is that a lot? Lukin had no idea what the conversion rate was between the United States dollar and the Russian ruble. The colonial paper scrip he was paid in was worth only a third the value of Russian coin. And it was about to become worthless like an empty rum bottle.

It’s a chunk of money, Adams said. But it’s going to cost a pretty penny to ship everything up here, plus myself. And then we have to arrange to get more merchandise sent up the following year.

Lukin turned this over in his mind for a moment, then cast his eyes about to ensure they were not being listened to. I have some money hidden away.

How much? If I may ask.

Nearly nine hundred rubles. In gold.

In gold?

It was prize money. Less a few expenditures. The Company paid me handsomely for spying on the Hudson Bay men upriver at Fort Youcon back in sixty-two.

Adams seemed just short of dumbfounded. How have you managed to go all this time without spending it?

Riches sprout wings to fly away like an eagle.

Beg your pardon?

That’s just something Russians say. It means money has a way of evaporating from your purse. So I keep mine closed up tight.

True enough. So now with that capital we’ll have the advantage of your knowledge of the river. Is there any new fur country you’ve been itching to try?

A breeze stirred across the Bering Sea and slight as it was Lukin felt it as the first chill of the coming winter. He looked westward across the water to Siberia, Russia, China. The Company had for years been stringing him along with the prospect of starting up a new fort at Nuklukayet, the neutral trading grounds at the confluence of the Tananah and Kwifpak rivers. How many times had he stared up the Tananah, wondering what was up there? His father Semyon Lukin back in his prime once had designs to penetrate the region but the Dinneh tribes on the upper Kuskokwim warned him away, saying it was an unfriendly place, full of backward warlike savages. But times had changed, and were now about to change again.

Captain? said Adams.

Yes, Lukin replied. I do have a place in mind. 

* * *

Toward the middle of January, 1868 Lukin was in the St. Michael dogyard, helping the Koryak dogmaster Yuri squeeze out the anal glands of several of the males. Footsteps approached and they looked up. It was Stepanov. A train of four dogsleds had just come overland from the Kuskokwim and there were nearly twice as many animals in residence in usual. Dogs with impacted glands became so miserable they would barely pull. You could either whip them until they bled or you could stick a finger up their rectum and squeeze out the fluid to relieve the pressure.

Stepanov wrinkled up his nose at the odor. God, that smells awful.

Lukin grunted. A dog driver’s life is full of adversity. They were working on the anus of a Samoyed cross; it was his turn to hold the beast while Yuri inserted a finger and did the procedure.

At least it’s warm in here, said the dogmaster, which even got a chuckle from the boss.

Stepanov watched them for a minute, quite literally holding his nose. He’d carried on a love affair with Lukin’s wife Iriana for several years and by tacit agreement they avoided the topic.

Yuri finished and