The Sea Runners (11 page)

To his own surprise as much as anyone's, Braaf proved the best of them at reading the weather. Long before even Melander, the one seasoned sailor among them, Braaf would know a change was coming onto the ocean, as if along with his naive robin face he possessed a bird's hollow bones in which to feel the atmosphere's shift.

And Melander, Melander's personal orbit was detail: Melander navigating, finding fresh water for the cask, fetching firewood, mothering the canoe and its stowage; Melander sew your button for you, treat your blister, sustain you with a midmorning piece of dried salmon, commiserate your ache of knee; the edge strength to hold all into place, Melander provided.

More than this henwork lie saw to, though. Subtract parts from this extensive man in their successive value
to the escape, the ultimate item would be his tongue. For Melander knew what poets and prime ministers know, that the cave of the mouth is where men's spirits shelter. His gift of gab stood him well with crews on all the vessels of his voyaging. Now he worked words on Wennberg and Braaf and Karlsson like a polish rag on brass. "Keep your hair on, Wennberg, there'll be supper quick as quick.... Braaf, it would be pretty to think this canoe will paddle itself, but it won't. Get the holiday out of your stroking, aye?...Karlsson, that surf looks to me like worse and more of it. Let's bend our way around, so-fashion...."

Could you, from high, hold to view a certain time of each evening now—the brink when dark is just overcoming dusk—you would see a surprising tracery of bright embers southward from New Archangel: the fires of each campsite of the canoemen. Only six or eight, as yet, but trending, definitely trending, drafting fresh pattern along the night coast.

"Too much smoke. We're not signaling Saint Peter from here." Melander once more. He dropped to his knees to fan the campfire into purer flame.

"You'd 've never lasted over a forge," jeered Wennberg. "A whiff of smoke tans the soul."

Melander calculated. Three camps in a row, this smoky debate with Wennberg. The tall man made his decision.

"You need to know a thing, Mister Blacksmith.
Braaf, Karlsson, you also. This I heard from Dobzhansky, that interpreter who helped me out at first with the Kolosh fishing crews. He came once somewhere into these waters with a trading mission the Russians tried ...

The mission had been contrived as retaliation against the Hudson's Bay Company for its practice of slipping firearms to the Sitka Koloshes, so both the Russians and the downcoast natives were in a mood to make as much face as possible. They inaugurated with a night of feast, and Dobzhansky found himself sharing a baked salmon and goathorn cups of fermented berry juice with a canoe chieftain. The pair discovered they could converse in the trading tongue of the coast, Chinook jargon. At once the native sought to know of Dobzhansky how many heads the tsar had.

"How many heads? Why, one like you and me."

No, the native made Dobzhansky understand, not how many
heads.
How many
skulls?

"Skulls? What would the tsar do with skulls?"

Sleep on them, the way Callicum does, the native said, pointing out to Dobzhansky the tribal chief in the middle of the carousal.

"Sleeps on them? Why does he do that?"

For strength, the native answered. Anyone who sleeps 011 a pile of skulls is a strong man, is he not?

Melander had not intended to tell his crew Dobzhansky's tale of this coast's people. He was not heaven-certain he should have.

But no more objections were heard about care over campfire smoke.

***

The water met their daily moods with its own. One morning their channel would drowse, lie heavy, with a molten look like gray bottle glass. Another, it would wake in full fret, white lids of wave opened by wind or current.

The weather could change with knife-edge sharpness. Once they saw to the southeast a pastel fluff of clouds, peach and pale blue, which was directly abutted by an ink cloud of squall: a tender seascape neighboring with tantrum. The join of continent and ocean seemed to excite the weather into such local targeting. Time and time, the canoemen saw a storm swoop onto a single mountain amid many, as if sacking up a hostage as a lesson to all the rest.

Once Braaf pointed out for the others a narrow white sheet of sky, very likely snow, north on the coast behind them. "Stay north and frost the Russians' asses," Melander directed the storm with a push of his hands. It stayed.

A thirty-nosed sea creature poked abruptly from the water, delivered the canoeists a thunderous burp, and sank.

"Sea lions," Karlsson called. When the school surfaced again, each pug-nosed head making steady quick thrusts as if breaking the silver pane of the water, the
leathery swimmers held pace for a while alongside the canoe, watching the upright creatures in it.

The past few days Melander had traded about with Karlsson, thinking it well that more than one of them be able to handle the steering paddle at the stern and that these waters were the place to do the learning. Melander once had been told by his Kolosh fishing crew that the practice of some southward natives was to dub the bowman of a canoe "Captain Nose." Accordingly, with Karlsson's move forward Melander bestowed the title on him, and Braaf and Wennberg took the notion up. For the next while, it was all "Captain Nose, Your Honor, what's it to be for supper tonight?" and "May I suggest, Captain Nose, that it's nice to see something ahead besides Melander's back?"

A number of tossful nights passed before any of them could become accustomed to the noise of ocean contending against coast. Surf expelling up the beach and draining back, the increasing crash of tide incoming, the held-breath instants of silence at lowest low tide.

Melander's unease went on longest. An absence of some sort nagged through the dark at him, persistent as the sweet spruce odor of their nightly mattress of boughs. Time and again he would come up in the night, sit a minute in his long angles, propped, and gazing at the blanketed forms on either side of him. Two chosen by him as tools would be pulled from a
carpenter's
kit, one who had chosen himself. Known casually to one another at New Archangel, but not much more than that. And maybe no more even now, Melander's plan their single creed in common. Behind their foreheads, still strangers to each other. And perhaps would step out at Astoria yet the same. Be it said, among these new watermen waited crosscurrents that, if they were let to flow free, might prove as roily as any of the North Pacific's. Wennberg of course was the oftenest source of tension, for after his manner of wedging himself into the escape none of the others could entirely put trust in him. Then too, as with many strong-tempered men, the anger in Wennberg that could flare pure and fast as pitch fire covered other qualities. A capable enough voyager, able to put up with the discomforts and as steady at the canoe work as could be asked—that was this blacksmith, if some incident did not set him off. But the trigger in Wennberg was always this close to click. As for Melander himself, the problem with so elevated a type is that ordinary men cannot always see eye to eye with him. Difficult to be totally at ease with a man who is thinking so many steps ahead, even though those stairs of thought may be your salvation. Similarly, Karlsson's silent style could be judged a bit too aloof. There seemed to be not much visit in the slender man, and less jokery. "An icicle up his ass," Wennberg was heard to mutter of Karlsson. Braaf? Being around Braaf was like being in the presence of a natural phenomenon, such as St. Elmo's fire or marsh vapors. Braaf simply was there, on his own misty terms, take
him for what he was. As if still in echo of their encounter on the parade ground, Braaf and Wennberg it was who were most apt to jangle with each other. Wennberg would suggest that Braaf had about as much weight in the world as the fart of a fly, and Braaf would recommend that Wennberg shove his head up the nearest horse's behind to see whether it held any more exact turds like him. Melander was able to slow their slanging, but never quite to stop it. So it was something to sit up with, the fact of these four separate lives lie had gathered under this sailcloth shelter.

At last, amid one of these propped sessions, Melander found the bother to him in the shoresounds of the night. He was listening for the creak of ship timbers, the other part of the choir whenever ocean was heard.

"Sweet porridge with cinnamon," Wennberg burst out one night beside the fire.

The other three broke into laughter.

"Laugh yourselves crooked, you bastards, but you'd give as much for a sweet porridge right now as I would. Trip your own mother to get to it, too, you would."

"Mister Blacksmith is right," Melander admitted with a chuckle. "Though with me it's not sweet porridge, but a feather bed in a sailors' inn I know at Danzig. I could bob in that for a week and never open an eye except to look for more sleep, aye?"

Karlsson nominated next, "A woman I remember in our village in Småland," he said slowly. "Her name was Anna-Karin and her hair was fox red."

Braaf blinked as the other three looked at him, awaiting his choice. "I'll settle just for three paces of headstart on each of you."

To do something about the sameness of their menu Karlsson suggested they try trolling. Out of the canoe, back alongside Melander, was let a line and a hook baited with a sliver of salt beef. On their second day of attempt, Melander yelped when the line whipped taut across his shins. "It's collect the whale or stove the boat," he boomed happily as he hand-over-handed at their catch.

Melander tugged the head of the fish out of the water against the side of the canoe, then halted his grapple. "Mother of Moses," he swore in wonder.

The other three peered over the side at the spiny, reddish mottled lump glaring up at Melander.

"Ugly pig of a thing," observed Wennberg. "What the devil is it?"

"Looks like a toad fathered by a porcupine," muttered Melander. "Could be some kind of cod, my guess. Well, how do you say? Do we try to eat it?"

No one wanted to be the first, repellent as the red snapper looked, to commit one way or the other. Finally Karlsson offered, "I'm the potman, and I'll give a try. But I don't know..."

"Hunger is good sauce," Braaf put in dubiously.

"It better be," said Wennberg.

"At least cut off its head first," Braaf prompted.

"Else it looks like it'll be gnawing on us before we can get to it."

"Eat it is," Melander proclaimed. "Somebody reach the gaff and heave the bastard aboard."

"I saw a bear make supper on fish once, near Ozherskoi." Skinned and baked over coals, the snapper had proved delicious, and Karlsson's relief was such that he was breaking out in words. "He looked big as a bullock. But he swatted salmon out of the water and peeled off just the skin with his claws, skoffed it down dainty as anything."

Melander pretended to ponder. "You'd ought to have invited him for supper tonight. He'd have been welcome to the outside of that sea beast we've just put into ourselves."

A moment of these encamped nights, cherish with Melander the scroll he fetches from its snug place in the canoe.

Hunkered within the firelight as Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson settle to sleep, he places the waterproof map case beside him. One by one, he polishes four biscuit-sized stones against the leg of his britches. Wipes his fingers down his shirt front. From a pocket digs a stub of pencil. Lays a square of sailcloth the size of a baker's apron, smooths it creaseless. Now extracts the maps and, like a Muslim with a prayer rug, unfurls the roll tenderly onto the cloth and sets a scrubbed stone to weight each corner.

Each time, this unfolding of his set of the Tebenkov maps riffles a profound pleasure through Melander. It is as if an entire tiny commonwealth has sprung to creation just for him. Sprigs small as the point of his pencil denote the great stands of forest. Tideflats arc delicately dotted, as if speck-sized clams breathe calmly beneath. Wherever the land soars—and this coastline, recall, abounds in up and down—the rise in elevation is shown as a scalloped plateau. Threaded among the shores and islets go the proven sailing routes, as though an exploring spider has spun his test voyage of each passage. The total of engraver's strokes on each map is astounding, thousands. Melander cannot imagine who among the Russian quill pushers in the Castle possessed the skill and energy for such pin-precise work.

In time since, a poet has offered the thought that it is within civilization's portions of maps now that the injunction ought be inked,
Here be monsters.
Melander's firelit maps represent an instant of balance in humankind's relationship with the North Pacific: after sea serpents were discounted, and before ports and their tentacles of shipping lanes proliferated. To cast a glance onto these superbly functional maps is like seeing suddenly beneath the fog-and-cloud skin of this shore, down to the truth of nature's bone and muscle and ligament. The frame of this shoulder of the Pacific is what Melander avidly needs to know, and the Tebenkov maps peel it into sight for him.

The first map, that of New Archangel and Sitka Sound, Melander particularly gazes at again and
again. Detail here comes most phenomenal of all: the exact black speck, slightly longer than wide, which was the Swedes' barracks is shown just above the cross-within-a-cross indicating the Russian cathedral. (That time when Melander unrolled this map to seek Karlsson's opinion about the best route through Sitka's covey of islands, lie had been gratified by Karlsson's blink of surprise. "You can see everything but the flea in the governor's ear, aye?") Melander worked much with maps in his sea time, but to lie able to trace from the very dwelling where you packed your sea bag, this now is a new thing of the world.

The coastscape at hand just now is not Sitka Sound, however, but the geography enwrapped in the third of Melander's furl of maps. Here these ten or so days south from Sitka the map begins to report a lingual stew, islands left oddly paired—Heceta and Noyes, Raker and Suemez, Dall and San Fernando—from the crisscross of British and Spanish explorations, these names Russified by the New Archangel mapmaker, then notated into Swedish by the pencil of the man above them now: Melander of Gotland gives his centered grin when the full hibble-bibble occurs to him.