The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [0]
Ivan Doig
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A HARVEST BOOK
HARCOURT, INC.
Orlando Austin New York
San Diego Toronto London
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Copyright © 1982 by Ivan Doig
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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Requests for permission to make copies of any part of
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Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
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www.HarcourtBooks.com
First published by Atheneum in 1982
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doig, Ivan
The sea runners/Ivan Doig.—1st Harvest ed.
p. cm.
"A Harvest book."
1. Indentured servants—Fiction. 2. Escapes—Fiction.
3. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.O415S4 2006
813'.54—dc22 2005037024
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603102-8 ISBN-10: 0-15-603102-7
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition 2006
G I K J H F
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TO JOHN RODEN
for splicing the lifeline at Ellen Creek
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The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence ..
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.
Robinson Jeffers, The Place for No Story
ONE
A HIGH-NOSED cedar canoe, nimble as a sea-bird, atop a tumbling white ridge of ocean.
Carried nearer and nearer by the water's determined sweep, the craft sleds across the curling crest of wave and begins to glide the surf toward the dark frame of this scene, a shore of black spruce forest. On a modern chart of the long, crumbled coastline south from the Gulf of Alaska toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca this particular landfall is written in as Arisankhana Island. None of the four voyagers bobbing to its shore here in a winter dusk of the year 1853, however, knows anything of this name, nor would it matter to their prospect if any did.
Now the canoemen as they alight. Karlsson and Melander and Wennberg and Braaf, More days than they wish to count they have been together in the slender canoe, dodging from one of this coast's constant humps of forest-and-rock to the next. Each man of them afraid a number of times in these days; brave almost as often. Here at Arisankhana they land wetly, heft their slim but laden craft across the gravel beach into hiding within the salal and salmonberry.
"Hope to Christ"—the broad man, Wennberg, this—"this's drier than last night's."
"Oil, aye, and God send you wine and figs too, Wennberg ?"
"Ought'vc left him, Melander." The one named Braaf, here. "Ought've left him cooped in New Archangel."
The slender one of them, called Karlsson, stays silent.
They turn away to the abrupt timber. As the trees sieve them from sight, another white wave replaces the rolling hill of water by which the four were borne to this shore where they are selecting their night's shelter, and where one of them is to die.
Their escape from New Archangel was of Melander's making. In any day's comings and goings at that far-north assemblage of hewn logs and Russian tenacity, Melander you would have spied early. Toplofty man with lanks of anus and high hips, so that he seemed to be ail long sections and hinges. His line of jaw ran on as well, and so too his forehead; in the extent of Melander only the bright blue eyes and stub nose and short mouth neighbored closely, a sudden alert center of face amid the jaw-and-forehead expanse as if peering in wily surprise out of the hole of a tree trunk.
"A strong right arm is the lever of life, these Russians say. You'd think by chance the Castle crowd might once put the lever to something other than hoisting a glass of champagne, aye?" Early on, too, you would have come to know the jointed talk of the man, this Melander habit of interrupting himself to affirm whether he dared go on with so mesmerizing a line of conversation. All such reluctance to dazzle further notwithstanding,