Northwind by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Sliding Currents

It was the same current that he had come to ride, to know, the current he thought he understood that brought him to the edge of disaster.

Or actually a mix of currents.

He had found there were many thousands of islands, small and large. And he had come to use some of them as temporary, bear-free stopping places to dry the canoe and smoke salmon and boil soup-stew.

He had not thought much of the placement of the islands. They were just there. And if he had considered it at all, where they were and what they meant, he would have skipped over it as being unimportant to his welfare.

Nature put them there, or Odin, or the sea, and that was it. Where they were didn’t matter.

Except …

And the except could be lethal.

The islands and inlets were everywhere. Too numerous to count, really. But though they seemed separate from one another, scattered, so it seemed, all over the place, they were all part of an enormous living kind of ocean being, all interacting with one another.

And the tide.

And the island-and-inlet placement became critical. As the tide, the moon-current, pulled the water around the islands and up into the inlets, the flow—the massive flow—of the current was structured and limited, sometimes slowed, other times pushed hard around curves, until it came upon high tide and all the places were as filled with sea as they could be.

But not all at the same time. The filling was different depending on location, on length of inlet, on size of islands so that it took a relatively long time for all the tidal-filling to occur.

And when it finally had happened, there was a brief time when everything was static. Flood tide.

Then the tide fell and the water started to run back out of the inlets.

And the placement of some islands and inlets became vitally important. In most areas there would just be a simple current flowing outward and it was only a matter of tethering the canoe to shore or paddling across or with the current.

But sometimes the current coming out of one inlet would move more rapidly than the current sweeping by out in a channel, causing the waters to curve, and curve again, moving stronger and stronger in a circle that would soon begin a small circling tidal flow. But then, feeding on itself, eating more and more passing current, it would change its character. It would grow into a monster. An enormous ripping, sinking, savage whirlpool.

If the tide had been very high, and larger-than-usual amounts of seawater were involved, these whirlpools could be huge, clawing all nearby things in the water into the middle and without mercy sucking everything into a killing, downward spiral.

Leif did not know any of this.

Not yet.

He was asleep, sound asleep in the bottom of the canoe with his head on the blanket roll. He had used a piece of cord to tie the blanket in a tight bundle enclosing his meager equipment because he had found that when he dozed, slept, the ravens grew bolder and would try to get inside the blanket.

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