The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [13]
Now: the three of them were of one mind for the canoe, was there any other—
Paddles, Karlsson announced, and insisted they be Haida paddles, a deft leaf-bladed type carved by a tribe somewhere downcoast and occasionally bartered north as far as New Archangel as prized items of trade, and one of them further needed be a long steering paddle of perfect balance.
Hearing this, Braaf frowned.
He had full reason. It took him all of the next week to accumulate a trio of Haida paddles from the natives along the harbor.
"Three?" said Karlsson when they met again. "What if we lose one over the side?"
Braaf cursed in his sweet voice, and went off to start the thief's siege of watching and waiting which would accrue a fourth paddle.
Like the single eye of some great guarding creature, each morning at six the stockade gate near the west-most corner of New Archangel came open, at six each evening it swung resolutely shut.
Only during those hours of day were the Koloshes allowed into the settlement, in scrutinized numbers, and the market area where they were permitted to trade was delineated directly inside the gate, so that they could he rapidly shoved out in event of commotion, Moreover, the first of the four gun-slitted blockhouses buttressing the stockade sat close above the area of market and gate on a shieldlike short slope of rock, miniature of the strong knob uplifting Baranov's Castle. Scan from inside or out, here at New Archangel's portal Russian wariness held its strongest focus.
Except. Except that, bachelor existence on a frontier being what it was, the gate sometimes peeped open in the evenings. Until dusk went into solid night, it was not unknown that a recreative stay might he made among certain bargainable women in the Kolosh village. For those dwelling within New Archangel rather than without, then, the gate's second and unofficial—and by order of the governor, absolute—curfew was full dark.
Karlsson quirked his mouth enough to show skepticism, for him a typhoon of emotion. Melander was one who would have you believe that sideways is always true north. But Karlsson was a vane of stiffer sort. He possessed a close idea of his own capabilities and could gauge himself with some dispassion as to whether he was living up to them. (That he bad not much interest in people who lacked either capability or gauge, his stand-off style more than half hinted.) What Melander was proposing in this gate enterprise, Karlsson doubted he could fashion himself to.
"Right fit or not," Melander assured him, "you're the only fit."
And so Karlsson began to increase his frequency of visit to the native village, and by lingering on after the other visitants, to stretch each stay deeper into dusk. Eventually he was nudging regularly against the second curfew, much to the discomfiture of the night watchman at the gate of the stockade, Bilibin.
Bilibin was one of the longest-serving of the Russian indenturees who had been funneled out through the Siberian port of Okhotsk and across the northern seas to New Archangel. Peg him, perhaps, somewhere amid the milder miscreants, without doubt having skinned his nose against one law or another but not the most hellhound soul you can call to mind, either. Simply a burden bearer of the sort life always puts double load onto: in this era when it was said, "Better even to go to the army than to Russian America," Bilibin had ended up at New Archangel and shouldering a musket as well.
For purpose here, however, which is that of Karlsson and Braaf and Melander, Bilibin's significant earmark was his longevity at New Archangel. Like many another, he had stayed on and on in the employ of the Russian-American Company because he was in debt to it deep as his eyeteeth. He also was sufficiently a scapegrace to have exasperated a generation of superiors, so that he now stood the least desirable of shifts, the gravy-eye watch, those heavy hours spanning