The Sea Runners

  As the men gaped up, two bald eagles swept soundlessly across the orb of stone.

  Around the point Melander and Karlsson pulled the canoe to security and clambered onto the flow of black rock beneath the cliff for a fuller look.

  "God's bones, what a place," Melander murmured.

  The point had been convulsed into hummocks and parapets, pitted with holes as if having come under siege from small cannon, strewn with a tumble of black boulders the size of oxcarts, and finally riven with tidal troughs.

  As Melander and Karlsson stood gawking, surf blasted up from a blowhole behind them. A mocking geyser of white bowed toward them as they whirled to the commotion.

  "Aye, well. At least we know what's hung those trees into the middle of the air." Atop the dome of cliff over them, tall evergreens poked forth like feathers in a war bonnet. "Had better find a way up there, I had, and see if I can place us on the map. If any Koloshes show up, trade Wennberg to them for a haunch of beef, aye?"

  Melander long-gaited off around the base of the cliff. Staying in range of where they had landed the canoe, Karlsson passed time by exploring into the start of the stand of forest between half-mountain and river. Cedar richly scented the air. To Karlsson, these days of the coast had been a holiday for the nose. No more of the accumulated man-smells of the barracks—damp boots, aged mattresses, tobacco, clothes as winter-stale as the tasks they were worn to...

  He was beside the bole of a particularly huge cedar when a fat bead of water ticked his right wrist.

  In surprise, Karlsson tipped his head until he was peering straight up. He saw another water bead detach from a limb eighty feet above him and drop like a slow tiny jewel, giving him time to step aside before it struck.

  Another, another.

  Karlsson stepped, stepped again.

  Like strange slowed-down rain the droplets descended two, three to the minute. The forest trees had become sharp green clouds, Karlsson upturned to them as a sunflower will seek the sun, the leisured freshet the pulse of attraction between them. Drop and drop and drop Karlsson evaded lithely, stepping back and forth around the girth of the tree, face up like a drunk man at the gate of God. As coal is said to concentrate to diamond, the coastal world of water spun tiny in these falling crystals: flicker of a mountain stream trying to leap from itself, white veils of spray brushing back from the Pacific's wave brows, quick thin lakes strewn by a half-day rain, all here now flying down in sparkle. The moment bathed Karlsson. His mind went free, vaulted the exertions and dangers of the past many days, nothing existed but the beaded dazzles from above and his body, slow-dancing with water...

  "At least I know who not to stand sentry the next time it rains, aye?"

  Karlsson halted in place, looked around at Melander, and was promptly splattered with a dew glob atop his head. The tall man's amusement twitched behind his mouth.

  "Moonbeams must have got into me," Karlsson offered, vastly embarrassed.

  "I can believe this place sends a man lopsided," said Melander. "Let's get back to the beach before I go chasing raindrops myself."

  Melander discovered from the summit that the arc of beach continued some miles northeastward, to Hecate Strait. This intelligence turned into taunt, however, by the time he and Karlsson returned to the campsite. Wind was pushing in off Kaigani. Not wanting a repeat of the crossing they just had endured, the canoemen sat to wait out the bluster.

  ***

  And the wind stiffened. By the afternoon, there were roars of air, A sky-filling sound like that of vast flame. The wind itself seemed cross-purposed, now in great speed to one direction and the next moment whooshing hack. Kaigani meanwhile turned ice-gray, with slopes and pools of foam everywhere on it.

  When firewood was needed the men went out from the shelter in pairs, one to gather, the other to watch against widowmakers flying down out of the shore forest. Often a gust slammed so hard a man had to bend his knees to stay upright.

  For three days of this blow they held to the site—gaining no distance, which Melander knew was the same as losing it.

  During a lull, Braaf scuffed a boot against something in the sand, close by where the other three sat sheltered. A dead loon, its bill thrust ahead like a bayonet, one checkered wing stiffly cocked a bit as though readying to fly, the rest of the body beneath the beach surface.

  "Buried as Bering," said Melander.

  "Means what?" queried Braaf.

  "It's something the Russian navy men say. Bering was a skipper, an old sir, first one into the islands up where the Aleuts come from. He was sailing in the tsar's hire, a ship called the Saint Peter. A true Russian vessel, leaky as a basket. Somewhere up there among the Aleuts they got themselves wintered in. Those islands haven't a whisker of timber, so Bering and bis crew dug into sandhills, pulled over sail canvas for roof, Lived in burrows like lemmings, aye? Lived till they died, at least, and then, the Russians tell it, foxes would come into camp and gobble the bodies. Bering himself took frail and they laid him in one of the dugouts. Sand caved down over his feet, but he wouldn't let the crew dig it away. Said it kept him warm. Then sand over his knees. Still wouldn't let them dig. Then up to his waist. Next his belly, just before he died. Very nearly all in his grave before the last breath was out of him. So, buried as Bering, a Russian'll say to feel sorry for himself."

  "How about melon-headed as Melander?" Wennberg suggested. "Do the Russians say that one, too?"

  Melander cut a quick look at Wennberg. His sarcasm notwithstanding, the broad man did not seem to be in the brownest of his moods.

  "Wennberg, Wennberg. Always ready to bone the guff out of me, aye? Tell me a thing, how do we come by this honor of having you in our crew? What sugar was it that kept you on at New Archangel past your years?"

  Wennberg studied the tall leader. Then he spat to one side and muttered: "Serving for Rachel,"

  Melander tugged an ear. "Lend us that again?" Karlsson and Braaf also glanced over at Wennberg.

  "'Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah was tender-eyed, but Rachel was beautiful and well favored. And Jacob loved Rachel, and said, I will serve thee seven years for Rachel.'" Wennberg broke off his recital and spat again.

  Melander and Braaf and Karlsson stared at him.

  "Never heard Genesis before?" Wennberg resumed. "Doesn't surprise me, you'd all be off diddling squirrels instead of—"

  "Wennberg a Bible-spouter!" Braaf looked genuinely shocked.

  The blacksmith shifted uneasily. "My family were church-strong. So's I, when I was a young fool."

  "This Rachel matter," Melander pursued. "It sounds more like a sweetmeat for Karlsson than for you."

  "Judas's single ball, Melander, can't you tell a goddamned saying when it comes out anybody's mouth but your own? Serving for Rachel means—it means being done out of something." Wennberg drew a breath. "'And Jacob said unto Laban, give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her.... And it came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah; and he said to Laban, What is this thou has done unto me? Did I not serve with thee for Rachel?'" Wennberg glowered across at Melander. "Now d'you savvy it?"

  "Aye," said Melander softly. "I just didn't recognize Laban as a Russian name."

  "Tell us a thing, Braaf, You've earned with your pockets, as they say. What's the grandest thing you ever stole?"

  Braaf blinked in Wennberg's direction. "Your nose, from up your ass where you usually keep it."

  "Just trying to be civil, you Stockholm whelp. Something to pass the time from squatting on this goddamned sand, I thought."

  "The pair of you," Melander conciliated. "Don't make a feather into five hens."

  Braaf eyed up into the line of timber, the treetops nodding this way and that in the wind. "Could tell you, though, if I wanted. If I was asked right."

  The request for etiquette sank through to Wennberg. "Oh, God's green socks, all right, Braaf, all right. Would you be so kind as to
tell us whatever the hell it is you have in mind?"

  "A time, I was working slow—"

  "Working? I thought this is going to be true."

  "Near enough the truth for common purposes, as we say on ship," Melander suggested. "Let Braaf get on with it, aye?"

  "Your little finger's between your legs, Wennberg. Working slow is a way we go about it in the streets. Walk as if counting the cobblestones, that's what it means. Do that, and you see what's around. See who's forgot a window, or whose purse is sleeping fat in his coat. So I spied the thimble then. A shopman was sweeping—"

  "Thimble? You went round Stockholm stealing thimbles? Christ and the devil, Braaf, some tales I've heard in my time but—"

  "The thimble's the chance, ironhead. Means you see a chance for yourself. Haven't you heard anything in this world but a hammer?"

  Wennberg muttered this or that. Braaf resumed.

  "The shopman was sweeping the steps. Had one of those birch brooms—widow's musket they're called, isn't that so, Wennberg? So he had his back away from me, and the door just open, like so. i slipped in, knew I had to be fast. A shopkeeper likes to be clever. Else he wouldn't be a shopkeeper. Sometimes he'll stash money right there, in some crock like any other. Biscuits here and salt herring there and just maybe riksdaler somewhere around. This time, there're crocks on parade. All along there. So I picked one, lifted the lid. And there they were, riksdaler and more of them. My pockets had mumps when I went out of the place. I slid behind the shopman, he's at the other end of the steps by now, ask him please sir, is the store open? Never to the likes of me, he says. Buns me off. Tells himself, clever man like him he'll not let in some street stray."

  "The money, Braaf," prompted Wennberg. "What'd you do with it all?"

  Braaf reflected. "It lasted just about as long as it's taken to tell of it."

  Their third morning storm-held on the Kaigani shore, a gunshot clapped sleep out of the men under the sailcloth shelter. Then another, even as Melander flung up and out of the tent like an aroused stork and Wennberg and Braaf were untangling from their blankets.

  Melander immediately was back to say that Karlsson was absent, along with his hunting rifle and Bilibin's gun. "Bear milking, he must be."

  The pairs of shots continued as the three men got breakfast into themselves. Then after a time of no firing, Karlsson appeared with a bag of ducks, a dozen or more as lie emptied the sack.

  "Weathered in, like us," was bis report. "There at the river mouth."

  "A lazy wind, we call this on Gotland." Now the next morning after the duck plucking. "It goes through you instead of around you."

  "Melander, serve you a plate of fly shit and you'd declare it pepper," muttered Wennberg.

  "And you'd lend me your soul as salt, aye, Mister Blacksmith? lint we have deciding to do. We've been holed here too damned long. The water ahead of us doesn't shrink while we're here. I say we had better chance the next stretch today, wind or no. Karlsson?"

  "You're the sailor of us. How much of this wind is between us and the next island?"

  "I think six hours' paddling."

  "Six hours, we can last. I say chance."

  "Braaf?"

  The thief glanced out into the white-capped water, then somewhere above Melander's brow. "If you say so, chance."

  "Wennberg?"

  "The only thing worse than that bedamned water is this bedamned waiting. Chance, Melander. You know so God-all much, teach us how to eat the wind. May it sit better on mv stomach than that last ration did."

  ***

  For a change, luck puffed 011 them. Once the paddling men had struggled the canoe around the horn tip: of the beach, they came into a wind skewing directly across Hecate Strait. For the first time since their leaving of New Archangel, up went the canoe's small pole of mast and the sailcloth.

  "Not much of a suit of sails, more like a kerchief," as Melander said, but the canvas carried them across the strait and once more into a scatter of shoreline islands.

  "Even this hardtack isn't as bad as it might be." Melander, musing, their first day of south-paddling after wafting across Hecate Strait. "A time I can tell you on the brig Odin, we had to break our biscuits into our coffee and skim away the weevils as they came up. No, not so bad, aye?"

  Braaf, at the onset of their second day after: "I know what Valhalla is now. It's where I never again hear Melander say, 'Tumble up.'"

  Wennberg, midway of their third day and yet another Melander monologue: "Melander, I wonder you don't swallow your tongue sometime for the savor of it."

  ***

  "Good job of work done": Karlsson, startling them all after they hefted ashore into the spruce forest at the close of their fourth straight progressful day.

  The river shoved through the land like a glacier of slate. Had the surface been solid as its turbid appearance—one newcoming settler or another inaugurated the jest that in the season of runoff not much more mud content was needed to make the flow pedestriable—a man crossing here from its north shore toward its south would have had to hike steadily for a full hour. That man would have stridden the Columbia, largest river of the Pacific shore of the Americas, and there on the south bank he would have stamped silt from his feet at Astoria.

  Another frontier pinspot of great name, Astoria. John Jacob Astor's wealth, not to say intentions for more of it, installed the settlement as a fur depot in 1811, The ensuing four decades had not made it much more of a place: post office, customs house, long T-shaped dock straddling into the tidal flow, cooperage, Methodist church, handful of stores and saloons catering to the settlers sprinkled south and north of the river's mouth, several tall Yankee houses along the foot of a shaggy Columbia headland. A rain-soaked shore-sitting little colony, each low tide showing the shins of the town. Yet also the recognized port of America's Pacific Northwest, tapping the twelve-hundred-mile-long Columbia and its tributaries like a cup hung to gather the sugar of a giant maple. Month by month a dozen or fifteen vessels plied here. So ves, if through whatever unlikelihood you were to find yourself at Astoria, you could handily enough aim yourself Oil ward into the world.

  This night, the four canoe-going Swedes are encamped not quite half the water distance downcoast from New Archangel to that long T of dock at Astoria.

  Trying to yawn the last of sleep from himself, Karlsson eased out through the trees toward the island's edge. As usual now that the voyaging rhythm had worked its way into him, lie was the first awake and the earliest to wonder about weather.

  This morning he found that the Pacific lay gray with cold, but no storm sheeted up from its surface. Along the beach ahead a small surf pushed ashore, idly rinsed back on itself: low tide. A pair of cormorants amid a spill of tidal boulders hung their black wings wide. High tip on the beach gravel a hundred or so strides away the sharp-pro wed canoe rested, as if having plowed to a furrow end and now waiting to be turned for another day's tilling.

  Between one eyeblink and the next, Karlsson's brain filled with the jolt of what he was seeing. He anil Melander and Wennberg and Braaf had carried their canoe as ever into the cover of forest for the night: this canoe sat larger by half: the painted designs entwining the prow were different, simpler, bolder: and Karlsson by now was in crouched retreat toward the trees, staring hard at the wall of forest beyond the canoe for any sign that lie had been detected.

  Putting his fingers lightly across the tall man's mouth to signal silence, he roused Melander. Melander snapped awake with the quickness learned of arising to some thousands of shipboard watches and crept behind Karlsson away from the camp.

  "A big one," Karlsson husked when they had sidled far enough not to be heard. "Eight, ten paddlemen at least."

  "Cabbageheads, Why aren't they holed up for the winter like the Sitka Koloshes? What do they think this is, the Midsummer's Day yachting? Aye?"

  "We had better hope they're not going to hole up here."

  "No, just one canoe, they couldn't be. Seal hunters or a fishing crew or
some such, out for a few days. Cabbage-heads."

  "You already called them that, and they're still here."

  "Aye, so. What's your guess, can we get our canoe to the water and slide away without them seeing us?"

  "No."

  "No. Outwait them without them tumbling onto us?"

  "No."

  "No." Melander grimaced as if his echo word had hurt his ears, then squinted back toward camp. "You greet Braaf, I'll do Wennberg."

  Again fingers of silence awoke lips. Again Karlsson told the situation.

  When his words had sunk into Wennberg and Braaf, Melander sent Braaf, the most accomplished slinker among them, to keep watch on the beach.

  Then Melander glanced at Karlsson, and Karlsson, after hesitation, nodded. "Yes, it needs to be him."

  The pair of them turned their eyes to Wennberg. Melander asked: "How are you at turning yourself into a sand crab?"

  Wennberg's debut into the art of creeping also marked the first occasion in his life that he ever regretted his strength. Regretted, rather, that more of his power wasn't directly beneath his nose, as Melander's was. "This one is your line of country, Wennberg. You need to do it, or those people of that canoe will snore tonight on our skulls." And Karlsson in his rock-faced way agreeing that only Wennberg possessed the muscle for it; Wennberg could not choose between fury at Karlsson for siding with Melander or ire at him for doing it dubiously. Every lens of clarity, Wennberg believed, bad slipped from his life when he leagued himself with this muddle of—

  A stone nicked Wennberg's right knee and cued his attention back to creeping. Here in the first eighty yards or so he had cover of a sort, a rib of rock and drift logs behind which he managed to scuttle, chest almost down to his knees, without showing himself, much. But next lay a naked distance of thirty yards. An angle across and up the beach, to the unfamiliar canoe.