The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [77]
"Or it's smoke soup tonight," Wennberg muttered.
Karlsson's shot struck the seal in the neck, not far beneath the base of its head.
A lurch by the animal. Its foreflippers and tail Happed briefly. Then the head lowered as if into doze.
... Fetched him! Shot-and-pot, we'll surprise our bellies yet....
Meantime, the other seals writhed rapidly toward the rock edge, were gone.
"Square eye, Karlsson!" Braaf congratulated. He was first onto his feet, stepping to the right of the bump of rock Karlsson had shot from, Wennberg and Karlsson up now too, the three of them setting off io hurry toward the seal, the tide in mind.
Of what happened next, only this much is sure. That amid a climbing stride by Braaf as he began to cross the wrist of rock, surf burst its power in front of him. That a startling white weight of water leapt, seemed to stand in the air. That it then fell onto Braaf.
Comical, this ought to have been. A drenching, an ass-over-earhole tumble as Wennberg might have said, and there the sum of it, Braaf bouncing up now with a grin of rue. But the topple of water slung Braaf backward more than that and the hand he put down to halt himself met the wet slickness of brown rockweed.
Braaf slid on into the tidal trough.
Above, Karlsson and Wennberg, half-turned in stare to the crevasse water, were twins of disbelief.
Braaf' was vanished.
Then, and a long then it began to seem, up through foam hobbled Braaf's head. For a breath space, his eves held the affronted look they'd had when Wennberg's boot clattered the spittoon in the officers' clubhouse.
Next the insurging tide shot him from view of Karlsson and Wennberg around the bend of the trough.
... Rifle, reach the rifle to him, only chance...
Down toward the trough Karlsson clambered, Wennberg heavily at his heels and cursing blue. The footing along the top of the trough was treachery itself. Karlsson and Wennberg skidded like men on soapstone as they tried to approach the edge.
The out-slosh of the tide brought Braaf whirling back below them, grabbing with both hands at the walls of the trough, barnacles and mussels denying him grip and costing him skin. This time it was around the trough's seaward bend that the riptide tossed him from sight.
"Hold me," Karlsson directed Wennberg.
The burly man clamped his arms around Karlsson's knees as Karlsson stretched himself flat, down toward the spilling water. Like a man peering down a well, Karlsson now. With both hands he held the rifle at its barrel end, thrust the stock into the channel as Braaf popped to sight once more.
"Braaf! Grab! We'll pull...!"
A wrath of water—it bulged a full three feet over all other froth in the channel, as if some great-headed creature was seeking surface—careened in. Surf spewed over Karlsson and Wennberg, both of them clenching eves tight against the salt sting.
When they could peer again, Braaf bobbed yards past them on the landward side, his boy's face in a grimace. He scented to shake his head at them. Then the tide abruptly sucked back toward the ocean and Braaf was spinning toward his rescuers once more, his arms supplicating in search of the gunstock.
But short, a hand's length short...
... God's bones, it never behaves the same twice. Need be quicker, make ready...
"This time, Wennberg! Lower me more, there, now'll reach ..."
The pair of them stared expectation toward the seaward corner of the trough, bracing themselves for the riptide's return and the hurl of spray over them once more.
It arrived, crashing high along the trough walls, hard spatter, runnels down faces, now eyes could open again...
This time the tide had not brought Braaf back with it.
"Braaf!" demanded Wennberg. "Braaf, where the hell—?"
Karlsson scrambled wildly for the ocean edge, banging knees and hands on rough rock, Wennberg lurching after him.
The coastal afternoon's same royal colors of blue and brown were all about the two men, the horizon brow of the planet untroubled out there in front of them, the Pacific's flume of surf flowing as ever to their