The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [39]
By now, they could notice that daylight, what there was of it, stayed with them a bit longer.
"After Christmas, each day gets a chicken step longer," Melander assured them solemnly.
Even in these sheltered waters the currents sometimes twirled witches' knots in themselves. Once the canoemen watched as such a whirlpool took a drifting tree and spun it like a compass needle in total turn.
***
The sky opened entirely one morning, cloudless as if curtains had been taken down.
After days of hovering gray and cloaking rain the sun seemed a new idea in the scheme of things. The fresh breadth of existence was astounding. The nearest mountains stood green as May meadows. The next, loftier group darkened toward black. Then the highest, horizon peaks farthest east and south, were a shadowed blue as though thinning of substance as they extended along the coast.
This fresh light and warmth replenished all four men. "Midsummer Day come early," Melander exulted. "Today we jump over our own heads."
But through the morning the sun hung so low along the southern horizon that the glare made hazard of the water in front of the canoe. An hour or so of the ferocious dazzle left the men air-headed, sozzled with light.
Melander squinted and swore.
"Too much of everything, this bedamned coast has."
By strong afternoon effort when the sun had swung out above the ocean the canoeists managed to make a usual day's mileage.
"Braaf, you piss near me one more time and I'll rub your nose in it like a bitch pup."
Wennberg's warning halted Braaf in mid pull at the front of his thighs. Thoughtfully he arced a look from the item of interest there to the blacksmith seated a few yards away. The look, it could have been, of a marksman calculating windage and declination.
Across the campsite from the pair, ever so slightly Melander shook his head in message: No, Braaf, don't rile the bull.
"I'll wait the day I've enough to drown you," Braaf said offhandedly and eased away into the timber.
A dusk breeze gossiped here and there in the higher-up swags of forest. His wool britches undone, Braaf stood spraddled, any mother's lad with head cocked dreamily to the croon of the great woods.
Abruptly Braaf stopped hearing the wind, all his listening jerked elsewhere. Standing there with his legs wide, Braaf felt the touch of being watched, as when the thief's timbre within him would warn that the instant was wrong for pilferage. But in these woods who—
Braaf spun and met the eyes. Eyes big as his hands, staring at him from either side of an arm-long hooked beak.
In a half moment Braaf recognized that the phantasm was blind, as wood must he: and that up from its carved stare squatted several more stock-still gandering creatures, a ladder of sets of eyes.
Braaf broke to the edge of the trees and urged softly to the other three men, "Come look."
Within and around an opening in the forest they found other acrobat columns of gargoyles, some atilt as if peering more sharply down at the interlopers. Creature upon creature bursting from cedar bole, these carvings annihilated reality, loomed in a middle air of existence as if the knife, adze, whatever edged tool shaved fantasy into form, somehow had flinted life into them as well.
"What's it all?" asked Braaf. "Like those poles the Koloshes stick up, but bigger."
"I'd guess a kind of cathedral," Melander replied.
"Don't give us your hagbag riddles, Melander." Wennberg was reaching a hand up to inspect the joinery of the beak piece onto the column seen first by Braaf. Rather, which first had seen Braaf. In spite of himself the blacksmith was tugged close by the serene craft of these goblin poles. "Next you'll be telling us Braaf is the saint of egg snitchers."
Melander looked steadily at Wennberg. "A kind of cathedral," he repeated. "Whatever it is that these people believe is said in