The Sea Runners Page 12

  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.

  FOUR

  DEATH'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.

  Firm dirt over Melander, they hefted stones from the beach and piled them onto the gravetop to discourage—more likely, merely delay—animals.

  In the unending windstorm of history, how Sven Melander of Gotland and the sea was put to earth could not possibly make a speck's difference. Vet to these three this forest grave seemed to matter all. They had done now what could be thought of, except—

  Karlsson and Braaf looked to Wennberg.

  The broad man licked his lips as if against a sour taste, and much white was showing at the corners of his eyes.

  "No. Goddamn, no. I don't believe in that guff anymore. Particularly after this."

  "Just do it for the words," Braaf murmured. "Do the words for Melander."

 
; Wennber greyed Braaf; Karlsson. Then in a low rapid rumble he delivered the psalm:

  "... A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.... We spend our years as a tale that is told.... So teach us to number our days ...'"

  ***

  The next bad time was quick to come.

  They needed a meal, and somehow pieced one together. Just after, crossing the campsite on one fetch or another—all the budget of fuss Melander had attended to now needed to be shared out—Wennberg clomped past the sitting Braaf. Stopped, and examined.

  "What's here on the back of you, then?" Wennberg demanded.

  Braaf glanced dully up toward the blacksmith. Slipping his arms from the Aleut parka, lie brought the garment around for a look.

  Across the shoulders and the middle of the back showed small dark splats, as if a rusty rain had fallen.

  The three men stared at the stains where Melander's blood had showered forward.

  At last Wennberg shifted awkwardly. "Maybe it'll wash—"

  Twin glistens of tears laned Braaf's round face. "Say anything, either of you," he choked out, "and Til gut you."

  After, Karlsson never was sure what the flag had been between Wennberg and him, how it happened that they faced each other, off along the brink of shore from the weeping Braaf.

  Wennberg began fast, as if the words needed to rattle their way out of him. "Karlsson, listen now—we've— Hell's own clung ditch, we're fallen in now. The lucky one of us may be Melander. So—"

  "You didn't trade places with him there at the grave."

  "What? No!" Wennberg seemed startled by Karlsson's rejoinder. Then tried to muster: "No, bad choices're getting to be a habit with me. As when I went out that gate with you damned three."

  "But out it you are." Karlsson scanned from Wennberg away into the forest, the constant shaggy nap of these islands. Tried to find concentration in the convoking of all the green beings, the way they touched each to each. Karlsson's head swam a bit and ached a lot and he was wearier than all the axwork of his life ever had made him, and here loomed Wennberg to be dealt with, and Melander dead, and..."And a far swim to get back in," Karlsson bought a further moment with. God's wounds, think now, how to halter this damned bull of a blacksmith....

  "Karlsson, hear me. Just—just hear me, will you? We can't go at each other like cats with tails tied together and slung over a fence. Not now, not after—Someway we've got to make miles along this God-lost coast. So somebody needs to load. Decide, this way or that, or we'll meet ourselves in a circle in these bedamned islands. Not even Melander's going to make himself heard up through the earth."

  Karlsson's weariness abruptly doubled. "So you're lifting yourself to it."

  Exasperation flooded Wennberg. "Karlsson, goddamn—you won't see a matter until it lands on your nose and has a shit there, will you?" With effort, Wennberg tried to steady his tone. Karlsson remembered the same ominous tremor through the blacksmith, the earthquake in a man when temper fights with itself, the time Melander informed him the cache had been spirited away. "No, not—not me to lead. You."

  As Karlsson tried to lay hold of the seven words he had just heard, Wennberg discharged more.

  "It's sense, is all. There're the maps to be savvied and tin's bedamned canoe to be pointed, and you've done some of so, out with the bear milkers. So it's sense, you in charge of that."

  Wennberg scratched his sidewhiskers as he sought how to put his next premise.

  "All the other, we'll just—we don't need a sermon at every turn, like Melander gave. Divvy tasks without all that yatter, we can."

  Wennberg paused. Something was yet to pry its way. Finally—

  "Braaf, there. He'd never take to me as leader. Be happy to see him left here to bunk with Melander, I would, but we need the little bastard."

  "And you." Karlsson someway found the mother wit to say this more as statement than question, "You'll take to me."

  Another effort moved through Wennberg. He lifted his look from Karlsson, bent a bleak gaze to the ocean. He said: "I need to, don't I?"

  Close by that night's firelight, Karlsson in kneel.

  Untying the flap of the waterproof map pouch. Bringing out the scroll of maps. Performing the unrolling, then the weighting of each corner with an oval pebble from the beach gravel.

  Into view arrived all their declension of the coast, an amount of ti ck across white space that surprised Karlsson, as though he Were gazing on sudden new line of tracks across snow.

  Only the top map of the lot had Karlsson ever seen, the one on which Me lander's pencil route took its start at the square house-dots of New Archangel. That once, Melander had been borrowing opinion, and here was traced Karlsson's advice, the canoe's side loop around Japonski Island and then veering down and down, at last out the bottom of Sitka Sound. The night forest of a continent ten paces on one side of him and half a world of night ocean thirty paces on the other, Karlsson could scarcely credit it—that there had been time when he, when any of this canoe's adopted men, existed at that regiment of dots, answered work call, dwelt in barracks, fought fleas, wintered on salt fish ... set honey for a gate guard named Bilibin.

  On the next map the penciled line hugged the west shore of Baranof Island to Cape Ommaney; then, as if deflected by what waited south, struck east to Kuiu. Because of Melander's route sketch in the dirt and the knowledge that their port of destination lay southward Karlsson had supposed that they were going along the escape route much like men shinnying down a rope—maybe a sidle of effort once and again, but the total plunge into one direction. It was a revolution in his thinking to sec now that all the time they were canoeing south they also were sidestepping east.

  More of angling down the North Pacific, map three brought. The Kuiu-Heceta-Noyes-Suemez-Dall skein of islands and the crossing of Kaigani Strait to the horn tip of the Queen Charlottes. Those days of voyage Karlsson tried to sort in his mind. In the waters along Heceta, was it, where they caught the ugly delicious fish? On which island did the carved creatures rear over Braaf? The great trees beside that dome of cliff, the water diamonds dropping in dazzle, had they been—? Hut the days of this coast blended like its trees, none could be made to stand in memory without the others.

  Karlsson unscrolled to the fourth map, the one showing how they crossed Hecate Strait, stairstepped the islands of the past several days, and then, just more than halfway down this chart, at a rough-edged small island with no name written in beside it, Melander's penciling halted. Yes, well...

  Melander. In every corner of Karlsson's thoughts, Melander. A painful stutter in the mind, him, his death, the cost to it. Melander with that abrupt alert face atop his length, like the glass cabin up a lighthouse; Melander who believed that an ocean can be fended with, ridden by a Kolosh saddle of wood and reined with these Russian maps. But Melander no longer on hand to dispense such faith. Too well, Karlsson understood that he and Braaf and Wennberg, none of them anything of a Melander and as different from each other as hip-high and upstairs and the moon, needed now to find their own resources to endure this sea run.

  At least Braaf had wrinkled smooth again. When Karlsson and Wennberg returned to camp and the who-ought-lead proposition was put to him, it took the young thief an instant to realize he was being polled at all. He blinked then and said as if it were common fact: "You've to do it, Karlsson. I can't read the maps and Wennberg couldn't lead his shadow. You've to do it."

  And at least there were the maps, these extra eyes needed to know the intentions of this coast and ocean. Glancing to the bottom of this fourth map, down from where Melander's tracery of route left off, Karlsson saw that the coastline was shown as far as the north most tip of Vancouver's Island. Cape Scott, Melander had penciled in beside the ragged thumb of land. Karlsson recalled Vancouver's Island to be the third of the landforms, those wheres of their escape, scratched into the dirt by Melander the day of last summer. The maps next would bring Vancouver's shore and then the fin
al southering coastline from the Strait of Fuca to Astoria.

  Karlsson slipped his fingers beneath the top and bottom edges to lift away this map to those next ones. And was fixed to that motion, as if the chill of beach gravel against Ins knuckles had conducted petrifaction into him.

  Beneath the fourth map lay nothing but that gravel.

  Karlsson drew in a breath which met his heart at the top of his throat.

  Came to his feet, yanked a brand from the fire for light, and was gone past the sheltered sleeping lengths of Braaf and Wennberg on his way to the canoe.

  There he dug through the entire stowage. Then dug again, and still found only what lie dreaded most, confirmation.

  There weren't more maps. The fourth map was the last of the scroll.

  "Narrow enough matter it was ... Needed to paw through every bedamned scrap of sheet..." Melander's words spun through the months to Karlsson, their shadow of meaning huge behind them now. "Skimpy bastards, these Russians ... Should have figured ... Should have figured—that the pilothouse of the steamship did not hold the further maps; that since the cumbersome Nicholas never voyaged far enough south to go beyond these four, the Russians simply didn't provide more. So Melander during his theft himself was robbed; had to glom just these four maps and clamber away from discovery. And then, being Melander, at once fathered a judgment; that when these charts of the tangled top of the coast were expended the rest of the voyage could be borne on by his sailor's sense; that he would bother the heads of the other three escapees with this only at some far-downcoast bend of time, when necessity showed itself. Through and through Melander would have worked it, and when time came would have made the further maps seem as little vital as extra whiskers 011 a cat.

  But Melander was stretched under that heap of stones, and Karlsson it would be to point the prow of the canoe into maplessness.

  The sensation going through Karlsson now was of being emptied, as if his body from the stomach down had vanished, the way the bottom of the fourth map dissolved their route of escape.