The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [80]
And each dusk, came ashore like old women stiff in the knees. Wennberg encouraged a fire while Karlsson gathered mussels or clams, whatever could pass as a meal. Only after they had food in them were they able to face the chores of night, finding water, wood supply, putting up the sailcloth shelter, laying groundcloth and blankets, covering the canoe against possibility of storm finding their night's cove. And after those, face the loneliness which occupied where Braaf ought to have been.
... It needs to be the pair of us against this coast now, blacksmith. Ironhead. Just that, no other load on our backs. You're five kinds of an ox but that much you can sec, when your temper isn't in the way. If just Braaf..."If" is fairy gold. Make it past, what happened. Ahead, we need to point. Wennberg, though: can I keep you damped down....
And again in the morning, nerved themselves and pushed the dark canoe into the surf of the North Pacific.
"Beach!" Wennberg was pointing. "Beach like heaven's own 1"
"What was that?" Night down over them now on this sand shore, Karlsson was at the fire boiling clams for supper when Wennberg came and tossed something into the flames.
"That Aleut calendar of Braaf's, found it in the bottom of the canoe." Wennberg picked up a drift branch to add to the fire. "Won't be needing it in eternity, him."
Karlsson reached, plucked the branch from Wennberg, with it flipped the little rectangle from the fire. Its edges were charred and the day-peg browned, but the wood was whole.
"What's that for, then?" demanded Wennberg. "Every damned day along here is every other damned day. It helps nothing to keep adding them up. Why count misery?"
"Maybe not. But this ought be kept." Karlsson set to shaving the char off the calendar with his dagger, then moved the peg the three days since Braaf had gone into the tide trough. A cross-within-a-circle. Russian holy day, Pure Monday or St. Someone's birthday or who knew what ... Karlsson realized Wennberg still was staring at him. "It's all we have of Braaf."
"All we—? Of Braaf? That hive of fingers—?"
Karlsson stopped work on the char but held to the dagger. He took long inventory of Wennberg. Finally, as if not at all keen on the result:
"Braaf happened to be a thief, and he happened to be as high a man as any. I know there's little space in there for it, but try to get both those into mind,"
"Karlsson, I'll never savvy you—" Wennberg's eyes slid from their lock with Karlsson's, The dagger had come up off the charred wood.
It paused. Then the blade thrust under the bail of the kettle.
The slender man hoisted the mealware from the coals and set it to the ground.
"Food," said Karlsson.
The coast uncluttered itself for them for the next three days. The beaches stayed steadily sand, and ample, while the oecan and continent margined struighter here, as if this ought be a careful boundary of truce. Waves ar rived eream-colored, then thinned to itiiIk as they spilled far up the barely tilted shore. Once in a while rocks ganged themselves along tide line, but nothing of the dour constant throngs of the days just past. The (lolloped stone islands quit off too, except the one early on Karlsson and Weiinbcrg's second morning of this new coast scape, a long stark bench out a few miles in the ocean.
One last new reach of coast, then, and its visible population only these two ki lined against their will, the one family of tfie kind in all creation, slim Swede and broad Swede arked in a Tliiigit canoe.
The beach at the end of the third of these days was widest yet. Wide as kingdom after the ledgelike Weeks to the north, somehow a visit of desert here between timbered continent and cold ocean. Five stints of pushing, each a contest against an ever more reluctant sledge, it took the pair of men to skid the canoe in beyond the last mark of the tide.
Scoured shore, too. Between surf and high tide line no tiling but a speckle of broken clam and sand dollar shells, suggesting that only sea gulls prospered