The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [4]
The sentry nodded in pitying savvy and returned to his watching slot within the timbered tower. Melander was left solitary, scanning out beyond Sitka Sound and its dark-treed islands schooled like furry whales to the threadline of horizon that is the Pacific.
A time of studying seaward. The ports of all the planet were out there. Danzig and Copenhagen, Kronstadt, Trondheim, Rotterdam, London ... Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge: Melander aland was yet Melander, First Mate.
A raven flapped past, pulled a glance from the tall man. These black birds ruled the roofs of New Archangel and their metallic comment up there somehow struck an odd humility into a person.
Finally, as if at last reassured that the water portion of the world still hung in place, Melander dropped his gaze. Now was peering directly down at the edge of shore subjacent to the outside end of the stockade.
Here his looking held for a good while.
Eventually, the tall man murmured something. Something so softly said that the sentry nearby in the blockhouse mistook the sound for another mutter against twittering Finns.
It was not that, though. This:
"Maybe not bladeless."
Do such things have a single first moment? If so, just here Melander begins to depart from a further half-dozen years of the salting of fish.
"Take our swig outside the stockade, whyn't we? The farther you can ever get from these Russians, the better anything tastes. Aye?"
Tin mugs of tea in hand, Melander and Karlsson passed the sentry at the opened gateway of the stockade and sauntered to the edge of the native village which extended in a single-file march of dwellings far along the shoreline. In front of the two Swedes now stretched Japonski, biggest of the islands schooled thick in Sitka Sound. The channel across to Japonski was just four hundred yards or so, but one of the quirks of New Archangel's spot in the world was that this moatlike side of water somehow emphasized isolation more than the open spans of the bay.
This Karlsson was a part-time bear milker. That is to say, ordinarily he worked as an axman in the timber-felling crew, but also had sufficiently skilled himself as a woodsman that he was sent with the hunting party which occasionally forayed out to help provision New Archangel—to milk the bears, as it was jested. The sort with nothing much he cared to put to voice and of whom even less was remarked, Karlsson. It is told that at a Scandinavian free-for-all, Danes will be the ones dancing and laughing, Norwegians endeavoring to start a fight, Finns passing bottles, and Swedes standing along the wall waiting to be introduced. Melander constituted a towering exception to this slander, but Karlsson, narrow bland face like that of a village parson, would have been there among the wall props.
"They say it'll be rice kasha for noon again. A true Russian feast they're setting us these clays, anything you want so long as it's gruel, aye?"
"Seems so," answered Karlsson.
Sociability was nothing that Melander sought out of Karlsson. A time, he had noticed Karlsson canoeing in across Sitka Sound here, back from a day's hunting. Karlsson's thrifty strokes went beyond steady. Tireless, in a neat-handed, workaday fashion. The regularity of a small millwheel, Melander had been put in mind of as he watched Karlsson paddle.
What brought down Melander's decision in favor of Karlsson, however, was a feather of instant remembered from shipboard. Karlsson had been home to Alaska on the same schooner as Melander, and Melander recalled that just before sailing when others of the indentured group, the torsion of their journey-to-come tremendous in them at the moment, were talking large of the bright success ahead, what adventure the frontier life would furnish and how swiftly and with what staggering profit their seven years of contract with the Russians would pass, Karlsson had listened, given a small mirthless smile and a single shake of his head, and moved off along the deck by himself.