The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [87]
Somehow the two canoemen stretched what was left of their strength, did not give way until the day at last did. Dusk and fog together now, shore as well as canoe clasped into their cloud.
Watching how sluggish Wennberg had become, Karlsson was not certain he was any better himself. Thirty more, he vaguely heard himself decide. Aloud, to Wennberg? He wasn't sure.
Those thirty strokes numbly done, Karlsson turned the craft toward where the compass said shore ought to be.
"How to hell far out'd you take us?"
"Ought be almost in now."
"Where's shore, then?"
"Just ahead."
"Maybe that compass's gone wrong, maybe you've steered us to sea—"
"We're with the tide, Wennberg. Can't be taking us anywhere but in."
"This goddamn fog."
"Wennberg, listen."
"So? You think you can say anything that'll bring shore, fetch it out—"
"Not to me, goddamn it. Listen for rocks."
"liocks? What, you—?"
Karlsson and Wennberg both had stopped paddling, the canoe being carried by the tide, the slosh of surf now near in the fog. Both listening, listening until it seemed each ear must narrow as a squinting eye would.
But the slosh around them stayed steady, no underdrum of tidal rock anywhere behind it, and the canoe continued to be carried in.
The sightlessness seemed to extend time, the ride through slosh went on and on. Still no beach, no dark bank of forest.
They were onto shore before they ever saw it. The canoe simply stopped, as if reined up short.
Karlsson and Wennberg lurched out of the canoe and sank ankle deep into tideflat. "Muck," said Wennberg as if it was exactly what he had expected. And then they pushed, the canoe asking shove and shove.
Amid one, Wennberg slipped. He fell from view, splatted somewhere below the wooden wall of the canoe.
Karlsson labored around the craft.
Wennberg was elbowing himself from the mire, like a person trying to rise out of a deep soft bed. Karlsson got him up. Mud coated Wennberg's legs and his left side to the shoulder.
They went back to shoving. Finally the canoe was beyond water and mud. Only then could the leaden men beside it see the forest, a tangle at the edge of the fog and near dark.
Something of the landfall nudged at Karlsson. But couldn't surface through his weariness. It was as much as he could manage to grasp that the fog had not fed Wennberg and him to the coast's rocks, that they had fumhled the sailcloth and blankets out, that Wennberg already had sagged off under them, that he too now was being let to sink from the day.
It shot clear to Karlsson as he woke in the morning.
...Wrong side. Sweet sweat of Christ, water's to the wrong side of us, how ...
Water east rather than water west, and water that was not ocean but a broadsheet of bay, miles of it.
Through the hills across the bay a silvery haze hung, but Karlsson could make out that those bills and the shore forest all around were like the Alaska coastline pressed down and spread: rumpled and green but low.
Karlsson clambered across the beach toward the tree-line for higher view, turned, scanned fervently. Beyond the canoe, across the broad brown tideflat, into all the blue of water, his search: and nowhere in it, any steady move of current which would mark a great river flowing out.
...Drifted us in, blind as kittens. But in to where?...
Its scatter of water across greatly more geography than it had depth for gave name to the bay: Shoalwater. A startling washout in the southern Washington coast, Shoalwater Bay pooled across nearly ten miles at its widest and managed to stretch itself Southward another twenty-five. A kind of evergreen fen country, Shoalwater, taking some cons to decide whether to remain tideflat and marsh or to danken into forested swamp. Tide, current, channel, seep, all were steadily at work 011 the decision, sometimes almost within splash of each other. Shoalwater's modest rivers, though, along the eastern bayside, seemed ambivalent.