FOUR

DEATH's credence comes to us in small costs, mounting and mounting.

At first within the canoe, capacity only for the disbelief. Melander gone from life, the long coast snapping down the cleverest of them as an owl would a dormouse.

Like wild new hearts this shock of loss hammered in Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson, there never could be room for all the resound in their minds, any minds, it thudded around cars and trembled in throats, such concussion of fresh circumstance: Melander's body now a cargo, deadweight, clotting not just the pulse of the canoe but of whatever of existence was left to the other three of them....

After, it could only seem that during tbis blind thunderous time the canoe sensed out its own course. When the thought at last forced a way to one of them—Karlsson, the displaced steersman in the bow, it happened to be—that to pull numbly on paddles was not enough, that a compass heading and a map reading were necessitated, the needle and the drawn lines revealed the canoe to be where it ought; where Melander would have steered it.

In that catch-of-breath pause, Braaf whitely burrowing the compass and map case from beneath the corpse that was Melander, Wennberg in a sick glaze handing on the instrument and container to Karlsson—in that stay of time, the absence began its measured toll on them.

Melander's sailor-habited scrutiny of the water around, every chance of rock or shoal or tide rip announced.

The reminding word to Braaf when he made his habitual dawdle in shifting his paddle.

Regulation on Wennberg's bluster, which evidently even Wennberg had come to rely on.

The musing parleys with Karlsson, treetop communing with stone.

Day on day and all the waking hours of those days, Such losses of Melander would be exacted now, in silences conspicuous where there ought have rung the watchword of that voice—aye?

***

Midday, the canoe ashore at the next southward island, Melander's three-man crew yet trying to unbelieve the folded-forward body in the trench of cedar.

Three men, each with new age on him. During the crossing Wennberg had blurted periodic and profound curses, hut now said nothing, seemed to be gritting against whatever slunk on its way next. Braaf, too, stood still and wordless as a post. Karlsson it was who stepped first out of the silence.

"We need to bury him."

They managed with Karlsson's ax, the gaff, and the cooking pot to gouge a shallow grave in the forest floor. Then, with struggle, they brought the body from the canoe. Queerly, lifelessness had made Melander greatly heavy to carry, even with Wennberg's strength counted into the task, while at the same time the sense of death somehow seemed to thin the gravity around Braaf and Karlsson and Wennberg. This emotional addle, not a man of them would have known how to utter. But now in each there swirled atop the dread and confusion and gut gall from Melander's killing an almost giddy feel of ascension. Of being up high and more alert than ever before, alert in every hair, aware of all sides of one's self. It lasts not long—likely the human spirit would burn to blue ash in more than moments of such atmosphere—but the sensation expends the wonder that must course through us at such times: Death singled thee, not me.

They dared not spare sailcloth for a shroud. Karlsson took up the ax, whacked limbs from nearby spruce. Melander's last rest along this green coast would he under boughs rather than atop them.

Next, dirt was pushed into the grave. When they had done, Karlsson stepped amid the loose soil. Trod down his right heel, his left. Moved sideways, repeated.

Wennberg and Braaf looked loath, but in a minute joined in the tromp.

Firm dirt over Melander, they hefted stones from the beach and piled them onto the gravetop to discourage—more likely, merely delay—animals.

In the unending windstorm of history, how Sven Melander of Gotland and the sea was put to earth could not possibly make a speck's difference. Vet to these three this forest grave seemed to matter all. They had done now what could be thought of, except—

Karlsson and Braaf looked to Wennberg.

The broad man licked his lips as if against a sour taste, and much white was showing at the corners of his eyes.

"No. Goddamn, no. I don't believe in that guff anymore. Particularly after this."

"Just do it for the words," Braaf murmured. "Do the words for Melander."

Wennber greyed Braaf; Karlsson. Then in a low rapid rumble he delivered the psalm:

"... A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.... We spend our years as a tale that is told.... So teach us to number our days ...'"

***

The next bad time was quick to come.

They needed a meal, and somehow pieced one together. Just after, crossing the campsite on one fetch or another—all the budget of fuss Melander had attended to now needed to be shared out—Wennberg clomped past the sitting Braaf. Stopped, and examined.

"What's here on the back of you, then?" Wennberg demanded.

Braaf glanced dully up toward the blacksmith. Slipping his arms from the Aleut parka, lie brought the garment around for a look.

Across the shoulders and the middle of the back showed small dark splats, as if a rusty rain had fallen.

The three men stared at the stains where Melander's blood had showered forward.

At last Wennberg shifted awkwardly. "Maybe it'll wash—"

Twin glistens of tears laned Braaf's round face. "Say anything, either of you," he choked out, "and Til gut you."

After, Karlsson never was sure what the flag had been between Wennberg and him, how it happened that they faced each other, off along the brink of shore from the weeping Braaf.

Wennberg began fast, as if the words needed to rattle their way out of him. "Karlsson, listen now—we've— Hell's own clung ditch, we're fallen in now. The lucky one of us may be Melander. So—"

"You didn't trade places with him there at the grave."

"What? No!" Wennberg seemed startled by Karlsson's rejoinder. Then tried to muster: "No, bad choices're getting to be a habit with me. As when I went out that gate with you damned three."

"But out it you are." Karlsson scanned from Wennberg away into the forest, the constant shaggy nap of these islands. Tried to find concentration in the convoking of all the green beings, the way they touched each to each. Karlsson's head swam a bit and ached a lot and he was wearier than all the axwork of his life ever had made him, and here loomed Wennberg to be dealt with, and Melander dead, and..."And a far swim to get back in," Karlsson bought a further moment with. God's wounds, think now, how to halter this damned bull of a blacksmith....

"Karlsson, hear me. Just—just hear me, will you? We can't go at each other like cats with tails tied together and slung over a fence. Not now, not after—Someway we've got to make miles along this God-lost coast. So somebody needs to load. Decide, this way or that, or we'll meet ourselves in a circle in these bedamned islands. Not even Melander's going to make himself heard up through the earth."

Karlsson's weariness abruptly doubled. "So you're lifting yourself to it."

Exasperation flooded Wennberg. "Karlsson, goddamn—you won't see a matter until it lands on your nose and has a shit there, will you?" With effort, Wennberg tried to steady his tone. Karlsson remembered the same ominous tremor through the blacksmith, the earthquake in a man when temper fights with itself, the time Melander informed him the cache had been spirited away. "No, not—not me to lead. You."

As Karlsson tried to lay hold of the seven words he had just heard, Wennberg discharged more.

"It's sense, is all. There're the maps to be savvied and tin's bedamned canoe to be pointed, and you've done some of so, out with the bear milkers. So it's sense, you in charge of that."

Wennberg scratched his sidewhiskers as he sought how to put his next premise.

"All the other, we'll just—we don't need a sermon at every turn, like Melander gave. Divvy tasks without all that yatter, we can."

Wennberg paused. Something was yet to pry its way. Finally—

"Braaf, there. He'd never take to me as leader. Be happy to see him left here to bunk with Melander, I would, but we need the little bastard."

"And you." Karlsson someway found the mother wit to say this more as statement than question, "You'll take to me."

Another effort moved through Wennberg. He lifted his look from Karlsson, bent a bleak gaze to the ocean. He said: "I need to, don't I?"

Close by that night's firelight, Karlsson in kneel.

Untying the flap of the waterproof map pouch. Bringing out the scroll of maps. Performing the unrolling, then the weighting of each corner with an oval pebble from the beach gravel.

Into view arrived all their declension of the coast, an amount of ti ck across white space that surprised Karlsson, as though he Were gazing on sudden new line of tracks across snow.

Only the top map of the lot had Karlsson ever seen, the one on which Me lander's pencil route took its start at the square house-dots of New Archangel. That once, Melander had been borrowing opinion, and here was traced Karlsson's advice, the canoe's side loop around Japonski Island and then veering down and down, at last out the bottom of Sitka Sound. The night forest of a continent ten paces on one side of him and half a world of night ocean thirty paces on the other, Karlsson could scarcely credit it—that there had been time when he, when any of this canoe's adopted men, existed at that regiment of dots, answered work call, dwelt in barracks, fought fleas, wintered on salt fish ... set honey for a gate guard named Bilibin.

On the next map the penciled line hugged the west shore of Baranof Island to Cape Ommaney; then, as if deflected by what waited south, struck east to Kuiu. Because of Melander's route sketch in the dirt and the knowledge that their port of destination lay southward Karlsson had supposed that they were going along the escape route much like men shinnying down a rope—maybe a sidle of effort once and again, but the total plunge into one direction. It was a revolution in his thinking to sec now that all the time they were canoeing south they also were sidestepping east.

More of angling down the North Pacific, map three brought. The Kuiu-Heceta-Noyes-Suemez-Dall skein of islands and the crossing of Kaigani Strait to the horn tip of the Queen Charlottes. Those days of voyage Karlsson tried to sort in his mind. In the waters along Heceta, was it, where they caught the ugly delicious fish? On which island did the carved creatures rear over Braaf? The great trees beside that dome of cliff, the water diamonds dropping in dazzle, had they been—? Hut the days of this coast blended like its trees, none could be made to stand in memory without the others.

Karlsson unscrolled to the fourth map, the one showing how they crossed Hecate Strait, stairstepped the islands of the past several days, and then, just more than halfway down this chart, at a rough-edged small island with no name written in beside it, Melander's penciling halted. Yes, well...

Melander. In every corner of Karlsson's thoughts, Melander. A painful stutter in the mind, him, his death, the cost to it. Melander with that abrupt alert face atop his length, like the glass cabin up a lighthouse; Melander who believed that an ocean can be fended with, ridden by a Kolosh saddle of wood and reined with these Russian maps. But Melander no longer on hand to dispense such faith. Too well, Karlsson understood that he and Braaf and Wennberg, none of them anything of a Melander and as different from each other as hip-high and upstairs and the moon, needed now to find their own resources to endure this sea run.

At least Braaf had wrinkled smooth again. When Karlsson and Wennberg returned to camp and the who-ought-lead proposition was put to him, it took the young thief an instant to realize he was being polled at all. He blinked then and said as if it were common fact: "You've to do it, Karlsson. I can't read the maps and Wennberg couldn't lead his shadow. You've to do it."

And at least there were the maps, these extra eyes needed to know the intentions of this coast and ocean. Glancing to the bottom of this fourth map, down from where Melander's tracery of route left off, Karlsson saw that the coastline was shown as far as the north most tip of Vancouver's Island. Cape Scott, Melander had penciled in beside the ragged thumb of land. Karlsson recalled Vancouver's Island to be the third of the landforms, those wheres of their escape, scratched into the dirt by Melander the day of last summer. The maps next would bring Vancouver's shore and then the final southering coastline from the Strait of Fuca to Astoria.

Karlsson slipped his fingers beneath the top and bottom edges to lift away this map to those next ones. And was fixed to that motion, as if the chill of beach gravel against Ins knuckles had conducted petrifaction into him.

Beneath the fourth map lay nothing but that gravel.

Karlsson drew in a breath which met his heart at the top of his throat.

Came to his feet, yanked a brand from the fire for light, and was gone past the sheltered sleeping lengths of Braaf and Wennberg on his way to the canoe.

There he dug through the entire stowage. Then dug again, and still found only what lie dreaded most, confirmation.

There weren't more maps. The fourth map was the last of the scroll.

"Narrow enough matter it was ... Needed to paw through every bedamned scrap of sheet..." Melander's words spun through the months to Karlsson, their shadow of meaning huge behind them now. "Skimpy bastards, these Russians ... Should have figured ... Should have figured—that the pilothouse of the steamship did not hold the further maps; that since the cumbersome Nicholas never voyaged far enough south to go beyond these four, the Russians simply didn't provide more. So Melander during his theft himself was robbed; had to glom just these four maps and clamber away from discovery. And then, being Melander, at once fathered a judgment; that when these charts of the tangled top of the coast were expended the rest of the voyage could be borne on by his sailor's sense; that he would bother the heads of the other three escapees with this only at some far-downcoast bend of time, when necessity showed itself. Through and through Melander would have worked it, and when time came would have made the further maps seem as little vital as extra whiskers 011 a cat.

But Melander was stretched under that heap of stones, and Karlsson it would be to point the prow of the canoe into maplessness.

The sensation going through Karlsson now was of being emptied, as if his body from the stomach down had vanished, the way the bottom of the fourth map dissolved their route of escape.

This Karlsson now. Circumstance's man.

... Do It? Do I say, Braaf, Wennberg, surprise in the pot this morning, we haven't the maps we need? Going to voyage blind soon now, we are....

More than any of the other three runners of the sea, a man too of the countryside of Sweden which had birthed him. Karlsson was of the Swedish dispersion that began with the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, the bitter years of bad weather and worsening harvests. Rye thin and feeble in the fields, cows like walking boneyards for lack of hay, potatoes rotten lumps in the earth—as though the elaborate clock of the seasons was awry, whatever could happen wrong did so sometime in those years, and all too much of it repeatedly. Karlsson's father Was confounded by the coil of the times, generations of landholding now crimping to futility before his eyes. But bafflement was no helpful crop either. Like many another, young Karlsson in that harsh time became extra to his home soil of Småland, early was uncoupled, simply cast to drift, from his family's farmstead. The two brothers older than lie caught America fever, put themselves into the emigrant stream coursing to the prairies beyond the Great Lakes. At their urging that he come along this brother of theirs shook his head in his parson-serious way and said only : "I am no farm maker."

... Melander had reason, whatever to Christ it was, for saying nothing of the maps. Melander had reason for what direction he stirred his tea. So he said nothing. And now I, I'm the Melander of us, is that the matter of it? Or...

But just what he was, seemed to take the young Karlsson some finding out. While he turned the question he set to work as a timberman on the largest estate in the parish, and there the forester's first words to him, after a look up and down this silent youngster, were: "Hear what I tell you, lad. I don't boil my cabbage twice." His next: "Wedo the day here. Up like lamplighters we are, and late as a miser's tithe." Stropped by that forester's relentless tongue—until he encountered Melander, Karlsson thought it the most relentless possible—Karlsson began to come keen, learn all of axwork, of woodcraft, of a pace to life.

... First hour on the gallows is the worst, Melander'd have said. We are still three, we're strong enough yet. We've the chance....

The merchant arrived to the estate in the winter of 184–9, another crows' winter in that corner of Småland, bleak cold week on bleak cold week, with the announcement that he was looking for supple wood for sled shafts. His true eye, though, was for the grain on men. What he saw in Karlsson suited very well. Karlsson's lovely thrift at work, that knack of finishing an ax stroke and drawing back for the next before it seemed the first could be quite done. The self-sufficiency of him, working his own neighborhood of timber, the forester never needing to hawk over him. Even the still—water-touches-deep reputation of the these young timberman, that parents of blossoming daughters—and perhaps too husbands of certain ripened wives—would not weep to see Småland soil go from under Karlsson's feet; even this augured for the purpose of the merchant.

There was this, too. The merchant was not entirely at ease about trafficking in men, and Karlsson he could account as a salving bargain. The Russian-American Company would gain an excellent workman, a seven-year man, as consigned; but evidently one With enough flint in him to maybe strike the Russians a few Swedish sparks someday, too.

... But kill one of us like a rook on a fence, why Melander? Wennberg there. Bellied into this on his own, take him. Wennberg broke that Kolosh canoe for us, maybe earned life with that. Earn life, no, it just happens. Braaf. Never'd have been him, Braaf survives the way a winter hare knows to hide. Me then. Could easily been. I was Captain Nose just then instead of steersman or I'd be under those rocks and Melander'd be here guzzling this tea....

The recruitment was made and Karlsson rode in the merchant's sleigh to Stockholm, a place, like heaven, where he had never been and hadn't much expected to get to. Then voyage, the passage to the America of the Russians, if most of a year of patient endurance of tip and tilt can be called passage. Patience Karlsson possessed in plenty, had it to the middle of his bones; to the extent where, like any extreme, it ought not entirely be counted virtue. This forbearance of his kept him in situations, for instance, when a Wennberg might have crashed out or a Braaf wriggled out. Indeed, now had done much to deposit him, without overample debate or decision, onto that whittled spot of the frontier shore where the sea months at last ended, New Archangel.

Promptly Karlsson was paired on the timber-felling crew to a stocky Finn as close-tongued as he, the two of them so wordless the other tree cutters dubbed them "the standing stones." The labor was not all that bad—axwork was axwork, Småland or on the roof of the world—although Karlsson had been caused to rethink the task a bit when he overheard Melander state that New Archangel's true enterprise was the making of axes to cut down trees to turn into charcoal which was then used for forge fire to make more axes. Looked at that way, any workman within an enterprise such as the Russian-American Company amounted to something like one slat in a waterwheel. Laboring in a circle, and a damned damp one at that. But the hunting leavened Karlsson's Alaskan life some. And the Kolosh women more so. So Karlsson had been self-surprised by his readiness to hear out Melander's plan of escape. Never would Karlsson have put it as beribboned as this, but what drew him was a new echo of that years-long purl of question. Where ought a man to point himself, how ought he use his ableness? Not the answers Karlsson ever had expected or heard hint of, Melander's: down one of the wild coasts of the world, to see whether seven-year men could break their way to freedom. Which maybe was the beckon in them.

... Melander. Melander fathered this, and I've to get on with it. So. The maps, do I...

Karlsson knew he was not so wide a thinker as Melander. Come all the way to it, he and Braaf and Wennberg together probably were not that spacious. Melander's province of interest was this entire coastline plus whatever joined it over beyond the bend of the planet. "A roomy shore, this, aye? Not like that Russian woodbox, New Archangel. Here's where you needn't open the window to put your coat on." That was all very well, the power in a grandness of view, it sprung the gate of New Archangel and opened the North Pacific to them, skimmed them across Kaigani and through the labyrinth of isles, propelled them these hundreds of water miles. But even grandness has its eventual limits. In Karlsson was the inkling—he had never needed to think it through to the point where it ought be called creed—that realms much tinier than Melander's counted for something, too. The circlet of strength, say, where the palm of a hand went round the handle of an ax. Or the haft of a paddle.

"Tea, you pair," Karlsson called.

As every morning Braaf arrived drowsy, a blinking child somehow high as a man.

Wennberg sat with a grunt, at once fed more wood to the breakfast fire as if stoking a forge for the day.

... May as well, get it behind us....

"I'll show you what we face." As the other two slurped the first of their tea, Karlsson opened the map case and pulled out the fourth map.

"We're this place, here"—midway down the map, amid a shattered strew of coast—"and Melander meant to aim us east, over to this channel"—trench of white, inland a way, north-south through the coastal confusion.

"Then we've a sound to cross"—Milbanke, read Melander's penciling here—"then more of channel, then another sound"—Queen Charlotte, this inscription—"and we're to Vancouver's Island."

Wennberg and Braaf were gazing down at the map with fixation, tea forgotten. The Russians' map, Melander's map, the white-and-ink tapestry of their escape there to see ... Braaf said softly, "I don't savvy front from hack of it, but it's tsar's wealth to us, isn't it?"

Wennberg's eyelines were crinkled in concentration. '■Christ sideways on the cross, this's a coast. How we've got this far and only Melander—" That trend of thought treacherous, Wennberg peered to the bottom of the map, "And more of more, ahead of us there yet. The piece here, just a tit of it, this's—what'd you say, Karlsson?"

"Vancouver's Island," said Karlsson, and took a slow-drink of tea.

"Only one way to get there," Wennberg rumbled on, "and that's pry ourselves off our asses. Isn't that so, Captain Nose?"

"That's so," agreed Karlsson, and rerolled the fourth map.

As they pushed east, all three men eyed around at the shoreline continually, on watch for another canoeload of Koloshes.

Apprehension wears fast at stamina. Karlsson called an early halt for midday.

He did so again for the night. Melander had been able to stretch men beyond what they thought were their heavenmost limits. Karlsson already was calculating just how much he was going to have to ration his demands 011 these other two. Both of them were wan by the end of this day, looked hard-used, despite Karlsson's care with pace. But then Karlsson supposed he himself didn't look newly minted.

... But there's a day. They're pulling full this way, Wennberg and Braaf, not worrying their hair off about maps we don't have. We've made miles. Melander, old high-head, we're keeping 011 with it, this voyage of yours. We'll maybe step out at Astoria for you yet....

The next day arrived not yet certain of mood to choose, merely average gray or storm-dark. Behind the campsite the forest walled close as always, and somewhere up in the highest green a limb stammered in the breeze.

Gazing in the direction, Braaf said : "Waste of noise, like a blacksmith."

Wennberg glanced to Braaf, then turned aside and spat.

... Melander's line of country, this ocean, not mine. Savvied water, him. To the others of us it's a kind of night. See it but not into it. And try not catch a tumble from it. God's bones, can it be deep under here as Melander said? Some places as far to bottom as these mountains go high? Take his word for it, thank you. Sitka Sound a millpond to any of this. If this coast was other we'd maybe he hiking out. More my journey, that'd have been. Forest you can thread your way through, sort for yourself as you go. In Småland lead me with a mealsack over my head into any wood and straight out I'd find my way. Toss one foot in front of another, you know you get somewhere. But water, can't keep a fix on water. Only keep after it, stroke and stroke and stroke. Say this paddle work was ax strokes, how many trees'd been brought down by now? How many forests, more like. Could've built our own stockade and town. Called it New Stockholm. No, Melander in charge, New Gotland it'd be....

Karlsson caught up with his drift of mind. Bothered that such straying had happened—new wile of ocean, this—he shook bis stare from the backs of Braaf and Wennberg, purposely scanned the entire length of the water horizon. Sober anyone, that gray endless seam of sea and sky.

Wennberg with joy would have been at his forge. Any forge, anywhere. Glowing charcoal before him, circle of water ladled around its edge to concentrate the heat, then hammer courting metal, fire flakes leaping from the iron as Wennberg imposed shape 011 it, his arm decreeing axhead or hinge or bolster plate, now there was proper work, not shoveling ocean all the bedamned day, Wennberg went in his mind time and again to that morning when he strode up behind Braaf in the parade ground—and each of these remade times, Wennberg deflected determinedly away from the laden thief.

Of course, thinking on it was like trying to undo fire in the forge: raking coals out in hope they would lapse to fresh charcoal once again. Indeed, Wennberg's wishing was of a fervency that amounted to reversing a forge fire all the way back to living tree.

And made, he sermoned himself yet again, as little sense. In this life paths cross paths and there you arc, jangled up with a Braaf and a Karlsson. No help for it, who can number the clouds or stay the bottles of heaven P

But oh, Hell take it, if he just hadn't crossed that parade ground—

Braaf, now—Braaf always was a guess. As best could he told, though, Braaf was enduring coastal life something as an ouzel—that chick-sized bird common along the rivers which cut the Northwest shoreline and the streams which vein down from the mountains into those rivers. Slaty iu color, peg-tailed, the ouzel at streamside is not much to notice, except as an example of bother; the bird constantly bobs as though wary of some lifelong peril overhead. In actuality the motion must he practice for its livelihood, which is to plunge into the water, immerse, and walk the bottoms of the rivers and streams, picking hits of feed as it goes. A hydraulic adaptee, the ouzel: somehow the bird has learned to use the flow of current to keep itself pinned down into place during this dinner delve beneath the riffles. Much in that way that the ouzel can shop along the cellar of the river, Braaf was held into route, into canoe and camp routine, hy the sum of the pressures all around. Weather above, ocean beside, forest solid along the continent edge—each day's life was pressed to him by such powers of the coast, and Braaf had the instinct simply to stay wary while letting the push of it all carry him ahead.

Kelp drifted alongside them in a tangle, a skim of the the Pacific's deep layers of life.

As in the forest when branches become moving wands overhead but the air at ground keeps strangely still, the coastal weather now cruised over the canoemen without quite touching down. Streamers of cloud shot along, would-be storms jostled with pretensions of clearing; the sky all hither and thither in this fashion, Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf never knew what to expect except that it would be unruly. Putty weather, gray and changeable. True, Sitka with its weather-of-the-minute had accustomed the Swedes to changeableness. But at least at Sitka the concern was not that the next gray onset would cause the ocean to erupt under them.

Crone mountains, these now. Old bleak places gray-scarved above the green shore.

***

The weather held stormless, as though curious to ivatch down at this orphaned crew for a while. At the midday stop, Karlsson's pencil mark on the map moved east. Moved as much again at evening's camp—hut south now. They were in the channel.

"Those Koloshes." Wennberg fed a branch to the supper fire. "Those ones that—back at that island, there. What d'you suppose they're in the world for?"

"For?" Karlsson was loading the rifles for the night, standard now since the encounter with the Koloshes at Arisankhana. He stopped to regard the blacksmith. As steadily as he tried to keep a reading of Wennberg, moods kited in and out of the broad man.

"What I mean, how d'they spend their lives?"

"Paddling their arms off," Braaf guessed, "about same as we are?"

"Sit on mine and ride home, Braaf, I mean truth here. This bedamned coast now, like forty kinds of a Finland. What's the use of these fish-fuckers, scatting around here and there? Whyn't it just empty?"

... We need to hope it damned well is, here on, ...

Karlsson aloud: "Maybe people are like crops, conic up everywhere."

"Or weeds, if they're Wennbergs," added Braaf.

"Oh, Hell take the both of you. A man tries to figure life and you fart from the front of your faces at him. I'm turning in, A blanket's better company than you pair."

***

... Still can be as touchy as a poisoned pup, Wennberg can. But at least it's not war. Maybe he's in troth about it, needing me to lead. Or thinking that I'm leading, instead of just tumbling us down this coast...

Karlsson came awake just after daylight had begun to hint. Frost on the sailcloth shelter this morning.

By the time Braaf and Wennberg were roused and breakfast was into the three of them, ridgelines and mountains in their cloaks and hoods of dark were arriving to sight all around the channel.

Canoe prow into water, three paddles into the shimmer sent by the craft. The near shore, the western, was coming distinct with trees now. Then within the first few-hundred strokes by the canoemen the horizon to the east brightened with low strips of dawn, as though chinking had fallen out between mountains and clouded sky.

The dawn warmed from silver to straw yellow, to peach. Vow clouds burnt free by the light began to drift from view over the eastern crags. Karlsson's third day as escapemaster was going to be stormless.

... Thank you to this, any day. Sun, easy water. Wine and figs next, aye, Melander?...

The paddles dipped, glistened wet on the forward reach of the stroke, dipped again.

Braaf haphazardly hummed. That he seemed to have no acquaintanceship whatsoever with tune mattered none to Braaf. His random buzzes irked Wennberg, sufficiently justifying them.

Wennberg today you would have thought a prisoner on his way to exile. In his armwork showed none of Karlsson's thrift nor Braaf's minimum attention, just the plod of a man wishing he were anywhere else.

Karlsson while he paddled scanned steadily ahead, as though he could pull the horizon of water nearer with his eyes.

The canoe glided higher in the water now, without Melander. Without, too, as much food. Dried peas, beans, tea, corners of biscuit, not much salt horse, less than a quarter of the deer ... the provisions seemed to dwindle these days as if seeping out the bottom of the boat, and Karlsson spent long thinking how to replenish.

Queer, but with forest stacked high on both sides of them now, the timber put less weight on their day than had the single-sided throng along the ocean. The calm of the channel, stretching lakewide, perhaps made it so. Ocean-neighboring forest never stood quite so quiet as this, there one breeze or another seeking through the upper boughs, birds conversing in the lower limbs, the devil knew what rustling behind the salmonberry and nettle.

Midmorning, the canoemen steered around a flotilla of trees—not drift logs but roots, branches, cones and all—drifting in the channel. Launched by an avalanche, Karlsson guessed.

Clouds stayed few and to the east, no weather gallcons from the ocean. Respite of every sort, this channel so far.

At midday Karlsson called a briefer stop than usual. So steadily were they adding mile onto mile that he wanted only scantest interruption.

They landed, stretched, peed, ate salt beef and biscuit, got back in the canoe.

On and on, trough of channel. All of this was less willful country to face into than any of the ocean shoreline. Poised rather than bolstering. The forested ridges conforming the channel, and their kin-mountains beyond them, sat as if in arrest; awaiting the next How of existence maybe, the next pose to assume when the geologic clock chimed again.

Karlsson did not know how it could be, but times like this, concern and fascination now were sharing space in him. The fret of this shore of danger and yet its allure. Thoughts forking either way, there. The Russians had a flag of this—an eagle, two-headed, peering this side and that. Just so, the lineaments halved inside Karlsson. Terrible, this chasm of coast. And splendid. Monotonous as a limp, this paddling. And clean labor.

Half through the afternoon Braaf asked Karlsson could it be true that the Russians had buried the finger of a saint under the church of theirs at New Archangel?

Wennberg snorted derision.

Karlsson doubted the tale. How would any saintly finger find its way to New Archangel?

Braaf pondered, nodded, hummed.

If anything, green now crowded the waterline beside the canoemen more thickly than ever. When crows and ravens flew into this timber they disappeared as if gulped. The repetition of pattern, each green shape pyring dozens of long branches upward to a thin rod of top, seemed to have no possible end to it, simply multiplied ahead to circle the world and join back on itself here in this mesh beside the canoe. Braaf and Wennberg long since had ceased seeing individual trees, only the everlasting shag. Karlsson worked at watching for changes in this channel forest, but without result yet.

"Don't make a melody of it, Wennberg. Fog's fog, it'll leave when the ghosts in it want to visit somewhere else." The sea mist which clung onto the forest and was delaying launch into the channel this morning had been the blacksmith's topic of indignation during the past minutes, Braaf now his moderator.

"You'd know, you've as much fog in that head of yours as this bedamned coast," Wennberg muttered.

"Drown in your soup," Braaf invited. He glanced somewhere over the heads of Wennberg and Karlsson. "Mast paint."

"What?"

"Mast paint, he called it."

Still Wennberg gaped at Braaf.

"Mast paint," Braaf recited one more time. "Melander called pea soup that."

"Melander." Wennberg gave a half-hearted snort.

"At least he was worth grave space, more than can be said for you."

"You little pile of—"

"The pair of you, douse it," Karlsson inserted quickly.

"My regrets, blacksmith," Braaf offered. "Maybe you're worth grave space after all. But just tell me a thing, you've swallowed gospel in your time. Where is he?"

"Where's—? Braaf, are you moonstruck or what?"

"No, only tell me. Bible-true. Where's Melander just now?"

Wennberg squinted as if Braaf had asked him the exact cubits of the universe. "Melander's buried, you helped tuck him into his grave."

"Not the grave," Braaf proceeded patiently. "After. Away there."

"Oh. You mean, where's he—been fetched to?"

Braaf bobbed yes. Wennberg appeared no more comfortable with this translation than with the original query.

"That's, well, the pastors now, they say it's a matter of how he'd've met judgment, that's all. 'Judge none blessed before his death,' is what they preach."

Braaf blinked and waited.

"Look at it this way," the blacksmith bid anew. "Those balance scales where the Russians weighed out the poods of fur, remember those?"

Braaf nodded.

"Well, then, you know how one too many pelts made the scale go down on that side, or one too few made it go down on the weighted side."

Braaf nodded.

"Well, the pastors say life gets measured out that way, good deeds and bad, and whichever the judgment scale comes down on, you see, a sou! goes either to Heaven or Hell."

Braaf didn't nod.

"You mean its all up to some weighmaster?" asked Braaf with incredulity.

"Well, not, no, not just a weighmaster, so to speak. God does it. The pastors say."

"What if it comes out dead even?"

"Dead—?"

"What if God puts a pood over here, credit to Melander, and another pood over here, his misdeeds your gospel spouters'd call them, and it comes out dead even, balanced?"

Wennberg looked to Karlsson for aid, Karlsson shook his head. "Bible is your rope of knots, Wennberg, not mine."

"I say he'd come out dead even, Melander would," Braaf swept on. "He'd have savvied any scales, known how to wink them into balance."

"So where—" Braafian theology riveted Wennberg. "So where d'you think Melander is, if judgment didn't deliver him cither place?"

"Somewhere between," Braaf reasoned. "17p there swimming the air, maybe, inside this fog. If a goose can, Melander could." Braaf turned his glance from the mist to a place just above Karlsson's brow. "Is there more of that mast paint?"

***

The morning of what Karlsson calculated to he their final day ¡11 this stretch of channel, the highest ridges showed new snow on their timbered tops, like wigs freshly powdered.

... Rather have it up there on the roof than down here 011 us. Hold, weather. We've a job of work this day....

But work different, and pleasanter, than Karlsson had been looking toward. At midmorning he shot another blacktail deer, out of a herd grazing where a stream emptied into the channel.

Karlsson's first shot missed, and the second echoed so long it seemed to be out searching for Koloshes to hear it, Braaf kept watch on the channel as Wennberg helped Karlsson butcher the deer.

"If those cannon shots didn't bring us company, smoke maybe won't either," Karlsson suggested. Braaf and Wennberg scrutinized from the channel water to the fresh meat, to each other.

"I'll have mine with dumplings and ale," Braaf proposed.

"New potatoes and little green onions with mine," voted Wennberg.

The three of them fed on the meat until they wobbled, then took the rest of the day to cut and boil venison chunks for mealtimes ahead.

While yet within what ought to have been sheltered waters, ridge horizon still solid to their west and ahead of them as far as they could peer, the canoemen the next morning began to meet swells. Long swaybacks which trembled the canoe under them with the strong ancient message: the ocean is waiting.

Their afternoon began as if it was of the same wool as the morning. The identical long, even swells which lapped into the channel were ribbed all across Milbanke Sound; a ceaseless rumple moving across the water, the tautness of the ocean skin continually being tested.

These steady dunes of water the canoe met well, rising easily and then dipping, without the staggers and quivers of the Kaigani crossing.

"Ever I get out of this," Wennberg just had said, "the next water I want to see'll fit in a teacup." And Braaf bad just advised, "Whistle for it, blacksmith." Karlsson, keeping eye to the southwest where the sound opened to the ocean, saw then the first whitecaps flick among the swells, like snowy dolphins appearing and disappearing.

"Keep steady at it," Karlsson said. "We're half across."

But now each swell wrinkled white as the canoe breasted into it.

Wennberg was sicker, quicker, longer, than he'd been in the crossing of Kaigani.

"Wennberg, your sour guts'll drown us all yet," Braaf began in profound disgust.

"We're not drowned nor going to be," Karlsson told him. "Paddle, Braaf. We've to do it, until Wennberg gets bis belly back."

... Sick as a dog 011 grass, oh God damn, Wennberg, why can't your guts be solid as your head....

And so it became Braaf and Karlsson and their paddles against the second powerful plain of the North Pacific coast; between them in the surging canoe, Wennberg half of himself and struggling to stay even that much; around the three and their slim craft, the hours of strait they had come, the hours yet to cross.

Perhaps bring to thought that trick done with apple and knife—the fruit to be peeled in one stopless cutting, down and down the pare of skin coiling from the blade's glide, the red-white-red-white spiral stair ever more likely to snap away: but yet is it, for each shaving of coil twirls a bond with all the others, the helix holding itself together, spin on spin, by creational grace. Just such an accumulating dangle this Milbanke voyage became. With each effort by Braaf and Karlsson the canoe sliced distance from the North Pacific, making the journey just that much more apt to sunder or just that much more cunningly pliant, persistent—you would not have wagered which.

It was full dark when they tottered onto the shore.

"Tomorrow," came Braaf's voice. "What's the water tomorrow? Not another ocean like that, is it?"

"No," said Karlsson. "Channel again, tomorrow."

... and the day after that, and maybe another and another, then it's ocean again, Braaf, bigger yet....

And after that, Karlsson knew but did not say either, the expanse beyond the edge of the map.

Days of rain, those four next.

Of channel water like a gray-blue field very gently stirred by wind.

Of clouds lopping the mountains, so that they seemed strange shagged buttes of green.

Of soft rattle of wings as gulls would rise in a hundred from a shore point of gravel.

Of fog walking the top of the forest in morning.

... God's bones, look at it tumble. Melander, you'd have had the words for it, you've maybe seen the like, but I...

Alongshore to the southeast of the canoemen a fishing fleet stood in long file, sails of many shapes bright against the forest.

As Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson ogled, the fleet toppled and was folded back into the water for the next stunt of surf.

This time, not ghost boats hut round white islets, a pretty archipelago of froth.

Karlsson, Wennberg, Braaf stared on at the vanishment, the magical refashioning—this version, momentary cottages shining with whitewash.

The onlooking three considered that already the voyage had shown them ample surf for their lifetimes. But eruption of this sort was of new order altogether: so powerful the water in this tidal expanse that it sought to cavort up into the sky. As shown by the fourth Tebenkov map this was the part of the coast where the Pacific abruptly got two harsh pries against the continent, broad rough thrusts of water driven in like points of a clawbar through the offshore layer of islands. First of these shore gaps where the Pacific prised had been Mil ban ke Sound, the four days before. The second, and much greater, was here—Queen Charlotte Sound.

"Tomorrow's work, that," pronounced Karlsson, and nobody arguing this in the least, they made camp.

Usual now, ever since the ordeal of Mil ban ke, Karlsson waking to the peg of warmth between his groin and his belly. "Pride of the morning," Melander called such night-born rearing‹. "If your britches don't bulge at dawn it's a scant day ahead, aye?" Hut from all Karlsson could tell, these particular full-rigged longings seemed to be put up not by the habited urges of a man's blood hut by his nights of dream. In each dark now matters chased one another like squirrels, Småland and New Archangel somehow bordered together, people of gone years thrust their faces inside hi skull. Dream maybe was a wild sentinel against the clutch of this coast; perhaps demanded that the night mind of Karlsson hear its howling tales instead of brood on predicament. Whatever, all of it built and built through the nights into the wanting which he awoke to. Made him enter each morning in a mood to want any of a variety of things that were nowhere in the offing—a woman, time under a roof, fresh clothes, a square meal, existence without Wennberg. Just now, though, the one particular wanting took up all capacity in Karlsson. He wanted not to be captaining this canoe voyage, and more than that, not on this shore brink of Queen Charlotte Sound, and more than that again, not on this day of crossing that Sound.

Karlsson lay on his side, waiting for the longing to unstiffen. Then rose and went into the forest to start the day with a pee.

"We could make a wintering of it."

The words halted Karlsson and Braaf in mid-chew. Carefully they eyed across the fire, as if to be sure some daft stranger had not put on Wenn berg's whiskers this morning.

"Keep snug here, we could," the broad man was saying. "You're clever with an ax, Karlsson, whyn't we grapple together a shelter of some sort, wait out this pissy winter?"

Braaf palmed a hand out and up as if to catch rain, gazed questioningly into the air. The sky over the three men was as clear as if scoured to blue base. A moment, it took Wennberg to catch Braafs mockery.

"Hell swallow you, Braaf. So it's not pissing down rain just now. That only means it will tomorrow and the forty days after." Wennberg broke off, evidently finding his way back to his original sally. "Why not a wintering? Wait till better season, not fight this goddamn ocean at its worst—"

Rapidly as he could Karlsson was fitting angles to a reply. But meantime Braaf chimed, as if to the air:

"Wait till better season the way the Koloshes are, d'you mean, ironhead? Last time you were in the company of a few of them you ran your legs to stubs. What if spring brings canoe and canoe of them?"

Wennberg cut a glare to Braaf, but the look he fastened again to Karlsson still came earnest, and more. Karlsson realized he was being met by something lie had not thought to be Wennberg. A plea.

"—could get by on ducks and deer," Wennberg was proposing.

"—maybe get us a milk cow and a few chickens, too?" Braaf was amending sweetly.

The realization drove sharper into Karlsson. These plains of water, the sounds bare to the ocean, Wennberg was not merely leery of. He held a horror of them. Of their wide swells. Of the teetering gait of the canoe atop them. Of the nausea they pumped into him. Kaigani had invoked the distress in Wennberg, hour on plunging hour of it, and Milbanke Sound a few days ago must have revived it. These past days of sheltered channel Wennberg's new reticence had been taken by Karlsson as amen to the miles they were achieving. Instead it must have been a time of dread building silently toward panic....

... Ready to lick dust, the bastard ... "

—want to roost, whyn't you stay to New Archangel?" Braaf was goading, "—just till better season, that's not goddamn eternity," Wennberg was arguing back.

"Wennberg, hear us," Karlsson set out slowly. "Say the prettiest of this voyage, and it's still going to be grind work. But it has a bottom end somewhere, like all else." I le watched Wennberg's eyes. The plea yet hazed them, still needed the cold airing. "A wintering could be a wait on death, Wennberg. Braaf says truth. With spring the Koloshes will swim solid along here. And the first canoe of them will be apt to have us with Melander."

"But—" Wennberg pulled a face, as if he already could smell the gall being brewed for him by Queen Charlotte Sound. "This weather, all the bedamned miles—if we'd just wait—"

"The miles'd still be there," Braaf murmured.

Karlsson dug for more voice.

"Waiting we've already tasted," he said with decision. "We spat it out at New Archangel."

Braaf turned to speculate just above Karlsson's brow. Wennberg cocked a look as if a matter Was dawning to him. Somewhat near as much as the other two, Karlsson had surprised himself.

What he just had come out with was hot far off the sort of thing Melander might have delivered, aye?

The least necessary instruction of his young captaincy was issued now by Karlsson—the need In veer well clear of that tideline turmoil and they set forth onto Queen Charlotte Sound.

This day, sun was staying with them. Wisps of cloud hung above the shore, and a few thin streamers out over the ocean, westward and north. But the Sound itself was burned pure in the light; water blue-black, an elegant ink in which every swirl showed perfectly.

Along here mountains did not thrust so mightily, except some far on the eastern horizon. A lower, more rumpled shore, this, than the canoeists yet had seen, and the effect was to magnify the Sound—its dark sumptuous water and wild bright edge of surf, and then the blue dike, low and distant there, that was Vancouver Island.

Straightway Karlsson and Wennberg and Braaf discovered that between them and Vancouver lay some uncountable total of instances of monotony. Wave upon wave, the canoe was met, lofted at the bow, then let slump, in a half-fall rightward, into the water's trough. A new law of seagoing this seemed to be, stagger-and-dive.

Karlsson questioned to Wennberg.

Wennberg half-turned. He was grim but functioning.

Braaf, though, announced into the crystal air: "Might as well bail up your breakfast now as later, iron puddler."

"You crow-mouthed bastard," Wennberg husked.

Minutes later, he clutched the side of the canoe, leaned over, retched. Then grasped his paddle again, cast a glare around at Braaf, and plowed water in rhythm, more or less, with the other two.

Their crossing was seven hours of stupefying slosh, under the most winsome weather of the entire journey.

***

"Cape Scott, off there," Karlsson called as they were approaching the south margin of the Sound.

Across Karlsson's lap lay the fourth Tebenkov map, with etchwork that presented him an identifying silhouette of the cape ahead. Several inches of crinkled rock inked in series there, dragon's grin it might have been, precise miniature profile of the westward jut of shore now showing its outline in front of the canoe, and the broken rampart of sea rock that thrust beyond the cape.

"Cape Snot, may's well be," Wennberg retorted thickly. "That map quits off, you showed us. So where d'we bear from here?"

A forcible part of Karlsson wanted to shout out and have done with it:...Wennberg, where from here isn't anything I can know, we've run dry not just of this map but all maps, put your finger to any direction and you'll choose as clever as I can....

The rest of Karlsson struggled and said: "Tell you when I've pulled the next map, it'll take a bit."

Karlsson did up the fourth map. Reached the map case to himself and put the roll of paper in. Braaf and Wennberg were paddling steadily, studying ahead to Vancouver Island. As though plucking a new broadsheet from the scroll in the map case, Karlsson unrolled the fourth map once more.

Same as a minute ago, the silhouette artistry still there like a farewell flourish, across at the lower right the last of the mapped coastline itself, that ragged thumb of land beside which Melander had penciled in "Cape Scott"; and then white margin.

... So now I go blind and say that I see. Braaf, Wennberg, forgive this, but we need for me to aim us as if i know the shot....

Braaf put a glance over his shoulder to Karlsson, attracted by his stillness.

A wave worried the canoe and Braaf went back to his fending manner of paddling.

One more time Karlsson looked up from the map to the cape ahead, checked again his memory of Melander's sketched geography in the New Archangel dirt. Then said, offhanded as he could manage: "To the right, there. West."