The Sea Runners (10 page)

"What'll it be like?" This was Braaf, who took the chance to stop his paddle while asking. "Another wet woodpile like New Archangel?"

"Sailors' buzz I've heard is that it's a proper port but small. Sits on a fat river with Hell's own sandbar at its mouth. The Americans—paddle, Braaf, a scissor of a lad like you is sharp enough to move your mouth and arms at the same time, aye?—the Americans, recent years, have been coming into that country in numbers and they boast Astoria as tomorrow's town of this coast. But all wc care is whether ships touch at the place, and touch they do."

Not far into the day, Melander called a pause in the paddling, "Time for a listen," he said.

"A listen—?" Wennberg Caught on. "The steamship, you don't think—Melander, damn you seven ways, you said the Russians'd not come chasing after us with it—"

"I still say so. But maybe we'd do well to have a listen now and again, for the practice of it, aye? Close your face, Wennberg."

Melander cocked his long head as if counting the trees of the forested shore. Braaf sat as always but still as a gravestone. Karlsson leaned down toward the water to catch any bounce of sound. Wennberg concentrated so hard his back bowed.

The canoe rolled mildly, moved the heads of the men inches to this side, then same inches to the other, a slow tiny wigwag.

Melander at last turned his gaze, solemn, to Wennberg.

"What—" the blacksmith started, "is there something—Melander, d'you hear—?"

"Aye," intoned Melander. "Clear as anything." The smile came out, "Silence. Which is just what we need to hear, and more of it."

Melander captained them to near North Cape, some thirty water miles downcoast from New Archangel, before stopping. By then Braaf, the least accustomed to exertion, looked particularly done in. But he said nothing, and lent a hand in the unstowing and then in hefting the canoe into shelter among a shore-touching stand of spruce.

Melander stepped over to Braaf. "Let's see."

Braaf held out his hands. "Chafed some just here"—the skin around from the back of each thumb to the forefinger, particular target of sea spray as he'd paddled—"but could be worse."

"So arc mine," Melander said. "Three or four days it'll take to toughen the skin there. But then you'll be solid as horn. Braaf, you'll make a deckhand yet,"

The sail and mast, fitted onto a pair of long cleft sticks and pegged taut, were put up as tent. Melander had not said so, but he expected shelter was going to be the main service of their sailing equipment.

Wennberg was cajoled into building a fire, Melander apportioned beans and salt beef into a kettle, Karlsson cut spruce boughs to sleep on and spread the sailcloth
which would serve as a ground tarp and then their blankets, and dark brought night two of their leaving of New Archangel.

"Cheery as a graveyard, isn't it? The Russians deserve such country."

They were into their third full day of paddling beside the drab-rocked foreshore of Baranof Island, mile of whitish gray following mile of grayish white, and Melander thought it time to brighten the situation.

"Maybe we ought to have pointed north." First words out of Karlsson since breakfast, but at least he was going along with Melander's try. "I've been up the coast a way with the bear milkers and those cliffs are good dark ground."

"You'd see enough gray-gray-gray, white-white-white there too, Karlsson. Go far enough, up past the Aleuts, it's drift ice and glacier, and glacier and drift ice. Cold enough to make the walls creak. No, that's the north slope of Hell up there, the high north. At least credit me with knowing enough to point us the other way. Aye?"

Wennberg jumped for that. "That means you're taking us down Hell's south slope, does it, Melander?"

Melander blew out his breath. "Wennberg, your soul is as dingy as those rocks. Shut your gab and paddle,"

Of a sudden, rain swept the coast. Not New Archangel's soft, muslinlike showers, but cold hard rods of wet, drilling down on the men. The downfall stuttered
on their garments—
pitpitpitpit
—like restless fingers drumming on a knee.

The other three donned well-worn seal-gut rain shirts, but Braaf sat resplendent in a knee-length Aleut parka, bright yarn embroidery at the cuffs, a front ruff of eagle down.

"What're you, on parade?" Wennberg demanded, "Where'd you come up with that rig?"

Braaf held up a wrist and admired the sewn filigree. "Round and about, where all good ware comes from, blacksmith."

"Elegant as new ivory, Braaf," Melander put in dryly. "If the Koloshes come pestering again, we'll tell them you're the crown prince, aye? Now paddle."

That day and most of the one after it took them to reach the southmost tip of Baranof Island, Cape Ommaney.

In that time Braaf and Wennberg and Melander began to realize, though it never would have occurred to the first two to offer it aloud and even Melander found the sentiment a bit unwieldy to frame into words, that in all their seasons at New Archangel they never really had put eyes on the Alaskan forest. True, timber hedged the stockade and settlement, furred the isles of Sitka Sound and the humped backs of mountains around. But here downcoast, Alaska's forest stretched like black-green legions of time itself, the horizon to the left of the canoemen relentlessly jutting with trees wherever there was firmament for them to fasten themselves upright on. Where soil ran out at the shore edge, trees teetered on rock. Fleece thick as this forest was, it seemed possible that every tree of the coast was in green touch with every other, limb to limb, a continent-long tagline of thicket.

Along this universe of standing wood the Swedes saw not another human—which was what Melander had banked on—nor even sea life to speak of, the Russian-American Company's "marine Cossacks," the Aleuts, long since having harvested these waters bare of otters and seals. What abounded were birds. Lordly ravens, big as midnight cats. Crows, smaller and baleful about it. Sharp-shinned hawks in tree outlooks. Eagles riding the air above the coastal lines of bluff, patrolling in great watchful glides before letting the air spiral them high again. Sea gulls, cormorants, scoters, loons, puffins, kingfishers, ducks of a dozen kinds. At times, every breathing thing of this coastline except the four paddlers seemed to have taken wing.

Cape Ommaney steepened southward into nearly half a mile of summit, evidently detailed to hunch there as the island's last high sentry against the open water all around.

Perhaps the stony bluff put Wennberg in mind of the round-backed mountains near New Archangel, for that evening after supper he nodded out toward the bay between the canoeists' camp and the cape and asked: "What'd you do, Melander, if the
Nicholas
poked around that point just now?"

"After I emptied my britches, do you mean? So then, Wennberg, the
Nicholas
chugs in your dreams tonight, does it? Me, by now I think she's still anchored firm iu Sitka Sound and the Russians are in their beds with their thumbs up their butts." The canoe's progress thus far had set Melander up on stilts of humor. "But I've been in error before. Once, anyway—the time I thought I was wrong. What about you other pair, now, what's your guess? Are the Russians panting after us like hounds onto hares as Brother Wennberg thinks? Aye?"

"No," Karlsson offered. "They think we can't survive."

"What the hell makes you think we can?" retorted Wennberg.

"Because we're alive to now, and closer to Astoria each time we move a paddle."

"Your prediction, Braaf?"

"They're not after us. They don't spend thought on us at all by now."

Wennberg snorted. "We dance out of New Archangel practically under their goddamn noses and they don't even think about us? Braaf, your head is mud."

"They need forget us, or we'll mean too much to them. You learn that fast in the streets, blacksmith. The ones who rule never bother their minds with the likes of us. The provisions I took from the Russians, they regret. That they're short of our faces at work call, they regret. Maybe they even regret the Kolosh canoe gone. But us ourselves, we're smoke to them by now."

None of them had ever heard so many sentences one after another oat of Braaf and in the silence that followed, it seemed to be taken as truth even by Wennberg that whatever they encountered onward along this coast, and there might be much, the challenge probably now would not be Russian.

They readied in the morning to cross the channel from Cape Ommaney east to Kuiu, the first of the island stairsteps onward from Baranof, On Melander's map Kuiu could have been where palsy seized the mapmaker's hand, a spatter of crooked shores and hedging rocks. Melander said nothing of all this quiver to the other three, simply told them that he judged there'd be stout current up the passage so that they would need to aim mostly south to end up east.

It worked out his way, and by noon the canoe was nearing Kuiu, snow-scarved peaks rising beyond shore. Here, however, the map's muss of dots and squiggles became real, and the coastline stood to them with a rugged headland.

"No hole in the shore, aye?" Surf blasted across rocks not far off the point, "Let's stay away from that horse market," Melander decreed. Avoiding the channel between headland and rocks the canoe stood south again, the paddlers now working directly against the current.

In a few miles a cove revealed itself, but faced open to the weather from the west.

The next break in the shore yawned more exposure yet.

"Damn." Melander's exasperation was outgrowing his epithets. "Is this whole stone of an island unbuttoned like this?"

Two further inhospitable Kuiu coves answered him.

Dusk waited not far by now, and the labor of paddling against the current was sapping the canoemen. From weariness, they nearly blundered into a broad slop of kelp before Karlsson glimpsed it in the gloom.

By now the canoe had reached the southern tip of the island, a rocky point which bade less welcome than any profile yet.

"Bleak as ashes," Melander bestowed on this last of Kuiu. Then reached out the spyglass, to see whether there was any hope out in the channel.

Maybe, he reported. In the water beyond them stood what looked like thin clumps of timber.

Melander lit a pitch splinter in order to peer close at his map. Through the channel hung a thread of line; a ship had navigated here, testimony which was needed now because low rocks and shoals so easily could hide themselves in the gray mingle of water and dusk.

Melander set the craft for the timber clumps. They proved to be small islands, and on one of the narrowest, the kind that sailors said could be put through an hourglass in half a day, the canoeists pulled to shelter just short of full dark.

***

That was their first day of stumble, two stair treads of island when but one bad been in glimpse. Yet Melander and bis three-man navy somehow had alit secure, and after Kuiu the going smoothened.

In the days now, the canoe jinked its way southeast amid constant accessible landfall. The major island called Prince of Wales rests dominantly in this topography like a long platter on a table, smaller isles along its west a strew of lesser plateware of this North Pacific setting. Here the canoeists could cut a course which, while Melander said a snake would break its back trying to follow their wake, kept them mostly shielded from the ocean's tempers of weather. It granted them too a less hectic chance to learn some of the look and behavior of the Northwest coast. How a break in the forest ahead meant not merely gulch or indent of shore, it meant stream and possible campsite. How a bed of kelp could serve as breakwater, smoothen the route between it and shore even when the outer water was fractious. And the vital reading by Melander that alongshore, in a width about that of a broad street, flowed local currents and eddies that sometimes were opposite to a hindering wind or tide. It was not the voyage any of the Swedes had expected, these stints in among the eelgrass and anemones, but they eased the miles.

"New Archangel, there. What d'you suppose they're at, just now?"

"The governor's just done his whole day's labor—taken a sniff of snuff."

"Okhotskans're staring themselves cross-eyed at the bedamned mountains."

"The Finns, they're praying for it to rain ale."

"Trade boots with any of them, would you?"

"No. Not yet."

The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done. Forces hang invisibly there, tethering the spheres across the black infinite canyons: an unseeable cosmic harness which somehow tugs night and sun, ebbtide and flood, season and coming season. So too the distances among men cast in with one another on an ocean must operate. In their days of steady paddling, these four found that they needed to cohere in ways they had never dreamt of at New Archangel. To perform all within the same close orbit yet not bang against one another.

Meals brought a first quandary. Melander began as cook, but fussed the matter. Perpetually his suppers lagged behind everyone else's hunger. When he could 110 longer stand Melander's dawdling and poking, Wennberg volunteered himself. That lasted two tries. "You're not smithing axheads here," Braaf murmured as he poked at the char of Wennberg's victuals. Braaf himself, it went without saying, could not be entirely relied upon to prevent food from detouring between his lips instead of arriving at the others' plates. By the
sixth day, then, the cooking chore had singled out Karlsson. He was no festal prodigy, but his output at least stilled the nightly grumbling that one might as well go off into the forest and graze.

Wennberg's particular tithe turned out to be his paddling. Not built best for it, much too much ham at his shoulders and upper arms; but Wennberg had the impatience to take on the water like a windmill in a high breeze. Always exerting toward Karlsson's example of deftness, the blacksmith stroked at half again the pace Melander could manage, twice as great as the inconstant Braaf. Day on day the canoe pushed itself through the water primarily on the aft paddles of Karlsson and Wennberg, Melander would have preferred more balance to the propulsion, yet it worked.