He took a deep breath, braced his knees at the sides of the canoe, dug the paddle in with everything in his arms, his back, and felt the canoe answer him. It swung to the one side, the bow sweeping, hung for an eternal moment as he heard the top of the wave hissing at him and the canoe shuddered once, her whole length, and passed through it and he was over the top.

He steered head-on into the next wave, half felt the water spray back on his face and chest as the bow cut through it, and he had a moment in the still water between the waves and then went over the next one as well.

And the next.

And the next . . .

He worked against the waves, heading out the side for the mouth of the inlet, until the tidal current heading out slackened and stopped. Now he had only the swells to contend with, taking them gently on the nose, sliding up and over them until he cleared the mouth of the inlet and moved north.

To the next canyon that cut back into the land, larger still than what he had just finished. But he knew how to cross them now, big or small, and he set to surf this new one – as the dolphins returned and surfed next to him – and he thought that was the difference.

He was learning . . .

No, not just that. He was learning to learn; knowing more.

He was bigger?

No. Not that either. As he moved north, saw more, lived more, he knew one thing for certain. He was the smallest part of everything he passed through.

So he wasn’t bigger.

But he was still more in some way.

Had grown so that he was truly different from the orphan boy in the ships and he knew, believed and knew, that he would never be that boy again. That nothing on Odin’s earth could make him become that again.

He smiled now, sliding in with the small dolphins, and the smile turned to open laughter as he felt the canoe come alive and ride the wave. He would find where a river came out and take fish and make soup with salt water and lie back in the sun.

In sun and joy, he thought.

That’s what was really different.

He had found joy.

Dancing Giants

And now the country changed.

As he had changed.

For a slogging period of days the whole business of inlets disappeared and he was forced to paddle directly northwest up a long channel. There were nearly no side places to long-stop and rest, and when he finally had to just flat quit in exhaustion all he had available were thick brush and stunted trees that grew out of the side of rock faces to tie the canoe off to hang and rest.