The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [7]
How hard it would have been anyway to lodge a believable case against Braaf. At twenty, he displayed the round ruddy face of a farmboy—an apple of a face—and in talking with you lofted his gaze with innocent interest just above your eyes, as if considerately measuring you for a hat.
The morning after tea was taken outside the stockade of New Archangel by a pair of Swedes, it was taken by a trio.
"Me?" Braaf murmured when Melander loomed alongside him and Karlsson appeared at his opposite shoulder. "No, I was just about to ... Sorry, I've to ... Maybe the noon break, I'll..."
In his quiet manner Karlsson suggested Braaf had better shove a bung in his spout and hear out Melander's proposition.
"You put it that way," Braaf revised, "and my ears are yours."
On the slope of shore above the canoes, Braaf studied back and forth from Melander's forehead to Karlsson's as Melander once more outlined the plan.
"Austria, I've heard of that. But is it anywhere around here?"
"Astoria," Melander repeated with patience. "It's the port for a part of this coast the Americans call Oregon."
"Imagine," said Braaf politely through a slurp of tea.
"Braaf, we need your skill of, umm, acquiring. It'll take supplies and supplies for such a journey."
"Why should I?"
"Because you're stuck here like a stump if you don't."
"That's a reason, I suppose. Why won't we drown?"
"God's bones, Braaf, these Kolosh canoes float like waterbugs. You'd need be an oaf to tip one over."
"I've been in company with an oaf or two in my time."
"Braaf, listen," Karlsson broke in. "I go in these canoes all the time, and I am undrowned."
"For all I know you have gills in the cheeks of your ass, too."
"Braaf," Melander resumed as if reciting to a limited child. "You have a choice here which comes rare in life. Join us and leave this Russian shitpile, or stay and be caught one day lifting one snuffbox too many. You've seen what these Russians can do with a knout. That sergeant of the sentries will sign his name up and down your back. Aye?"
"Pretty choice you paint. Rock and stony place."
"What else is the world? Step in with us, Braaf, It'll take your fast fingers to get us from here. But we can get."
"My fingers should ever see the day they're fast as your tongue, Melander."
"Thank you, but we can race another time. With us, arc you, or not?"
"You know for heaven-certain that we'll find this American fort at—what's it, Astruria?"
"Astoria. It is there. I have known sailors whose ships have called there. Could be we'll not even need to go that far, maybe meet a merchantman or trading ship or whaler along the way. English, Spanish, Americans, or the devil, won't matter which. So long as they're not Russians. Aye?"
"And the downcoast natives? Koloshes and what-ever-the-hell-else they might be?"
"I already said the devil."
Only for an instant now, about the duration of a held breath, did Braaf's eyes come steady with those of Melander and Karlsson, Just before he nodded agreement to join the escape. And that is how they became three.
In the galaxy of frontier enclaves sparked into creation by colonialism, New Archangel was a map dot unlike any other. Simultaneously a far-north backwater port and capital of a territory greater than France and Spain and England and Ireland taken together, the settlement ran on Russian capacities for hard labor and doggedness, and was kept from running any better than it did by Russian penchants for muddle and infighting. New Archangel here fifty years after its founding still stood forth in the image of its progenitor, the stumpy and tenacious Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov. Of Baranov historians exclaim that, like Napoleon, lie was a little great man,