The Sea Runners

A HARVEST BOOK
HARCOURT, INC.
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Copyright © 1982 by Ivan Doig

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First published by Atheneum in 1982

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doig, Ivan
The sea runners/Ivan Doig.—1st Harvest ed.
p. cm.
"A Harvest book."
1. Indentured servants—Fiction. 2. Escapes—Fiction.
3. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.O415S4 2006
813'.54—dc22 2005037024
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603102-8 ISBN-10: 0-15-603102-7

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvest edition 2006
G I K J H F

TO JOHN RODEN
for splicing the lifeline at Ellen Creek

The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence ..
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.

Robinson Jeffers,
The Place for No Story

A
HIGH-NOSED
cedar canoe, nimble as a sea-bird, atop a tumbling white ridge of ocean.

Carried nearer and nearer by the water's determined sweep, the craft sleds across the curling crest of wave and begins to glide the surf toward the dark frame of this scene, a shore of black spruce forest. On a modern chart of the long, crumbled coastline south from the Gulf of Alaska toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca this particular landfall is written in as Arisankhana Island. None of the four voyagers bobbing to its shore here in a winter dusk of the year 1853, however, knows anything of this name, nor would it matter to their prospect if any did.

Now the canoemen as they alight. Karlsson and Melander and Wennberg and Braaf, More days than they wish to count they have been together in the slender canoe, dodging from one of this coast's constant humps of forest-and-rock to the next. Each man of them afraid a number of times in these days; brave almost as often. Here at Arisankhana they land wetly, heft their slim but laden craft across the gravel beach into hiding within the salal and salmonberry.

"Hope to Christ"—the broad man, Wennberg, this—"this's drier than last night's."

"Oil, aye, and God send you wine and figs too, Wennberg ?"

"Ought'vc left him, Melander." The one named Braaf, here. "Ought've left him cooped in New Archangel."

The slender one of them, called Karlsson, stays silent.

They turn away to the abrupt timber. As the trees sieve them from sight, another white wave replaces the rolling hill of water by which the four were borne to this shore where they are selecting their night's shelter, and where one of them is to die.

Their escape from New Archangel was of Melander's making. In any day's comings and goings at that far-north assemblage of hewn logs and Russian tenacity, Melander you would have spied early. Toplofty
man with lanks of anus and high hips, so that he seemed to be ail long sections and hinges. His line of jaw ran on as well, and so too his forehead; in the extent of Melander only the bright blue eyes and stub nose and short mouth neighbored closely, a sudden alert center of face amid the jaw-and-forehead expanse as if peering in wily surprise out of the hole of a tree trunk.

"A strong right arm is the lever of life, these Russians say. You'd think by chance the Castle crowd might once put the lever to something other than hoisting a glass of champagne, aye?" Early on, too, you would have come to know the jointed talk of the man, this Melander habit of interrupting himself to affirm whether he dared go on with so mesmerizing a line of conversation. All such reluctance to dazzle further notwithstanding, thirty-one times out of thirty Melander could be counted on for continuation. "But 110, lie around up there like seals they all do, yip-yipping down at the rest of us.... Luck for them that we were born, else they'd starve to death figuring out right hoot from left foot.... To be Russian is to be a toothache to the world, aye?"

Horn on the isle of Gotland and thinking of himself as a Swede, Melander actually numbered in the landless nationality, that of the sea. Beyond memory his people on Gotland were fisherfolk, generation upon generation automatically capable with their reaping nets as if having happened into the world with hands shaped only for that task. So it came as a startling flex of independence when Melander, himself beginning to resemble a sizable height of pine spar, went off from his village of Slite to tall-masted vessels. Aboard ship he proved rapidly apt, the type of sea roamer of whom it was appraised that each drop of his blood was black Stockholm tar and his every hair a rope yarn. Ten or so years of sailing the Baltic and the North Sea bettered his position almost voyage by voyage, and then—"Had I been born with brass on my corners, you'd one day be calling me Admiral," Melander half-joked to his deckhands the day he was made first mate.

Just such a billet, second in command of a schooner bearing twenty fresh seven-year men from Stockholm in the spring of 1851, was the one that shunted Melander to Alaska. Russian America, that world-topping wilderness yet was known as, its wholesale purchase by the United States—and consequent rechristening of New Archangel to what the coast's natives knew this vital speck of site as, Sitka—waiting a decade and a half into the future.

Although he had no farthest thought of new endeavor at the onset of that voyage, a pair of outlooks swerved Melander into staying on at New Archangel. The first loomed square ahead—the eleven-month expanse of return voyage in the company of the schooner's captain, a fidgety little circle-faced Finn who was veteran in the Baltic trade but had proved to be quite literally out of his depth on the ocean. The other lay sidewise to Mister First Mate Melander's scrutiny, berthed there against a backdrop of Alaskan forest the spring morning when he reached final exasperation
with his dim captain: The Russian-American Company's steamship, the
Emperor
A
Nicholas I.

In a time and place earlier, Melander would have been the fellow you wanted to set a spire on a cathedral ; in a later, to oversee a fleet of mail planes. But on an April clay in 1851 at one of the rim ends of the known world, what sat at hand was this squatty wonder of self-propulsion. This, and a proclaimed shortage of gifted seamen in these northern Pacific waters which the fur-trading Russians historically had navigated,
pro-Nicholas
and pre-Melander, like men lurching across ice.

"If the wind were clever enough," Melander observed to the baffled Finnish skipper upon taking leave of him, "it ought to snuff out these steam snorters before they get a start, aye?"

Melander maybe under different policy would have gone on to earn his way up the ranks of the Russian-American Company at New Archangel like a lithe boy up a schooner's rigging; become a valued promyshlen-nik, harvester of pelts, for the tsar's Alaskan enterprise in the manner, say, of occasional young Scotsmen of promise who, along the adjoining fur frontier of northmost North America, were let to fashion themselves into field captains of the Hudson's Bay Company by learning to lead brigades of trappers and traders, keep the native tribes cowed or in collaboration, deliver a reliable profit season upon season to London; and, not incidentally, to hold those far spans of map not only in the name of their corporate employers but for the British crown, which underlay the company's
charter terms like an ornate watermark. Simpson, McLoughlin, Douglas, Campbell, Rae, others: Caledonians who whittled system into the wilderness, names known even yet as this continent's northern roster of men of enterprise and empire, lint maybe is only maybe, and the facts enough are that on the broad map of mid-nineteenth-century empires Alaska lies apart from the Hudson's Bay span of Canadian dominion. ("It was but natural," the magistrate of America's frontier history, H. H. Bancroft, would aver, "in the gigantic robbery of half a world, that Russia should have a share; and had she been quicker about it, the belt might as well have been continued to Greenland and Iceland.") That, indeed, this colossal crude crown of northwestmost wilderness is tipped sharply, as if in deliberate spurn, away from London to the direction of Siberia and St. Petersburg. That within the tsar's particular system of empire-by-proxy, Swedes and other outlanders who signed on with the Russian-American Company's fur-gathering enterprise did so as indentured laborers, seven-year men. And that the name Melander thus is not to be discovered anywhere among the frontier baronage.

For as will happen, Melander after pledging to the Russian-American Company did find his life altered by the alluring new nautical machinery, right enough. But not in the direction hoped. Only seldom the Russians fired up the
Nicholas,
whose boilers proved to require approximately two days of woodchopping for each day of voyage—a visiting Hudson's Bay officer once amended the vessel's name to
Old Nick,
on the
ground that it consumed fuel at the rate you might expect of Hell—and on the occasions when its paddle-wheels were set into ponderous thwacking motion, positions aboard were snatched by bored officers of the small Russian navy contingent stationed at New Archangel. Melander's service aboard the
Nicholas
occurred only whenever the Russian governor, Rosenberg, took his official retinue on an outing to the hot springs at Ozherskoi, an outpost south a dozen miles down Sitka Sound. In Melander's first Alaskan year this happened precisely twice, and his sea-time-under-steam totaled six days.

The rest of his workspan? A Russian overseer conferred assignment on Melander as promptly as the supply schooner vanished over the horizon on the voyage back to Stockholm and Kronstadt. "Friend sailor," the overseer began, "we are going to give you a chance to dry out your bones a bit," and Melander knew that what followed was not going to be good. Because of his ability of handling men and, from time on the Baltic, his tongue's capability with a bit of Russian—and his Gotland knowledge of fish—henceforth Melander was in charge of the crew that salted catches of salmon and herring for New Archangel's winter larder.

Seven-year men. "The Russians' hornless oxen," as Melander more than once grumbled it.

"Deacon Step-and-a-Half is at it again."

Melander peered with interest along the cardplayers and conversationalists in the workmen's barracks to
see where the gibe had flown from. A fresh turn of tongue was all too rare in New Archangel. Melander himself had just tried out his latest declaration to no one in particular: "A seven-year man is a bladeless knife without a handle." That had attracted him the anonymous dart, not nearly the first to bounce off his seaman's hide.