Carefully, along the shore, in and out across shallow inlets, quickly paddling across deeper ones that sometimes went in further than he could see, he worked north.

Now there is no line that separates me from the canoe, from what I have become. The boat is my skin and body and mind and I am the water and wood and the sun and the birds.

All one.

All together as one. I am part of it now.

Part of all of it.

I have become.

Heartbeat; Sea Pulse

Almost a routine now.

He paddled until he grew tired. Then he would find another safe island, and either set up a camp or tie the canoe to shore tree branches and sleep in the boat.

When he became hungry he would eat. If he were low on food, he would stop and find a stream with no bear droppings – feeling he had used up all his luck with bears – and take fish. If the spear broke – which happened frequently – he would simply make another. If he were hungry for more than fish, he would eat berries and if there were no berries, he would make a fish stew and put in bits of chopped grass – the same kind the bear had eaten – and turn it into a vegetable-fish soup.

Sometimes he would stop for a day or two and make a proper camp with a resting fire and a bed of cedar limbs beneath the canoe, and pull the canoe up to let it dry. In this he had to be cautious to not dry the canoe too much. In several places very tiny cracks would appear if the wood became too dry and he didn’t want them to grow large enough to become problems.

To everything, he found, there was a balance. Dry, but not too dry. Take fish to smoke when he was hungry but not too many, lest they spoil. A balance. Paddle until he became tired, then rest.

He worked on the story board when he was taking a long stop to dry the canoe. He started with a carving of the fish camp and the death ship coming and was working on a smaller story-picture of Little Carl dancing – hard because of the memories – when he suddenly wondered why he was doing the stories at all.

But he kept working on them, even with the wondering, and finally decided it didn’t matter what happened to them later, or why he was doing them. They were done because what had happened to him, the movement of his life, was there in the wood. The stories on the board were life itself. When he was done with them, or part of them, they were like permanent memories and whether anybody else saw them, or understood them . . . didn’t matter.

They were carved memories.

Just that. The stories were themselves and that’s all that mattered.