The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [75]
Karlsson one more time put his attention south.
The withdrawing tide was lifting more and more spines of reef to view. But no beach was coming evident, just a broad tidal tract of roundish rocks, as if the farm fields of all the world had been emptied of stone here. Or, cannonball-like as these rocks looked to be, it might be said battlefields.
Beyond the stone clutter no islands stood to sight, only the bladed outlines of seastacks. Many of them. All in all, Karlsson saw, this appeared the rockiest reach of coast yet, and it needed be paddled past by night and a landing made on it somewhere in earliest dawn.
... Day this has been, even that can't be much damn worse....
"Burning the goddamn world over there. What in the name of hell d'you suppose they're up to?"
The villagers' beach fire just had flared high, a puff of sun against the dark, from a bowl of whale oil flung onto it.
"Whether they mean to or not, they're making us a beacon to steer from awhile," Karlsson answered Wennberg. The three canoemen hefted, and the canoe left land, caught the water's pulse.
Not since taking their quit of New Archangel had they paddled at night, and the memory of that stint did not go far to reassure anybody.
Ordinarily dark was Braaf's time, the thief's workplace. But here in the canoe with blackness around, Karlsson could sense Braaf's distrust of the situation, feel how his paddling grew more tentative, grudging, than ever.
Wennberg at the bow meantime seemed in every hurry to yank them through the night single-handed; his paddling was near flail.
Karlsson drew breath deep, exhaled exasperation oh so carefully, and decreed:
"Hold up, the both of you. We need to flap our wings together. At my word, do your stroke. Now ... now ... now ..."
The night Pacific is little at all like the day's. With the demarking line of horizon unseeable the ocean draws up dimension from its deeps, sends it spreading, distending, perhaps away into some blend with the sky itself. If stars ever kindle out there amid the wavetops we need not be much surprised. And all the while every hazard, rock, shoal, reef, shelf, snag, is being whetted against the solid dark.
In their watch for collision Wennberg and Braaf and Karlsson stared tunnels into the black. From Wennberg's harsh breathing and undervoice curses, every instant that catastrophe did not occur only convinced him that it was overdue.
"How far are we going in this?" Braaf this was, his tone suggesting that lie for one had gone a plentiful distance.
"Far enough past those whale stab hers, Unless you want to sail in on them and ask breakfast. Put your breath to work. Now ... now ... now ..."
... There's a night I don't need to live again. But now there'll be tonight. That ought do it, put us past the country of those whalemen at least. Then we can go by day, like men with eyes....
As if it was nothing to yacht along this coast, gulls were drifting up a current over a headland to the south, Karlsson was studying the rock-cornered shore beneath the gulls, a half mile or so from this crescent of beach where the canoe had put in at dawn. The credit of the night was that the canoe and its men survived it, not met with stone in the dark. Its debit had been the interminable wait offshore for daybreak, the canoe tied to a patch of bull kelp, Karlsson keeping a watch while Braaf and Wennberg tried to doze, before the coast could be studied for a landing site and any sign of Koloshes. Now it must have been noon or past, all of them having slept deep as soon as the canoe was lodged from sight behind shore rocks. Afternoon would have to be waited through, until the launch into dark again. Meanwhile this thrust of shore to their south...
... Might be. Just might by Christ be. Chance to go shake the bush and find out, anyway....
"We've maybe been looking the wrong direction for game," Karlsson mused aloud. "Forest instead of ocean."
"What, thee"—Wennberg—"go shooting at fish, are you? About like you, that'd be." By now