The Sea Runners

by Ivan Doig

  This Karlsson now. Circumstance's man.

  ... Do It? Do I say, Braaf, Wennberg, surprise in the pot this morning, we haven't the maps we need? Going to voyage blind soon now, we are....

  More than any of the other three runners of the sea, a man too of the countryside of Sweden which had birthed him. Karlsson was of the Swedish dispersion that began with the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, the bitter years of bad weather and worsening harvests. Rye thin and feeble in the fields, cows like walking boneyards for lack of hay, potatoes rotten lumps in the earth—as though the elaborate clock of the seasons was awry, whatever could happen wrong did so sometime in those years, and all too much of it repeatedly. Karlsson's father Was confounded by the coil of the times, generations of landholding now crimping to futility before his eyes. But bafflement was no helpful crop either. Like many another, young Karlsson in that harsh time became extra to his home soil of Småland, early was uncoupled, simply cast to drift, from his family's farmstead. The two brothers older than lie caught America fever, put themselves into the emigrant stream coursing to the prairies beyond the Great Lakes. At their urging that he come along this brother of theirs shook his head in his parson-serious way and said only : "I am no farm maker."

  ... Melander had reason, whatever to Christ it was, for saying nothing of the maps. Melander had reason for what direction he stirred his tea. So he said nothing. And now I, I'm the Melander of us, is that the matter of it? Or...

  But just what he was, seemed to take the young Karlsson some finding out. While he turned the question he set to work as a timberman on the largest estate in the parish, and there the forester's first words to him, after a look up and down this silent youngster, were: "Hear what I tell you, lad. I don't boil my cabbage twice." His next: "Wedo the day here. Up like lamplighters we are, and late as a miser's tithe." Stropped by that forester's relentless tongue—until he encountered Melander, Karlsson thought it the most relentless possible—Karlsson began to come keen, learn all of axwork, of woodcraft, of a pace to life.

  ... First hour on the gallows is the worst, Melander'd have said. We are still three, we're strong enough yet. We've the chance....

  The merchant arrived to the estate in the winter of 184–9, another crows' winter in that corner of Småland, bleak cold week on bleak cold week, with the announcement that he was looking for supple wood for sled shafts. His true eye, though, was for the grain on men. What he saw in Karlsson suited very well. Karlsson's lovely thrift at work, that knack of finishing an ax stroke and drawing back for the next before it seemed the first could be quite done. The self-sufficiency of him, working his own neighborhood of timber, the forester never needing to hawk over him. Even the still—water-touches-deep reputation of the these young timberman, that parents of blossoming daughters—and perhaps too husbands of certain ripened wives—would not weep to see Småland soil go from under Karlsson's feet; even this augured for the purpose of the merchant.

  There was this, too. The merchant was not entirely at ease about trafficking in men, and Karlsson he could account as a salving bargain. The Russian-American Company would gain an excellent workman, a seven-year man, as consigned; but evidently one With enough flint in him to maybe strike the Russians a few Swedish sparks someday, too.

  ... But kill one of us like a rook on a fence, why Melander? Wennberg there. Bellied into this on his own, take him. Wennberg broke that Kolosh canoe for us, maybe earned life with that. Earn life, no, it just happens. Braaf. Never'd have been him, Braaf survives the way a winter hare knows to hide. Me then. Could easily been. I was Captain Nose just then instead of steersman or I'd be under those rocks and Melander'd be here guzzling this tea....

  The recruitment was made and Karlsson rode in the merchant's sleigh to Stockholm, a place, like heaven, where he had never been and hadn't much expected to get to. Then voyage, the passage to the America of the Russians, if most of a year of patient endurance of tip and tilt can be called passage. Patience Karlsson possessed in plenty, had it to the middle of his bones; to the extent where, like any extreme, it ought not entirely be counted virtue. This forbearance of his kept him in situations, for instance, when a Wennberg might have crashed out or a Braaf wriggled out. Indeed, now had done much to deposit him, without overample debate or decision, onto that whittled spot of the frontier shore where the sea months at last ended, New Archangel.

  Promptly Karlsson was paired on the timber-felling crew to a stocky Finn as close-tongued as he, the two of them so wordless the other tree cutters dubbed them "the standing stones." The labor was not all that bad—axwork was axwork, Småland or on the roof of the world—although Karlsson had been caused to rethink the task a bit when he overheard Melander state that New Archangel's true enterprise was the making of axes to cut down trees to turn into charcoal which was then used for forge fire to make more axes. Looked at that way, any workman within an enterprise such as the Russian-American Company amounted to something like one slat in a waterwheel. Laboring in a circle, and a damned damp one at that. But the hunting leavened Karlsson's Alaskan life some. And the Kolosh women more so. So Karlsson had been self-surprised by his readiness to hear out Melander's plan of escape. Never would Karlsson have put it as beribboned as this, but what drew him was a new echo of that years-long purl of question. Where ought a man to point himself, how ought he use his ableness? Not the answers Karlsson ever had expected or heard hint of, Melander's: down one of the wild coasts of the world, to see whether seven-year men could break their way to freedom. Which maybe was the beckon in them.

  ... Melander. Melander fathered this, and I've to get on with it. So. The maps, do I...

  Karlsson knew he was not so wide a thinker as Melander. Come all the way to it, he and Braaf and Wennberg together probably were not that spacious. Melander's province of interest was this entire coastline plus whatever joined it over beyond the bend of the planet. "A roomy shore, this, aye? Not like that Russian woodbox, New Archangel. Here's where you needn't open the window to put your coat on." That was all very well, the power in a grandness of view, it sprung the gate of New Archangel and opened the North Pacific to them, skimmed them across Kaigani and through the labyrinth of isles, propelled them these hundreds of water miles. But even grandness has its eventual limits. In Karlsson was the inkling—he had never needed to think it through to the point where it ought be called creed—that realms much tinier than Melander's counted for something, too. The circlet of strength, say, where the palm of a hand went round the handle of an ax. Or the haft of a paddle.

  "Tea, you pair," Karlsson called.

  As every morning Braaf arrived drowsy, a blinking child somehow high as a man.

  Wennberg sat with a grunt, at once fed more wood to the breakfast fire as if stoking a forge for the day.

  ... May as well, get it behind us....

  "I'll show you what we face." As the other two slurped the first of their tea, Karlsson opened the map case and pulled out the fourth map.

  "We're this place, here"—midway down the map, amid a shattered strew of coast—"and Melander meant to aim us east, over to this channel"—trench of white, inland a way, north-south through the coastal confusion.

  "Then we've a sound to cross"—Milbanke, read Melander's penciling here—"then more of channel, then another sound"—Queen Charlotte, this inscription—"and we're to Vancouver's Island."

  Wennberg and Braaf were gazing down at the map with fixation, tea forgotten. The Russians' map, Melander's map, the white-and-ink tapestry of their escape there to see ... Braaf said softly, "I don't savvy front from hack of it, but it's tsar's wealth to us, isn't it?"

  Wennberg's eyelines were crinkled in concentration. '■Christ sideways on the cross, this's a coast. How we've got this far and only Melander—" That trend of thought treacherous, Wennberg peered to the bottom of the map, "And more of more, ahead of us there yet. The piece here, just a tit of it, this's—what'd you say, Karlsson?"

  "Vancouver's Island," said Karlsson, and
took a slow-drink of tea.

  "Only one way to get there," Wennberg rumbled on, "and that's pry ourselves off our asses. Isn't that so, Captain Nose?"

  "That's so," agreed Karlsson, and rerolled the fourth map.

  As they pushed east, all three men eyed around at the shoreline continually, on watch for another canoeload of Koloshes.

  Apprehension wears fast at stamina. Karlsson called an early halt for midday.

  He did so again for the night. Melander had been able to stretch men beyond what they thought were their heavenmost limits. Karlsson already was calculating just how much he was going to have to ration his demands 011 these other two. Both of them were wan by the end of this day, looked hard-used, despite Karlsson's care with pace. But then Karlsson supposed he himself didn't look newly minted.

  ... But there's a day. They're pulling full this way, Wennberg and Braaf, not worrying their hair off about maps we don't have. We've made miles. Melander, old high-head, we're keeping 011 with it, this voyage of yours. We'll maybe step out at Astoria for you yet....

  The next day arrived not yet certain of mood to choose, merely average gray or storm-dark. Behind the campsite the forest walled close as always, and somewhere up in the highest green a limb stammered in the breeze.

  Gazing in the direction, Braaf said : "Waste of noise, like a blacksmith."

  Wennberg glanced to Braaf, then turned aside and spat.

  ... Melander's line of country, this ocean, not mine. Savvied water, him. To the others of us it's a kind of night. See it but not into it. And try not catch a tumble from it. God's bones, can it be deep under here as Melander said? Some places as far to bottom as these mountains go high? Take his word for it, thank you. Sitka Sound a millpond to any of this. If this coast was other we'd maybe he hiking out. More my journey, that'd have been. Forest you can thread your way through, sort for yourself as you go. In Småland lead me with a mealsack over my head into any wood and straight out I'd find my way. Toss one foot in front of another, you know you get somewhere. But water, can't keep a fix on water. Only keep after it, stroke and stroke and stroke. Say this paddle work was ax strokes, how many trees'd been brought down by now? How many forests, more like. Could've built our own stockade and town. Called it New Stockholm. No, Melander in charge, New Gotland it'd be....

  Karlsson caught up with his drift of mind. Bothered that such straying had happened—new wile of ocean, this—he shook bis stare from the backs of Braaf and Wennberg, purposely scanned the entire length of the water horizon. Sober anyone, that gray endless seam of sea and sky.

  Wennberg with joy would have been at his forge. Any forge, anywhere. Glowing charcoal before him, circle of water ladled around its edge to concentrate the heat, then hammer courting metal, fire flakes leaping from the iron as Wennberg imposed shape 011 it, his arm decreeing axhead or hinge or bolster plate, now there was proper work, not shoveling ocean all the bedamned day, Wennberg went in his mind time and again to that morning when he strode up behind Braaf in the parade ground—and each of these remade times, Wennberg deflected determinedly away from the laden thief.

  Of course, thinking on it was like trying to undo fire in the forge: raking coals out in hope they would lapse to fresh charcoal once again. Indeed, Wennberg's wishing was of a fervency that amounted to reversing a forge fire all the way back to living tree.

  And made, he sermoned himself yet again, as little sense. In this life paths cross paths and there you arc, jangled up with a Braaf and a Karlsson. No help for it, who can number the clouds or stay the bottles of heaven P

  But oh, Hell take it, if he just hadn't crossed that parade ground—

  Braaf, now—Braaf always was a guess. As best could he told, though, Braaf was enduring coastal life something as an ouzel—that chick-sized bird common along the rivers which cut the Northwest shoreline and the streams which vein down from the mountains into those rivers. Slaty iu color, peg-tailed, the ouzel at streamside is not much to notice, except as an example of bother; the bird constantly bobs as though wary of some lifelong peril overhead. In actuality the motion must he practice for its livelihood, which is to plunge into the water, immerse, and walk the bottoms of the rivers and streams, picking hits of feed as it goes. A hydraulic adaptee, the ouzel: somehow the bird has learned to use the flow of current to keep itself pinned down into place during this dinner delve beneath the riffles. Much in that way that the ouzel can shop along the cellar of the river, Braaf was held into route, into canoe and camp routine, hy the sum of the pressures all around. Weather above, ocean beside, forest solid along the continent edge—each day's life was pressed to him by such powers of the coast, and Braaf had the instinct simply to stay wary while letting the push of it all carry him ahead.

  Kelp drifted alongside them in a tangle, a skim of the the Pacific's deep layers of life.

  As in the forest when branches become moving wands overhead but the air at ground keeps strangely still, the coastal weather now cruised over the canoemen without quite touching down. Streamers of cloud shot along, would-be storms jostled with pretensions of clearing; the sky all hither and thither in this fashion, Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf never knew what to expect except that it would be unruly. Putty weather, gray and changeable. True, Sitka with its weather-of-the-minute had accustomed the Swedes to changeableness. But at least at Sitka the concern was not that the next gray onset would cause the ocean to erupt under them.

  Crone mountains, these now. Old bleak places gray-scarved above the green shore.

  ***

  The weather held stormless, as though curious to ivatch down at this orphaned crew for a while. At the midday stop, Karlsson's pencil mark on the map moved east. Moved as much again at evening's camp—hut south now. They were in the channel.

  "Those Koloshes." Wennberg fed a branch to the supper fire. "Those ones that—back at that island, there. What d'you suppose they're in the world for?"

  "For?" Karlsson was loading the rifles for the night, standard now since the encounter with the Koloshes at Arisankhana. He stopped to regard the blacksmith. As steadily as he tried to keep a reading of Wennberg, moods kited in and out of the broad man.

  "What I mean, how d'they spend their lives?"

  "Paddling their arms off," Braaf guessed, "about same as we are?"

  "Sit on mine and ride home, Braaf, I mean truth here. This bedamned coast now, like forty kinds of a Finland. What's the use of these fish-fuckers, scatting around here and there? Whyn't it just empty?"

  ... We need to hope it damned well is, here on, ...

  Karlsson aloud: "Maybe people are like crops, conic up everywhere."

  "Or weeds, if they're Wennbergs," added Braaf.

  "Oh, Hell take the both of you. A man tries to figure life and you fart from the front of your faces at him. I'm turning in, A blanket's better company than you pair."

  ***

  ... Still can be as touchy as a poisoned pup, Wennberg can. But at least it's not war. Maybe he's in troth about it, needing me to lead. Or thinking that I'm leading, instead of just tumbling us down this coast...

  Karlsson came awake just after daylight had begun to hint. Frost on the sailcloth shelter this morning.

  By the time Braaf and Wennberg were roused and breakfast was into the three of them, ridgelines and mountains in their cloaks and hoods of dark were arriving to sight all around the channel.

  Canoe prow into water, three paddles into the shimmer sent by the craft. The near shore, the western, was coming distinct with trees now. Then within the first few-hundred strokes by the canoemen the horizon to the east brightened with low strips of dawn, as though chinking had fallen out between mountains and clouded sky.

  The dawn warmed from silver to straw yellow, to peach. Vow clouds burnt free by the light began to drift from view over the eastern crags. Karlsson's third day as escapemaster was going to be stormless.

  ... Thank you to this, any day. Sun, easy water. Wine and figs next, aye, Melander?...

  The p
addles dipped, glistened wet on the forward reach of the stroke, dipped again.

  Braaf haphazardly hummed. That he seemed to have no acquaintanceship whatsoever with tune mattered none to Braaf. His random buzzes irked Wennberg, sufficiently justifying them.

  Wennberg today you would have thought a prisoner on his way to exile. In his armwork showed none of Karlsson's thrift nor Braaf's minimum attention, just the plod of a man wishing he were anywhere else.

  Karlsson while he paddled scanned steadily ahead, as though he could pull the horizon of water nearer with his eyes.

  The canoe glided higher in the water now, without Melander. Without, too, as much food. Dried peas, beans, tea, corners of biscuit, not much salt horse, less than a quarter of the deer ... the provisions seemed to dwindle these days as if seeping out the bottom of the boat, and Karlsson spent long thinking how to replenish.

  Queer, but with forest stacked high on both sides of them now, the timber put less weight on their day than had the single-sided throng along the ocean. The calm of the channel, stretching lakewide, perhaps made it so. Ocean-neighboring forest never stood quite so quiet as this, there one breeze or another seeking through the upper boughs, birds conversing in the lower limbs, the devil knew what rustling behind the salmonberry and nettle.

  Midmorning, the canoemen steered around a flotilla of trees—not drift logs but roots, branches, cones and all—drifting in the channel. Launched by an avalanche, Karlsson guessed.

  Clouds stayed few and to the east, no weather gallcons from the ocean. Respite of every sort, this channel so far.