The Sea Runners

by Ivan Doig

  As the canoe came around, the figure in its stern leveled a long hunting gun.

  Startled, the range being greater than they themselves would expend shots across, the Kolosh paddlers ducked and grappled for their own weapons. But the chieftain sat steady and watched. Here was an instant he owed all attention.

  The slender white hair swung his rifle into place, on a line through the air to the Kolosh leader.

  The chieftain knew, as only one man of combat can see into the power of another, what Karlsson was doing. The whitehair was touching across distance to the chieftain's life, plucking it up easily as a kitten, either to claim or to let drop back into place.

  The other three whitehairs aimed their weapons as well, hut not with the slender one's measure.

  Rattled by the turnabout of men who were supposed to be desperately fleeing them, the Kolosh crew were trying to yank their rifles into place, the canoe rocking with their confusion.

  The chieftain still watched ahead. He knew himself to be twice the watcher here, the one intent on the waiting rifleman across the water and the other in gaze to himself at this unexpected seam between existences. There was this and that to be said for courage and a calm death; life was tasked with a decent departure, lint the fact was that here, straddled between the strange tribes of whitehairs and tsarmen, did not seem the ultimate site and audience a canoe warrior of his years had a right to expect.

  The decision was out of the chieftain's mouth before his mind knew it had concluded the weighing.

  The Kolosh paddlers slid their guns into the bottom of their canoe. Their craft steadied 011 the water, gentling, a steed of sea cavalry settling into rest.

  In the other canoe, the slender man set aside his rifle; as did the big whitehair in the bow. Silently the Koloshes watched as the two of them, strokesmen of power, paddled the canoe away while the other pair maintained rifles.

  The Swedes' craft was passing from view around a shorewall of timber when the chieftain said one thing more.

  "Let the sea eat them."

  Shortly before noon, Naval Captain of Second Rank Nikolai Yakovlevich Rosenberg, governor of Russian America, pinched hard at the bridge of his nose in hope of alleviating the aftereffect of the previous night's festivities, decided that no remedy known to man could staunch such aches as were contending within his forehead, sighed, and instructed his secretary to send in the Lutheran pastor.

  The pastor, a Finn from Saarijaarvi who was considered something of a clodhopper not only by the Russian officers but by the Stockholm contingent of Swedes, dolefully had been anticipating his call into the governor's chamber. By breakfast every tongue in New Archangel knew of the escape. The double number of sentries along the stockade catwalk retold the news, and the sidelong glances every Russian was casting at every Swede and Finn this morning bespoke most eloquently of all. The pastor's hesitant entrance into the governor's presence gathered beneath a single ceiling two of the three unhappiest men in New Archangel. The third was named Bilibin.

  "Excellency."

  "Pastor. As you may have heard, our citizenry is fewer by four this morning."

  "I did happen to hear the, ah, rumor."

  "Yes. Oblige me, if you will. Were these men parishioners of yours?' Rosenberg intoned through the list of four names his secretary had initiated this blighted day with.

  Melander: incredible, that gabby stork of a sailor a plotter.

  Karlsson and Wennberg: the governor could put vague faces to them; average slag among the seven-year force.

  Braaf: this one he could not recall ever having heard of at all.

  The pastor cleared his throat. "Wennberg was. Formerly, I mean to say."

  "Formerly? Oblige me further."

  The pastor housecleaned in His vocal box some more, then ventured into history. "Wennberg was in the group of artisans who arrived here with Governor Etholen—was it ten, twelve years ago? When I myself arrived to succeed Pastor Cygnaeus, Wennberg was a member of our congregation. He came of a God-fearing family, I believe. But you know how a Swede is, a hard knot even for God."

  The pastor paused to sort his words with some care here.

  "A turn of mind, you see, happened in him. The devil's mischief, always watching its chance. Sometime not long after my arrival here, it could be seen that Wennberg had slipped from the path of right. When I sought to—to show him the way of return, he cursed me. lie also cursed—God. Since then he has fallen, if I may say so, even deeper into harmful ways."

  Rosenberg pinched the area between his eyes again. Had Melander's name been able to speak off the list, the governor would have been solemnly assured he had caught the morning-after affliction that they on Gotland called "ont i haret": pain in the hair, aye?

  "Drink, do you mean, Pastor?"

  "Actually, no. Wennberg, ah, gambled."

  At this the governor pursed his lips and looked quizzically at the pastor, who himself was known at the officers' clubhouse as a devout plunger at the card table. The pastor hurried on:

  "Wennberg, you see, is—was—long past his seven years of service here, his gambling debts have kept him on. Not the first ever to—overstay. Yes, well, what I mean ... Wennberg has become, may God grant that he see his erring way, a man destroying himself. Sullen, unpredictable. A loose cannon, I think the naval phrase is? If you would like my opinion, he is capable of destroying others as well."

  Rosenberg rose, crossed to a window, leaned his forehead against the glass coolness, and stared out at the clouded coastline south across Sitka Sound. So, now. Send the Nicholas to alert Ozherskoi? If the damnable Swedes could paddle at all they likely were beyond the redoubt by now. No, the decision was fatter and homelier than that. Whether to order out the steamship to hunt down a canoe which could hide among the coves and islands of this coast like a mouse in a stable. Or let the bedamned Swedes go, let ocean and winter do the hunting of them. Vet this was no trifle of matter, thank you, the economics in the loss of four indenturees, two dozen or so man-years of service left in them—and the example to the other laborers could be treacherous. One thing certain, steamship or not: can't be remedied but can't be ignored, therefore paper it over. The governor knew the saying that paper is the schoolman's forest, and the governor had been to school. On quite a number of matters been to school, as a further saying had it. Months ago the dispatch had gone off to Russia requesting that he be relieved of his governorship—"ill health ... family reasons." In truth, a sufficiency of New Archangel and the declining fur trade and the grudgeful Koloshes and the inattention of the tsar's government half the world away. With a resourceful bit of clerkship, this matter of runaway Swedes could slide out of sight into the morass of inkwork his successor would inherit. For his part, Rosenberg would reap one further anecdote with which to regale dinner parties in St. Petersburg.

  "Three fools and a lunatic in a Kolosh canoe," he intoned against the windowpane as if practicing.

  Then, realizing lie had rehearsed aloud, the governor added without turning: "That will be all. Pastor. If you know a prayer for the souls of fools and lunatics, you perhaps might go say it."

  "Excellency."

  Late that afternoon, securely downcast from New Archangel and some careful miles shy of the Ozherskoi outpost, the four canoeists pulled ashore behind a small headland, in a cove snug as a mountainside tarn.

  Weariness burdened every smallest move as they tried to uncramp their legs, shrug the hunch from the top of their backs. Karlsson, evidently going to be methodical until he dropped, at once was unloading the rifles against further risk of accident from one. Wennberg, clumsy from the need of food, lurched to a rock and sat.

  Melander, though, Creakily, Melander leaned toward Braaf and whispered.

  Braaf nodded and ran a rapid hand into the supplies stowed within the canoe. When his hand came up, it held an elegant dark bottle.

  "Karlsson, forgive us that it isn't hootchina. But champagne from the officers' clubhouse was the best Braaf could manage unde
r the circumstances."

  Melander's long face as lie spoke was centered with a colossal grin, which now began to repeat itself on Karlsson and even Wennberg."

  "We think it may do well enough for a toast to our first day of journey even so," Melander purred on as Braaf worked the cork free. "Braaf, you furnished the ale, would you care to sip first"

  Melander, like the others, expected the young provisioner merely to swig and pass along. Instead Braaf stood looking at the slim bottle in his hands and murmured: "Let me remember a moment.... Yes, I know ..." He lifted his glance to the other three, sent it on above their heads, and recited:

  "'May you live forever and I never die.'"

  Then he drank deep.

  Permitting the others their champagne sleep, Melander enlists the last of dusk and begins to restow the lesser items in the canoe, taking more care than could be had in the dark and hurry at New Archangel. Fit the spyglass into this cranny, handy to hand, ...Stowage will be a perpetual chore of these voyage days, all the heavy items such as the water cask and the provisions and the guns unshipped each time the canoe is carried up the shore into shelter for the night, precaution against breaking the thin wooden skin with weight. Pauses now, gives a listen toward the water. Resumes : tucks away a box of tea....

  As Melander occupies himself at this, another picture is called for in the mind, large as you can manage to make it. Perhaps larger yet, for this image must be of the northmost arc of the Pacific Ocean: the chill ascendant quarter-moon of that hemisphere of water, from the schooled islands of Japan up to the Siberian coast and across to the Alaskan, then curving south and east along the continental extent of Canada and America.

  Vaster stretches can be found on the earth, but not all so many, and none as fiercely changeable. Most of the weathers imaginable arc engendered somewhere along the North Pacific's horizon coast, from polar chill to the stun of desert heat. Within this water world the special law of gravity is lateral and violent. Currents of brine and air rule. Most famous and elusive of these is the extreme wind called the williwaw—an ambusher, an abrupt torrent of gust flung seaward from the snow-held Alaskan mountains. But times, too, the North Pacific flings back the wind, gale so steady onto the coast it seems the continent has had to hunch low to keep from swaying.

  The North Pacific's most tremendous force, however, is something like a permanent typhoon under the water. Kuroshio, the Japanese Current, which puts easterly push into several thousand miles of ocean. Even here at this farthest littoral, the furrowed southeastern archipelago which on a map dithers at the flank of the main Alaskan peninsula like a puppy shadowing its mother—even here, Melander and Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf feel Kuroshio's shove against their journey without realizing it. Are touched too by the clemency Kuroshio brings from its origins near the equator, warmth being relayed along this portion of coast by a north-seeking offspring of Kuroshio, the Alaska Current. Snow can find southeastern Alaska and often enough visits it, but more commonly winter is moderated here to rain and fog. Not that these are small elements, tapping and sniffing at man as they do, as if deeply suspicious whether he is substantial. To the worst of Alaska's possible weather, though—true North Pacific storm, storm whirling down out of the Gulf of Alaska where the Alaska Current has collided with chill northern water, storm showing in full the North Pacific's set of strengths—fog and rain can be counted only as lazy cousins.

  These four Swedes in a Tlingit canoe are attempting a thousand or twelve hundred miles—something of that range, by Melander's estimate—of this North Pacific world. Not all so much, you may say. A fraction of a shard of an ocean, after all. Ten or a dozen hundred miles: in fifty or sixty sturdy days one might walk such a distance and perhaps yet have a wafer's-worth of leather on one's boot soles. Except that much of this particular distance is exploded into archipelago: island, island, island, island, like a field of flattened asteroids. Except, too, for season being fully against these water going men, the weather of winter capable of blustering them to a halt any hour of each day and seldom apt to furnish the favoring downcoast wind needed to employ the canoe's portable mast and square sail. Except, more than that, current too being against them, the flow of the Alaska Current up this coast as they seek to stroke down it. Except, finally, for details of barrier the eye and mind just now are beginning to reach—forbidding bristle of forest on those countless islands, white smash of breakers 011 rocks hidden amid the moating channels—so greatly more complex is this jagged slope of the North Pacific than the plain arithmetic of its miles.

  In this picture, Melander as he raptly stashes his boxes of tea and swags of sailcloth amounts to a worker ant 011 the rock toe of an Alp.

  "Tumble up! Fall onto your feet and suffer morning !"

  Melander roused his trio as rapidly as if they constituted the crew of a schooner aiming into storm, and for the ocean-old reason: to steal minutes. Snatch time whenever it was catchable was going to he the policy of his captaincy. Any distance gained here at the front of their voyage served as that much less to be slogged out later, when weariness would be like a weight grown into their bones.

  Melander amended their canoe positions from the night before. Karlsson still the stern paddler. But in front of him, Wennberg, In front of Wennberg, Braaf. Melander again in the bow. In such placement Melander of course had reason. Karlsson was the adept canoeman of them, far away the fittest to handle the large steersman's paddle. Wennberg, close by Karlsson's example, would be driven to try to keep pace with him. Braaf, Melander wanted nearest his own scrutiny, to ensure that he shirked no more than could be prevented.

  Their early miles went in silence, as if these new canoemen were not sure they could afford effort to talk. And had they been able to bend their vision upward over Baranof's dour foreshore to sec what they were traveling on the edge of, their powers of speech might have been appalled out of them for good. A high-standing sea of mountains, white chop of snow and ice and rock, with arms of the Pacific, blue fjords and inlets, thrusting in at whatever chance: Alaska's locked grapple of continent and ocean.

  Then—

  "Melander, you said these first days we'd only to keep this shore on our left, there's no other land along here. What the hell d'you call that out there?"

  Wennberg was pointing southwest, where a dim bulk rose on the horizon.

  "You've caught your eye on Cape Flyaway," Melander responded. "Clouds. Sometimes they sit down on the water like brood hens and you'd swear they're land, couldn't be anything but. That Finn skipper spent half of one morning searching our charts for a thunderhead he thought was a piece of Hawaii. We need to take care. This coast would gladly stand us on our ears. Read the map, read the compass, read the landmarks, and not go chasing clouds. That'll fetch us to Astoria. Aye?"

  "What'll it be like?" This was Braaf, who took the chance to stop his paddle while asking. "Another wet woodpile like New Archangel?"

  "Sailors' buzz I've heard is that it's a proper port but small. Sits on a fat river with Hell's own sandbar at its mouth. The Americans—paddle, Braaf, a scissor of a lad like you is sharp enough to move your mouth and arms at the same time, aye?—the Americans, recent years, have been coming into that country in numbers and they boast Astoria as tomorrow's town of this coast. But all wc care is whether ships touch at the place, and touch they do."

  Not far into the day, Melander called a pause in the paddling, "Time for a listen," he said.

  "A listen—?" Wennberg Caught on. "The steamship, you don't think—Melander, damn you seven ways, you said the Russians'd not come chasing after us with it—"

  "I still say so. But maybe we'd do well to have a listen now and again, for the practice of it, aye? Close your face, Wennberg."

  Melander cocked his long head as if counting the trees of the forested shore. Braaf sat as always but still as a gravestone. Karlsson leaned down toward the water to catch any bounce of sound. Wennberg concentrated so hard his back bowed.

  The canoe rolled mildly, mo
ved the heads of the men inches to this side, then same inches to the other, a slow tiny wigwag.

  Melander at last turned his gaze, solemn, to Wennberg.

  "What—" the blacksmith started, "is there something—Melander, d'you hear—?"

  "Aye," intoned Melander. "Clear as anything." The smile came out, "Silence. Which is just what we need to hear, and more of it."

  Melander captained them to near North Cape, some thirty water miles downcoast from New Archangel, before stopping. By then Braaf, the least accustomed to exertion, looked particularly done in. But he said nothing, and lent a hand in the unstowing and then in hefting the canoe into shelter among a shore-touching stand of spruce.

  Melander stepped over to Braaf. "Let's see."

  Braaf held out his hands. "Chafed some just here"—the skin around from the back of each thumb to the forefinger, particular target of sea spray as he'd paddled—"but could be worse."

  "So arc mine," Melander said. "Three or four days it'll take to toughen the skin there. But then you'll be solid as horn. Braaf, you'll make a deckhand yet,"

  The sail and mast, fitted onto a pair of long cleft sticks and pegged taut, were put up as tent. Melander had not said so, but he expected shelter was going to be the main service of their sailing equipment.

  Wennberg was cajoled into building a fire, Melander apportioned beans and salt beef into a kettle, Karlsson cut spruce boughs to sleep on and spread the sailcloth which would serve as a ground tarp and then their blankets, and dark brought night two of their leaving of New Archangel.

  "Cheery as a graveyard, isn't it? The Russians deserve such country."

  They were into their third full day of paddling beside the drab-rocked foreshore of Baranof Island, mile of whitish gray following mile of grayish white, and Melander thought it time to brighten the situation.