The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [33]
They readied in the morning to cross the channel from Cape Ommaney east to Kuiu, the first of the island stairsteps onward from Baranof, On Melander's map Kuiu could have been where palsy seized the mapmaker's hand, a spatter of crooked shores and hedging rocks. Melander said nothing of all this quiver to the other three, simply told them that he judged there'd be stout current up the passage so that they would need to aim mostly south to end up east.
It worked out his way, and by noon the canoe was nearing Kuiu, snow-scarved peaks rising beyond shore. Here, however, the map's muss of dots and squiggles became real, and the coastline stood to them with a rugged headland.
"No hole in the shore, aye?" Surf blasted across rocks not far off the point, "Let's stay away from that horse market," Melander decreed. Avoiding the channel between headland and rocks the canoe stood south again, the paddlers now working directly against the current.
In a few miles a cove revealed itself, but faced open to the weather from the west.
The next break in the shore yawned more exposure yet.
"Damn." Melander's exasperation was outgrowing his epithets. "Is this whole stone of an island unbuttoned like this?"
Two further inhospitable Kuiu coves answered him.
Dusk waited not far by now, and the labor of paddling against the current was sapping the canoemen. From weariness, they nearly blundered into a broad slop of kelp before Karlsson glimpsed it in the gloom.
By now the canoe had reached the southern tip of the island, a rocky point which bade less welcome than any profile yet.
"Bleak as ashes," Melander bestowed on this last of Kuiu. Then reached out the spyglass, to see whether there was any hope out in the channel.
Maybe, he reported. In the water beyond them stood what looked like thin clumps of timber.
Melander lit a pitch splinter in order to peer close at his map. Through the channel hung a thread of line; a ship had navigated here, testimony which was needed now because low rocks and shoals so easily could hide themselves in the gray mingle of water and dusk.
Melander set the craft for the timber clumps. They proved to be small islands, and on one of the narrowest, the kind that sailors said could be put through an hourglass in half a day, the canoeists pulled to shelter just short of full dark.
***
That was their first day of stumble, two stair treads of island when but one bad been in glimpse. Yet Melander and bis three-man navy somehow had alit secure, and after Kuiu the going smoothened.
In the days now, the canoe jinked its way southeast amid constant accessible landfall. The major island called Prince of Wales rests dominantly in this topography like a long platter on a table, smaller isles along its west a strew of lesser plateware of this North Pacific setting. Here the canoeists could cut a course which, while Melander said a snake would break its back trying to follow their wake, kept them mostly shielded from the ocean's tempers of weather. It granted them too a less hectic chance to learn some of the look and behavior of the Northwest coast. How a break in the forest ahead meant not merely gulch or indent of shore, it meant stream and possible campsite. How a bed of kelp could serve as breakwater, smoothen the route between it and shore even when the outer water was fractious. And the vital reading by Melander that alongshore, in a width about that of a broad street, flowed local currents and eddies that sometimes were opposite to a hindering wind or tide. It was not the voyage any of the Swedes had expected, these stints in among the eelgrass and anemones, but they eased the miles.
"New Archangel, there. What d'you suppose they're at, just now?"
"The governor's just done his whole day's labor—taken a sniff of snuff."
"Okhotskans're staring