The Sea Runners Read online

  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.

  Yet seen another way, such a muss of languages is exactly apt, for everything else of this map number three sprawls in pieces as well. Dabs, driblets, peninsulas, spits and spatters, this portion of coastline when rendered into linework looks startlingly like a breathing moil of sea things, jellyfish and oysters and barnacles and limpets and anemones. It takes an effort of will, even for Melander on his knees, to believe they are going to hold motionless, either on the map or in actuality, to permit voyage among them.

  The four fresh beards itched. At New Archangel, because the Russians sported beards most of the Finns and Swedes had made it a point to keep clean-shaven. Now Melander's face and Karlsson's were barbed with growth as blond as barley stubble, while Wennberg's ducal whiskers came a surprising rich sorrel shade. Braaf sprouted a thin downy fluff of almost white. "Spread cream on," Wennberg snickered, "and a cat'd lick them off for you."

  Melander had started from camp to gather firewood from the drift piles along the top of the tideline when Braaf surprised him by saying, "I'll fetch with you." Braaf volunteering for a chore was an event to put you on your guard considerably, as when a parson might offer to keep you company on your stroll to a brothel.

  When they were out of earshot of the others and starting on their armloads, Braaf asked, "Melander, tell me a thing, will you?"

  "If I can. What?"

  Braaf gave him his upcast look and began. "You were a sailor."

  "I was that. Until the Russians set me to putting salt on fishes' tails."

  "I had a half-brother. Or at least people said he was, and we looked alike. He was years older, and a sailor like you. I'd see him on the docks at Stockholm when his ship was in. The Ambrosius, a brig, it was. Then I heard the Ambrosius had sunk. They said it followed false lights onto the rocks somewhere, England or Spain, one of those places, and every one of its crew was drowned, and then the people there took its cargo from the wreck. Do they do that, Melander? Set false lights so that a ship will come onto the rocks?"

 
; For once Melander's tongue held back. Finally the tall man let his breath out with great slowness and shaped an answer.

  "They are called moon-cursers, Braaf. On a black night they hobble a horse and lead him along the shore with a lantern tied to his bridle. The lantern looks like the running light of a ship, and a ship at sea will follow in because it seems a proven course. Follow in to the rocks. Aye, Braaf. They do that."

  Braaf nodded above his armload of wood. "I thought they did," he said, and turned back toward camp.

  The day Karlsson shot a blacktail deer came none too soon. Melander counted, of course, on appetites being built by the constant paddling. He had apportioned into the provisions the prospect that each man might eat half again as much as usual in a New Archangel day. But they all were devouring more than twice as much, and hungering beyond that; Wennberg in particular was proving to be a human furnace for food. Already the dried salmon they snacked on for energy while paddling was nearly gone, and the potato supply was severely on the wane.

  So the venison banquet was glorious, midday on the long slope of beach where the five deer had paused to peer and the biggest of them, a three-point buck, paid to Karlsson for that curiosity.

  "Never thought I'd miss all that Russian grease." Fat was a craving of them all. Even as the haunch of the buck was cooking over the fire the Swedes had put their metal cups under to catch the drippings and then spooned them straight down.

  "You can fetch us one of these every day, Karlsson, why not."

  "You can talk the deer into it, I will."

  After the feed Karlsson and Braaf sectioned the rest of the deer meat, Melander and Wennberg then dunking the chunks in boiling sea water to case them against spoilage. "A crime against good meat," as Melander said it, but the other choice was to lose the venison bonanza to the damp weather.

  By now, they could notice that daylight, what there was of it, stayed with them a bit longer.

  "After Christmas, each day gets a chicken step longer," Melander assured them solemnly.

  Even in these sheltered waters the currents sometimes twirled witches' knots in themselves. Once the canoemen watched as such a whirlpool took a drifting tree and spun it like a compass needle in total turn.

  ***

  The sky opened entirely one morning, cloudless as if curtains had been taken down.

  After days of hovering gray and cloaking rain the sun seemed a new idea in the scheme of things. The fresh breadth of existence was astounding. The nearest mountains stood green as May meadows. The next, loftier group darkened toward black. Then the highest, horizon peaks farthest east and south, were a shadowed blue as though thinning of substance as they extended along the coast.

  This fresh light and warmth replenished all four men. "Midsummer Day come early," Melander exulted. "Today we jump over our own heads."

  But through the morning the sun hung so low along the southern horizon that the glare made hazard of the water in front of the canoe. An hour or so of the ferocious dazzle left the men air-headed, sozzled with light.

  Melander squinted and swore.

  "Too much of everything, this bedamned coast has."

  By strong afternoon effort when the sun had swung out above the ocean the canoeists managed to make a usual day's mileage.

  "Braaf, you piss near me one more time and I'll rub your nose in it like a bitch pup."

  Wennberg's warning halted Braaf in mid pull at the front of his thighs. Thoughtfully he arced a look from the item of interest there to the blacksmith seated a few yards away. The look, it could have been, of a marksman calculating windage and declination.

  Across the campsite from the pair, ever so slightly Melander shook his head in message: No, Braaf, don't rile the bull.

  "I'll wait the day I've enough to drown you," Braaf said offhandedly and eased away into the timber.

  A dusk breeze gossiped here and there in the higher-up swags of forest. His wool britches undone, Braaf stood spraddled, any mother's lad with head cocked dreamily to the croon of the great woods.

  Abruptly Braaf stopped hearing the wind, all his listening jerked elsewhere. Standing there with his legs wide, Braaf felt the touch of being watched, as when the thief's timbre within him would warn that the instant was wrong for pilferage. But in these woods who—

  Braaf spun and met the eyes. Eyes big as his hands, staring at him from either side of an arm-long hooked beak.

  In a half moment Braaf recognized that the phantasm was blind, as wood must he: and that up from its carved stare squatted several more stock-still gandering creatures, a ladder of sets of eyes.

  Braaf broke to the edge of the trees and urged softly to the other three men, "Come look."

  Within and around an opening in the forest they found other acrobat columns of gargoyles, some atilt as if peering more sharply down at the interlopers. Creature upon creature bursting from cedar bole, these carvings annihilated reality, loomed in a middle air of existence as if the knife, adze, whatever edged tool shaved fantasy into form, somehow had flinted life into them as well.

  "What's it all?" asked Braaf. "Like those poles the Koloshes stick up, but bigger."

  "I'd guess a kind of cathedral," Melander replied.

  "Don't give us your hagbag riddles, Melander." Wennberg was reaching a hand up to inspect the joinery of the beak piece onto the column seen first by Braaf. Rather, which first had seen Braaf. In spite of himself the blacksmith was tugged close by the serene craft of these goblin poles. "Next you'll be telling us Braaf is the saint of egg snitchers."

  Melander looked steadily at Wennberg. "A kind of cathedral," he repeated. "Whatever it is that these people believe is said in these carvings. Like rune stones, aye?"

  Until now, insofar as Melander and company could discern in their clamber down the precipice of coastline, not another human might ever have existed among these shore islands. Take the matter to truth, though, and their journey more resembled the course a late-of-night stroller might follow through slumbering neighborhoods. In tribal clusters, perhaps as many as sixty thousand residents inhabited this long littoral of what would become British Columbia: Tlingits, Haidas, Tsimshians, Bellabellas, Bella Coolas, Kwakiutls, Nootkas, peoples often at odds among themselves but who had in common that they put their backs to the rest of the continent and went about matters as if they alone knew the terms of life. For behind the rain curtains of this winter theirs was a Pacific-nurtured existence which asks to he called nothing less than sumptuous. In Spawning time the coastal rivers were stippled thick with salmon, veins of protein bulging there in the water to be wrested, fileted, dried for the winter larder. Abovestream the wealth was wood, particularly the cedar whose cunning these people knew how to set free; under their hands it transformed to capacious lodges, canoes the length of a decent trawler, and art, this most startling of art. Tree-sized columns of carvings simply offered the most evident form of how these tribes told stories of the creatures of timber and sea, sang and recited them, danced and acted them behind masks, in chill times wore pelts as if taking the saga animals into themselves.

  Out of this vivid swirl wafted, inevitably, the reputation of these coastal people as canoe warriors and slave takers—plus illustrative talcs such as that matter of the bed of skulls. These four interloping Swedes knew no specifics of the downcoast tribes, but reason told them this much. If they never dipped paddle into a one of the populated coves where the rain season was being whiled away in performance and potlatch, so much the better luck.

  Just now Braaf was the one of them to speak that dialect called if.

  "Why's this out here, deserted? If it is."

  "Likely they do as the Sitka Koloshes," Melander guessed. "Hunt from a summer village right around here, in winter pull back to a main village somewhere."

  In the dusk, eagle poised eternally atop bear.

  Whale stood on end in dive through contorted lesser creatures.

  One being, possibly frog the size of calf, pranced merrily upside down.
r />   Every sort of winkless forest changeling, they goggled in unison at the backs of the retreating men.

  Later, the others breathing their rhythms of night beside the fire, Melander could not find sleep.

  His memory was at a New Archangel market morning, hubbub of Sitka Koloshes and three or four dozen visiting tribesmen from somewhere to the north, Amid the newcomers hawking their wares squatted a seam-faced carver. Word had rippled through the settlement about this man's daggers: blades of power with each hilt carved as the rising neck of some alarming beast. The head topping a hilt neck sometimes was a bear with glinting abalone inlays of eyes and nostrils and teeth, sometimes a long-faced wolf, again a great-toothed beaver; always, angled and fierce and magical as dragons. The interpreter Dobzhansky tried to converse with the northern carver. Dobzhansky's first question received answer, then the native stayed silent. Me lander inquired what had been said, Dobzhansky related that he had asked how many years it took to obtain such skill.