The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [30]
These four Swedes in a Tlingit canoe are attempting a thousand or twelve hundred miles—something of that range, by Melander's estimate—of this North Pacific world. Not all so much, you may say. A fraction of a shard of an ocean, after all. Ten or a dozen hundred miles: in fifty or sixty sturdy days one might walk such a distance and perhaps yet have a wafer's-worth of leather on one's boot soles. Except that much of this particular distance is exploded into archipelago: island, island, island, island, like a field of flattened asteroids. Except, too, for season being fully against these water going men, the weather of winter capable of blustering them to a halt any hour of each day and seldom apt to furnish the favoring downcoast wind needed to employ the canoe's portable mast and square sail. Except, more than that, current too being against them, the flow of the Alaska Current up this coast as they seek to stroke down it. Except, finally, for details of barrier the eye and mind just now are beginning to reach—forbidding bristle of forest on those countless islands, white smash of breakers 011 rocks hidden amid the moating channels—so greatly more complex is this jagged slope of the North Pacific than the plain arithmetic of its miles.
In this picture, Melander as he raptly stashes his boxes of tea and swags of sailcloth amounts to a worker ant 011 the rock toe of an Alp.
"Tumble up! Fall onto your feet and suffer morning !"
Melander roused his trio as rapidly as if they constituted the crew of a schooner aiming into storm, and for the ocean-old reason: to steal minutes. Snatch time whenever it was catchable was going to he the policy of his captaincy. Any distance gained here at the front of their voyage served as that much less to be slogged out later, when weariness would be like a weight grown into their bones.
Melander amended their canoe positions from the night before. Karlsson still the stern paddler. But in front of him, Wennberg, In front of Wennberg, Braaf. Melander again in the bow. In such placement Melander of course had reason. Karlsson was the adept canoeman of them, far away the fittest to handle the large steersman's paddle. Wennberg, close by Karlsson's example, would be driven to try to keep pace with him. Braaf, Melander wanted nearest his own scrutiny, to ensure that he shirked no more than could be prevented.
Their early miles went in silence, as if these new canoemen were not sure they could afford effort to talk. And had they been able to bend their vision upward over Baranof's dour foreshore to sec what they were traveling on the edge of, their powers of speech might have been appalled out of them for good. A high-standing sea of mountains, white chop of snow and ice and rock, with arms of the Pacific, blue fjords and inlets, thrusting in at whatever chance: Alaska's locked grapple of continent and ocean.
Then—
"Melander, you said these first days we'd only to keep this shore on our left, there's no other land along here. What the hell d'you call that out there?"
Wennberg was pointing southwest, where a dim bulk rose on the horizon.
"You've caught your eye on Cape Flyaway," Melander responded. "Clouds. Sometimes they sit down on the water like brood hens and you'd swear they're land, couldn't be anything but. That Finn skipper spent half of one morning searching our charts for a thunderhead he thought was a piece of Hawaii. We need to take care. This coast would gladly stand us on our ears. Read the map, read the compass, read the landmarks, and not go chasing clouds. That'll fetch us to Astoria. Aye?"
"What'll it be like?"