Shpack is herein classed Russian for lack of a more adequate term;
for Shpack's father, a Slavonic convict from the Lower Provinces,
had escaped from the quicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where
he knew Zimba, who was a woman of the Deer People and who became
the mother of Shpack, who became the grandfather of Jees Uck.
Now had not Shpack been captured in his boyhood by the Sea People,
who fringe the rim of the Arctic Sea with their misery, he would
not have become the grandfather of Jees Uck and there would be no
story at all. But he WAS captured by the Sea People, from whom he
escaped to Kamchatka, and thence, on a Norwegian whale-ship, to the
Baltic. Not long after that he turned up in St. Petersburg, and
the years were not many till he went drifting east over the same
weary road his father had measured with blood and groans a half-
century before. But Shpack was a free man, in the employ of the
great Russian Fur Company. And in that employ he fared farther and
farther east, until he crossed Bering Sea into Russian America; and
at Pastolik, which is hard by the Great Delta of the Yukon, became
the husband of Halie, who was the grandmother of Jees Uck. Out of
this union came the woman-child, Tukesan.
Shpack, under the orders of the Company, made a canoe voyage of a
few hundred miles up the Yukon to the post of Nulato.
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