The Sea Runners Read online

  The rest of Karlsson struggled and said: "Tell you when I've pulled the next map, it'll take a bit."

  Karlsson did up the fourth map. Reached the map case to himself and put the roll of paper in. Braaf and Wennberg were paddling steadily, studying ahead to Vancouver Island. As though plucking a new broadsheet from the scroll in the map case, Karlsson unrolled the fourth map once more.

  Same as a minute ago, the silhouette artistry still there like a farewell flourish, across at the lower right the last of the mapped coastline itself, that ragged thumb of land beside which Melander had penciled in "Cape Scott"; and then white margin.

  ... So now I go blind and say that I see. Braaf, Wennberg, forgive this, but we need for me to aim us as if i know the shot....

  Braaf put a glance over his shoulder to Karlsson, attracted by his stillness.

  A wave worried the canoe and Braaf went back to his fending manner of paddling.

  One more time Karlsson looked up from the map to the cape ahead, checked again his memory of Melander's sketched geography in the New Archangel dirt. Then said, offhanded as he could manage: "To the right, there. West."

  FIVE

  THAT bump of land at the bottom of Karlsson's final map nudged not only the water of Queen Charlotte Sound. Cape Scott was dividing, once and all, Karlsson-as-escape master from Melander-as-escapemaster.

  For there on the next of the coastal maps—had Karlsson possessed that cartographic treasure—Vancouver Island lies angled across most of the sheet like a plump oyster shell, blunt at each end and nicked rough all along its west with inlets and sounds and bays. An expansive and stubborn mound of shore, fashioned right for its role: largest island of the western coast of North America, dominant rampart of its end of what then was christened New Caledonia and now is the British Columbia shoreline. Nearly three hundred miles in its northwest-southeast length and generally fifty or more miles wide, this ocean-blockading island; and there along its uppermost, the vicinity of Cape Scott, Tebenkov's mapmaker has continued that thread of route followed by Melander in most of the journey of descent from New Archangel, and down out of Queen Charlotte Sound that threadline of navigation weaves, past the prow of Vancouver Island. But past it east, not west.

  Melander's penciling has shown Karlsson that he amended from the mapped line of navigation whenever he thought needed. To leap Kaigani. Again to shear across Hecate Strait. And Melander's last amendment ever, to jink among the islands that included Arisankhana. But now, here at the northern pivot of Vancouver, say you are Melander, a bullet once whiffed nearer your ear than sailor's luck ought to permit hut your concern just now is a judgment you parented in the pilothouse of the Nicholas—the judgment to sell risk then and buy it back later. Later is here, and it has spent your four maps, and Cape Scott looms. The formline of this vast coast you know traces off to the west; the outshore of Vancouver Island, then the Strait of Fuca, and next, last, the American shore down to the Columbia River and Astoria.

  But—"We're all of us weary. As down as gravediggers, even Karlsson and Wennberg."

  And—"Wennberg there. Any tiddle of ocean has him tossing up, costs us hard in paddling."

  So—"We've maybe had enough of ocean. Go the lee of this place, we could, aye? That navigation line has to touch to somewhere...."

  An eastward tilt, in such musings as these, do you feel?

  And so you/Melander in perhaps three days, not more than four, bring your canoe and crew to the stretch of Queen Charlotte Strait where the Hudson's Bay Company in the past few years has installed a trade post called Fort Rupert. Chance is strong against it, but perhaps Fort Rupert eludes you, dozes in fog or storm as you pass. In another dozen days along this inner shore you are rounding the southeastern tip of Vancouver Island and there poises the British New Archangel, the Hudson's Bay command port called Fort Victoria. Say, somehow, you do not happen onto even this haven. From here amid the Strait of Juan de Fuca where you now arc paddling, chimney smoke might be seen there over the southern shore, or the canvas of a lumber vessel standing forth against the dark coast—either smudge marking the site of the fledgling American settlement at the mouth of Puget Sound, Port Townsend.

  All this, then, is the sort of eventuating interrupted by that chance bullet at Arisankhana. Karlsson, with his nod west, has leaned into his own eventuating.

  At length ... we again saw land. Our latitude was now 49° 29' north. The appearance of the country differed much from that of the parts which we had seen before, being full of high mountains whose summits were covered with snow. The ground was covered with high, straight trees that formed a beautiful prospect of one vast forest. The southeast extreme of land was called Point Breakers, the other extreme I named Woody Point. Between these two points the shore forms a large bay, which I called Hope Bay, hoping to find in it a good harbor and a comfortable station to supply all our wants, and to make us forget the hards hips and delays experienced during a constant succession of adverse winds and boisterous weather ever since our arrival upon the coast of America.

  The line of route of Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson now was also one of the Pacific's meridians of history. In 1778 Cook, the great English captain, explored north through these waters, journaled this outshore of Vancouver Island, put names on the land as points and inlets won his fancy. Cook's expedition, and forays by the Spanish, and the roving Yankee captains who rapidly appeared, they arrived as an empyrean newness to this coast. Indelible people, these European and American explorers and traders proved to be, the broader wakes of their sailing ships never fading from the traditional waters of the canoe tribes.

  Like men following a canyon unknown to them, then, Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf began their descent of this Vancouver shore where past and future had seamed.

  ... It is like trying to bend rock. We pull at these paddles until we ache and always there's more ocean. We do make miles, Melander. Wennberg complains like a creaky gate and Braaf slacks, but we earn distance, more than I'd thought the three of us could, More than possible and less than enough, you'd have said....

  One thing only about this Vancouver coast was Karlsson certain on. Hut like the sum of what the hedgehog knew, it was one big thing. Karlsson savvied that they must not blunder into a downcoast Sitka, come nosing one evening into some fat sheltered sound where a blinking look would show the shore to be a sand street, and longhouses backing it, and Koloshes standing there just in wait for Swedes. None of such as that, thank you. The outmost crannies of this island Karlsson would rem the canoe to.

  And so looped them past Quatsino Sound, and around Cape Cook of the Brooks Peninsula.

  Nights now, the trio of eanoemen camped at places that might have been the forgotten upper crags of Hell. Ledges of shore just wide enough to grapple the canoe onto and wedge a spot to sleep... Grudging beaches, sometimes a gruel of gravel and surf, sometimes stone for stone's sake.

  The while, salt rings from sweat crusting in a three-quarter ring where the men's arms met their shoulders. Their clothing terrible, they knew, and their smell undoubtedly worse.

  And ran them wide of Kyuquot Sound, and of Esperanza Inlet where Cook left that wistful christening, a bay named for hope.

  Days, there was the ocean, perpetual paint pot of gray. And broken shore. Now and then a dun cliff, green gently moving atop it as the forest stirred in the ocean's updraft. Of course, rain, and with it, murk. No sunrise, nor sunset, only grayings lighter or darker. Not even mountains relieved the eye, for clouds broke off the peaks and weighted the horizon up there to flatness, a wall along all that side of the world.

  Three times it snowed, swarm of white from out of the gray.

  The while, their appetites growing and their bellies shrinking. The pinched shore and the snow days and the drizzle kept Karlsson from hunting, and fishing too came scant, a half-dozen smallish bass and two more red snappers the total catch of this Vancouver voyage.

  —And past Nootka Sound, named too by Cook; Nootka, where another colossal
Englishman, Meares, in 1789 brought Chinese crews to build fur-trading schooners; Nootka, where in the 1790s the British and Spanish empiremakers entangled like mountaineering parties clambering in from both sides of the same precipice, and nearly came to war; Nootka, home harbor of a vibrant canoe people who just now were passing the winter in their style of frequent feast and potlatch, a seasonal rain-trance of song and drama and dance.

  The constant push of the North Pacific was wearing deep into the three canoemen, up their wrists and anus, across their effort-bent shoulders. True, once in a while the wind granted them a few hours' use of the sail, and they had the greater luck that their creature of sea run, the dark canoe, was one of the most fluent craft for its task. But the task along Vancouver was no less remitting for such facts. This was slog, nothing but.

  The while, Karlsson showing answer to the single doubt Melander had held of him: whether lie had lasting edge. The biting surface to put against life, to strop and set to whatever dangerous angles were necessary. The Karlsson of New Archangel could be seen as cause to wonder a bit about that, and depend on it, Melander missed no bit of wondering. All very well it was to go about life as unobtrusively as the quiet Smålander ax man—some of that could be recommended to most of humankind—but what of when life began to go about him? Then would be the test of edge: whether the man bent or broke; or worked his salients back at life, made a thrust where he could, a nick as possible. Karlsson was not heaven-made for all that he needed do along Vancouver; spoke as little as Melander had much, at time when Braaf and Wennberg could have heard regular encouragement; let the deceit about the maps take up too much of the inside of bis head. But life is mostly freehand, and this Karlsson of the outmost Vancouver shore was verifying Melander's guess of him that under the silence lay some unused edge.

  —And past Sydney Inlet, and Clayoquot Sound.

  "Karlsson, aren't we about done with this fucking island? The damned place's longer than perdition."

  "About, Wennberg. About."

  ... One way or other, about done, yes...

  —And looped them at last past Barkley Sound, where yet another canoeing people read weather from the behavior of frogs and mice and had concluded this to be a wet, gusty moon of winter, a time to sit snug in longhouses yet a while.

  Since Cape Scott, the peg of Braaf's calendar had advanced half a month.

  Before the canoemen a channel several miles wide angled, and across its breadth another rumpled coastline, more of the dark world-long pelt of forest.

  ... Must be. Can't he any other. Can it?...

  Karlsson raised his contemplation from the compass to the water. "Fuca's Strait, this must be."

  "Must be?" Wennberg eyed him. "Must be is fool's prayer. What's the map say?"

  "Fuca's Strait. I was skeining wool."

  "Have a care you don't skein yourself a shroud, and ours with it." Wennberg waited—a count all the way to four could have been done—then demanded: "So, Captain Nose? Where're you aiming us next? There's coast all over the kingdom here."

  ... That much I know, thank you all the way to Hell, ironhead. It's all else I don't....

  "We cross right over. For that corner of shore." Karlsson pointed to a long reach of bluff which came down from the higher coast to shear into the ocean, a sort of bowsprit of land. "But we need go past it a way before we put in. It's places like that the Koloshes maybe roost."

  "Noah's two asses! Is there no end to the damned Koloshes? I thought Rosenberg had too many of them there at the back porch of the stockade, keeping them like hounds on scraps. But he hasn't made a start on the bastards."

  "Figure what the Koloshes'd say if they come onto us, blacksmith," Braaf put in. "'Noah's two asses! More tsarmen yet, and smelling like a heifer's fart as well!'"

  "Braaf, shove your head—"

  "The both of you, put your breath to paddling. Or do we squat out here until Koloshes happen along and prove Braaf right?"

  They made a scampering afternoon of it. The strait lay as a smaller, dozing version of Kaigani, and the canoe stole mile after mile without the gray water arousing. It even happened that Wennberg managed to stay unsick.

  Across, a high sharp cape with waves boiling white at its base took over the continental horizon.

  "What's that called, there?" Wennberg asked.

  "Cape ... Etholen." Duping Bilibin those nights at the gate had been short work to this endless piece of performance as mapmaster. "One of the old sirs, wasn't he? Governor when you were a young blood at New Archangel?"

  "The one. Cold as a raven, but a fair man. None like him, since."

  Off the point of the big timbered cape stood a sheer-cliffed island, as flat on top as if sawn. The passage between continent's wall and the island's lay broad as several fields, but Karlsson, trying to think Melander way, decided to he leery of any currents hiding in there. Around the seaward side of the isle and its guardian reefs he steered the canoe.

  Abruptly now Karlsson, Braaf, Wennberg could see ahead to the coast which was to lead them south, the last footing of their climb down from Russian America.

  Forest, as ever, but neighbored with rock. Talons of cape rock, haired on top with timber, clutched down into the bright surf. Everywhere offshore were strewn darker blades and knobs of rock. Stones of the sea standing in pillars, in triangles, in shapes there were 110 names for.

  No one said anything. They paddled on.

  Melander dabs that bit of stick to the New Archangel earth. Baranof Island he draws, and the Queen Charlotte group, and Vancouver Island, and fourth, last, this coastline between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the mouth of the Columbia River. One hundred fifty miles lie between strait and river, although Melander did not possess that sum when he drew, nor does Karlsson have so much as a cross-eyed guess of it as he arrives here to the top of this final coast.

  Even had either of these unfledged canoe captains known the total, the miles of this shore do not so much resemble those of the Alaska—British Columbia coast to the north, that crammed seaboard of waterside mountains and proliferated islands. In certain profiles, in the ancient pewtered light of continent and ocean alloying, this cousin coast does stand handsome; hut strong in detail rather than soaring gesture. Tide pools, arches of rock, the tidemark creeping higher on its beaches with each surge of surf—ditties of coastscape, not arias, here touch the mind. Almost, it seems the usual mainstays of coastline were forgotten. This shore's upper two-thirds lacks not only fetching harbors but honest anchorages of any sort; is in fact a rock-dotted complication of foreshore which sailors kept their distance from, unless they were the adept local Indians or blindly venturesome European explorers. Even such beaches as exist on the section the Swedes are reaching now come as quick crescents between headlands—bites that the ocean has eaten of the continental crust.

  In political terms too a coastline of erasures, contentions. Late in the eighteenth century the Spanish arrived to christen melodious names onto geography the local Indians long since assumed they had adequately denominated; next, the British editing severely over the Spanish. Some honest drama was gained in that last transaction. Destruction Island for Isla Dolores. Cape Flattery—just now momentarily rebaptized yet again by Karlsson as Cape Etholen—for Punta de Martinez. But some poetry lost, too: Point Grenville for Punta de los Martires. And even as Karlsson and Braaf and Wennberg have arrived to it, one more incongruity, American now, is being affixed over all. This upper-outside corner of the United States is about to be dubbed Washington Territory, making this ancient sea margin the Washington shore.

  Nomenclature and latitude and logic say in chorus, then, that here south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca the canoemen at last have trekked down from the crags of the North Pacific's coast to its lowlands. Yet there was that first view of disordered coast ahead, as if lower shore was not necessarily less troubled shore.

  At dusk's start, the paddling men were just to the north of a procession of close-set seastacks out into the ocean, like a c
aravan of cliffs and crags crossing the canoe's route. Older than old, as though preserved by the Pacific brine ever since creation's boil, these pyramids and arches of rock appeared.

  Day-worn as the canoemen were, Karlsson did not want to risk rounding this coastal salient into whatever its far side might hold.

  "Shore," he called to Braaf and Wennberg above the surf noise. "We've done the day."

  ... Moon. First in—God's bones, how long? Since New Archangel, and an age before that. "Stone on the stomach of heaven'll make the weather mend." That we could use. In plenty. Mend all night every night, I wouldn't mind, moon....

  Sometime in these days the canoe had slid them out of winter into not-winter.

  No calendar can quite catch the time, and the cluster of moments themselves is as little possible to single out as the family of atoms of air that pushes against the next and has begun a breeze. Yet the happening is unmissable. Out of their winter rust, ferns Unroll green. Up from the low dampnesses of the forest the blooms of skunk cabbage lick, a butter-gold flame and scent like burnt sugar. The weather calms, sometimes as much as a week of laze and non-storm. Seals bob forth in the offshore swells. Salmon far out in the Pacific reverse compass, start their instinctual trace back from under-ocean pastures toward the rivers where they were spawned and must now seed spawn in turn. Baja California has been departed by gray whales, the Bering Sea is to know them next. Geese and ducks and whistling swans write first strokes of their calligraphy of flight northward. To the north too, glaciers creak with the earliest of the strains which at last will calve icebergs into the azure bays. Within the white rivers, Yukon and Stikine and Susitna and Alsek, Kuskokwim and Kvichak and Nushagak, currents begin to pry at their winter roofs of ice.