The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [64]
But—"We're all of us weary. As down as gravediggers, even Karlsson and Wennberg."
And—"Wennberg there. Any tiddle of ocean has him tossing up, costs us hard in paddling."
So—"We've maybe had enough of ocean. Go the lee of this place, we could, aye? That navigation line has to touch to somewhere...."
An eastward tilt, in such musings as these, do you feel?
And so you/Melander in perhaps three days, not more than four, bring your canoe and crew to the stretch of Queen Charlotte Strait where the Hudson's Bay Company in the past few years has installed a trade post called Fort Rupert. Chance is strong against it, but perhaps Fort Rupert eludes you, dozes in fog or storm as you pass. In another dozen days along this inner shore you are rounding the southeastern tip of Vancouver Island and there poises the British New Archangel, the Hudson's Bay command port called Fort Victoria. Say, somehow, you do not happen onto even this haven. From here amid the Strait of Juan de Fuca where you now arc paddling, chimney smoke might be seen there over the southern shore, or the canvas of a lumber vessel standing forth against the dark coast—either smudge marking the site of the fledgling American settlement at the mouth of Puget Sound, Port Townsend.
All this, then, is the sort of eventuating interrupted by that chance bullet at Arisankhana. Karlsson, with his nod west, has leaned into his own eventuating.
At length ... we again saw land. Our latitude was now 49° 29' north. The appearance of the country differed much from that of the parts which we had seen before, being full of high mountains whose summits were covered with snow. The ground was covered with high, straight trees that formed a beautiful prospect of one vast forest. The southeast extreme of land was called Point Breakers, the other extreme I named Woody Point. Between these two points the shore forms a large bay, which I called Hope Bay, hoping to find in it a good harbor and a comfortable station to supply all our wants, and to make us forget the hards hips and delays experienced during a constant succession of adverse winds and boisterous weather ever since our arrival upon the coast of America.
The line of route of Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson now was also one of the Pacific's meridians of history. In 1778 Cook, the great English captain, explored north through these waters, journaled this outshore of Vancouver Island, put names on the land as points and inlets won his fancy. Cook's expedition, and forays by the Spanish, and the roving Yankee captains who rapidly appeared, they arrived as an empyrean newness to this coast. Indelible people, these European and American explorers and traders proved to be, the broader wakes of their sailing ships never fading from the traditional waters of the canoe tribes.
Like men following a canyon unknown to them, then, Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf began their descent of this Vancouver shore where past and future had seamed.
... It is like trying to bend rock. We pull at these paddles until we ache and always there's more ocean. We do make miles, Melander. Wennberg complains like a creaky gate and Braaf slacks, but we earn distance, more than I'd thought the three of us could, More than possible and less than enough, you'd have said....
One thing only about this Vancouver coast was Karlsson certain on. Hut like the sum of what the hedgehog knew, it was one big thing. Karlsson savvied that they must not blunder into a downcoast Sitka, come nosing one evening into some fat sheltered sound where a blinking look would show the shore to be a sand street, and longhouses backing it, and Koloshes standing there just in wait for Swedes. None of such as that, thank you. The outmost crannies of this island Karlsson would rem the canoe to.
And so looped them past Quatsino Sound, and around Cape Cook of the Brooks Peninsula.
Nights now, the trio of eanoemen camped at places that