The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [90]
Karlsson stared long at the breakers, willing against what he knew to be the truth written white in them. Even could he persuade Wennberg back to the canoe and they someway summoned muscle to launch into the mud bay, against such flow as this the two of them were too weary to paddle through to ocean. Never in this lifetime. Whatever candle end of it was left to them.
... Melander. Then Braaf. Oughtn't happened, either time. They were keeping in life, bending themselves to our voyage. So why...
The dune grass was attacking the backs of Karlsson's hands again.
... Hadn't been for the last storm and the fog we'd maybe done it. Be at Astoria now, wherever place it is. Wherever...
Whatever figure it took in his mind at any moment, one constant mood was within Karlsson now. Anger at bow it was all turning out. The way their lives had been, these vast weeks of dare since New Archangel; and tall clever Melander gone, and deft skylark Braaf; and Wennberg, even Wennberg had earned survival, broken that Kolosh canoe and provided more than his share of paddle strokes, paid out what endurance he had. Not right, that it all dwindled to this. This jinxed goddamn day. Karlsson despised the injustice of it. Whetted his resentment on its minutes. Aimed his aggrievedness to the sand defying his feet.
After long, the surface under him changed. Slogging on the tidal mud again now. The gray log with its wig of green was ahead.
Wennberg was against the log as he had left him.
Karlsson reached down, gripped a wide shoulder. Wennberg was shivering again and when he lifted his head, his eyes were indifferent.
Karlsson sought anything to say. Everything now seemed too major for words.
Wennberg mumbled something, and lapsed off again.
... Finish me, Wennberg made me the promise once. At least we've jumped that. No need, coast'll do it for him....
The cost of air is mortality. This principle Karlsson now knew in every inch of himself.
... Not yet though. Not just damn yet. Takes God and his brother to kill a Smålander....
Karlsson put his back against the high drift log, could feel the cedar grain beneath his fingers. Against every urge of the fatigue all through him, did not let himself sit but stayed propped there, looking across the tideflat to the shore forest. To the blue spread of bay. To the four marking sticks, tall and thin and stark, striking their reflections crooked across the tidewater. To a lone dark stretched form between the mud and the timber which, his mind slowly managed to register, was the canoe.
SEVEN
THE dark-bearded man carried a lamp to the table, trimmed the wick, lent flame to it from a kindling splinter lit at the fireplace; established the lamp at the farthest side from the draft seeping in tinder the cabin door, then sat to the pool of yellow light.
Across the next minute or so he fussed at the materials that awaited 011 the table. Unusual, but he was a trifle uneasy with himself. It being Sunday night, he was going to need to trim scruple next. Keeping the Sabbath ought be like a second backbone in any New England man, even one away here as far west from Vermont as you could venture and not fall off America, lint in the morning Win ant's schooner Mary Taylor would sail from the bay and packet the mail out with it, possibly three weeks, a month, intervening before the next postal opportunity. Too, there was the consideration that Waterman paid coin for worthwhile report, and the clink of specie was rare sound at this back corner of frontier....
He slid the paper to him, dipped the goosefeather pen to the ink, and began.
Shoalwater Bay
March 20th 1853
Mr. John Orvis Waterman
Editor, Oregon Weekly Times
Dr Sir—On Monday last, as I was riding with my son Jared to examine our oyster bed at a tideflat north of