The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [86]
Straight out to ocean they paddled, until Wennberg stopped stroking and turned to demand: "Where to hell're you taking us? Shore's almost out of sight."
"We need to stay out from those surf waves or your belly will be visiting your mouth again. I'll bead us by compass the way the coast has been pointing."
Wennberg could be seen to be choosing. Seasickness, or swallow Karls son's notion of voyaging all-but-blind.
He said something Karlsson couldn't catch. And dipped his paddle.
Fog, gray dew on the air. During a rest pause Karlsson touched a hand to his face and found that his beard was wet as if washed.
Fog, the breath of—what, ocean, skv, the forest? Or some mingling of all as when breath smoked out of everyone at New Archangel the morning after the December snow?
Fog, and more of it as the canoemen labored south-east. Through this damp sea-smoke the shore was a dimmest margin of forest, now glimpsed, now gone.
This day, different eyes had been set in the heads of Karlsson and Wennberg. Nothing they saw except the beak of the canoe had sharpness, definite edge to it. This must have been what it would be like to drift across the sky amid mare's tail clouds.
... Got to be near, Astoria. All the miles we've come. Can't have gone past. River mouth would tell us, Melander said it's a river of the world, big as Sitka Sound. Can't have missed that....
In the slim space of the canoe the two of them now were the pared outlines of their New Archangel selves. The canoe, though, seemed to have grown; looked lengthened, disburdened, with a pair of men astride it rather than four.
As best they could, Karlsson and Wennberg settled to terms with the shadowless, unedged day. Their paddling was slow, with frequent need to rest. In what might have been the vicinity of noon they ate cold clams from the potful Karlsson had cooked the night before. Two-thirds of the total vanished into them, and each man could have immediately begun the meal over. But Wennberg said nothing to Karlsson's policy that they needed to save the remainder for midafternoon.
The close fog. Somewhere in it over there, the sand haunch of coast they were trying to trace along.
Paddle swash and silence, silence and paddle swash, Untended, a mind let them take it over. Karlsson shook lus head sharply.
***
Cold clams again, sips of water. Then two pairs of callused hands, resuming paddles.
End and beginning, land and water, endurance and task; the Pacific's fusions seemed to distill up endlessly, persist into the mind as if the fog was the elixir of all such matters. Into a belowstairs corner of this ocean—the year, 1770—another of Cook's vessels nosed. An inlet was about to be dubbed Botany Bay and the moment was history-turning, arrival of white exploration to an unknown coast of Australia. A hundred five feet long and thunderheads of canvas over her, Cook's Endeavour swept in from the sea, while the black people on the shore and in the bay registered—nothing. Past fishermen in dugout canoes the great ship hovered, and the fishermen did not even toss a second glance. A woman ashore looked to the Endeavour, "expressed neither surprise nor concern," and squatted to light her meal fire. Too strange for comprehension, Cook's spectral ship to the aborigines; in the dreaming, they accepted it to be. An apparition, a waft of the mind. Just so, here on their own gable end of the Pacific, was the fog taking Karlsson and Wennberg into a dreaming of their own. Through the hours it shifted, and diluted, then came potent again; the vast hover of coastline north behind them, Alaska to Kaigani to Vancouver to wherever this was, the join of timber to ocean, islands beneath peaks, tsarmen beside seven-year men, Koloshes beside whales; it curled and sought, then to now: Melander's vision of how they would run on the sea, and Braaf's single stride wrong on tins inexorable shore, and Karlsson day by day finding dimension he never knew of, and Wennberg in over his head as he always