The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [48]
"You're the sailor of us. How much of this wind is between us and the next island?"
"I think six hours' paddling."
"Six hours, we can last. I say chance."
"Braaf?"
The thief glanced out into the white-capped water, then somewhere above Melander's brow. "If you say so, chance."
"Wennberg?"
"The only thing worse than that bedamned water is this bedamned waiting. Chance, Melander. You know so God-all much, teach us how to eat the wind. May it sit better on mv stomach than that last ration did."
***
For a change, luck puffed 011 them. Once the paddling men had struggled the canoe around the horn tip: of the beach, they came into a wind skewing directly across Hecate Strait. For the first time since their leaving of New Archangel, up went the canoe's small pole of mast and the sailcloth.
"Not much of a suit of sails, more like a kerchief," as Melander said, but the canvas carried them across the strait and once more into a scatter of shoreline islands.
"Even this hardtack isn't as bad as it might be." Melander, musing, their first day of south-paddling after wafting across Hecate Strait. "A time I can tell you on the brig Odin, we had to break our biscuits into our coffee and skim away the weevils as they came up. No, not so bad, aye?"
Braaf, at the onset of their second day after: "I know what Valhalla is now. It's where I never again hear Melander say, 'Tumble up.'"
Wennberg, midway of their third day and yet another Melander monologue: "Melander, I wonder you don't swallow your tongue sometime for the savor of it."
***
"Good job of work done": Karlsson, startling them all after they hefted ashore into the spruce forest at the close of their fourth straight progressful day.
The river shoved through the land like a glacier of slate. Had the surface been solid as its turbid appearance—one newcoming settler or another inaugurated the jest that in the season of runoff not much more mud content was needed to make the flow pedestriable—a man crossing here from its north shore toward its south would have had to hike steadily for a full hour. That man would have stridden the Columbia, largest river of the Pacific shore of the Americas, and there on the south bank he would have stamped silt from his feet at Astoria.
Another frontier pinspot of great name, Astoria. John Jacob Astor's wealth, not to say intentions for more of it, installed the settlement as a fur depot in 1811, The ensuing four decades had not made it much more of a place: post office, customs house, long T-shaped dock straddling into the tidal flow, cooperage, Methodist church, handful of stores and saloons catering to the settlers sprinkled south and north of the river's mouth, several tall Yankee houses along the foot of a shaggy Columbia headland. A rain-soaked shore-sitting little colony, each low tide showing the shins of the town. Yet also the recognized port of America's Pacific Northwest, tapping the twelve-hundred-mile-long Columbia and its tributaries like a cup hung to gather the sugar of a giant maple. Month by month a dozen or fifteen vessels plied here. So ves, if through whatever unlikelihood you were to find yourself at Astoria, you could handily enough aim yourself Oil ward into the world.
This night, the four canoe-going Swedes are encamped not quite half the water distance downcoast from New Archangel to that long T of dock at Astoria.
Trying to yawn the last of sleep from himself, Karlsson eased out through the trees toward the island's edge. As usual now that the voyaging rhythm had worked its way into him, lie was the first awake and the earliest to wonder about weather.
This morning he found that the Pacific lay gray with cold, but no storm sheeted up from its surface. Along the beach ahead a small surf pushed ashore, idly rinsed back on itself: low tide. A pair of cormorants amid a spill of tidal boulders hung their black wings wide. High tip on