The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [27]
While the leader of the Koloshes sought to balance it all in his mind and the exertion of his crew shortened the water between the canoes, the craft in front suddenly began to swing broadside, a bold-necked creature of wood turning as if having decided, at last, to do fight even if the foe was of its own kind.
As the canoe came around, the figure in its stern leveled a long hunting gun.
Startled, the range being greater than they themselves would expend shots across, the Kolosh paddlers ducked and grappled for their own weapons. But the chieftain sat steady and watched. Here was an instant he owed all attention.
The slender white hair swung his rifle into place, on a line through the air to the Kolosh leader.
The chieftain knew, as only one man of combat can see into the power of another, what Karlsson was doing. The whitehair was touching across distance to the chieftain's life, plucking it up easily as a kitten, either to claim or to let drop back into place.
The other three whitehairs aimed their weapons as well, hut not with the slender one's measure.
Rattled by the turnabout of men who were supposed to be desperately fleeing them, the Kolosh crew were trying to yank their rifles into place, the canoe rocking with their confusion.
The chieftain still watched ahead. He knew himself to be twice the watcher here, the one intent on the waiting rifleman across the water and the other in gaze to himself at this unexpected seam between existences. There was this and that to be said for courage and a calm death; life was tasked with a decent departure, lint the fact was that here, straddled between the strange tribes of whitehairs and tsarmen, did not seem the ultimate site and audience a canoe warrior of his years had a right to expect.
The decision was out of the chieftain's mouth before his mind knew it had concluded the weighing.
The Kolosh paddlers slid their guns into the bottom of their canoe. Their craft steadied 011 the water, gentling, a steed of sea cavalry settling into rest.
In the other canoe, the slender man set aside his rifle; as did the big whitehair in the bow. Silently the Koloshes watched as the two of them, strokesmen of power, paddled the canoe away while the other pair maintained rifles.
The Swedes' craft was passing from view around a shorewall of timber when the chieftain said one thing more.
"Let the sea eat them."
Shortly before noon, Naval Captain of Second Rank Nikolai Yakovlevich Rosenberg, governor of Russian America, pinched hard at the bridge of his nose in hope of alleviating the aftereffect of the previous night's festivities, decided that no remedy known to man could staunch such aches as were contending within his forehead, sighed, and instructed his secretary to send in the Lutheran pastor.
The pastor, a Finn from Saarijaarvi who was considered something of a clodhopper not only by the Russian officers but by the Stockholm contingent of Swedes, dolefully had been anticipating his call into the governor's chamber. By breakfast every tongue in New Archangel knew of the escape. The double number of sentries along the stockade catwalk retold the news, and the sidelong glances every Russian was casting at every Swede and Finn this morning bespoke most eloquently of all. The pastor's hesitant entrance into the governor's presence gathered beneath a single ceiling two of the three unhappiest men in New Archangel. The third was named Bilibin.
"Excellency."
"Pastor. As you may have heard, our citizenry is fewer by four this morning."
"I did happen to hear the, ah, rumor."