The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [34]
"The Finns, they're praying for it to rain ale."
"Trade boots with any of them, would you?"
"No. Not yet."
The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done. Forces hang invisibly there, tethering the spheres across the black infinite canyons: an unseeable cosmic harness which somehow tugs night and sun, ebbtide and flood, season and coming season. So too the distances among men cast in with one another on an ocean must operate. In their days of steady paddling, these four found that they needed to cohere in ways they had never dreamt of at New Archangel. To perform all within the same close orbit yet not bang against one another.
Meals brought a first quandary. Melander began as cook, but fussed the matter. Perpetually his suppers lagged behind everyone else's hunger. When he could 110 longer stand Melander's dawdling and poking, Wennberg volunteered himself. That lasted two tries. "You're not smithing axheads here," Braaf murmured as he poked at the char of Wennberg's victuals. Braaf himself, it went without saying, could not be entirely relied upon to prevent food from detouring between his lips instead of arriving at the others' plates. By the sixth day, then, the cooking chore had singled out Karlsson. He was no festal prodigy, but his output at least stilled the nightly grumbling that one might as well go off into the forest and graze.
Wennberg's particular tithe turned out to be his paddling. Not built best for it, much too much ham at his shoulders and upper arms; but Wennberg had the impatience to take on the water like a windmill in a high breeze. Always exerting toward Karlsson's example of deftness, the blacksmith stroked at half again the pace Melander could manage, twice as great as the inconstant Braaf. Day on day the canoe pushed itself through the water primarily on the aft paddles of Karlsson and Wennberg, Melander would have preferred more balance to the propulsion, yet it worked.
To his own surprise as much as anyone's, Braaf proved the best of them at reading the weather. Long before even Melander, the one seasoned sailor among them, Braaf would know a change was coming onto the ocean, as if along with his naive robin face he possessed a bird's hollow bones in which to feel the atmosphere's shift.
And Melander, Melander's personal orbit was detail: Melander navigating, finding fresh water for the cask, fetching firewood, mothering the canoe and its stowage; Melander sew your button for you, treat your blister, sustain you with a midmorning piece of dried salmon, commiserate your ache of knee; the edge strength to hold all into place, Melander provided.
More than this henwork lie saw to, though. Subtract parts from this extensive man in their successive value to the escape, the ultimate item would be his tongue. For Melander knew what poets and prime ministers know, that the cave of the mouth is where men's spirits shelter. His gift of gab stood him well with crews on all the vessels of his voyaging. Now he worked words on Wennberg and Braaf and Karlsson like a polish rag on brass. "Keep your hair on, Wennberg, there'll be supper quick as quick.... Braaf, it would be pretty to think this canoe will paddle itself, but it won't. Get the holiday out of your stroking, aye?...Karlsson, that surf looks to me like worse and more of it. Let's bend our way around, so-fashion...."
Could you, from high, hold to view a certain time of each evening now—the brink when dark is just overcoming dusk—you would see a surprising tracery of bright embers southward from New Archangel: the fires of each campsite of the canoemen. Only six or eight, as yet, but trending, definitely trending, drafting fresh pattern along the night coast.
"Too much smoke. We're not signaling Saint Peter from here." Melander once more. He dropped to his knees to fan the campfire into purer flame.
"You'd 've never lasted over a forge," jeered Wennberg. "A whiff of smoke tans the soul."
Melander calculated. Three camps in a row, this smoky debate with Wennberg.