The Sea Runners Read Free

stockade.
    Here his looking held for a good while.
    Eventually, the tall man murmured something. Something so softly said that the sentry nearby in the blockhouse mistook the sound for another mutter against twittering Finns.
    It was not that, though. This:
    "Maybe not bladeless."
    Do such things have a single first moment? If so, just here Melander begins to depart from a further half-dozen years of the salting of fish.

    "Take our swig outside the stockade, whyn't we? The farther you can ever get from these Russians, the better anything tastes. Aye?"
    Tin mugs of tea in hand, Melander and Karlsson passed the sentry at the opened gateway of the stockade and sauntered to the edge of the native village which extended in a single-file march of dwellings far along the shoreline. In front of the two Swedes now stretched Japonski, biggest of the islands schooled thick in Sitka Sound. The channel across to Japonski was just four hundred yards or so, but one of the quirks of New Archangel's spot in the world was that this moatlike side of water somehow emphasized isolation more than the open spans of the bay.
    This Karlsson was a part-time bear milker. That is
to say, ordinarily he worked as an axman in the timber-felling crew, but also had sufficiently skilled himself as a woodsman that he was sent with the hunting party which occasionally forayed out to help provision New Archangel—to milk the bears, as it was jested. The sort with nothing much he cared to put to voice and of whom even less was remarked, Karlsson. It is told that at a Scandinavian free-for-all, Danes will be the ones dancing and laughing, Norwegians endeavoring to start a fight, Finns passing bottles, and Swedes standing along the wall waiting to be introduced. Melander constituted a towering exception to this slander, but Karlsson, narrow bland face like that of a village parson, would have been there among the wall props.
    "They say it'll be rice kasha for noon again. A true Russian feast they're setting us these clays, anything you want so long as it's gruel, aye?"
    "Seems so," answered Karlsson.
    Sociability was nothing that Melander sought out of Karlsson. A time, he had noticed Karlsson canoeing in across Sitka Sound here, back from a day's hunting. Karlsson's thrifty strokes went beyond steady. Tireless, in a neat-handed, workaday fashion. The regularity of a small millwheel, Melander had been put in mind of as he watched Karlsson paddle.
    What brought down Melander's decision in favor of Karlsson, however, was a feather of instant remembered from shipboard. Karlsson had been home to Alaska on the same schooner as Melander, and Melander recalled that just before sailing when others of the indentured group, the torsion of their journey-to-come tremendous in them at the moment, were talking large of the bright success ahead, what adventure the frontier life would furnish and how swiftly and with what staggering profit their seven years of contract with the Russians would pass, Karlsson had listened, given a small mirthless smile and a single shake of his head, and moved off along the deck by himself. Whatever directed Karlsson to Alaska, it had not been a false northern sun over his future.
    "I don't see why that water doesn't pucker them blue. They must have skins like seals with the hair off."
    As Melander and Karlsson stood arid sipped, a dozen natives had emerged from one of the nearest longhouses, men and women together and all naked, and waded casually hit‹) the channel to bathe.
    Karlsson's reply this time was a shrug.
    One further impression of the slender man's interesting constancy also was stored away in Melander. The observation that Karlsson visited more often to the women in the native village than did any of the merchants of wind who perpetually bragged in the barracks about their lust. Or as Melander mused it to himself, the mermaids had hold of Karlsson's towrope but he didn't go around yipping the news.
    Melander swept the bay and