The Sea Runners (13 page)

Melander spat over the side to clear his mouth, not recognizing the taste of diluted faith but decidedly not caring much for it. Then he said: "Time for our stroll."

The powerful rumple of the Pacific made itself felt to them at once. Swells were spaced wide, perhaps two lengths of the canoe between crests, but regular as great slow breathings. Each swell levered up the prow of the canoe, Melander instantly created even taller, a foremast of man, then the craft was shrugged downward.

"More beef, Wennberg. Push that paddle deeper, aye?"

Melander's urging began while the tips of the fir trees of Dall Island still feathered against the sky behind them. Wennberg he had not expected to be slack in this situation. Braaf it was who could be anticipated to scant his labor if high heaven itself depended on it. But Braaf was thrusting steadily, and onto Melander's admonition tossed gibe of his own.

"Bashful are you, Wennberg? Beach right down there and meet the wet, why not..."

Wennberg grumped something unbearable, but this paddling picked up markedly.

What Melander's Russian map here denominated as Kaigani Strait has since become Dixon Entrance, a name engrafted for the English captain who delved the region in the ship
Queen Charlotte.
By whatever christening, the expanse forms one of the largest of dozens of plains of water between the broken lands of the North Pacific coastline. Extensive in its perils as wells this water, "The tidal currents are much confused," navigators are cautioned; in storm the channel can seem to be forty white miles of breakers. All times of year the flood tide east into Hecate Strait can surge as rapid as a man can walk. Small wonder that at the eastern reach of this mariners' thicket, islands are bundled like galleons desperately seeking a Ice anchorage.

Not a whit of this was suggested from that calm space between shorelines on Melander's map.

"Got a lump in it today, it has," Melander admitted as a wave shuddered the canoe.

Thirty or forty hillocks of water later, again the heart ski]) in the rhythm of the boat.

"Wennberg!" Melander's tone crackled now. "You're dabbing at it again,"

Wennberg held his paddle just above the lapping-waves, as though trying to recall whether water or air was the element in which it operated. His face hung open in surprise. His mouth made motions but no sound. Then with gulped effort: "I'm. Getting. Sick."

"If you don't paddle you'll get dead, and us with
you, Have a puke now and be done with it, Wennberg. We need your arms, aye?"

Wennberg glassily found Melander, seemed to mull the suggestion, then shook Ins wide head.

"Drag it up," Melander insisted. "You've got to."

Wennberg put his head over the side of the canoe and gaped his mouth as if hoping to inhale better health up from the ocean.

After a minute his gasps managed to be words: "Can't. Too. Sick."

"Wennberg, listen to me, aye? Jab a finger down your gullet, tell yourself you've swallowed baneberries, pretend that Braaf here melted a slug into your tea this morning—do whatever the hell, but heave the sickness out of you now. Do it, Wennberg. Dump your gut."

"Keep on, you'll have me tossing up, too," muttered Braaf.

Just then Melander's prescriptions took their intended effect on Wennberg.

"There now, you're empty and scraped," Melander proclaimed in satisfaction. "You'll be a bull again before you know it. Rest a half moment, we can spare you until you get your breath back."

Wennberg focused woozily toward Melander. "Mela rider—one time I'll—reach down that—mouth of yours and—" But before long, he retrieved his paddle and, while still not able to stroke in smoothness with the others, was adding push to theirs.

***

For a time—say, the first few dozen hundred paddlestrokes of this day's journey—a wall of reassurance yet could he seen behind the canoemen, the outline of Dall Island and its greater neighbor, Prince of Wales. Farther though that landline was becoming, the shore of the islands lay as a footing, a ledge to return to.

Then, just after Melander reckoned aloud that they might be a third of the way across, Karlsson glanced back and saw that the landwall was gone. In place of the islands hovered a sheet of storm. Kaigani had enwrapped the canoe and its men, anywhere about them nothing other than water or cloud or mix of the two.

They had no timepiece, but an onlooker could have clocked Melander's decrees to within two minutes' regularity of one another. Each time he called rest, one man continued to paddle to keep the canoe from backsliding in the swells. That sentinel then rested briefly while the other three resumed, then plunged to work again. At the next rest, the solitary paddling duty slid to the next man.

Near to what Melander estimated ought to be the midpoint of the channel, waves began to chop more rapidly at the canoe. A fresh sound, a slapping higher against the side of the craft, could be heard, and spray now and again tossed itself over the bow and Melander.

"A fast ship's always wet forward," he called out, the while wondering how much more the water would thicken.

Braaf, though, noticed an absence. The gulls which hung in curiosity beside them in the island waters and the early distance offshore from Dall were vanished. He discovered too that the air felt different, more tooth in it, and that off to the west a particular splotch of weather resembled neither fog nor rain.

Braaf leaned ahead enough to pass the news softly over Melander's shoulder, as it were their secret: "Snow."

"Jesu Maria," Melander said back.

The squall hit them first with wind. Gust tagged closely onto gust, taking the canoe at an angle from the southwest.

Melander watched along the surface of Kaigani intently.
Upon the high seas
is the wrong saying of it, a horizon of ocean all around makes shallow the place of an onlooker, sloshes even a Melander in a basin of the taller water.

Then what Melander dreaded sprung to creation. Wind streaks on the water, long ropy crawlers of white. "Neptune's snakes," Melander knew them as from his shipboard years, and knew too that they are the spawn of a thirty-knot gale.

"Melander!" Karlsson called forward. "We need be steadier with the paddles. That slap the Koloshes do, let's try..."

"Be the drum lad," Melander agreed instantly. "Braaf, Wennberg, listen sharp..."

Karlsson began as the next wave struck the canoe, quivered it, lie paddled twice, deep strokes; then rapped his paddle against the side of the canoe, just below the gunwale.

The craft meanwhile mounted the roll of water, another hummock waited to slide under the hull. When it came, again Karlsson's double stroke and rap to signal pause.

The other three took the rhythm and the canoe steadied its pace, two strong climbing strokes up each wave, the tap of waiting, then next wave and same again.

The sky began to fleck, snowflakes like tiny gulls riding down the wind which now strengthened into a constant whirl past the canoemen's ears. Melander looked away from his compass only to monitor the stroking of his crew and to glance at the angle of the swells to the canoe. The compass could not he wrong, daren't be, yet there was constant urge to check it against the evidence of his eyes.

Water was finding its way over the gunwales, lopping in off rollers now mighty enough that when they crested beneath the bow, Melander went so uplifted he had to reach far down to get his paddle to the ocean.

Chop of this sort needed rapid heed. Still struggling against seasickness, Wennberg was erratic at the paddle. But if he lowered his head to bail, he would be sicker yet. So—"Braaf." Water noise made Melander
raise his choice to a shout. "
Braaf!
You'll need to shovel water, and quick!"

Three motions fought in the water now: the broad sloshing advance of the waves themselves; the lizardy wrinkle of their texture; and the gale ripple skipping ahead. At odds with all these and with the wind-spun snow as well, the canoe's progress fell to a kind of embarrassed wallow, as when a good steed is forced to slog through mire.

Working the bailer, a cedar scoop which coupled over his hand like a hollowed-out hoof, Braaf pawed seawater from the canoe's bottom.

Karlsson gritted against spray and snow and tried to hold in mind nothing but the pulse of stroke stroke slap, stroke stroke slap. But he somehow did hear the voice of agony in front of him. "Oh God who watches over fools and babes," Wennberg implored. "What am I doing in this pisspot of a canoe?"

Like a prophet promising geysers of honey just there beyond shovel point, Melander preached steadily to his straining crew now, ..."We're straddling it, Karlsson. No water is wide as forever ... Karlsson's face could have been mounted forward as figurehead for the craft, if imagination permits that a Kolosh canoe ever would breast the sea with a Småland parson's profile at its front. Everything, each fiber, of Karlsson was set
to
the twin grips of his hands on the steering paddle, the portioning-out of effort. If stone profile and millwork arms could grind a way across Kaigani, Karlsson meant it to he done.... Melander: "Dig the paddle, Wennberg. You're strong as wake ale now." (Melander within: May he not go ill on us again, this lumpy water is no place for a cripple in the crew....) lint Wennberg yet tussled with a hive of woes. The tipping wave surface was had enough, and the unending exertion, and the over-the-side-of-the-world absence of land or even horizon. Worst of all, the nausea which hid so sly within him, reambushing whenever he thought the bile might have receded. The blacksmith felt weaker than he could ever remember, listless, yet this uphill labor of paddling demanded and demanded of him. Wennberg too fell into a machined rhythm, jab-pull back-jab, wait, do-it-again, but out of a different drive-wheel than Karlsson's. Overswarmed with doom and unhealth, Wennberg could think of no way to struggle back hut to move his arms, which happened to have a flat-faced rod of wood at their end.... Melander: "Braaf, can you find in your heart to stroke along with the rest of us?" (Melander within: May the canoe dance as lightly on these waves as it 1ms been. If just they don't rise...) Among the larger men Braaf sat small and hunched with caution. lie was the one of the four of them most in place in this situation, for at basis, this crossing of Kaigani Strait constituted an act of theft. Of stealing survival from a hazard that held every intention of denying it to you. Afloat you exist in balance between unthinkable distances. Above, the sky
and the down-push of all its vastnesses. Under, the thickness of ocean with its queer unruly upward law of gravity, buoyancy. In time the greater deep, that of sky, must win this pushing contest in which you are the flake of contention, and you will go down. The game is to scamper landward before this obliteration can happen. None of this could Braaf have declaimed aloud—just as there never was a philosopher who could pocket another man's snuffbox with no itch of conscience—yet Braaf understood the proposition of Kaigani profoundly: it had to do with dodging life's odds, like all else. Braaf then did not stroke mechanically in Karlsson's way nor try to fend strenuously as Wennberg did. Braaf poked his paddle to the water as if using a stick to discourage a very big dog ... Melander: "Neck or nothing, now. Pull ... pull ... pull ... (Melander within: May this storm hold to the compass where it is. But oh God if the bastard shifts, shoves us east into the miles of Hecate ...) So the matter, like most of this coast's matters, came down to perseverance. While Melander urged, Wennberg was grunting dismally and Braaf once in a while shirking, out of sheer habit when he wasn't reminding himself otherwise, and at. the stern Karlsson staying a human piston: all of them trying to put from mind the numbing of their knees and the deepening ache of their arms and shoulders; and across Kaigani Strait the canoe striving steadily southeast, a dark sharp-snouted creature stretched low against the gray wavescape, four broad-hoofed legs striking and striking at the water, running on the sea.

M
ELANDER
broke awake on the tamest of terrain.

Anywhere in sight, not a sea cliff nor boulder nor so much as a fist-sized stone.

Beach of sand, all tan satin. Waves did not pound at the tideline, simply teased it, shying tiny clouds of spume along the water edge and then lapping away.

The canoe had taken shore here in the dark, Swedes having prevailed—barely—over storm in the wrestle that went 011 all day and across dusk and into the first of night. At last dragging their craft onto whatever this place was, the four men groped together the shelter
of sailcloth and collapsed to sleep. Now to find, by this morning's evidence, that Kaigani had flung them through the customary coastal geography to an opposite order of matters. Everything flat, discreet, lullful.

No, not everything meek. It registered now on Melander that the treetops spearing up through mist just to the west of him stood twice the height conceivable for trees to stand.

"On the same ocean as last night, are we?" Karlsson was at his elbow.

"Mother's milk this morning, isn't it?" agreed Melander. "Ever see trees to that height, up to the clouds like steeples?"