True mountains with snow-capped peaks could be seen off in the distance and the inlets – not nearly as numerous as they had once been – went far, far back in some places, endless. Literally mountain canyons filled with the sea.

One in particular he was interested in entering, could see that it went far back in a deep canyon, but the entry opening was too narrow and filled with such a ripping current he decided the risk was too great.

He had started to nose in but the water pummelling out simply flip-turned the canoe – he barely kept his balance – and shot it into the bay fast enough that he knew if he had become caught in it he would have been rolled up and sunk.

Learning. He was learning.

Some things he could do – some not. There was some comfort in knowing what he could do, what he couldn’t. But a danger as well – if he thought he knew too much, knew everything – he could get in trouble.

The bays were now becoming so enormous they amounted nearly to open sea and if the wind came up, the surface went quickly to waves. Not the monster waves of the open ocean, where swells added to wave height, but still waves that could be as tall as he was if he were standing, and they seemed even taller as he knelt and paddled at the back of his canoe. Big enough to cause trouble for the canoe and Leif found that he could just weather them – pulling hard on the paddle – if he kept the nose of the canoe straight up into them.

Except they might push him backwards while he was keeping the canoe straight and all the waves – or nearly all of them, depending on wind strength – blew directly into the shore. Without an inlet to hide in and do a long stop he became vulnerable to getting piled into the rocky shoreline and one good-size wave taking the canoe into rocks would crush the canoe and turn it into kindling.

And there weren’t many inlets to hide in.

Which led more than once to Leif getting caught out in the open where he had to paddle – sometimes for full days at a time – to keep from getting, as he thought it, mushed on the rocks.

When this happened, and he was forced into paddling hard for whole days, he went beyond exhaustion, beyond even pain, and into a state of almost mental blankness. His body became little more than a paddling machine and his thoughts sought, it seemed on their own, for safety, of thinking, memories that would take at least his spirit to some other place while his body kept the canoe moving against the waves.