The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [88]
Karlsson's eyes were correct. Shoalwater Bay was not the mouth of the great river of the west of America, Astoria's river. No, it still was beyond the southern squishy extent of Shoalwater that the Columbia shoved forth into the Pacific. Four miles beyond.
Something in Wennberg had gone slack. Karlsson's rouse of him took minutes and when at last he was upright, he looked pale and bleary. Caked mud from last night's tumble covered his britches like scales.
Wennberg shivered and sat with slow heaviness onto the gunwale of the canoe. "Caught a chill, must've."
"Here." Karlsson teetered a bit himself as he shawled a blanket over the blacksmith's shoulders. He noticed there even was a clot of mud in the man's sidewhiskers. "Wennberg, get awake. We need to make a fire and try this tideflat for clams,"
Wennberg sat staring along the rippled mud and tidewater. "Where to hell are we?"
"In a bay, looks like."
Wennberg hugged the blanket more snug around him. "Are we there?"
"In a bay, yes. Get up now, we'll fetch firewood."
"Astoria. Are we at Astoria?"
"Not yet. Get up."
Wennberg still was staring out along the tide line. "Karlsson," he intoned. "Karlsson, what're those?"
Karlsson turned for a look.
"Is it? Got to be—" Wennberg was haggard, hung between hope and alarm. "Karlsson, is it?"
Karlsson still studied into the bay. He and Wennberg bad slogged a few hundred yards north for a closer gaze. "I—don't think so."
"Got to be! What the hell are those, if there aren't whites here to put them up? Karlsson, this's got to be the Columbia mouth, people here—"
Karlsson tried to make his mind work past Wennberg's insistences, figure what the thin shapes rising from the water could signify. Four wands of them, like long, peeled willows implanted out in the tidewater, their small bare branches forking to the sky. Standing like four corners of a plot of—water? Tidal muck? Wennberg had the point that they'd never seen anything of the sort done by Koloshes. But if whites had markered here, why? And where was sign of anyone, except these skinny corner posts of nothing?
... Still no river current. Can't he the Columbia, this. We need go on. But why four sticks, middle of nowhere...
All the desperation in Wennberg seemed to be coming out at once. He swayed around wildly scanning the bay. "Whites've got to've done those. Marking off some goddamn thing or other. Around here somewhere—'"
... Wennberg, easy with this. There's no ... Karlsson realized he was not saying aloud, began to: "Wennberg..."
"Karlsson! Give a look!"
... Oh Christ, he's moonstruck about this, how'll I...
"No, there!" Wennberg was pointing farther north along the low shore. "There, there!"
The cabin sat in the mid-distance, on the far side of where the tideflat made a thrust into the beach.
Not since New Archangel had they set eye on such a dwelling, a spell of house!essness which asked some moments of blink to cure itself, to allow in the news of peaked green roof, weathered gray walls, hearth, warmth—
"Those markers out there!" Wennberg, all over himself with excitement. "Told you there had to be whites here! Fishermen of some sort, must be, planted those sticks! Christ-of-mercy, let's get ourselves across there!"
Into the muck the pair of men plunged.
Impetus of all the voyage moved their legs now. The distance down the precipice of coast since New Archangel, the pieces of ocean like an endless series of waterfalls, the cold burn of North Pacific wind and current, all now pushed these two grimy men like pebbles in a torrent.
Whenever lie had breath Wennberg hallooed, his calls hoarse and lonely in the stillness.
The prospect ahead lensed everything around Karlsson. The