The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [65]
The while, salt rings from sweat crusting in a three-quarter ring where the men's arms met their shoulders. Their clothing terrible, they knew, and their smell undoubtedly worse.
And ran them wide of Kyuquot Sound, and of Esperanza Inlet where Cook left that wistful christening, a bay named for hope.
Days, there was the ocean, perpetual paint pot of gray. And broken shore. Now and then a dun cliff, green gently moving atop it as the forest stirred in the ocean's updraft. Of course, rain, and with it, murk. No sunrise, nor sunset, only grayings lighter or darker. Not even mountains relieved the eye, for clouds broke off the peaks and weighted the horizon up there to flatness, a wall along all that side of the world.
Three times it snowed, swarm of white from out of the gray.
The while, their appetites growing and their bellies shrinking. The pinched shore and the snow days and the drizzle kept Karlsson from hunting, and fishing too came scant, a half-dozen smallish bass and two more red snappers the total catch of this Vancouver voyage.
—And past Nootka Sound, named too by Cook; Nootka, where another colossal Englishman, Meares, in 1789 brought Chinese crews to build fur-trading schooners; Nootka, where in the 1790s the British and Spanish empiremakers entangled like mountaineering parties clambering in from both sides of the same precipice, and nearly came to war; Nootka, home harbor of a vibrant canoe people who just now were passing the winter in their style of frequent feast and potlatch, a seasonal rain-trance of song and drama and dance.
The constant push of the North Pacific was wearing deep into the three canoemen, up their wrists and anus, across their effort-bent shoulders. True, once in a while the wind granted them a few hours' use of the sail, and they had the greater luck that their creature of sea run, the dark canoe, was one of the most fluent craft for its task. But the task along Vancouver was no less remitting for such facts. This was slog, nothing but.
The while, Karlsson showing answer to the single doubt Melander had held of him: whether lie had lasting edge. The biting surface to put against life, to strop and set to whatever dangerous angles were necessary. The Karlsson of New Archangel could be seen as cause to wonder a bit about that, and depend on it, Melander missed no bit of wondering. All very well it was to go about life as unobtrusively as the quiet Smålander ax man—some of that could be recommended to most of humankind—but what of when life began to go about him? Then would be the test of edge: whether the man bent or broke; or worked his salients back at life, made a thrust where he could, a nick as possible. Karlsson was not heaven-made for all that he needed do along Vancouver; spoke as little as Melander had much, at time when Braaf and Wennberg could have heard regular encouragement; let the deceit about the maps take up too much of the inside of bis head. But life is mostly freehand, and this Karlsson of the outmost Vancouver shore was verifying Melander's guess of him that under the silence lay some unused edge.
—And past Sydney Inlet, and Clayoquot Sound.
"Karlsson, aren't we about done with this fucking island? The damned place's longer than perdition."
"About, Wennberg. About."
... One way or other, about done, yes...
—And looped them at last past Barkley Sound, where yet another canoeing people read weather from the behavior of frogs and mice and had concluded this to be a wet, gusty moon of winter, a time to sit snug in longhouses yet a while.
Since Cape Scott, the peg of Braaf's calendar had advanced half a month.
Before the canoemen a channel several miles wide angled, and across its breadth another rumpled coastline, more of the dark world-long pelt of forest.
... Must be. Can't he any other. Can it?...
Karlsson raised his contemplation