The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [57]
Wennberg with joy would have been at his forge. Any forge, anywhere. Glowing charcoal before him, circle of water ladled around its edge to concentrate the heat, then hammer courting metal, fire flakes leaping from the iron as Wennberg imposed shape 011 it, his arm decreeing axhead or hinge or bolster plate, now there was proper work, not shoveling ocean all the bedamned day, Wennberg went in his mind time and again to that morning when he strode up behind Braaf in the parade ground—and each of these remade times, Wennberg deflected determinedly away from the laden thief.
Of course, thinking on it was like trying to undo fire in the forge: raking coals out in hope they would lapse to fresh charcoal once again. Indeed, Wennberg's wishing was of a fervency that amounted to reversing a forge fire all the way back to living tree.
And made, he sermoned himself yet again, as little sense. In this life paths cross paths and there you arc, jangled up with a Braaf and a Karlsson. No help for it, who can number the clouds or stay the bottles of heaven P
But oh, Hell take it, if he just hadn't crossed that parade ground—
Braaf, now—Braaf always was a guess. As best could he told, though, Braaf was enduring coastal life something as an ouzel—that chick-sized bird common along the rivers which cut the Northwest shoreline and the streams which vein down from the mountains into those rivers. Slaty iu color, peg-tailed, the ouzel at streamside is not much to notice, except as an example of bother; the bird constantly bobs as though wary of some lifelong peril overhead. In actuality the motion must he practice for its livelihood, which is to plunge into the water, immerse, and walk the bottoms of the rivers and streams, picking hits of feed as it goes. A hydraulic adaptee, the ouzel: somehow the bird has learned to use the flow of current to keep itself pinned down into place during this dinner delve beneath the riffles. Much in that way that the ouzel can shop along the cellar of the river, Braaf was held into route, into canoe and camp routine, hy the sum of the pressures all around. Weather above, ocean beside, forest solid along the continent edge—each day's life was pressed to him by such powers of the coast, and Braaf had the instinct simply to stay wary while letting the push of it all carry him ahead.
Kelp drifted alongside them in a tangle, a skim of the the Pacific's deep layers of life.
As in the forest when branches become moving wands overhead but the air at ground keeps strangely still, the coastal weather now cruised over the canoemen without quite touching down. Streamers of cloud shot along, would-be storms jostled with pretensions of clearing; the sky all hither and thither in this fashion, Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf never knew what to expect except that it would be unruly. Putty weather, gray and changeable. True, Sitka with its weather-of-the-minute had accustomed the Swedes to changeableness. But at least at Sitka the concern was not that the next gray onset would cause the ocean to erupt under them.
Crone mountains, these now. Old bleak places gray-scarved above the green shore.
***
The weather held stormless, as though curious to ivatch down at this orphaned crew for a while. At the midday stop, Karlsson's pencil mark on the map moved east. Moved as much again at evening's camp—hut south now. They were in the channel.
"Those Koloshes." Wennberg fed a branch to the supper fire. "Those ones that—back at that island, there. What d'you suppose they're in the world for?"
"For?" Karlsson was loading the rifles for the night, standard now since the encounter with the Koloshes at Arisankhana. He stopped to regard the blacksmith. As steadily as he tried to keep a reading of Wennberg, moods kited in and out of the broad man.
"What I mean, how d'they spend their lives?"