The Sea Runners

by Ivan Doig

  The towline soon was taken from the lead canoe by quick hands ashore and the villagers leaned back in pull as the canoe crew carried their craft high onto the beach. The harpooner, a man larger than the others, was followed to the surf's edge by a swirling attendance of women and children. Canoe followed canoe now in swift unharnessing, the hawser at last only between the whale carcass and the people of the shore, tug-of-war between nature's most vast creature and its most pursuitful.

  Slowly the gray form, a reef of flesh, crept toward tide line.

  Just short, the tugging ceased. The children of the village ran to the towline and took places, small beads among larger. Then as it is said, a long pull—a strong pull—and a pull all together—the generations of the village drew the whale the last yards up onto their beach.

  "So?" This was put by Braaf, in confoundment.

  "Yes, so." If this portion of coast was populated with such sea hunters, the problem was beyond any ready words. Karlsson was casting for anything more to say when Wennberg blurted:

  "This is a how-d'ye-do we don't need! You bastard."

  "Karlsson, you touched us in at this island, is there nothing you can't make goose shit of?"

  "Rather be ashore there to welcome those Koloshes, would you?" That held Wennberg for an instant, and Karlsson used it to go on: "One thing we can do. Need do. Travel from here by night."

  This notion set Braaf to chewing at the corner of bis mouth. Wennberg meanwhile tried to lurch the argument sideways.

  "But these whale chasers—why n't they be like other Koloshes, lay up now and celebrate themselves silly? Eat and drink and tumble one another in the bushes and the like, won't they now? Reason it, Karlsson. What if we paddle wide of them here, right now, out from this island and swing to shore downcoast?"

  ... A notion, there. Get away maybe while they're prancing around that whale-But...

  "This lot may cut capers for a while," Karlsson allowed, "but what if there're more crews, still out there running down whales? Which risk would you rather, dark or meeting a pack of those canoes?"

  "Dark," voted Braaf rapidly. "And blacker, better."

  Wennberg stared morosely toward shore, where the whale had been lashed into place and the village people seemed to be standing back and admiring.

  "Oh, Judas's ball," he at last gritted out. "Dark, dark, dark. These fish-fuckers down this coast, whyn't they just squat on their asses and look wise all the while like the Sitka Koloshes?"

  ***

  A watching clay, they would need to make it.

  Wennberg claimed the top of the island where the seaward side could be scanned for further canoes, "Spares me some hours with you pair," he rapped out, and went.

  Karlsson and Braaf stayed to where they could see across to the village. One Kolosh—Karlsson thought he might be the big harpooner from the lead canoe—had sliced a saddle of flesh from the whale's back and with his train of admirers disappeared into a longhouse with it. Otherwise, though, all the come-and-go of the village still was around the long blunt-nosed carcass.

  Sen tried for the day this way, life maybe depending on what he and Braaf could bring into their eyes and calculate from it, Karlsson felt the dividing come to him again. The kettle island, green flow of the shore horizon, the water span around, the might of the whale, the speckle of white barnacle scars along its vast skin, the festival the Koloshes were going through, all this pageantry of what the world could be held a side of his mind even as he sorted at predicament.

  "Sweden," Evidently Braaf's mind was in two, as well. "Tell me truth, Karlsson. Think we'll see it again?"

  Karlsson studied the kettle island as if it were Braaf's question. Then answered:

  "I won't."

  Braaf turned to him in quick regard. "What, you think we can't keep in life? Those Kolosh eg across there—?"

  "No. Not that. I'm not going back."

  "But then, why're you—the place Astoria, what about—?"

  "Astoria, we all need find. And will. It's the foothold of this part of the world. Only one, so far as we know. Or Melander knew. But once there I'll stay to America."

  "And do what?"

  "New land, here. Christ knows, we've seen skeins of it along this coast. Melander said the Americans are taking this shore. Reason for Astoria, must be. New land is land to clear. A timberman can find a place in that."

  On the foreshore the Koloshes were gathered close around the whale. They seemed to be listening raptly to one of their number, the big harpooner again. Among the New Archangel whites it was lore that no Kolosh could so much as glance up at the weather without feeling the need for a speech.

  "What d'you suppose he's preaching, Parson Kolosh there?"

  "I don't have any glint of it. Maybe saying what it's like to hunt a mountain of creature like that."

  Another whaleman seemed to be marking off the carcass into portions. Six or eight old men, still as cormorants, stood watching him.

  "Are they brave, Karlsson? To chase whales? Or just fools?"

  "Might be more than one yes to that."

  The oration at last concluded, the villagers circled the whale and began to cut at the great form.

  "Butchering it, looks like they are! Not going to eat that thing, can they he?"

  "This is all Dutch to me. Just count it luck that they're busy over there, whatever the Christ it is they're doing."

  Blocks of blubber began to be stripped from the carcass. The whale was open now like a hillside being mined; a few of the women disappeared entirely inside the carcass.

  "Must have stomachs like leather," Braaf marveled. "I'm hungry as a hawk, but walking around in that thing and then eating it—"

  Braaf was quiet awhile. Then confirmed: "So you'll stay to this coast?"

  "This end of America, anyway. Across the world from Småland and out from under the Russians."

  "Along here with these Kolosh whale hounds?"

  "They can't he everywhere of this coast. It just seems so, today."

  Braaf shook his head slowly. "Stockholm for me. These years away, they'll have forgot me, the shopkeepers and the high ones. There'll he my new land, their shops and purses."

  The two men turned squarely to each other a moment, as if a good-bye was about to be offered. Instead, Karlsson gave Braaf the quick serious smile and said: "Life's harvest to us both, Braaf."

  Meeting the ocean swell at the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the brig rocked and dipped as though in introduction. A bob and curtsy, it may have been, for the vessel was christened the June.

  A quick ship, the Jane, as a Cape May brig will be; but also being of Yankee registry, a working and earning one too. Within its hold lay eleven thousand feet of recent forest, freshly taken aboard at one of the sawmill settlements that were popping into existence along Puget Sound the past year or so. Piling stock constituted this particular cargo, plump round Douglas fir to underpin the docks of one of America's new ports of the Pacific.

  Now, outbound, the Jane rode clear of Cape Flattery, let out full sails on both its masts, then bore away in the direction of the most robust of those ports—San Francisco—ward, south.

  Three hours from then, off the top of the island Wennberg came tumbling.

  "Karlsson! Braaf! Christ-of-mercy, out there—!"

  Respectful of the turbulent coast, the Jane was ranging two miles or more out from shore, and by the time Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf clambered up to Wennberg's sighting point the ship already was drawing even with the island.

  In Karlsson's mind the choices ran: Canoe ... no, full sails bent that way, the ship couldn't be caught or even gained on. Even could the Swedes paddle into view of the vessel, logic would account them Koloshes from this village, all the better to be left back there sniffing wake.... Signal fire ... same. Even build one instantly, what sane captain would heave in along this howling canyon of a coast? But the whale people, they were more than guaranteed to he attracted across by any such smoke.... Gunshots ... same a
gain, only quicker doom....

  Evidently at different pace and route the same sorting had been racing in Braaf and Wennberg, Wennberg yas yet squinting dismally toward the ship when Braaf swung to Karlsson.

  "Sailcloth," agreed Karlsson, and Braaf was gone for it.

  Careful to be always below the seaward brow of the island, walled from any Kolosh glance from the mainland, they flapped sailcloth. Flapped it as if trying to con jure flight, a man at each end of the length of fabric, third man jumping in whenever a pair of arms gave out, the fabric bucking as if in anguish to join that clan of sheets kiting atop the Jane.

  Whichever of the three was not pummeling the air performed the steady yearning toward the Jane with the spyglass, rifle of vision aimed in search of a lens ogling back) But found nothing but portrait of a ship on the wing. Wennberg's wishful curses ran steady as incantation, ought ill themselves have wrought some drastic change in the brig's glide. Caused the mainmast to split and crash over. Tumbled the cabin lad overboard. Invoked Neptune to rise and shoo the ship back north. Tugged loose the sails and tangled them so thoroughly the captain would trice her right around. Any miracle, whatever style, would do.

  Those sails continued to waft serenely southward. Leaving Wennberg and Braaf and Karlsson to stand and watch the distancing ship like men yearning to dive to a cloud.

  The day at last declining toward dusk, Karlsson took the glass and eased to the down coast cud of the island to study the shoreline ahead. Wennberg was staying atop the island to brood, Braaf was hack at watching the Koloshes demolish the whale. Since the passing of the ship, both wore a look as though they had just been promised pestilence.

  ... Danced right by us. Damn. All the days since New Archangel, and a ship chooses this goddamned one. Damn, damn. Hadn't been for the Koloshes we'd right now be ...

  With the glass Karlsson checked back on the villagers and their whale festival. Wood was being piled up the beach from the carcass. Evidently the celebration was going to rollick on into night.

  Something flitted, was down among the shore rocks before Karlsson could distinguish it. Birds of this shoreline evidently had caught motion from the surf. Sanderlings, oyster catchers, turnstones, dowitchers, snipe, along here always some or other of them bobbing, skittering, dashing off; the proud-striding measured ravens of New Archangel were nowhere in it with these darters. Contrary another way, too, this southering coast was beginning to show itself. Its clouds were not the ebb and flow skidding about above Sitka Sound, but fat islands that impended on the horizon half a day at a time. Here it seemed, then, that you could navigate according to the clouds' positions, and that the routes of birds had nothing to teach but life's confusion—which it would be like both weather and wingdom to deceive you into.

  Karlsson one more time put his attention south.

  The withdrawing tide was lifting more and more spines of reef to view. But no beach was coming evident, just a broad tidal tract of roundish rocks, as if the farm fields of all the world had been emptied of stone here. Or, cannonball-like as these rocks looked to be, it might be said battlefields.

  Beyond the stone clutter no islands stood to sight, only the bladed outlines of seastacks. Many of them. All in all, Karlsson saw, this appeared the rockiest reach of coast yet, and it needed be paddled past by night and a landing made on it somewhere in earliest dawn.

  ... Day this has been, even that can't be much damn worse....

  "Burning the goddamn world over there. What in the name of hell d'you suppose they're up to?"

  The villagers' beach fire just had flared high, a puff of sun against the dark, from a bowl of whale oil flung onto it.

  "Whether they mean to or not, they're making us a beacon to steer from awhile," Karlsson answered Wennberg. The three canoemen hefted, and the canoe left land, caught the water's pulse.

  Not since taking their quit of New Archangel had they paddled at night, and the memory of that stint did not go far to reassure anybody.

  Ordinarily dark was Braaf's time, the thief's workplace. But here in the canoe with blackness around, Karlsson could sense Braaf's distrust of the situation, feel how his paddling grew more tentative, grudging, than ever.

  Wennberg at the bow meantime seemed in every hurry to yank them through the night single-handed; his paddling was near flail.

  Karlsson drew breath deep, exhaled exasperation oh so carefully, and decreed:

  "Hold up, the both of you. We need to flap our wings together. At my word, do your stroke. Now ... now ... now ..."

  The night Pacific is little at all like the day's. With the demarking line of horizon unseeable the ocean draws up dimension from its deeps, sends it spreading, distending, perhaps away into some blend with the sky itself. If stars ever kindle out there amid the wavetops we need not be much surprised. And all the while every hazard, rock, shoal, reef, shelf, snag, is being whetted against the solid dark.

  In their watch for collision Wennberg and Braaf and Karlsson stared tunnels into the black. From Wennberg's harsh breathing and undervoice curses, every instant that catastrophe did not occur only convinced him that it was overdue.

  "How far are we going in this?" Braaf this was, his tone suggesting that lie for one had gone a plentiful distance.

  "Far enough past those whale stab hers, Unless you want to sail in on them and ask breakfast. Put your breath to work. Now ... now ... now ..."

  ... There's a night I don't need to live again. But now there'll be tonight. That ought do it, put us past the country of those whalemen at least. Then we can go by day, like men with eyes....

  As if it was nothing to yacht along this coast, gulls were drifting up a current over a headland to the south, Karlsson was studying the rock-cornered shore beneath the gulls, a half mile or so from this crescent of beach where the canoe had put in at dawn. The credit of the night was that the canoe and its men survived it, not met with stone in the dark. Its debit had been the interminable wait offshore for daybreak, the canoe tied to a patch of bull kelp, Karlsson keeping a watch while Braaf and Wennberg tried to doze, before the coast could be studied for a landing site and any sign of Koloshes. Now it must have been noon or past, all of them having slept deep as soon as the canoe was lodged from sight behind shore rocks. Afternoon would have to be waited through, until the launch into dark again. Meanwhile this thrust of shore to their south...

  ... Might be. Just might by Christ be. Chance to go shake the bush and find out, anyway....

  "We've maybe been looking the wrong direction for game," Karlsson mused aloud. "Forest instead of ocean."

  "What, thee"—Wennberg—"go shooting at fish, are you? About like you, that'd be." By now even the blacksmith had thinned drastically, his blockiness planed away to width. Their last few meals had been beans and mussels and clams, the shellfish a slow pantry to find and gather. Without fresh meat all three canoemen soon would be husks of themselves.

  "Fish, no. But a hair seal, maybe. If they've followed season to these waters ... that point across there, it's the sort they lie around on."

  "Gunshot, though?" This doubt from Braaf.

  "A lot of noise from surf there, all that rock. And we can gander around the headland for Koloshes before getting onto the point."

  Wennberg hitched his trousers, maybe calculating all the new room in them. "I could eat a skunk from the ass forward. If you think you remember which end of the goddamn gun to point, Smålander, I'm for it."

  Karlsson checked Braaf, received a slow nod. And made it decision : "Let's go find supper."

  Plump jetsam on the outmost of shore, the seals were there.

  So was a new style of coast to any the Swedes had seen yet. Having clambered downbeach to the point, the three found themselves at the inshore edge of a rook shelf high and fiat as a quay—although no one hut nature could employ a quay some two hundred paces wide and that much again in length. Odd in this, too: in the blue and brown afternoon, the Pacific tossing bright around the somber rock face of the coast, this huge
queer natural wharf lay thinly sheeted with wet, like puddles after rain.

  By now Braaf had tides in his bones alongside the weather. "The high drowns all this, then," he stated, nodding the attention of Karlsson and Wennberg to the remnant pools. "We'll need be quick." Even as Braaf said so, earliest waves of the incoming tide tried to leg themselves up over the seaward edge of the rock quay.

  "Quick we'll be," Karlsson responded and was in motion while the words still touched the air. "Over here, that horn of rock."

  Onto the tidal plateau he led the other two, to where a formation the height and outline of a sloop sail bladed up. Beside this prong, from view of the seal herd, Karlsson studied out ambush.

  Leftward, the rock shelf lay open and bare. Any least twitch of invasion there would he instantly seen by the seals.

  To the right, close by Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf, the ocean with undreamable patience had forced a tidal trough—a lengthy crevasse bent at the middle, like an arm brought up to ward off a blow. Every insurge of surf slopped a harsh compressed tide through this shore crack, a hurl of water as if flung from a giant pan, and the crevasse gaped wider than a man would want to try to jump. o surprise to the seals from this foaming quarter either, then.

  The sea end of this trough, though. There a fist of boulder met the ocean, and just inland toward the men bulged a low knurl of rock off that formation. A wen on the (jack of the tide-rock wrist, you might think of it.

  ... Little help but some help. I'll need make it be enough, won't I....

  "I'll shoot from there," Karlsson indicated the wen site ahead to Wennberg and Braaf. He made the short crawl to the I lump, Wennberg scrabbling behind on the left and Braaf vastly more agile to the right. They hunched either side of Karlsson, Wennberg breathing heavy, Braaf soundless, as the slender hunter peered to the seals.