The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [58]
"Paddling their arms off," Braaf guessed, "about same as we are?"
"Sit on mine and ride home, Braaf, I mean truth here. This bedamned coast now, like forty kinds of a Finland. What's the use of these fish-fuckers, scatting around here and there? Whyn't it just empty?"
... We need to hope it damned well is, here on, ...
Karlsson aloud: "Maybe people are like crops, conic up everywhere."
"Or weeds, if they're Wennbergs," added Braaf.
"Oh, Hell take the both of you. A man tries to figure life and you fart from the front of your faces at him. I'm turning in, A blanket's better company than you pair."
***
... Still can be as touchy as a poisoned pup, Wennberg can. But at least it's not war. Maybe he's in troth about it, needing me to lead. Or thinking that I'm leading, instead of just tumbling us down this coast...
Karlsson came awake just after daylight had begun to hint. Frost on the sailcloth shelter this morning.
By the time Braaf and Wennberg were roused and breakfast was into the three of them, ridgelines and mountains in their cloaks and hoods of dark were arriving to sight all around the channel.
Canoe prow into water, three paddles into the shimmer sent by the craft. The near shore, the western, was coming distinct with trees now. Then within the first few-hundred strokes by the canoemen the horizon to the east brightened with low strips of dawn, as though chinking had fallen out between mountains and clouded sky.
The dawn warmed from silver to straw yellow, to peach. Vow clouds burnt free by the light began to drift from view over the eastern crags. Karlsson's third day as escapemaster was going to be stormless.
... Thank you to this, any day. Sun, easy water. Wine and figs next, aye, Melander?...
The paddles dipped, glistened wet on the forward reach of the stroke, dipped again.
Braaf haphazardly hummed. That he seemed to have no acquaintanceship whatsoever with tune mattered none to Braaf. His random buzzes irked Wennberg, sufficiently justifying them.
Wennberg today you would have thought a prisoner on his way to exile. In his armwork showed none of Karlsson's thrift nor Braaf's minimum attention, just the plod of a man wishing he were anywhere else.
Karlsson while he paddled scanned steadily ahead, as though he could pull the horizon of water nearer with his eyes.
The canoe glided higher in the water now, without Melander. Without, too, as much food. Dried peas, beans, tea, corners of biscuit, not much salt horse, less than a quarter of the deer ... the provisions seemed to dwindle these days as if seeping out the bottom of the boat, and Karlsson spent long thinking how to replenish.
Queer, but with forest stacked high on both sides of them now, the timber put less weight on their day than had the single-sided throng along the ocean. The calm of the channel, stretching lakewide, perhaps made it so. Ocean-neighboring forest never stood quite so quiet as this, there one breeze or another seeking through the upper boughs, birds conversing in the lower limbs, the devil knew what rustling behind the salmonberry and nettle.
Midmorning, the canoemen steered around a flotilla of trees—not drift logs but roots, branches, cones and all—drifting in the channel. Launched by an avalanche, Karlsson guessed.
Clouds stayed few and to the east, no weather gallcons from the ocean. Respite of every sort, this channel so far.
At midday Karlsson called a briefer stop than usual. So steadily were they adding mile onto mile that he wanted only scantest interruption.
They landed, stretched, peed, ate salt beef and biscuit, got back in the canoe.
On and on, trough of channel. All of this was less willful country to face into than any of the ocean shoreline. Poised rather than bolstering. The forested ridges conforming the channel, and their kin-mountains beyond them, sat as if in arrest; awaiting the next How of existence maybe, the next pose to assume when the geologic clock chimed again.
Karlsson did not know how it could be, but times like this, concern and fascination now were sharing space in him. The