The Sea Runners

by Ivan Doig

  "Maybe we ought to have pointed north." First words out of Karlsson since breakfast, but at least he was going along with Melander's try. "I've been up the coast a way with the bear milkers and those cliffs are good dark ground."

  "You'd see enough gray-gray-gray, white-white-white there too, Karlsson. Go far enough, up past the Aleuts, it's drift ice and glacier, and glacier and drift ice. Cold enough to make the walls creak. No, that's the north slope of Hell up there, the high north. At least credit me with knowing enough to point us the other way. Aye?"

  Wennberg jumped for that. "That means you're taking us down Hell's south slope, does it, Melander?"

  Melander blew out his breath. "Wennberg, your soul is as dingy as those rocks. Shut your gab and paddle,"

  Of a sudden, rain swept the coast. Not New Archangel's soft, muslinlike showers, but cold hard rods of wet, drilling down on the men. The downfall stuttered on their garments— pitpitpitpit—like restless fingers drumming on a knee.

  The other three donned well-worn seal-gut rain shirts, but Braaf sat resplendent in a knee-length Aleut parka, bright yarn embroidery at the cuffs, a front ruff of eagle down.

  "What're you, on parade?" Wennberg demanded, "Where'd you come up with that rig?"

  Braaf held up a wrist and admired the sewn filigree. "Round and about, where all good ware comes from, blacksmith."

  "Elegant as new ivory, Braaf," Melander put in dryly. "If the Koloshes come pestering again, we'll tell them you're the crown prince, aye? Now paddle."

  That day and most of the one after it took them to reach the southmost tip of Baranof Island, Cape Ommaney.

  In that time Braaf and Wennberg and Melander began to realize, though it never would have occurred to the first two to offer it aloud and even Melander found the sentiment a bit unwieldy to frame into words, that in all their seasons at New Archangel they never really had put eyes on the Alaskan forest. True, timber hedged the stockade and settlement, furred the isles of Sitka Sound and the humped backs of mountains around. But here downcoast, Alaska's forest stretched like black-green legions of time itself, the horizon to the left of the canoemen relentlessly jutting with trees wherever there was firmament for them to fasten themselves upright on. Where soil ran out at the shore edge, trees teetered on rock. Fleece thick as this forest was, it seemed possible that every tree of the coast was in green touch with every other, limb to limb, a continent-long tagline of thicket.

  Along this universe of standing wood the Swedes saw not another human—which was what Melander had banked on—nor even sea life to speak of, the Russian-American Company's "marine Cossacks," the Aleuts, long since having harvested these waters bare of otters and seals. What abounded were birds. Lordly ravens, big as midnight cats. Crows, smaller and baleful about it. Sharp-shinned hawks in tree outlooks. Eagles riding the air above the coastal lines of bluff, patrolling in great watchful glides before letting the air spiral them high again. Sea gulls, cormorants, scoters, loons, puffins, kingfishers, ducks of a dozen kinds. At times, every breathing thing of this coastline except the four paddlers seemed to have taken wing.

  Cape Ommaney steepened southward into nearly half a mile of summit, evidently detailed to hunch there as the island's last high sentry against the open water all around.

  Perhaps the stony bluff put Wennberg in mind of the round-backed mountains near New Archangel, for that evening after supper he nodded out toward the bay between the canoeists' camp and the cape and asked: "What'd you do, Melander, if the Nicholas poked around that point just now?"

  "After I emptied my britches, do you mean? So then, Wennberg, the Nicholas chugs in your dreams tonight, does it? Me, by now I think she's still anchored firm iu Sitka Sound and the Russians are in their beds with their thumbs up their butts." The canoe's progress thus far had set Melander up on stilts of humor. "But I've been in error before. Once, anyway—the time I thought I was wrong. What about you other pair, now, what's your guess? Are the Russians panting after us like hounds onto hares as Brother Wennberg thinks? Aye?"

  "No," Karlsson offered. "They think we can't survive."

  "What the hell makes you think we can?" retorted Wennberg.

  "Because we're alive to now, and closer to Astoria each time we move a paddle."

  "Your prediction, Braaf?"

  "They're not after us. They don't spend thought on us at all by now."

  Wennberg snorted. "We dance out of New Archangel practically under their goddamn noses and they don't even think about us? Braaf, your head is mud."

  "They need forget us, or we'll mean too much to them. You learn that fast in the streets, blacksmith. The ones who rule never bother their minds with the likes of us. The provisions I took from the Russians, they regret. That they're short of our faces at work call, they regret. Maybe they even regret the Kolosh canoe gone. But us ourselves, we're smoke to them by now."

  None of them had ever heard so many sentences one after another oat of Braaf and in the silence that followed, it seemed to be taken as truth even by Wennberg that whatever they encountered onward along this coast, and there might be much, the challenge probably now would not be Russian.

  They readied in the morning to cross the channel from Cape Ommaney east to Kuiu, the first of the island stairsteps onward from Baranof, On Melander's map Kuiu could have been where palsy seized the mapmaker's hand, a spatter of crooked shores and hedging rocks. Melander said nothing of all this quiver to the other three, simply told them that he judged there'd be stout current up the passage so that they would need to aim mostly south to end up east.

  It worked out his way, and by noon the canoe was nearing Kuiu, snow-scarved peaks rising beyond shore. Here, however, the map's muss of dots and squiggles became real, and the coastline stood to them with a rugged headland.

  "No hole in the shore, aye?" Surf blasted across rocks not far off the point, "Let's stay away from that horse market," Melander decreed. Avoiding the channel between headland and rocks the canoe stood south again, the paddlers now working directly against the current.

  In a few miles a cove revealed itself, but faced open to the weather from the west.

  The next break in the shore yawned more exposure yet.

  "Damn." Melander's exasperation was outgrowing his epithets. "Is this whole stone of an island unbuttoned like this?"

  Two further inhospitable Kuiu coves answered him.

  Dusk waited not far by now, and the labor of paddling against the current was sapping the canoemen. From weariness, they nearly blundered into a broad slop of kelp before Karlsson glimpsed it in the gloom.

  By now the canoe had reached the southern tip of the island, a rocky point which bade less welcome than any profile yet.

  "Bleak as ashes," Melander bestowed on this last of Kuiu. Then reached out the spyglass, to see whether there was any hope out in the channel.

  Maybe, he reported. In the water beyond them stood what looked like thin clumps of timber.

  Melander lit a pitch splinter in order to peer close at his map. Through the channel hung a thread of line; a ship had navigated here, testimony which was needed now because low rocks and shoals so easily could hide themselves in the gray mingle of water and dusk.

  Melander set the craft for the timber clumps. They proved to be small islands, and on one of the narrowest, the kind that sailors said could be put through an hourglass in half a day, the canoeists pulled to shelter just short of full dark.

  ***

  That was their first day of stumble, two stair treads of island when but one bad been in glimpse. Yet Melander and bis three-man navy somehow had alit secure, and after Kuiu the going smoothened.

  In the days now, the canoe jinked its way southeast amid constant accessible landfall. The major island called Prince of Wales rests dominantly in this topography like a long platter on a table, smaller isles along its west a strew of lesser plateware of this North Pacific setting. Here the canoeists could cut a course which, while Melander said a snake would break its back trying
to follow their wake, kept them mostly shielded from the ocean's tempers of weather. It granted them too a less hectic chance to learn some of the look and behavior of the Northwest coast. How a break in the forest ahead meant not merely gulch or indent of shore, it meant stream and possible campsite. How a bed of kelp could serve as breakwater, smoothen the route between it and shore even when the outer water was fractious. And the vital reading by Melander that alongshore, in a width about that of a broad street, flowed local currents and eddies that sometimes were opposite to a hindering wind or tide. It was not the voyage any of the Swedes had expected, these stints in among the eelgrass and anemones, but they eased the miles.

  "New Archangel, there. What d'you suppose they're at, just now?"

  "The governor's just done his whole day's labor—taken a sniff of snuff."

  "Okhotskans're staring themselves cross-eyed at the bedamned mountains."

  "The Finns, they're praying for it to rain ale."

  "Trade boots with any of them, would you?"

  "No. Not yet."

  The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done. Forces hang invisibly there, tethering the spheres across the black infinite canyons: an unseeable cosmic harness which somehow tugs night and sun, ebbtide and flood, season and coming season. So too the distances among men cast in with one another on an ocean must operate. In their days of steady paddling, these four found that they needed to cohere in ways they had never dreamt of at New Archangel. To perform all within the same close orbit yet not bang against one another.

  Meals brought a first quandary. Melander began as cook, but fussed the matter. Perpetually his suppers lagged behind everyone else's hunger. When he could 110 longer stand Melander's dawdling and poking, Wennberg volunteered himself. That lasted two tries. "You're not smithing axheads here," Braaf murmured as he poked at the char of Wennberg's victuals. Braaf himself, it went without saying, could not be entirely relied upon to prevent food from detouring between his lips instead of arriving at the others' plates. By the sixth day, then, the cooking chore had singled out Karlsson. He was no festal prodigy, but his output at least stilled the nightly grumbling that one might as well go off into the forest and graze.

  Wennberg's particular tithe turned out to be his paddling. Not built best for it, much too much ham at his shoulders and upper arms; but Wennberg had the impatience to take on the water like a windmill in a high breeze. Always exerting toward Karlsson's example of deftness, the blacksmith stroked at half again the pace Melander could manage, twice as great as the inconstant Braaf. Day on day the canoe pushed itself through the water primarily on the aft paddles of Karlsson and Wennberg, Melander would have preferred more balance to the propulsion, yet it worked.

  To his own surprise as much as anyone's, Braaf proved the best of them at reading the weather. Long before even Melander, the one seasoned sailor among them, Braaf would know a change was coming onto the ocean, as if along with his naive robin face he possessed a bird's hollow bones in which to feel the atmosphere's shift.

  And Melander, Melander's personal orbit was detail: Melander navigating, finding fresh water for the cask, fetching firewood, mothering the canoe and its stowage; Melander sew your button for you, treat your blister, sustain you with a midmorning piece of dried salmon, commiserate your ache of knee; the edge strength to hold all into place, Melander provided.

  More than this henwork lie saw to, though. Subtract parts from this extensive man in their successive value to the escape, the ultimate item would be his tongue. For Melander knew what poets and prime ministers know, that the cave of the mouth is where men's spirits shelter. His gift of gab stood him well with crews on all the vessels of his voyaging. Now he worked words on Wennberg and Braaf and Karlsson like a polish rag on brass. "Keep your hair on, Wennberg, there'll be supper quick as quick.... Braaf, it would be pretty to think this canoe will paddle itself, but it won't. Get the holiday out of your stroking, aye?...Karlsson, that surf looks to me like worse and more of it. Let's bend our way around, so-fashion...."

  Could you, from high, hold to view a certain time of each evening now—the brink when dark is just overcoming dusk—you would see a surprising tracery of bright embers southward from New Archangel: the fires of each campsite of the canoemen. Only six or eight, as yet, but trending, definitely trending, drafting fresh pattern along the night coast.

  "Too much smoke. We're not signaling Saint Peter from here." Melander once more. He dropped to his knees to fan the campfire into purer flame.

  "You'd 've never lasted over a forge," jeered Wennberg. "A whiff of smoke tans the soul."

  Melander calculated. Three camps in a row, this smoky debate with Wennberg. The tall man made his decision.

  "You need to know a thing, Mister Blacksmith. Braaf, Karlsson, you also. This I heard from Dobzhansky, that interpreter who helped me out at first with the Kolosh fishing crews. He came once somewhere into these waters with a trading mission the Russians tried ...

  The mission had been contrived as retaliation against the Hudson's Bay Company for its practice of slipping firearms to the Sitka Koloshes, so both the Russians and the downcoast natives were in a mood to make as much face as possible. They inaugurated with a night of feast, and Dobzhansky found himself sharing a baked salmon and goathorn cups of fermented berry juice with a canoe chieftain. The pair discovered they could converse in the trading tongue of the coast, Chinook jargon. At once the native sought to know of Dobzhansky how many heads the tsar had.

  "How many heads? Why, one like you and me."

  No, the native made Dobzhansky understand, not how many heads. How many skulls?

  "Skulls? What would the tsar do with skulls?"

  Sleep on them, the way Callicum does, the native said, pointing out to Dobzhansky the tribal chief in the middle of the carousal.

  "Sleeps on them? Why does he do that?"

  For strength, the native answered. Anyone who sleeps 011 a pile of skulls is a strong man, is he not?

  Melander had not intended to tell his crew Dobzhansky's tale of this coast's people. He was not heaven-certain he should have.

  But no more objections were heard about care over campfire smoke.

  ***

  The water met their daily moods with its own. One morning their channel would drowse, lie heavy, with a molten look like gray bottle glass. Another, it would wake in full fret, white lids of wave opened by wind or current.

  The weather could change with knife-edge sharpness. Once they saw to the southeast a pastel fluff of clouds, peach and pale blue, which was directly abutted by an ink cloud of squall: a tender seascape neighboring with tantrum. The join of continent and ocean seemed to excite the weather into such local targeting. Time and time, the canoemen saw a storm swoop onto a single mountain amid many, as if sacking up a hostage as a lesson to all the rest.

  Once Braaf pointed out for the others a narrow white sheet of sky, very likely snow, north on the coast behind them. "Stay north and frost the Russians' asses," Melander directed the storm with a push of his hands. It stayed.

  A thirty-nosed sea creature poked abruptly from the water, delivered the canoeists a thunderous burp, and sank.

  "Sea lions," Karlsson called. When the school surfaced again, each pug-nosed head making steady quick thrusts as if breaking the silver pane of the water, the leathery swimmers held pace for a while alongside the canoe, watching the upright creatures in it.

  The past few days Melander had traded about with Karlsson, thinking it well that more than one of them be able to handle the steering paddle at the stern and that these waters were the place to do the learning. Melander once had been told by his Kolosh fishing crew that the practice of some southward natives was to dub the bowman of a canoe "Captain Nose." Accordingly, with Karlsson's move forward Melander bestowed the title on him, and Braaf and Wennberg took the notion up. For the next while, it was all "Captain Nose, Your Honor, what's it to be for supper tonight?" and "May I suggest, Captain Nose, that it'
s nice to see something ahead besides Melander's back?"

  A number of tossful nights passed before any of them could become accustomed to the noise of ocean contending against coast. Surf expelling up the beach and draining back, the increasing crash of tide incoming, the held-breath instants of silence at lowest low tide.

  Melander's unease went on longest. An absence of some sort nagged through the dark at him, persistent as the sweet spruce odor of their nightly mattress of boughs. Time and again he would come up in the night, sit a minute in his long angles, propped, and gazing at the blanketed forms on either side of him. Two chosen by him as tools would be pulled from a carpenter's kit, one who had chosen himself. Known casually to one another at New Archangel, but not much more than that. And maybe no more even now, Melander's plan their single creed in common. Behind their foreheads, still strangers to each other. And perhaps would step out at Astoria yet the same. Be it said, among these new watermen waited crosscurrents that, if they were let to flow free, might prove as roily as any of the North Pacific's. Wennberg of course was the oftenest source of tension, for after his manner of wedging himself into the escape none of the others could entirely put trust in him. Then too, as with many strong-tempered men, the anger in Wennberg that could flare pure and fast as pitch fire covered other qualities. A capable enough voyager, able to put up with the discomforts and as steady at the canoe work as could be asked—that was this blacksmith, if some incident did not set him off. But the trigger in Wennberg was always this close to click. As for Melander himself, the problem with so elevated a type is that ordinary men cannot always see eye to eye with him. Difficult to be totally at ease with a man who is thinking so many steps ahead, even though those stairs of thought may be your salvation. Similarly, Karlsson's silent style could be judged a bit too aloof. There seemed to be not much visit in the slender man, and less jokery. "An icicle up his ass," Wennberg was heard to mutter of Karlsson. Braaf? Being around Braaf was like being in the presence of a natural phenomenon, such as St. Elmo's fire or marsh vapors. Braaf simply was there, on his own misty terms, take him for what he was. As if still in echo of their encounter on the parade ground, Braaf and Wennberg it was who were most apt to jangle with each other. Wennberg would suggest that Braaf had about as much weight in the world as the fart of a fly, and Braaf would recommend that Wennberg shove his head up the nearest horse's behind to see whether it held any more exact turds like him. Melander was able to slow their slanging, but never quite to stop it. So it was something to sit up with, the fact of these four separate lives lie had gathered under this sailcloth shelter.