The Sea Runners (15 page)

Braaf, at the onset of their second day after: "I know what Valhalla is now. It's where I never again hear Melander say, 'Tumble up.'"

Wennberg, midway of their third day and yet another Melander monologue: "Melander, I wonder you don't swallow your tongue sometime for the savor of it."

***

"Good job of work done": Karlsson, startling them all after they hefted ashore into the spruce forest at the close of their fourth straight progressful day.

The river shoved through the land like a glacier of slate. Had the surface been solid as its turbid appearance—one newcoming settler or another inaugurated the jest that in the season of runoff not much more mud content was needed to make the flow pedestriable—a man crossing here from its north shore toward its south would have had to hike steadily for a full hour. That man would have stridden the Columbia, largest river of the Pacific shore of the Americas, and there on the south bank he would have stamped silt from his feet at Astoria.

Another frontier pinspot of great name, Astoria. John Jacob Astor's wealth, not to say intentions for more of it, installed the settlement as a fur depot in 1811, The ensuing four decades had not made it much more of a place: post office, customs house, long T-shaped dock straddling into the tidal flow, cooperage, Methodist church, handful of stores and saloons catering to the settlers sprinkled south and north of the river's mouth, several tall Yankee houses along the foot of a shaggy Columbia headland. A rain-soaked shore-sitting little colony, each low tide showing the shins of the town. Yet also the recognized port of America's Pacific Northwest, tapping the twelve-hundred-mile-long Columbia and its tributaries like a cup hung to gather the sugar of a
giant maple. Month by month a dozen or fifteen vessels plied here. So ves, if through whatever unlikelihood you were to find yourself at Astoria, you could handily enough aim yourself Oil ward into the world.

This night, the four canoe-going Swedes are encamped not quite half the water distance downcoast from New Archangel to that long T of dock at Astoria.

Trying to yawn the last of sleep from himself, Karlsson eased out through the trees toward the island's edge. As usual now that the voyaging rhythm had worked its way into him, lie was the first awake and the earliest to wonder about weather.

This morning he found that the Pacific lay gray with cold, but no storm sheeted up from its surface. Along the beach ahead a small surf pushed ashore, idly rinsed back on itself: low tide. A pair of cormorants amid a spill of tidal boulders hung their black wings wide. High tip on the beach gravel a hundred or so strides away the sharp-pro wed canoe rested, as if having plowed to a furrow end and now waiting to be turned for another day's tilling.

Between one eyeblink and the next, Karlsson's brain filled with the jolt of what he was seeing. He anil Melander and Wennberg and Braaf had carried their canoe as ever into the cover of forest for the night: this canoe sat larger by half: the painted designs entwining the prow were different, simpler, bolder: and Karlsson by now was in crouched retreat toward the trees, staring
hard at the wall of forest beyond the canoe for any sign that lie had been detected.

Putting his fingers lightly across the tall man's mouth to signal silence, he roused Melander. Melander snapped awake with the quickness learned of arising to some thousands of shipboard watches and crept behind Karlsson away from the camp.

"A big one," Karlsson husked when they had sidled far enough not to be heard. "Eight, ten paddlemen at least."

"Cabbageheads, Why aren't they holed up for the winter like the Sitka Koloshes? What do they think this is, the Midsummer's Day yachting? Aye?"

"We had better hope they're not going to hole up here."

"No, just one canoe, they couldn't be. Seal hunters or a fishing crew or some such, out for a few days. Cabbage-heads."

"You already called them that, and they're still here."

"Aye, so. What's your guess, can we get our canoe to the water and slide away without them seeing us?"

"No."

"No. Outwait them without them tumbling onto us?"

"No."

"No." Melander grimaced as if his echo word had hurt his ears, then squinted back toward camp. "You greet Braaf, I'll do Wennberg."

Again fingers of silence awoke lips. Again Karlsson told the situation.

When his words had sunk into Wennberg and Braaf,
Melander sent Braaf, the most accomplished slinker among them, to keep watch on the beach.

Then Melander glanced at Karlsson, and Karlsson, after hesitation, nodded. "Yes, it needs to be him."

The pair of them turned their eyes to Wennberg. Melander asked: "How are you at turning yourself into a sand crab?"

Wennberg's debut into the art of creeping also marked the first occasion in his life that he ever regretted his strength. Regretted, rather, that more of his power wasn't directly beneath his nose, as Melander's was. "This one is your line of country, Wennberg. You need to do it, or those people of that canoe will snore tonight on our skulls." And Karlsson in his rock-faced way agreeing that only Wennberg possessed the muscle for it; Wennberg could not choose between fury at Karlsson for siding with Melander or ire at him for doing it dubiously. Every lens of clarity, Wennberg believed, bad slipped from his life when he leagued himself with this muddle of—

A stone nicked Wennberg's right knee and cued his attention back to creeping. Here in the first eighty yards or so he had cover of a sort, a rib of rock and drift logs behind which he managed to scuttle, chest almost down to his knees, without showing himself, much. But next lay a naked distance of thirty yards. An angle across and up the beach, to the unfamiliar canoe.

At the end now of his final driftlog Wennberg squatted dismally, rubbed the stone bruise on his right knee, and glared back toward where he had departed from Melander, Karlsson, and Braaf.

"Puny bastards," he muttered.

From amid the spruce there a hand flashed into sight—Wennberg knew it would be Melander's—and patiently waved him on.

Wennberg braced, unbundled himself, and in a rolling stride ran toward the beached canoe.

He ran with his elbows cocked almost full out and his head sighted low, as if butting his way. Under his boots gravel clattered wildly, avalanche-loud it seemed to him. (iod's pity, those fish-fuckers in the forest would have to be without ears not to hear this commotion—

Past the stern of the canoe Wennberg plunged, like a ball rolling beyond its target. He hovered an instant, selecting, then stooped to thrust both hands beneath a gray boulder wide as his chest. Gravel roweled the backs of his hands, his wrists, and finally his forearms as Wennberg wrestled the rock. His breath ached in his throat. With a grunt he brought the burden upward. Grappled it into balance on his knees, next across his waist. Now like a washerwoman carrying an overfull tub of water, turned with the boulder toward the canoe.

Five staggering steps to the wooden wall of the craft, Wennberg more certain with each that the gunblast which would close off his life was being cocked behind him.

Above the bow, just there where the interior of the canoe came to sharpness and prow began to rise—just there where Melander had told him to target, Wennberg
heaved the boulder within his arms to the height of bis neck. Then with one last grunt let it crash onto the cedar craft.

The crunch was not loud, to Wennberg the first luck anywhere in this situation. But the end of the canoe, thin-carved for its sharp slide through water, split open—and back from the rock as well, a fracture wide as the side of a hand sprung toward midship.

Wennberg gave a rapid glance at his sabotage, skirted the stern of the canoe and was running again, a bear in a footrace.

He had just passed the drift log when he heard the shout behind him, and he did not look back.

Ahead of him Melander and Karlsson and Braaf were putting their own canoe into the surf, Melander somehow finding time as well to urge Wennberg to hurry and lend a hand.

They shoved with their paddles just as the first rifle ball tossed up water beside them. Wennberg in puffing agony glanced around to see two natives with rifles raised, others clustered around the bow-broken canoe, more oh God more emerging from the forest.

Karlsson, who had ended up in the bow, turned and hurried a shot at the two riflemen. It missed but caused them to flinch back from the bullet's ricochet among the beach gravel.

"Paddle-JesusJesus-paddle-paddle-paddle!" Melander was instructing. Another bullet's toss of water, this one nearer. The Swedes stroked as if hurling the ocean behind them as a barrier, and the canoe climbed a mild breaker, sped down its seaward side, climbed a stronger
wave and downsped again, then slid rapidly southward from the firing figures on the beach.

Out of the fear and excitement of the escape something other began to grope through to Karlsson in the next moments. From his place at its forepart, he sensed a change about the canoe. Its rhythm felt lightened. Not gone erratic as during Wennberg's sickness at Kaigani, hut lessened, thinned.

Karlsson turned enough to look straight back.

"SvenP" he called. "
Sven!
"

At the stern of the canoe Melander, almost tidily, lay folded forward, the upper part of his long body across his knees, the back of his head inclined toward the other three canoemen as if to show them where the rifle ball had torn its red hole.

D
EATH
's credence comes to us in small costs, mounting and mounting.

At first within the canoe, capacity only for the disbelief. Melander gone from life, the long coast snapping down the cleverest of them as an owl would a dormouse.

Like wild new hearts this shock of loss hammered in Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson, there never could be room for all the resound in their minds, any minds, it thudded around cars and trembled in throats, such concussion of fresh circumstance: Melander's body now a cargo, deadweight, clotting not just the pulse of the
canoe but of whatever of existence was left to the other three of them....

After, it could only seem that during tbis blind thunderous time the canoe sensed out its own course. When the thought at last forced a way to one of them—Karlsson, the displaced steersman in the bow, it happened to be—that to pull numbly on paddles was not enough, that a compass heading and a map reading were necessitated, the needle and the drawn lines revealed the canoe to be where it ought; where Melander would have steered it.

In that catch-of-breath pause, Braaf whitely burrowing the compass and map case from beneath the corpse that was Melander, Wennberg in a sick glaze handing on the instrument and container to Karlsson—in that stay of time, the absence began its measured toll on them.

Melander's sailor-habited scrutiny of the water around, every chance of rock or shoal or tide rip announced.

The reminding word to Braaf when he made his habitual dawdle in shifting his paddle.

Regulation on Wennberg's bluster, which evidently even Wennberg had come to rely on.

The musing parleys with Karlsson, treetop communing with stone.

Day on day and all the waking hours of those days, Such losses of Melander would be exacted now, in silences conspicuous where there ought have rung the watchword of that voice—aye?

***

Midday, the canoe ashore at the next southward island, Melander's three-man crew yet trying to unbelieve the folded-forward body in the trench of cedar.

Three men, each with new age on him. During the crossing Wennberg had blurted periodic and profound curses, hut now said nothing, seemed to be gritting against whatever slunk on its way next. Braaf, too, stood still and wordless as a post. Karlsson it was who stepped first out of the silence.

"We need to bury him."

They managed with Karlsson's ax, the gaff, and the cooking pot to gouge a shallow grave in the forest floor. Then, with struggle, they brought the body from the canoe. Queerly, lifelessness had made Melander greatly heavy to carry, even with Wennberg's strength counted into the task, while at the same time the sense of death somehow seemed to thin the gravity around Braaf and Karlsson and Wennberg. This emotional addle, not a man of them would have known how to utter. But now in each there swirled atop the dread and confusion and gut gall from Melander's killing an almost giddy feel of ascension. Of being up high and more alert than ever before, alert in every hair, aware of all sides of one's self. It lasts not long—likely the human spirit would burn to blue ash in more than moments of such atmosphere—but the sensation expends the wonder that must course through us at such times:
Death singled thee, not me.

They dared not spare sailcloth for a shroud. Karlsson took up the ax, whacked limbs from nearby spruce. Melander's last rest along this green coast would he under boughs rather than atop them.

Next, dirt was pushed into the grave. When they had done, Karlsson stepped amid the loose soil. Trod down his right heel, his left. Moved sideways, repeated.

Wennberg and Braaf looked loath, but in a minute joined in the tromp.