The Sea Runners (20 page)

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 caravan 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.

In stirrings tiny and mighty, the restive great coast was engendering spring.

... One meal of deer left. Then beans. Two, three skoffs of those. And biscuit corners, maybe a meal's worth. Already Wennberg is saying his guts think his throat's been cut. An idea there, Braaf tells him, how'd he like help? The tWO of us to hold Wennberg into bridle, it takes....

The moon reminded Karlsson of ¡111 egg, and his stomach regretted that he had looked up. But the shine on the waves compelled it, a soft dazzle that began to lie gone even as ¡t showed itself; an eye could not help to wonder where that flitting sheen had been borne from.

Just from the chance at last to do so, stroll a spacious beach in moonlight, Karlsson had wandered south along the silverline of tide to where the file of seastacks anchored into the continent. Out into the water in front of him now the great loaves of stone loomed in succession, until at their outermost a last small whetted formation, like a sentry's spearpoint, struggled with the ocean, defiantly tearing waves to whiteness. Some mad try here at walling the Pacific, all this looked, the line of rock having been fought by the waves, overrun by them, left in gaps, shards, tumbled shapes, but the attempt of the rocks enduring.

...Need a hunt again. Anything, deer, goat. Beaver, God's bones, we could learn to think beaver was ¡1 manor lord's feast. Costs time and time to hunt, though. And risk to a gunshot, Christ knows whether there're Koloshes along here. But so's there risk to starving ourselves down. Pull to shore early tomorrow, try a bear milking....

Back north along the shore Karlsson could see the campfire, even could discern the arc of the canoe, the bumps of form that were Wennberg and Braaf. At first, when the canoe nosed in here for the night, Karlsson could not make himself feel easy about this fresh manner of coast. Three leisured windrows of surf and
the beach wide, gentle, full-sanded; a carpet of ease after the stone shores of the past weeks, it ought to have seemed. Yet through dusk and supper a constriction somehow clung to this mild site, an unexpected sense of squeeze which kept with Karlsson even when he strode the length of beach to the seastacks. Maybe it was the surround of land here, after their Vancouver nights of precarious perch. The battled wall of sea rock reared as barrier at this end and the cape the canoemen had rounded wide of after crossing the Strait of Fuca extended considerably into the ocean at that other. Inland the forest stood high—Karlsson had studied and studied that venue for sign of animals; in the weave of evergreen and brush, nothing moved—and behind the north end of the beach the terrain sharpened into a long clay cliff. For all the broad invitation of its sand this particular beach made a kind of sack mouth of the coast, the sort of place where you more-than-half-expected something unpleasant to be scooped ashore at any time.

... A man can worry himself ancient. Step them off, the days, that's what we need do. Keep on keeping on, Melander'd say. Earn our way to Astoria yet, we just may....

The ocean was bringing a constant rumble and within that a hiss, the odd cold sizzle as the tide edge melts into the sand. Left in the air was a smell of emphatic freshness—a tang beyond mint or myrtle, more a sensation than anything the nose could find recipe of. And over and through it all, the surf sound, here so solid it seemed to have corners: the unremitting
boom oil the seastacks, a constant crashing noise against the shore northward. The surf. No other energy on the planet approaches it. On any planet? The remorseless hurl of it, impending, collapsing, upbuilding, and its extent even beyond that of thunder, that grave enwrapping beat upon all shores of all continents at once: how is there any foothold left for us? Braaf's wonderment, he recently had confided to Karlsson, was that the power of the ocean didn't rip big chunks from the land all day long, Braaf figured probably in great storms it did just that, which must have been how the islands of their route from New Archangel had been chewed into creation.

... A far place now, New Archangel. Far as that moon, it seems. How long's it been? Braaf's calendar will tell. But we're where we are. Last coast, this....

Near the campfire Wennberg and Braaf were sitting at angle from each other, as if they had a treaty against face-to-face to be honored.

At Karlsson's approach Wennberg threw on a branch from the firewood pile beside him, sparks rocketing upward. In the heightened light Wennberg looked somehow more thunderous, and Braaf's eyes were higher out into the night than ever, seemed to be appraising the moon.

...They've been gnawing back and forth again, what now.... "A silver night," Karlsson offered. "First in a while. Maybe it'll bring sun on us tomorrow."

Wennberg stared at Karlsson. Then he brought up from behind the firewood the map case, open.

"Tomorrow, yes, that's what's to be studied on here. Braaf and I want to know of tomorrow. Where the goddamned map of it is, say. Yes, whyn't we start with knowing that."