The Sea Runners (23 page)

"Fish, no. But a hair seal, maybe. If they've followed season to these waters ... that point across there, it's the sort they lie around on."

"Gunshot, though?" This doubt from Braaf.

"A lot of noise from surf there, all that rock. And we can gander around the headland for Koloshes before getting onto the point."

Wennberg hitched his trousers, maybe calculating all the new room in them. "I could eat a skunk from the ass forward. If you think you remember which end of the goddamn gun to point, Smålander, I'm for it."

Karlsson checked Braaf, received a slow nod. And made it decision : "Let's go find supper."

Plump jetsam on the outmost of shore, the seals were there.

So was a new style of coast to any the Swedes had seen yet. Having clambered downbeach to the point, the three found themselves at the inshore edge of a
rook shelf high and fiat as a quay—although no one hut nature could employ a quay some two hundred paces wide and that much again in length. Odd in this, too: in the blue and brown afternoon, the Pacific tossing bright around the somber rock face of the coast, this huge queer natural wharf lay thinly sheeted with wet, like puddles after rain.

By now Braaf had tides in his bones alongside the weather. "The high drowns all this, then," he stated, nodding the attention of Karlsson and Wennberg to the remnant pools. "We'll need be quick." Even as Braaf said so, earliest waves of the incoming tide tried to leg themselves up over the seaward edge of the rock quay.

"Quick we'll be," Karlsson responded and was in motion while the words still touched the air. "Over here, that horn of rock."

Onto the tidal plateau he led the other two, to where a formation the height and outline of a sloop sail bladed up. Beside this prong, from view of the seal herd, Karlsson studied out ambush.

Leftward, the rock shelf lay open and bare. Any least twitch of invasion there would he instantly seen by the seals.

To the right, close by Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf, the ocean with undreamable patience had forced a tidal trough—a lengthy crevasse bent at the middle, like an arm brought up to ward off a blow. Every insurge of surf slopped a harsh compressed tide through this shore crack, a hurl of water as if flung
from a giant pan, and the crevasse gaped wider than a man would want to try to jump. \o surprise to the seals from this foaming quarter either, then.

The sea end of this trough, though. There a fist of boulder met the ocean, and just inland toward the men bulged a low knurl of rock off that formation. A wen on the (jack of the tide-rock wrist, you might think of it.

... Little help but some help. I'll need make it be enough, won't I....

"I'll shoot from there," Karlsson indicated the wen site ahead to Wennberg and Braaf. He made the short crawl to the I lump, Wennberg scrabbling behind on the left and Braaf vastly more agile to the right. They hunched either side of Karlsson, Wennberg breathing heavy, Braaf soundless, as the slender hunter peered to the seals.

"What do they taste like?" Braaf wondered in a whisper.

Karlsson's shake of head confessed lack of acquaintance.

"Pork," reported Wennberg. "The liver's just like a hog's."

The other two looked at him. "Spend the years I did at New Archangel," Wennberg said, "a little of goddamned everything crosses your plate."

The seals lay idle as anvils. Some had been lazing in the sun long enough that their fur had dried pale, others yet were damp and nearly as dark as their rock promenade. All of them were toward a hundred paces from where Karlsson lay sighting. He disliked the distance for the shot, but decided to amend what he could of ¡t by singling out a seal that lay a hit inshore from the others. A young bachelor, bullied into solitude by the older harem-masters of the herd.

"Tickle luck's chin," Braaf said softly as Karlsson aimed.

"Or it's smoke soup tonight," Wennberg muttered.

Karlsson's shot struck the seal in the neck, not far beneath the base of its head.

A lurch by the animal. Its foreflippers and tail Happed briefly. Then the head lowered as if into doze.

... Fetched him! Shot-and-pot, we'll surprise our bellies yet....

Meantime, the other seals writhed rapidly toward the rock edge, were gone.

"Square eye, Karlsson!" Braaf congratulated. He was first onto his feet, stepping to the right of the bump of rock Karlsson had shot from, Wennberg and Karlsson up now too, the three of them setting off io hurry toward the seal, the tide in mind.

Of what happened next, only this much is sure. That amid a climbing stride by Braaf as he began to cross the wrist of rock, surf burst its power in front of him. That a startling white weight of water leapt, seemed to stand in the air. That it then fell onto Braaf.

Comical, this ought to have been. A drenching, an ass-over-earhole tumble as Wennberg might have said, and there the sum of it, Braaf bouncing up now with a grin of rue. But the topple of water slung Braaf backward more than that and the hand he put down to halt himself met the wet slickness of brown rockweed.

Braaf slid on into the tidal trough.

Above, Karlsson and Wennberg, half-turned in stare to the crevasse water, were twins of disbelief.

Braaf' was vanished.

Then, and a long then it began to seem, up through foam hobbled Braaf's head. For a breath space, his eves held the affronted look they'd had when Wennberg's boot clattered the spittoon in the officers' clubhouse.

Next the insurging tide shot him from view of Karlsson and Wennberg around the bend of the trough.

... Rifle, reach the rifle to him, only chance...

Down toward the trough Karlsson clambered, Wennberg heavily at his heels and cursing blue. The footing along the top of the trough was treachery itself. Karlsson and Wennberg skidded like men on soapstone as they tried to approach the edge.

The out-slosh of the tide brought Braaf whirling back below them, grabbing with both hands at the walls of the trough, barnacles and mussels denying him grip and costing him skin. This time it was around the trough's seaward bend that the riptide tossed him from sight.

"Hold me," Karlsson directed Wennberg.

The burly man clamped his arms around Karlsson's knees as Karlsson stretched himself flat, down toward the spilling water. Like a man peering down a well, Karlsson now. With both hands he held the rifle at its barrel end, thrust the stock into the channel as Braaf popped to sight once more.

"Braaf! Grab! We'll pull...!"

A wrath of water—it bulged a full three feet over all other froth in the channel, as if some great-headed creature was seeking surface—careened in. Surf spewed over Karlsson and Wennberg, both of them clenching eves tight against the salt sting.

When they could peer again, Braaf bobbed yards past them on the landward side, his boy's face in a grimace. He scented to shake his head at them. Then the tide abruptly sucked back toward the ocean and Braaf was spinning toward his rescuers once more, his arms supplicating in search of the gunstock.

But short, a hand's length short...

... God's bones, it never behaves the same twice. Need be quicker, make ready...

"This time, Wennberg! Lower me more, there, now'll reach ..."

The pair of them stared expectation toward the seaward corner of the trough, bracing themselves for the riptide's return and the hurl of spray over them once more.

It arrived, crashing high along the trough walls, hard spatter, runnels down faces, now eyes could open again...

This time the tide had not brought Braaf back with it.

"Braaf!" demanded Wennberg. "Braaf, where the hell—?"

Karlsson scrambled wildly for the ocean edge, banging knees and hands on rough rock, Wennberg lurching after him.

The coastal afternoon's same royal colors of blue and brown were all about the two men, the horizon brow of the planet untroubled out there in front of them, the Pacific's flume of surf flowing as ever to their left and right; the single absence was Braaf.

In the surf's froth, very white beside the rock shelf, Karlsson and Wennberg scanned frantically for other color. Occasionally they glimpsed it, as you might see a bright-headed dancer a quick moment across a crowded room. The straw yellow of Braaf's hair, all but concealed in the tumult of the water and being banged north along the jagged rock shore.

Two now. But why that. God's bones, why,
why?
Why one slip and Braaf's gone from life? That how it'll happen, each by each of us? This coast snare us each like that? But Braaf. Braaf, oh Christ, Brant I'd give half my life to have it not happen, what did. Gone, though. Taken water for a wife, (die schooner met! say of it. Why. And pair of us now, we're not much better off than him. You were the tip weight of us, Braaf, kept us level. Turn on me, Wennberg had you to worry about. Go for you, there'd he me sharp on him. Hut now ... Wennberg'll he trouble's trumpet now. Can hear him over there, what must be whispering in that head of
his. "Oil Christ—the doom on us—the fish-fuckers shot Melander, Braaf tumbles in a millrace—now just the pair of us and I can't trust this Smålander any farther than I can fart—not after the maps—not after this—" Need to tamp him. Someway, Else we're dead men too, Waiting to fall. Not the way of it, this shouldn't be. We've done the work of the world, since New Archangel. Done Melander's plan this far, every hair of it. Ought he enough, lint always more, Wennberg, he's the first work now. Working slow. Braaf told of that. Braaf, Braaf, Swimming the air with Melander, I hope to Christ you are. And now I go over to that bull and work slow, ...

"I should've. Oh, I should've done you the other night. Slit you loose from life. Braaf and I'd kept on somehow, we'd've managed. But you, you're black luck if there ever was. The maps, and then those Kolosh whale hounds, now this—"

"You do me, Wennberg, and you've done yourself. Fed yourself to ocean or Koloshes, choose your devil."

They were either side of the canoe, the afternoon graying away, the coast gone somber. Tide was still high, covering the point where Braaf had been lost—and the seal as well, slosh up to the knees of Wennberg arid Karlsson when they struggled toward the animal, before they saw a retreating wave swash the gray form back into the ocean. Then the wrangle, on and on—"fucking squaw rider you, if you'd had the maps none of this"—"maps are wish, Wennberg, miles arc what
we need, so just"—until every word seemed to be out of t)ie both of them. They were weary, groggy, lame in the head. Being deprived of Melander had been like the stiffening of an arm or leg, they somehow learned to function in spite of it, gimped their way onward as they had to. This loss of Braaf was more a warp of the balance within the ear. Nothing stood quite whore it had before. And when the lurch of argument and temblors of predicament at last shook the two men silent, Karlsson knew he needed to begin his true labor. And so did.

"Can't paddle in daylight, you say yesterday," Wennberg had responded somewhere between bafflement and fury.
Beware the goat from the front, the horse from the rear, and man from all sides,
ran a saying of the New Archangel Russians. Everything of Wennberg recited this caution into Karlsson now. Yet Wennberg had to be worked back to the journey, into the canoe, brought around from Braaf's ... "Now it's can't paddle at night. Tell me this one thing, Karlsson. This one goddamned sideways thing. Where're you going to find us hours that aren't one or other, day or night? Whistle up your ass for them, arc you?"

"Dusk." Karlsson had repeated it carefully, "Dusk, Wennberg, We need make a short run of it, until we figure we're clear of any Koloshes along here. Just the two of us paddling now, we've got to learn about that, too. So we need do it. Steal enough twilight to paddle an hour, maybe two, we can. Whatever we make is gain toward Astoria,"

Now, the day stepping down toward dark, Wennberg sighed dismally, squinted to the ocean, gray and steadily
grayer, as though it were dishwater and lie were being asked to drink it at a swallow.

"Wennberg, we need do it."

As the two canoemen paddled they could make out that timber still spilled like a dark endless waterfall over the rim of the continent, but all else here looked more and more like old outlying ruins of the vigorous mountain coast behind them to the north.

The growl of the surf was constant on their left. Ahead, a high-sided squarish island, like a fort just offshore, stood in black outline. Two big sharkfin seastacks guarded its oceanward side.

"Country you wouldn't give the devil," Karlsson heard Wennberg say.

Through the near dark they achieved a half-handful of miles, put behind them the fortlike isle, before Karlsson, hoping he was reading this scalloped shore aright, pointed the canoe in between two headlands.

He strained now to pick shapes in the water before them, felt Wennberg ahead doing the same, heard him mutter.

Three, four, half a dozen rocks humped to view in an area the size of a commons field—and none more.

The route clear, the canoe drove in to one more haven of shore.

The camp this night, without Braaf, was like a remembered room with one wall knocked out.