The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [31]
"Sailors' buzz I've heard is that it's a proper port but small. Sits on a fat river with Hell's own sandbar at its mouth. The Americans—paddle, Braaf, a scissor of a lad like you is sharp enough to move your mouth and arms at the same time, aye?—the Americans, recent years, have been coming into that country in numbers and they boast Astoria as tomorrow's town of this coast. But all wc care is whether ships touch at the place, and touch they do."
Not far into the day, Melander called a pause in the paddling, "Time for a listen," he said.
"A listen—?" Wennberg Caught on. "The steamship, you don't think—Melander, damn you seven ways, you said the Russians'd not come chasing after us with it—"
"I still say so. But maybe we'd do well to have a listen now and again, for the practice of it, aye? Close your face, Wennberg."
Melander cocked his long head as if counting the trees of the forested shore. Braaf sat as always but still as a gravestone. Karlsson leaned down toward the water to catch any bounce of sound. Wennberg concentrated so hard his back bowed.
The canoe rolled mildly, moved the heads of the men inches to this side, then same inches to the other, a slow tiny wigwag.
Melander at last turned his gaze, solemn, to Wennberg.
"What—" the blacksmith started, "is there something—Melander, d'you hear—?"
"Aye," intoned Melander. "Clear as anything." The smile came out, "Silence. Which is just what we need to hear, and more of it."
Melander captained them to near North Cape, some thirty water miles downcoast from New Archangel, before stopping. By then Braaf, the least accustomed to exertion, looked particularly done in. But he said nothing, and lent a hand in the unstowing and then in hefting the canoe into shelter among a shore-touching stand of spruce.
Melander stepped over to Braaf. "Let's see."
Braaf held out his hands. "Chafed some just here"—the skin around from the back of each thumb to the forefinger, particular target of sea spray as he'd paddled—"but could be worse."
"So arc mine," Melander said. "Three or four days it'll take to toughen the skin there. But then you'll be solid as horn. Braaf, you'll make a deckhand yet,"
The sail and mast, fitted onto a pair of long cleft sticks and pegged taut, were put up as tent. Melander had not said so, but he expected shelter was going to be the main service of their sailing equipment.
Wennberg was cajoled into building a fire, Melander apportioned beans and salt beef into a kettle, Karlsson cut spruce boughs to sleep on and spread the sailcloth which would serve as a ground tarp and then their blankets, and dark brought night two of their leaving of New Archangel.
"Cheery as a graveyard, isn't it? The Russians deserve such country."
They were into their third full day of paddling beside the drab-rocked foreshore of Baranof Island, mile of whitish gray following mile of grayish white, and Melander thought it time to brighten the situation.
"Maybe we ought to have pointed north." First words out of Karlsson since breakfast, but at least he was going along with Melander's try. "I've been up the coast a way with the bear milkers and those cliffs are good dark ground."
"You'd see enough gray-gray-gray, white-white-white there too, Karlsson. Go far enough, up past the Aleuts, it's drift ice and glacier, and glacier and drift ice. Cold enough to make the walls creak. No, that's the north slope of Hell up there, the high north. At least credit me with knowing enough to point us the other way. Aye?"
Wennberg jumped for that. "That means you're taking us down Hell's south slope, does it, Melander?"
Melander blew out his breath. "Wennberg, your soul is as dingy as those rocks. Shut your gab and paddle,"
Of a sudden, rain swept the coast. Not New Archangel's soft, muslinlike showers, but cold hard rods of wet, drilling down on the men. The downfall stuttered on their garments— pitpitpitpit—like restless fingers drumming on a knee.
The other