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If the cargo amounted to half a million dollars in modern money as one of Drusenin's first trips did then a quarter of a million was a tidy sum to be divided among a crew of, say, thirty or forty.
As dawn comes up over the harbor something catches the attention of the runners. It is the main hatch, the planking, the mast poles of the ship, drawn up and scattered on the beach. Drusenin's ship has been destroyed. The crew is massacred; they, alone, have escaped; and the nearest help is one of those three other Russian ships anchored somewhere seventy miles west.
Korovin had almost concluded it was a false alarm, when three Indian servants of Drusenin's ship came dashing breathless across country with news that the ship and all the Russians on the east end of Oonalaska had been destroyed. Including the three newcomers, Korovin had only nineteen men; and his hostages numbered almost as strong.
Hostages and scurvy-stricken Russians were packed in the hold with the meat stores and furs like dying rats in a garbage barrel. It was as much as a Russian's life was worth, to show his head above the hatchway; and the siege lasted from the middle of December to the 30th of March, when Drusenin's four refugees, led by Korelin, made a final dash from Makushin Volcano, and gained Korovin's ship.
For four days he followed the very shore that the four escaping men were to cruise in an opposite direction. About forty miles from the anchorage he met Drusenin himself, leading twenty-five Russian hunters out from Captain Harbor. Surely, if ever hunters were safe, Korovin's were, with Medvedeff's forty-nine men southwest a hundred miles, and Drusenin's thirty sailors forty miles northeast.
Korovin decided to hunt midway between Drusenin's crew and Medvedeff's. It is likely that the letters exchanged among the different commanders from September to December were arranging that Drusenin should keep to the east of Oonalaska, Korovin to the west of the island, while Medvedeff hunted exclusively on the other island Oomnak.
The panic-stricken sailors were for burning huts and ship, and escaping overland to the twenty-three hunters somewhere southwest. It was the 10th of December the very night when Drusenin's fugitives had taken to hiding in the north mountains. While Korovin was still debating what to do, an alarm came from beneath the keel of the ship.
And best of all, along the sandy shore between the ship and the mountains that receded inland tier on tier into the clouds the dome-roofed, underground dwellings of two or three thousand native hunters ready to risk the surf of the otter hunt at Drusenin's beck!
When they reached the shore, they could neither hear nor see a sign of life; but the moss trail through the snows had probably become well beaten to the ship by this time four months from Drusenin's landing or else the fugitives found their way by a kind of desperation; for before daybreak they had run within shouting distance of the second detachment of hunters stationed at Kalekhta.
Anchoring sixty yards from shore, not very far from the volcano caves, where Drusenin's four fugitives were to fight for their lives the following spring, Korovin landed with fourteen men to reconnoitre. Deserted houses he saw, but never a living soul. Going back to the ship for more men, he set out again and went inland five miles where he found a village of three hundred souls.
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