The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [66]
"Must be?" Wennberg eyed him. "Must be is fool's prayer. What's the map say?"
"Fuca's Strait. I was skeining wool."
"Have a care you don't skein yourself a shroud, and ours with it." Wennberg waited—a count all the way to four could have been done—then demanded: "So, Captain Nose? Where're you aiming us next? There's coast all over the kingdom here."
... That much I know, thank you all the way to Hell, ironhead. It's all else I don't....
"We cross right over. For that corner of shore." Karlsson pointed to a long reach of bluff which came down from the higher coast to shear into the ocean, a sort of bowsprit of land. "But we need go past it a way before we put in. It's places like that the Koloshes maybe roost."
"Noah's two asses! Is there no end to the damned Koloshes? I thought Rosenberg had too many of them there at the back porch of the stockade, keeping them like hounds on scraps. But he hasn't made a start on the bastards."
"Figure what the Koloshes'd say if they come onto us, blacksmith," Braaf put in. "'Noah's two asses! More tsarmen yet, and smelling like a heifer's fart as well!'"
"Braaf, shove your head—"
"The both of you, put your breath to paddling. Or do we squat out here until Koloshes happen along and prove Braaf right?"
They made a scampering afternoon of it. The strait lay as a smaller, dozing version of Kaigani, and the canoe stole mile after mile without the gray water arousing. It even happened that Wennberg managed to stay unsick.
Across, a high sharp cape with waves boiling white at its base took over the continental horizon.
"What's that called, there?" Wennberg asked.
"Cape ... Etholen." Duping Bilibin those nights at the gate had been short work to this endless piece of performance as mapmaster. "One of the old sirs, wasn't he? Governor when you were a young blood at New Archangel?"
"The one. Cold as a raven, but a fair man. None like him, since."
Off the point of the big timbered cape stood a sheer-cliffed island, as flat on top as if sawn. The passage between continent's wall and the island's lay broad as several fields, but Karlsson, trying to think Melander way, decided to he leery of any currents hiding in there. Around the seaward side of the isle and its guardian reefs he steered the canoe.
Abruptly now Karlsson, Braaf, Wennberg could see ahead to the coast which was to lead them south, the last footing of their climb down from Russian America.
Forest, as ever, but neighbored with rock. Talons of cape rock, haired on top with timber, clutched down into the bright surf. Everywhere offshore were strewn darker blades and knobs of rock. Stones of the sea standing in pillars, in triangles, in shapes there were 110 names for.
No one said anything. They paddled on.
Melander dabs that bit of stick to the New Archangel earth. Baranof Island he draws, and the Queen Charlotte group, and Vancouver Island, and fourth, last, this coastline between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the mouth of the Columbia River. One hundred fifty miles lie between strait and river, although Melander did not possess that sum when he drew, nor does Karlsson have so much as a cross-eyed guess of it as he arrives here to the top of this final coast.
Even had either of these unfledged canoe captains known the total, the miles of this shore do not so much resemble those of the Alaska—British Columbia coast to the north, that crammed seaboard of waterside mountains and proliferated islands. In certain profiles, in the ancient pewtered light of continent and ocean alloying, this cousin coast does stand handsome; hut strong in detail rather than soaring gesture. Tide pools, arches of rock, the tidemark creeping higher on its beaches with each surge of surf—ditties of coastscape, not arias, here touch the mind. Almost, it seems the usual mainstays of coastline were forgotten. This shore's upper two-thirds lacks not only fetching harbors but honest anchorages of any sort; is in fact a rock-dotted complication of foreshore which sailors kept their