The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [29]
"Excellency."
Late that afternoon, securely downcast from New Archangel and some careful miles shy of the Ozherskoi outpost, the four canoeists pulled ashore behind a small headland, in a cove snug as a mountainside tarn.
Weariness burdened every smallest move as they tried to uncramp their legs, shrug the hunch from the top of their backs. Karlsson, evidently going to be methodical until he dropped, at once was unloading the rifles against further risk of accident from one. Wennberg, clumsy from the need of food, lurched to a rock and sat.
Melander, though, Creakily, Melander leaned toward Braaf and whispered.
Braaf nodded and ran a rapid hand into the supplies stowed within the canoe. When his hand came up, it held an elegant dark bottle.
"Karlsson, forgive us that it isn't hootchina. But champagne from the officers' clubhouse was the best Braaf could manage under the circumstances."
Melander's long face as lie spoke was centered with a colossal grin, which now began to repeat itself on Karlsson and even Wennberg."
"We think it may do well enough for a toast to our first day of journey even so," Melander purred on as Braaf worked the cork free. "Braaf, you furnished the ale, would you care to sip first"
Melander, like the others, expected the young provisioner merely to swig and pass along. Instead Braaf stood looking at the slim bottle in his hands and murmured: "Let me remember a moment.... Yes, I know ..." He lifted his glance to the other three, sent it on above their heads, and recited:
"'May you live forever and I never die.'"
Then he drank deep.
Permitting the others their champagne sleep, Melander enlists the last of dusk and begins to restow the lesser items in the canoe, taking more care than could be had in the dark and hurry at New Archangel. Fit the spyglass into this cranny, handy to hand, ...Stowage will be a perpetual chore of these voyage days, all the heavy items such as the water cask and the provisions and the guns unshipped each time the canoe is carried up the shore into shelter for the night, precaution against breaking the thin wooden skin with weight. Pauses now, gives a listen toward the water. Resumes : tucks away a box of tea....
As Melander occupies himself at this, another picture is called for in the mind, large as you can manage to make it. Perhaps larger yet, for this image must be of the northmost arc of the Pacific Ocean: the chill ascendant quarter-moon of that hemisphere of water, from the schooled islands of Japan up to the Siberian coast and across to the Alaskan, then curving south and east along the continental extent of Canada and America.
Vaster stretches can be found on the earth, but not all so many, and none as fiercely changeable. Most of the weathers imaginable arc engendered somewhere along the North Pacific's horizon coast, from polar chill to the stun of desert heat. Within this water world the special law of gravity is lateral and violent. Currents of brine and air rule. Most famous and elusive of these is the extreme wind called the williwaw—an ambusher, an abrupt torrent of gust flung seaward from the snow-held Alaskan mountains. But times, too, the North Pacific flings back the wind, gale so steady onto the coast it seems the continent has had to hunch low to keep from swaying.
The North Pacific's most tremendous force, however, is something like a permanent typhoon under the water. Kuroshio, the Japanese Current, which puts easterly push into several thousand miles of ocean. Even here at this farthest littoral, the furrowed southeastern archipelago which on a map dithers at the flank of the main Alaskan peninsula like a puppy shadowing its mother—even here, Melander and Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf feel Kuroshio's shove against their journey without realizing it. Are touched too by the clemency Kuroshio brings from its origins near the equator, warmth being relayed along this portion of coast by a north-seeking offspring of Kuroshio, the Alaska Current. Snow can find southeastern Alaska and often enough visits it, but more commonly