The Sea Runners (27 page)

Now at water edge. Beautiful blue.

Peering out into the bay entrance which the fog had poured them through.

Squinted to be sure of what he was seeing.

Instead of surf stacking against the shore three and four and five deep as had been happening all along this coast, here the waves flowed and flowed, breaking into the bay as if in stampede. They flashed, right, left, and before, across the entire neck of entrance. A mile-breadth of whitecaps.

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.

T
HE
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 20
^th
1853

Mr. John Orvis Waterman
Editor, Oregon Weekly Times

D
^r
Sir—On Monday last, as I was riding with my son Jared to examine our oyster bed at a tideflat north of our land claim, our attention was taken by a column of smoke. Knowing that no settler dwelt in that vicinity, we thought to investigate, a vessel perhaps having run aground near the bay mouth there.

Much was our astonishment to find, beside a big tidal log, two men, much emaciated and looking the perfect pictures of misery and hardship. One of the poor fellows could only utter again and again '
Merica, 'Merica,
so fixed was his mind on their arrival to this portion of America. The other man, a slender sort worn thin to the extreme by their ordeal, we could speak with, but could not make ourselves understood.
Astoria
was his oftenest word, and by trying our utmost, we at last conveyed to
him that that locality lay just beyond the southern reach of the bay, oti the opposite bank of the Columbia River.

We cooked a rough stew of some venison jerky we had with us, the pair eating as though they never could be sated. We then contrived to lift them onto our horses and after taking them to our house, summoned some of the other settlers from around. Among us since the grounding of the
Willimantic
in Gray's Harbor has been a Dane, dwelling at Chinook, who: was steward of that vessel, and through his endeavors we succeeded in conversing with the hard-used pair. Their history is as follows:

In 1850 they engaged to WOrk for the Russian Fur Company seven years, and accordingly embarked, in company with eighteen others, for the northwestern coast, bound for New Archangel, After a residence of nearly two years, they found they could not bear the ill usage which they were receiving, and determined to make their escape. They were four, who determined on that leave-taking. At a place beyond Vancouver Island, one of their number was slain by the Indians. A second unfortunate was drowned in the descent of the coast between the Strait of Fuca and here.

When found, the two who have survived had been in this bay for a span of time they did not know. They mistook the large drift stump for a cabin and were very nearly done up by their exertions to reach it. The more slight of the pair, and thus better fitted to tread his way atop the tideflat, returned to their canoe—a craft about twenty feet in length by three in width, sprightly built;
and with this they have made a winter voyage of over a thousand miles on one of the worst parts of the coast!—and from there fetched a cylinder of maps enwrapped in waterproofing. With these large sheets, and flint and steel, and branches and driftwood got from around, lie was able to construct atop the log the smudge fire which signaled us to their aid.

They are well cared for by the citizens here, and at present are comfortably situated at Chinook, whence they will be taken across the river to Astoria when their strength is sufficient.

Their names arc Nils Karlsson and Anders Wennberg, and they are of Sweden.

Yours &c
Jonathan E. Cotter

The End

IN THE WORDS
of an admired friend, the novelist Mildred Walker, my sea runners "have lived only in the world of this book." But their life in these pages does draw breath from actuality. According to a contemporary letter-to-the-editor in the
Oregon Weekly Times,
during the winter of 1852–53 oyster men at Shoalwater Bay (modernly renamed Willapa Bay) north of the mouth of the Columbia River came upon three men, "the perfect pictures of misery and despair," who had achieved a canoe voyage down the Northwest coast from indentureship at New Archangel. Their names were reported as Karl Gronland, Andreas Lyndfast, and Karl Waster holm; a fourth man, whose name was not reported, was killed by Indians along the way. Their great and terrible journey is not known in detail, I would hope that Melander, Karlsson, Wennberg, and Braaf are in the spirit of those actual voyagers.

Naval Captain of Second Rank Nikolai Yakovlevich Rosenberg and the Lutheran pastor, and Wha-laltl Asabuy and the Astoria collector of customs, did exist but their conversations herein arc imaginary.

To cut down on complication, I've employed present-day usages in the following instances: Alaska as synonymous with Russian America; Baranof as the name of the island which in 1853 was still called Sitka Island; and governor for the personage whose title in Russian is more accurately "chief manager."

The term "pood" is a Russian unit of weight equivalent to 36.11 pounds.

Kaigani Strait herein is not the modern-day passage between the Alaskan islands of Dall and Long, but the contemporary Russian designation of Dixon Entrance.

Arisankhana Island is a composite of the Northwest coastal islands from whose names I made it up.