The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [5]
"I don't see why that water doesn't pucker them blue. They must have skins like seals with the hair off."
As Melander and Karlsson stood arid sipped, a dozen natives had emerged from one of the nearest longhouses, men and women together and all naked, and waded casually hit‹) the channel to bathe.
Karlsson's reply this time was a shrug.
One further impression of the slender man's interesting constancy also was stored away in Melander. The observation that Karlsson visited more often to the women in the native village than did any of the merchants of wind who perpetually bragged in the barracks about their lust. Or as Melander mused it to himself, the mermaids had hold of Karlsson's towrope but he didn't go around yipping the news.
Melander swept the bay and channel east to west with an arm, as if in salute to the day. lie purposely had chosen this rainless morning of late June, gentle gray-silver overcast cupping the day's light to lend clarity down to the spruce islands of the harbor and the sudden spearing mountains behind the settlement, the usual morning wind off the bay lazed to a breeze, to approach Karlsson before work call. His thought was that if Karlsson would entertain escape on this most silken of New Archangel days, he truly was ready.
Melander's words, however, began where his motion ended, "Those canoes are longer than they look, aye?" In a row on the beach the natives' cedar shells lay; the line of lithe craft, like sea creatures dozing side by side on the sand, which his gaze had been drawn to when he stood atop the stockade. "We could step into one here and step out at Stockholm."
Karlsson's face, all at once not nearly so bland, suggested the standard skepticism toward talk of uncooping oneself from New Archangel. Because of the isolation so far into the North Pacific and because muskeg and sinkholes and an alpine forest so thick it seemed to be thatched began just beyond the stockade wall, the matter of escape always narrowed instantly to the same worn point. Where, except up to the sweet blue meadows of heaven, was there to go?
"The world has a lot of wheres," vouched Melander now. "We need just four of them,"
He drained his mug in a final gulp, folded himself down to rest one knee on the dirt, and with a stick began to trace.
A first south-pointing stab of shoreline, like a broad knife blade. "This one, we've got"—Baranof Island, on the oceanward side of which they squatted now.
A speckle of isles, then another large landform, south-pointing too, like the sheath Baranof had been pulled from. "The Queen Charlottes."
Another brief broken isle-chain of coast, then a long blunt slant, almost sideways to the other coastal chunks. "Vancouver's Island,"
At last, fourth and biggest solidity in tins geographical flagstone of Melander's, the American coastline descending to the Columbia River. The place where the dirt lines of coast and the river met, Icelander Xed large. "Astoria," Melander said this mark was.
Map lesson done, Melander recited to the close-tongued Karlsson the main frame of his plan. That if they selected their time well and escaped by night they could work a canoe south along the coast. That there at its southern extent, down beyond the Russian territory and that of the Hudson's Ray Company, the place called Astoria was operated by the Americans as an entry port. From there ships would come and go, ships to the docks of Europe. To, at last, Stockholm.
Six weeks' canoe journey, Melander estimated, to Astoria. If they caught luck, could manage to sail part of the voyage, a month.
"You talk us in royal style from here to there, Melander. But this God-forgotten coast, in a canoe..."
Karlsson fell silent again, looking off around the island-speckled bay and up into the timbered mountains. Verstovia's skirt forest showed every branch distinct today, almost every bristle; vast green lacework, it seemed.
Melander knew he was going to have a wait. There always was about this Karlsson a calm