The Sea Runners Read online

  At midday Karlsson called a briefer stop than usual. So steadily were they adding mile onto mile that he wanted only scantest interruption.

  They landed, stretched, peed, ate salt beef and biscuit, got back in the canoe.

  On and on, trough of channel. All of this was less willful country to face into than any of the ocean shoreline. Poised rather than bolstering. The forested ridges conforming the channel, and their kin-mountains beyond them, sat as if in arrest; awaiting the next How of existence maybe, the next pose to assume when the geologic clock chimed again.

  Karlsson did not know how it could be, but times like this, concern and fascination now were sharing space in him. The fret of this shore of danger and yet its allure. Thoughts forking either way, there. The Russians had a flag of this—an eagle, two-headed, peering this side and that. Just so, the lineaments halved inside Karlsson. Terrible, this chasm of coast. And splendid. Monotonous as a limp, this paddling. And clean labor.

  Half through the afternoon Braaf asked Karlsson could it be true that the Russians had buried the finger of a saint under the church of theirs at New Archangel?

  Wennberg snorted derision.

  Karlsson doubted the tale. How would any saintly finger find its way to New Archangel?

  Braaf pondered, nodded, hummed.

  If anything, green now crowded the waterline beside the canoemen more thickly than ever. When crows and ravens flew into this timber they disappeared as if gulped. The repetition of pattern, each green shape pyring dozens of long branches upward to a thin rod of top, seemed to have no possible end to it, simply multiplied ahead to circle the world and join back on itself here in this mesh beside the canoe. Braaf and Wennberg long since had ceased seeing individual trees, only the everlasting shag. Karlsson worked at watching for changes in this channel forest, but without result yet.

  "Don't make a melody of it, Wennberg. Fog's fog, it'll leave when the ghosts in it want to visit somewhere else." The sea mist which clung onto the forest and was delaying launch into the channel this morning had been the blacksmith's topic of indignation during the past minutes, Braaf now his moderator.

  "You'd know, you've as much fog in that head of yours as this bedamned coast," Wennberg muttered.

  "Drown in your soup," Braaf invited. He glanced somewhere over the heads of Wennberg and Karlsson. "Mast paint."

  "What?"

  "Mast paint, he called it."

  Still Wennberg gaped at Braaf.

  "Mast paint," Braaf recited one more time. "Melander called pea soup that."

  "Melander." Wennberg gave a half-hearted snort.

  "At least he was worth grave space, more than can be said for you."

  "You little pile of—"

  "The pair of you, douse it," Karlsson inserted quickly.

  "My regrets, blacksmith," Braaf offered. "Maybe you're worth grave space after all. But just tell me a thing, you've swallowed gospel in your time. Where is he?"

  "Where's—? Braaf, are you moonstruck or what?"

  "No, only tell me. Bible-true. Where's Melander just now?"

  Wennberg squinted as if Braaf had asked him the exact cubits of the universe. "Melander's buried, you helped tuck him into his grave."

  "Not the grave," Braaf proceeded patiently. "After. Away there."

  "Oh. You mean, where's he—been fetched to?"

  Braaf bobbed yes. Wennberg appeared no more comfortable with this translation than with the original query.

  "That's, well, the pastors now, they say it's a matter of how he'd've met judgment, that's all. 'Judge none blessed before his death,' is what they preach."

  Braaf blinked and waited.

  "Look at it this way," the blacksmith bid anew. "Those balance scales where the Russians weighed out the poods of fur, remember those?"

  Braaf nodded.

  "Well, then, you know how one too many pelts made the scale go down on that side, or one too few made it go down on the weighted side."

  Braaf nodded.

  "Well, the pastors say life gets measured out that way, good deeds and bad, and whichever the judgment scale comes down on, you see, a sou! goes either to Heaven or Hell."

  Braaf didn't nod.

  "You mean its all up to some weighmaster?" asked Braaf with incredulity.

  "Well, not, no, not just a weighmaster, so to speak. God does it. The pastors say."

  "What if it comes out dead even?"

  "Dead—?"

  "What if God puts a pood over here, credit to Melander, and another pood over here, his misdeeds your gospel spouters'd call them, and it comes out dead even, balanced?"

  Wennberg looked to Karlsson for aid, Karlsson shook his head. "Bible is your rope of knots, Wennberg, not mine."

  "I say he'd come out dead even, Melander would," Braaf swept on. "He'd have savvied any scales, known how to wink them into balance."

  "So where—" Braafian theology riveted Wennberg. "So where d'you think Melander is, if judgment didn't deliver him cither place?"

  "Somewhere between," Braaf reasoned. "17p there swimming the air, maybe, inside this fog. If a goose can, Melander could." Braaf turned his glance from the mist to a place just above Karlsson's brow. "Is there more of that mast paint?"

  ***

  The morning of what Karlsson calculated to he their final day ¡11 this stretch of channel, the highest ridges showed new snow on their timbered tops, like wigs freshly powdered.

  ... Rather have it up there on the roof than down here 011 us. Hold, weather. We've a job of work this day....

  But work different, and pleasanter, than Karlsson had been looking toward. At midmorning he shot another blacktail deer, out of a herd grazing where a stream emptied into the channel.

  Karlsson's first shot missed, and the second echoed so long it seemed to be out searching for Koloshes to hear it, Braaf kept watch on the channel as Wennberg helped Karlsson butcher the deer.

  "If those cannon shots didn't bring us company, smoke maybe won't either," Karlsson suggested. Braaf and Wennberg scrutinized from the channel water to the fresh meat, to each other.

  "I'll have mine with dumplings and ale," Braaf proposed.

  "New potatoes and little green onions with mine," voted Wennberg.

  The three of them fed on the meat until they wobbled, then took the rest of the day to cut and boil venison chunks for mealtimes ahead.

  While yet within what ought to have been sheltered waters, ridge horizon still solid to their west and ahead of them as far as they could peer, the canoemen the next morning began to meet swells. Long swaybacks which trembled the canoe under them with the strong ancient message: the ocean is waiting.

  Their afternoon began as if it was of the same wool as the morning. The identical long, even swells which lapped into the channel were ribbed all across Milbanke Sound; a ceaseless rumple moving across the water, the tautness of the ocean skin continually being tested.

  These steady dunes of water the canoe met well, rising easily and then dipping, without the staggers and quivers of the Kaigani crossing.

  "Ever I get out of this," Wennberg just had said, "the next water I want to see'll fit in a teacup." And Braaf bad just advised, "Whistle for it, blacksmith." Karlsson, keeping eye to the southwest where the sound opened to the ocean, saw then the first whitecaps flick among the swells, like snowy dolphins appearing and disappearing.

  "Keep steady at it," Karlsson said. "We're half across."

  But now each swell wrinkled white as the canoe breasted into it.

  Wennberg was sicker, quicker, longer, than he'd been in the crossing of Kaigani.

  "Wennberg, your sour guts'll drown us all yet," Braaf began in profound disgust.

  "We're not drowned nor going to be," Karlsson told him. "Paddle, Braaf. We've to do it, until Wennberg gets bis belly back."

  ... Sick as a dog 011 grass, oh God damn, Wennberg, why can't your guts be solid as your head....

  And so it became Braaf and Karlsson and their paddles against the second po
werful plain of the North Pacific coast; between them in the surging canoe, Wennberg half of himself and struggling to stay even that much; around the three and their slim craft, the hours of strait they had come, the hours yet to cross.

  Perhaps bring to thought that trick done with apple and knife—the fruit to be peeled in one stopless cutting, down and down the pare of skin coiling from the blade's glide, the red-white-red-white spiral stair ever more likely to snap away: but yet is it, for each shaving of coil twirls a bond with all the others, the helix holding itself together, spin on spin, by creational grace. Just such an accumulating dangle this Milbanke voyage became. With each effort by Braaf and Karlsson the canoe sliced distance from the North Pacific, making the journey just that much more apt to sunder or just that much more cunningly pliant, persistent—you would not have wagered which.

  It was full dark when they tottered onto the shore.

  "Tomorrow," came Braaf's voice. "What's the water tomorrow? Not another ocean like that, is it?"

  "No," said Karlsson. "Channel again, tomorrow."

  ... and the day after that, and maybe another and another, then it's ocean again, Braaf, bigger yet....

  And after that, Karlsson knew but did not say either, the expanse beyond the edge of the map.

  Days of rain, those four next.

  Of channel water like a gray-blue field very gently stirred by wind.

  Of clouds lopping the mountains, so that they seemed strange shagged buttes of green.

  Of soft rattle of wings as gulls would rise in a hundred from a shore point of gravel.

  Of fog walking the top of the forest in morning.

  ... God's bones, look at it tumble. Melander, you'd have had the words for it, you've maybe seen the like, but I...

  Alongshore to the southeast of the canoemen a fishing fleet stood in long file, sails of many shapes bright against the forest.

  As Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson ogled, the fleet toppled and was folded back into the water for the next stunt of surf.

  This time, not ghost boats hut round white islets, a pretty archipelago of froth.

  Karlsson, Wennberg, Braaf stared on at the vanishment, the magical refashioning—this version, momentary cottages shining with whitewash.

  The onlooking three considered that already the voyage had shown them ample surf for their lifetimes. But eruption of this sort was of new order altogether: so powerful the water in this tidal expanse that it sought to cavort up into the sky. As shown by the fourth Tebenkov map this was the part of the coast where the Pacific abruptly got two harsh pries against the continent, broad rough thrusts of water driven in like points of a clawbar through the offshore layer of islands. First of these shore gaps where the Pacific prised had been Mil ban ke Sound, the four days before. The second, and much greater, was here—Queen Charlotte Sound.

  "Tomorrow's work, that," pronounced Karlsson, and nobody arguing this in the least, they made camp.

  Usual now, ever since the ordeal of Mil ban ke, Karlsson waking to the peg of warmth between his groin and his belly. "Pride of the morning," Melander called such night-born rearing‹. "If your britches don't bulge at dawn it's a scant day ahead, aye?" Hut from all Karlsson could tell, these particular full-rigged longings seemed to be put up not by the habited urges of a man's blood hut by his nights of dream. In each dark now matters chased one another like squirrels, Småland and New Archangel somehow bordered together, people of gone years thrust their faces inside hi skull. Dream maybe was a wild sentinel against the clutch of this coast; perhaps demanded that the night mind of Karlsson hear its howling tales instead of brood on predicament. Whatever, all of it built and built through the nights into the wanting which he awoke to. Made him enter each morning in a mood to want any of a variety of things that were nowhere in the offing—a woman, time under a roof, fresh clothes, a square meal, existence without Wennberg. Just now, though, the one particular wanting took up all capacity in Karlsson. He wanted not to be captaining this canoe voyage, and more than that, not on this shore brink of Queen Charlotte Sound, and more than that again, not on this day of crossing that Sound.

  Karlsson lay on his side, waiting for the longing to unstiffen. Then rose and went into the forest to start the day with a pee.

  "We could make a wintering of it."

  The words halted Karlsson and Braaf in mid-chew. Carefully they eyed across the fire, as if to be sure some daft stranger had not put on Wenn berg's whiskers this morning.

  "Keep snug here, we could," the broad man was saying. "You're clever with an ax, Karlsson, whyn't we grapple together a shelter of some sort, wait out this pissy winter?"

  Braaf palmed a hand out and up as if to catch rain, gazed questioningly into the air. The sky over the three men was as clear as if scoured to blue base. A moment, it took Wennberg to catch Braafs mockery.

  "Hell swallow you, Braaf. So it's not pissing down rain just now. That only means it will tomorrow and the forty days after." Wennberg broke off, evidently finding his way back to his original sally. "Why not a wintering? Wait till better season, not fight this goddamn ocean at its worst—"

  Rapidly as he could Karlsson was fitting angles to a reply. But meantime Braaf chimed, as if to the air:

  "Wait till better season the way the Koloshes are, d'you mean, ironhead? Last time you were in the company of a few of them you ran your legs to stubs. What if spring brings canoe and canoe of them?"

  Wennberg cut a glare to Braaf, but the look he fastened again to Karlsson still came earnest, and more. Karlsson realized he was being met by something lie had not thought to be Wennberg. A plea.

  "—could get by on ducks and deer," Wennberg was proposing.

  "—maybe get us a milk cow and a few chickens, too?" Braaf was amending sweetly.

  The realization drove sharper into Karlsson. These plains of water, the sounds bare to the ocean, Wennberg was not merely leery of. He held a horror of them. Of their wide swells. Of the teetering gait of the canoe atop them. Of the nausea they pumped into him. Kaigani had invoked the distress in Wennberg, hour on plunging hour of it, and Milbanke Sound a few days ago must have revived it. These past days of sheltered channel Wennberg's new reticence had been taken by Karlsson as amen to the miles they were achieving. Instead it must have been a time of dread building silently toward panic....

  ... Ready to lick dust, the bastard ... "

  —want to roost, whyn't you stay to New Archangel?" Braaf was goading, "—just till better season, that's not goddamn eternity," Wennberg was arguing back.

  "Wennberg, hear us," Karlsson set out slowly. "Say the prettiest of this voyage, and it's still going to be grind work. But it has a bottom end somewhere, like all else." I le watched Wennberg's eyes. The plea yet hazed them, still needed the cold airing. "A wintering could be a wait on death, Wennberg. Braaf says truth. With spring the Koloshes will swim solid along here. And the first canoe of them will be apt to have us with Melander."

  "But—" Wennberg pulled a face, as if he already could smell the gall being brewed for him by Queen Charlotte Sound. "This weather, all the bedamned miles—if we'd just wait—"

  "The miles'd still be there," Braaf murmured.

  Karlsson dug for more voice.

  "Waiting we've already tasted," he said with decision. "We spat it out at New Archangel."

  Braaf turned to speculate just above Karlsson's brow. Wennberg cocked a look as if a matter Was dawning to him. Somewhat near as much as the other two, Karlsson had surprised himself.

  What he just had come out with was hot far off the sort of thing Melander might have delivered, aye?

  The least necessary instruction of his young captaincy was issued now by Karlsson—the need In veer well clear of that tideline turmoil and they set forth onto Queen Charlotte Sound.

  This day, sun was staying with them. Wisps of cloud hung above the shore, and a few thin streamers out over the ocean, westward and north. But the Sound itself was burned pure in the light; water blue-black, an elegant
ink in which every swirl showed perfectly.

  Along here mountains did not thrust so mightily, except some far on the eastern horizon. A lower, more rumpled shore, this, than the canoeists yet had seen, and the effect was to magnify the Sound—its dark sumptuous water and wild bright edge of surf, and then the blue dike, low and distant there, that was Vancouver Island.

  Straightway Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf discovered that between them and Vancouver lay some uncountable total of instances of monotony. Wave upon wave, the canoe was met, lofted at the bow, then let slump, in a half-fall rightward, into the water's trough. A new law of seagoing this seemed to be, stagger-and-dive.

  Karlsson questioned to Wennberg.

  Wennberg half-turned. He was grim but functioning.

  Braaf, though, announced into the crystal air: "Might as well bail up your breakfast now as later, iron puddler."

  "You crow-mouthed bastard," Wennberg husked.

  Minutes later, he clutched the side of the canoe, leaned over, retched. Then grasped his paddle again, cast a glare around at Braaf, and plowed water in rhythm, more or less, with the other two.

  Their crossing was seven hours of stupefying slosh, under the most winsome weather of the entire journey.

  ***

  "Cape Scott, off there," Karlsson called as they were approaching the south margin of the Sound.

  Across Karlsson's lap lay the fourth Tebenkov map, with etchwork that presented him an identifying silhouette of the cape ahead. Several inches of crinkled rock inked in series there, dragon's grin it might have been, precise miniature profile of the westward jut of shore now showing its outline in front of the canoe, and the broken rampart of sea rock that thrust beyond the cape.

  "Cape Snot, may's well be," Wennberg retorted thickly. "That map quits off, you showed us. So where d'we bear from here?"

  A forcible part of Karlsson wanted to shout out and have done with it:...Wennberg, where from here isn't anything I can know, we've run dry not just of this map but all maps, put your finger to any direction and you'll choose as clever as I can....