The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [79]
"Wennberg, we need do it."
As the two canoemen paddled they could make out that timber still spilled like a dark endless waterfall over the rim of the continent, but all else here looked more and more like old outlying ruins of the vigorous mountain coast behind them to the north.
The growl of the surf was constant on their left. Ahead, a high-sided squarish island, like a fort just offshore, stood in black outline. Two big sharkfin seastacks guarded its oceanward side.
"Country you wouldn't give the devil," Karlsson heard Wennberg say.
Through the near dark they achieved a half-handful of miles, put behind them the fortlike isle, before Karlsson, hoping he was reading this scalloped shore aright, pointed the canoe in between two headlands.
He strained now to pick shapes in the water before them, felt Wennberg ahead doing the same, heard him mutter.
Three, four, half a dozen rocks humped to view in an area the size of a commons field—and none more.
The route clear, the canoe drove in to one more haven of shore.
The camp this night, without Braaf, was like a remembered room with one wall knocked out.
Almost nothing was said during eating, and less after. Karlsson watched Wennberg occasionally shake his head and tug at his whiskers, as if in wonder at where he found himself now. Hut none of his usual almanac of complaints, nor any newly-thought-up blaze to hurl at Karlsson. Just those grim wags of head.
Trying to hear into that silence, Karlsson knew, was going to be a long piece of work.
The morning showed the two that they were on a beach as fine as velvet, gray-tan and nearly a mile long. At either end of the sand arc rough cliff's rose and pushed a thick green forest up into the sky.
On the cliff rim directly over Wennberg and Karlsson one small tree stood alone in crooked dance, as though sent out by the others to dare the precipice.
Here the surf was the mildest they had seen, only a single wave at a time furrowing in from the ocean. Yet the crash of the water came large, entirely outsize. And out on the horizon the Pacific was playing with its power in another way as well. There white walls periodically would fling up and at once disintegrate in spray—waves hitting on reefs. Unnerving, these surprise explosions as if the edge of the world were flying apart.
This landing spot presented them what Karlsson had hoped profoundly for, a deep view of the coast ahead. What the two of them saw was a shattered line of headlands, shadowed by seastacks in shapes of great gray shipsails and dark tunnel mouths; sea rock various and jagged as a field of icebergs.
"Not that jungle, Karlsson." Wennberg licked his lips, wiped a hand across. "Not in goddamn night nor even dusk, we can't."
A pair of kingfishers eluded past, sent a jump through both men with their raucous rattle.
Karlsson returned his look to the tusked coast ahead.
..."Chose wrong," Melander told the bastard a time. "Brought you instead of your forge and anvil, they'd been easier to drag along this coast than you." Still, Wennberg's right. Two of us can't handle the canoe well enough. And if there's luck at all in life we ought be down far enough from those whale chasers....
The two were keeping obvious distance between one another this morning. And the dagger was a new feel along Karlsson's left side, inside his rain shirt where he had slipped it the night before; where lie would be carrying it from now on. He figured Wennberg was doing the same.
"Then the other time is now," Karlsson answered the blacksmith.
That day and all the next Karlsson and Wennberg pulled past shattered coast, watching into the seastack colonies and the warps of shore for Koloshes as boys would peer through a forest for sight of one another.
... Like trying to see through a millstone, this line of coast. There's this, the Koloshes don't seem to fancy the place either. Maybe better tomorrow. It's all dragging work, though. Hero on, just the two of us to