The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [60]
"Somewhere between," Braaf reasoned. "17p there swimming the air, maybe, inside this fog. If a goose can, Melander could." Braaf turned his glance from the mist to a place just above Karlsson's brow. "Is there more of that mast paint?"
***
The morning of what Karlsson calculated to he their final day ¡11 this stretch of channel, the highest ridges showed new snow on their timbered tops, like wigs freshly powdered.
... Rather have it up there on the roof than down here 011 us. Hold, weather. We've a job of work this day....
But work different, and pleasanter, than Karlsson had been looking toward. At midmorning he shot another blacktail deer, out of a herd grazing where a stream emptied into the channel.
Karlsson's first shot missed, and the second echoed so long it seemed to be out searching for Koloshes to hear it, Braaf kept watch on the channel as Wennberg helped Karlsson butcher the deer.
"If those cannon shots didn't bring us company, smoke maybe won't either," Karlsson suggested. Braaf and Wennberg scrutinized from the channel water to the fresh meat, to each other.
"I'll have mine with dumplings and ale," Braaf proposed.
"New potatoes and little green onions with mine," voted Wennberg.
The three of them fed on the meat until they wobbled, then took the rest of the day to cut and boil venison chunks for mealtimes ahead.
While yet within what ought to have been sheltered waters, ridge horizon still solid to their west and ahead of them as far as they could peer, the canoemen the next morning began to meet swells. Long swaybacks which trembled the canoe under them with the strong ancient message: the ocean is waiting.
Their afternoon began as if it was of the same wool as the morning. The identical long, even swells which lapped into the channel were ribbed all across Milbanke Sound; a ceaseless rumple moving across the water, the tautness of the ocean skin continually being tested.
These steady dunes of water the canoe met well, rising easily and then dipping, without the staggers and quivers of the Kaigani crossing.
"Ever I get out of this," Wennberg just had said, "the next water I want to see'll fit in a teacup." And Braaf bad just advised, "Whistle for it, blacksmith." Karlsson, keeping eye to the southwest where the sound opened to the ocean, saw then the first whitecaps flick among the swells, like snowy dolphins appearing and disappearing.
"Keep steady at it," Karlsson said. "We're half across."
But now each swell wrinkled white as the canoe breasted into it.
Wennberg was sicker, quicker, longer, than he'd been in the crossing of Kaigani.
"Wennberg, your sour guts'll drown us all yet," Braaf began in profound disgust.
"We're not drowned nor going to be," Karlsson told him. "Paddle, Braaf. We've to do it, until Wennberg gets bis belly back."
... Sick as a dog 011 grass, oh God damn, Wennberg, why can't your guts be solid as your head....
And so it became Braaf and Karlsson and their paddles against the second powerful plain of the North Pacific coast; between them in the surging canoe, Wennberg half of himself and struggling to stay even that much; around the three and their slim craft, the hours of strait they had come, the hours yet to cross.
Perhaps bring to thought that trick done with apple and knife—the fruit to be peeled in one stopless cutting, down and down the pare of skin coiling from the blade's glide, the red-white-red-white spiral stair ever more likely to snap away: but yet is it, for each shaving of coil twirls a bond with all the others, the helix holding itself together, spin on spin, by creational grace. Just such an accumulating dangle this Milbanke voyage became. With each effort by Braaf and Karlsson the canoe sliced distance from the North Pacific, making the journey just that much more apt to sunder or just that much more cunningly pliant, persistent—you would not have wagered which.
It was full dark when they tottered onto the shore.
"Tomorrow," came Braaf's voice. "What's the water tomorrow? Not