The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [68]
...Need a hunt again. Anything, deer, goat. Beaver, God's bones, we could learn to think beaver was ¡1 manor lord's feast. Costs time and time to hunt, though. And risk to a gunshot, Christ knows whether there're Koloshes along here. But so's there risk to starving ourselves down. Pull to shore early tomorrow, try a bear milking....
Back north along the shore Karlsson could see the campfire, even could discern the arc of the canoe, the bumps of form that were Wennberg and Braaf. At first, when the canoe nosed in here for the night, Karlsson could not make himself feel easy about this fresh manner of coast. Three leisured windrows of surf and the beach wide, gentle, full-sanded; a carpet of ease after the stone shores of the past weeks, it ought to have seemed. Yet through dusk and supper a constriction somehow clung to this mild site, an unexpected sense of squeeze which kept with Karlsson even when he strode the length of beach to the seastacks. Maybe it was the surround of land here, after their Vancouver nights of precarious perch. The battled wall of sea rock reared as barrier at this end and the cape the canoemen had rounded wide of after crossing the Strait of Fuca extended considerably into the ocean at that other. Inland the forest stood high—Karlsson had studied and studied that venue for sign of animals; in the weave of evergreen and brush, nothing moved—and behind the north end of the beach the terrain sharpened into a long clay cliff. For all the broad invitation of its sand this particular beach made a kind of sack mouth of the coast, the sort of place where you more-than-half-expected something unpleasant to be scooped ashore at any time.
... A man can worry himself ancient. Step them off, the days, that's what we need do. Keep on keeping on, Melander'd say. Earn our way to Astoria yet, we just may....
The ocean was bringing a constant rumble and within that a hiss, the odd cold sizzle as the tide edge melts into the sand. Left in the air was a smell of emphatic freshness—a tang beyond mint or myrtle, more a sensation than anything the nose could find recipe of. And over and through it all, the surf sound, here so solid it seemed to have corners: the unremitting boom oil the seastacks, a constant crashing noise against the shore northward. The surf. No other energy on the planet approaches it. On any planet? The remorseless hurl of it, impending, collapsing, upbuilding, and its extent even beyond that of thunder, that grave enwrapping beat upon all shores of all continents at once: how is there any foothold left for us? Braaf's wonderment, he recently had confided to Karlsson, was that the power of the ocean didn't rip big chunks from the land all day long, Braaf figured probably in great storms it did just that, which must have been how the islands of their route from New Archangel had been chewed into creation.
... A far place now, New Archangel. Far as that moon, it seems. How long's it been? Braaf's calendar will tell. But we're where we are. Last coast, this....
Near the campfire Wennberg and Braaf were sitting at angle from each other, as if they had a treaty against face-to-face to be honored.
At Karlsson's approach Wennberg threw on a branch from the firewood pile beside him, sparks rocketing upward. In the heightened light Wennberg looked somehow more thunderous, and Braaf's eyes were higher out into the night than ever, seemed to be appraising the moon.
...They've been gnawing back and forth again, what now....