The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [32]
"What're you, on parade?" Wennberg demanded, "Where'd you come up with that rig?"
Braaf held up a wrist and admired the sewn filigree. "Round and about, where all good ware comes from, blacksmith."
"Elegant as new ivory, Braaf," Melander put in dryly. "If the Koloshes come pestering again, we'll tell them you're the crown prince, aye? Now paddle."
That day and most of the one after it took them to reach the southmost tip of Baranof Island, Cape Ommaney.
In that time Braaf and Wennberg and Melander began to realize, though it never would have occurred to the first two to offer it aloud and even Melander found the sentiment a bit unwieldy to frame into words, that in all their seasons at New Archangel they never really had put eyes on the Alaskan forest. True, timber hedged the stockade and settlement, furred the isles of Sitka Sound and the humped backs of mountains around. But here downcoast, Alaska's forest stretched like black-green legions of time itself, the horizon to the left of the canoemen relentlessly jutting with trees wherever there was firmament for them to fasten themselves upright on. Where soil ran out at the shore edge, trees teetered on rock. Fleece thick as this forest was, it seemed possible that every tree of the coast was in green touch with every other, limb to limb, a continent-long tagline of thicket.
Along this universe of standing wood the Swedes saw not another human—which was what Melander had banked on—nor even sea life to speak of, the Russian-American Company's "marine Cossacks," the Aleuts, long since having harvested these waters bare of otters and seals. What abounded were birds. Lordly ravens, big as midnight cats. Crows, smaller and baleful about it. Sharp-shinned hawks in tree outlooks. Eagles riding the air above the coastal lines of bluff, patrolling in great watchful glides before letting the air spiral them high again. Sea gulls, cormorants, scoters, loons, puffins, kingfishers, ducks of a dozen kinds. At times, every breathing thing of this coastline except the four paddlers seemed to have taken wing.
Cape Ommaney steepened southward into nearly half a mile of summit, evidently detailed to hunch there as the island's last high sentry against the open water all around.
Perhaps the stony bluff put Wennberg in mind of the round-backed mountains near New Archangel, for that evening after supper he nodded out toward the bay between the canoeists' camp and the cape and asked: "What'd you do, Melander, if the Nicholas poked around that point just now?"
"After I emptied my britches, do you mean? So then, Wennberg, the Nicholas chugs in your dreams tonight, does it? Me, by now I think she's still anchored firm iu Sitka Sound and the Russians are in their beds with their thumbs up their butts." The canoe's progress thus far had set Melander up on stilts of humor. "But I've been in error before. Once, anyway—the time I thought I was wrong. What about you other pair, now, what's your guess? Are the Russians panting after us like hounds onto hares as Brother Wennberg thinks? Aye?"
"No," Karlsson offered. "They think we can't survive."
"What the hell makes you think we can?" retorted Wennberg.
"Because we're alive to now, and closer to Astoria each time we move a paddle."
"Your prediction, Braaf?"
"They're not after us. They don't spend thought on us at all by now."
Wennberg snorted. "We dance out of New Archangel practically under their goddamn noses and they don't even think about us? Braaf, your head is mud."
"They need forget us, or we'll mean too much to them. You learn that fast in the streets, blacksmith. The ones who rule never bother their minds with the likes of us. The provisions I took from the Russians, they regret. That they're short of our faces at work call, they regret. Maybe they even regret the Kolosh canoe gone. But us ourselves, we're smoke to them by now."
None of them had ever heard