The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [35]
"You need to know a thing, Mister Blacksmith. Braaf, Karlsson, you also. This I heard from Dobzhansky, that interpreter who helped me out at first with the Kolosh fishing crews. He came once somewhere into these waters with a trading mission the Russians tried ...
The mission had been contrived as retaliation against the Hudson's Bay Company for its practice of slipping firearms to the Sitka Koloshes, so both the Russians and the downcoast natives were in a mood to make as much face as possible. They inaugurated with a night of feast, and Dobzhansky found himself sharing a baked salmon and goathorn cups of fermented berry juice with a canoe chieftain. The pair discovered they could converse in the trading tongue of the coast, Chinook jargon. At once the native sought to know of Dobzhansky how many heads the tsar had.
"How many heads? Why, one like you and me."
No, the native made Dobzhansky understand, not how many heads. How many skulls?
"Skulls? What would the tsar do with skulls?"
Sleep on them, the way Callicum does, the native said, pointing out to Dobzhansky the tribal chief in the middle of the carousal.
"Sleeps on them? Why does he do that?"
For strength, the native answered. Anyone who sleeps 011 a pile of skulls is a strong man, is he not?
Melander had not intended to tell his crew Dobzhansky's tale of this coast's people. He was not heaven-certain he should have.
But no more objections were heard about care over campfire smoke.
***
The water met their daily moods with its own. One morning their channel would drowse, lie heavy, with a molten look like gray bottle glass. Another, it would wake in full fret, white lids of wave opened by wind or current.
The weather could change with knife-edge sharpness. Once they saw to the southeast a pastel fluff of clouds, peach and pale blue, which was directly abutted by an ink cloud of squall: a tender seascape neighboring with tantrum. The join of continent and ocean seemed to excite the weather into such local targeting. Time and time, the canoemen saw a storm swoop onto a single mountain amid many, as if sacking up a hostage as a lesson to all the rest.
Once Braaf pointed out for the others a narrow white sheet of sky, very likely snow, north on the coast behind them. "Stay north and frost the Russians' asses," Melander directed the storm with a push of his hands. It stayed.
A thirty-nosed sea creature poked abruptly from the water, delivered the canoeists a thunderous burp, and sank.
"Sea lions," Karlsson called. When the school surfaced again, each pug-nosed head making steady quick thrusts as if breaking the silver pane of the water, the leathery swimmers held pace for a while alongside the canoe, watching the upright creatures in it.
The past few days Melander had traded about with Karlsson, thinking it well that more than one of them be able to handle the steering paddle at the stern and that these waters were the place to do the learning. Melander once had been told by his Kolosh fishing crew that the practice of some southward natives was to dub the bowman of a canoe "Captain Nose." Accordingly, with Karlsson's move forward Melander bestowed the title on him, and Braaf and Wennberg took the notion up. For the next while, it was all "Captain Nose, Your Honor, what's it to be for supper tonight?" and "May I suggest, Captain Nose, that it's nice to see something ahead besides Melander's back?"
A number of tossful nights passed before any of them could become accustomed to the noise of ocean contending against coast. Surf expelling up the beach and draining back, the increasing crash of tide incoming, the held-breath instants of silence at lowest low tide.
Melander's unease went on longest. An absence of some sort nagged through the dark at him, persistent as the sweet spruce odor of their nightly mattress of boughs. Time and again he would come up in the night, sit a minute in his long angles, propped, and gazing at the blanketed forms on either side of him. Two chosen by him as tools would be pulled