The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [62]
Rapidly as he could Karlsson was fitting angles to a reply. But meantime Braaf chimed, as if to the air:
"Wait till better season the way the Koloshes are, d'you mean, ironhead? Last time you were in the company of a few of them you ran your legs to stubs. What if spring brings canoe and canoe of them?"
Wennberg cut a glare to Braaf, but the look he fastened again to Karlsson still came earnest, and more. Karlsson realized he was being met by something lie had not thought to be Wennberg. A plea.
"—could get by on ducks and deer," Wennberg was proposing.
"—maybe get us a milk cow and a few chickens, too?" Braaf was amending sweetly.
The realization drove sharper into Karlsson. These plains of water, the sounds bare to the ocean, Wennberg was not merely leery of. He held a horror of them. Of their wide swells. Of the teetering gait of the canoe atop them. Of the nausea they pumped into him. Kaigani had invoked the distress in Wennberg, hour on plunging hour of it, and Milbanke Sound a few days ago must have revived it. These past days of sheltered channel Wennberg's new reticence had been taken by Karlsson as amen to the miles they were achieving. Instead it must have been a time of dread building silently toward panic....
... Ready to lick dust, the bastard ... "
—want to roost, whyn't you stay to New Archangel?" Braaf was goading, "—just till better season, that's not goddamn eternity," Wennberg was arguing back.
"Wennberg, hear us," Karlsson set out slowly. "Say the prettiest of this voyage, and it's still going to be grind work. But it has a bottom end somewhere, like all else." I le watched Wennberg's eyes. The plea yet hazed them, still needed the cold airing. "A wintering could be a wait on death, Wennberg. Braaf says truth. With spring the Koloshes will swim solid along here. And the first canoe of them will be apt to have us with Melander."
"But—" Wennberg pulled a face, as if he already could smell the gall being brewed for him by Queen Charlotte Sound. "This weather, all the bedamned miles—if we'd just wait—"
"The miles'd still be there," Braaf murmured.
Karlsson dug for more voice.
"Waiting we've already tasted," he said with decision. "We spat it out at New Archangel."
Braaf turned to speculate just above Karlsson's brow. Wennberg cocked a look as if a matter Was dawning to him. Somewhat near as much as the other two, Karlsson had surprised himself.
What he just had come out with was hot far off the sort of thing Melander might have delivered, aye?
The least necessary instruction of his young captaincy was issued now by Karlsson—the need In veer well clear of that tideline turmoil and they set forth onto Queen Charlotte Sound.
This day, sun was staying with them. Wisps of cloud hung above the shore, and a few thin streamers out over the ocean, westward and north. But the Sound itself was burned pure in the light; water blue-black, an elegant ink in which every swirl showed perfectly.
Along here mountains did not thrust so mightily, except some far on the eastern horizon. A lower, more rumpled shore, this, than the canoeists yet had seen, and the effect was to magnify the Sound—its dark sumptuous water and wild bright edge of surf, and then the blue dike, low and distant there, that was Vancouver Island.
Straightway Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf discovered that between them and Vancouver lay some uncountable total of instances of monotony. Wave upon wave, the canoe was met, lofted at the bow, then let slump, in a half-fall rightward, into the water's trough. A new law of seagoing this seemed to be, stagger-and-dive.
Karlsson questioned to Wennberg.
Wennberg half-turned. He was grim but functioning.
Braaf, though, announced into the crystal air: "Might as well bail up your breakfast now as later, iron puddler."
"You crow-mouthed bastard," Wennberg husked.
Minutes later, he clutched the side of the canoe, leaned