The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [76]
"Fish, no. But a hair seal, maybe. If they've followed season to these waters ... that point across there, it's the sort they lie around on."
"Gunshot, though?" This doubt from Braaf.
"A lot of noise from surf there, all that rock. And we can gander around the headland for Koloshes before getting onto the point."
Wennberg hitched his trousers, maybe calculating all the new room in them. "I could eat a skunk from the ass forward. If you think you remember which end of the goddamn gun to point, Smålander, I'm for it."
Karlsson checked Braaf, received a slow nod. And made it decision : "Let's go find supper."
Plump jetsam on the outmost of shore, the seals were there.
So was a new style of coast to any the Swedes had seen yet. Having clambered downbeach to the point, the three found themselves at the inshore edge of a rook shelf high and fiat as a quay—although no one hut nature could employ a quay some two hundred paces wide and that much again in length. Odd in this, too: in the blue and brown afternoon, the Pacific tossing bright around the somber rock face of the coast, this huge queer natural wharf lay thinly sheeted with wet, like puddles after rain.
By now Braaf had tides in his bones alongside the weather. "The high drowns all this, then," he stated, nodding the attention of Karlsson and Wennberg to the remnant pools. "We'll need be quick." Even as Braaf said so, earliest waves of the incoming tide tried to leg themselves up over the seaward edge of the rock quay.
"Quick we'll be," Karlsson responded and was in motion while the words still touched the air. "Over here, that horn of rock."
Onto the tidal plateau he led the other two, to where a formation the height and outline of a sloop sail bladed up. Beside this prong, from view of the seal herd, Karlsson studied out ambush.
Leftward, the rock shelf lay open and bare. Any least twitch of invasion there would he instantly seen by the seals.
To the right, close by Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf, the ocean with undreamable patience had forced a tidal trough—a lengthy crevasse bent at the middle, like an arm brought up to ward off a blow. Every insurge of surf slopped a harsh compressed tide through this shore crack, a hurl of water as if flung from a giant pan, and the crevasse gaped wider than a man would want to try to jump. \o surprise to the seals from this foaming quarter either, then.
The sea end of this trough, though. There a fist of boulder met the ocean, and just inland toward the men bulged a low knurl of rock off that formation. A wen on the (jack of the tide-rock wrist, you might think of it.
... Little help but some help. I'll need make it be enough, won't I....
"I'll shoot from there," Karlsson indicated the wen site ahead to Wennberg and Braaf. He made the short crawl to the I lump, Wennberg scrabbling behind on the left and Braaf vastly more agile to the right. They hunched either side of Karlsson, Wennberg breathing heavy, Braaf soundless, as the slender hunter peered to the seals.
"What do they taste like?" Braaf wondered in a whisper.
Karlsson's shake of head confessed lack of acquaintance.
"Pork," reported Wennberg. "The liver's just like a hog's."
The other two looked at him. "Spend the years I did at New Archangel," Wennberg said, "a little of goddamned everything crosses your plate."
The seals lay idle as anvils. Some had been lazing in the sun long enough that their fur had dried pale, others yet were damp and nearly as dark as their rock promenade. All of them were toward a hundred paces from where Karlsson lay sighting. He disliked the distance for the shot, but decided to amend what he could of ¡t by singling out a seal that lay a hit inshore from the others. A young bachelor, bullied into solitude by the older harem-masters of the herd.
"Tickle luck's chin,"