The Girl, the Cat and the Navigator

by Matilda Woods

  Oona walked over to the porthole and peered outside. She wondered if this would be the farthest north she ever went. If it was, that wouldn’t be so bad. At least she got to see the Northern Sea.

  Oona had almost come to terms with returning to Nordlor, when she noticed something odd. The ship wasn’t moving.

  Oona poked her head out of the storeroom. Below deck was dark and empty. She hurried over to the stairs and climbed the first ten steps. She stopped just before her head appeared above deck. Her father was talking.

  “She can’t stay,” her father said. “A ship is no place for a lady.”

  “We know you’re angry,” said another man. “But what’s the harm in letting her come along?”

  “She disobeyed me,” her father said.

  “That’s what children do. They disobey their parents.”

  “I don’t care what children do,” her father said, his voice rising with anger. “I only care what they don’t do, and they don’t sneak on to ships when they’re not supposed to and they don’t—”

  Oona realized too late that her father’s voice had been growing steadily louder. Just as she went to duck below deck, a large hand reached into the shadows and hauled her into the light.

  “Listen in on conversations they’re not a part of!”

  “Not a part of?” Oona said. “This whole conversation is about me. And I’m not going back.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Not ever!”

  Oona had hoped that by making a stand her father would listen. But he chose to ignore her instead. He looked past his daughter and to the men crowding the deck.

  “Time to get to work, boys,” he said. “If we move quickly, we’ll only lose five days.”

  The men hurried to complete the captain’s order, but one amongst them did not move.

  “What are you doing, Haroyld?” Oona’s father barked. “You heard me. Get to work. It’s an order.”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” the man said. He had a warm, lined face and a white beard. He was by far the oldest man on the ship. Oona had seen the man in Nordlor many times, walking the streets with a kind old lady whose eyes sparkled blue like the Northern Sea, but she had never met him. “You heard what Freydis said.”

  “Yeah, well, that woman says a lot of things that turn out not to be true.” The captain glanced Oona’s way.

  “But what if it does turn out to be true?” Haroyld said. “Even losing just one or two days could mean we all lose our lives.”

  A few of the crew standing nearest to Haroyld stopped what they were doing to listen. Nordlor was a small place – only two thousand people called it home – so Oona recognized the men and knew most of their names. She could see Peder: the father of a boy at school who always knew the answers. Over near the bridge stood Olaf the helmsman whose job it was to steer the ship. And up in the crow’s nest keeping watch was Karl. He was her neighbour. Every morning at dawn he practised playing the dulcimer. It wasn’t the nicest sound to wake up to, and Oona hoped he hadn’t brought the instrument on board.

  “Stop scaring the men,” the captain said. “If the sea starts to freeze you can guide us around the ice.”

  “I can’t guide the Leopard around the ice when the entire sea is ice. I know you are the captain and we will do what you tell us to do. And I know you like to gamble. But, please, don’t gamble with our lives. What do you say, Captain? Can she stay?”

  “We don’t have any spare bunks,” Oona’s father said.

  “She can stay in the storeroom. You’re all right with that, aren’t you?” Haroyld turned to Oona who nodded her head.

  “I’ll sleep on a sack of flour.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Haroyld said with a smile and a glint in his eyes. He turned to the captain who still did not look convinced. “And she’ll have to pull her weight,” he said, “just like the men. She can get up at dawn and work right through to dusk to pay for her sneaky passage. What do you say, Captain? Can we keep this ship on course? Can we continue to cut a passage north? Can we bring back a whale before winter closes in?”

  “I can’t believe it,” Oona whispered to herself that night as the Plucky Leopard rolled about in the Northern Sea. Her father had let her stay. Her adventure started here. And she wasn’t just going to find a nardoo. She was going to prove her father wrong. She would show him she was as good as any son he could have had. No. She would prove to him that she was even better. She would pull her weight, just like that old man said. She’d scale the masts. She’d catch the fish. She’d even turn the golden wheel if her father asked her to. She’d be the greatest sailor he’d ever seen. And it was all to start tomorrow!

  POTS AND PANS AND BROKEN BROOMS

  “The galley?” Oona said. “I have to work in the galley?”

  “The galley is the heart of every ship,” said Olf the cook. He was the man Oona had seen going in and out of the storeroom during her first five days below deck. So focused on the crates of food, he hadn’t once glimpsed her hiding in the corner.

  “But there must be a mistake.” Oona didn’t understand. “I can’t stay down here. I’ve got to help. Pull my weight, just like all of the men.”

  “And you will,” Olf said. He wore a white apron stained blue with fish guts. His fingers were stained blue too. “You’ll pull your weight down here in the galley with me.”

  Oona’s cheeks reddened with anger. It wasn’t fair. The other men got to work above deck. How was she going to see a nardoo all the way down here? The galley didn’t even have a porthole. The only light came from a few spluttering candles made out of whale fat.

  “Come on.” Olf waved Oona further into the galley. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, and you’ve already put us behind.”

  “Behind?” Oona said. “How can we be behind? It’s only just after dawn.”

  “When you work in the galley you have to be up two hours before everyone else. How else would we have time to prepare breakfast?”

  Oona was so busy working in the galley that she did not get a spare moment to herself all day. While Olf the cook made her father a cup of tea, she deboned fifty fish for breakfast. Then, while the cook rested his feet, she cleaned the mess hall and scrubbed every pot and pan in the galley. She had only just put the final pan away when Olf told her it was time to start preparing lunch.

  Oona had deboned another fifty fish for lunch and then cleaned the galley again. Afterwards, she was meant to have a few minutes free. But that was spoiled by a request, “straight from the captain’s mouth,” to sweep and mop the floors below deck. She had only just finished doing that when it was time to start work on dinner. If every day was like this, maybe she had made a mistake stowing away after all.

  At dinner, Oona was not allowed to sit with the men. Instead, she stayed in the galley eating her dinner out of the bottom of a pan. In between bites, she would glance into the dining hall, and what she saw inside was very odd.

  Though Oona had heard a person playing the fiddle every night since she’d come on board, nothing could have prepared her for the sight of who had been playing it.

  It was tradition on board the Plucky Leopard for the cat to play a song for his dinner. Some lesser cats may have been insulted by this ritual, but not Barnacles. He loved playing the fiddle. In fact, he loved playing the instrument so much that it was he who had started the tradition all those decades before.

  “Play us a song, Old Master Barnacles!” the men cried as the cat sauntered towards the middle of the mess hall. He jumped on to a seat, plucked a few strings, then rose on to his back paws and started to play. For Oona’s first night in the galley he chose a well-known tune: “The Coasts of the Northern Sea”.

  As she listened to the jolly sea shanty roll into the galley and trickle out into the starlit night, Oona couldn’t hide her shock. She had, of course, heard about the famed polar bear in Islo who had been trained from a cub to play the drums and the arctic fox who could play the dulcimer, but never in her life had sh
e imagined she would see a cat who was self-taught to play the fiddle.

  When the first song was over, the men yelled, “Encore! Encore!” And so, to the cat’s great pleasure, he played a little bit more.

  Oona did not get a chance to go up on deck until two hours after dinner. She walked to the front of the ship where the bow was breaking a path through the waves. She breathed in the fresh sea air. It was a pleasant change from the smell of sweat, whale oil and smoke below deck.

  “Ah, I see you’ve finally escaped the galley,” said a voice from behind her.

  Oona spun around and saw the kind old man who had convinced her father to let her stay. A pipe poked out of his mouth and blue smoke drifted up towards the stars. Barnacles the cat was rubbing against the old man’s leg. When Barnacles saw Oona watching him, he hissed and ran over to the bridge where Olaf stood steering the ship.

  “Don’t mind him,” the old man said, nodding towards the cat. “Takes about a decade to warm up to anyone. Haroyld Nordstrom’s the name. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” The old man held out his hand and Oona shook it. Despite the frosty night, his skin was warm.

  “Are you a fisherman?” Oona asked.

  Haroyld laughed so loudly his pipe almost fell overboard. “Never in my life have I caught a fish,” he said proudly.

  “Then what do you do?”

  “Why, I’m the navigator. Without me, this ship wouldn’t go anywhere. Well, not anywhere it’s meant to go. Here, look. I’ll show you.”

  Haroyld pointed up towards the sky.

  “There are billions of stars up there, Oona Britt. But you only need to know fifty-seven of them to find your way around the world. Celestial navigation it’s called, and I think it’s absolutely splendid.”

  Oona stared up at the sky. Out here on the water there were more stars than she could ever see on land.

  “How do you know what stars to follow?” she said.

  “By their shapes. You see that cluster of stars up there?” The navigator pointed into the inky sky. “That’s a leopard seal. And that cluster there” – he pointed far off to their right – “is a bear. And just behind us should be – oh!”

  “What’s wrong?” Oona said.

  “Those stars are missing tonight. It’s a sneaky one, that nardoo.” The navigator chuckled to himself. “Some nights it’s there and other nights … well, it’s like it has decided to fly away.”

  Oona looked up at the sky and wondered where the stars had gone.

  “If I could teach you only one thing about navigating, Oona, it’s this. Now listen closely. The leopard seal leads you north, the bear shows you to the east, the owl points west and if you follow the nardoo, why, it will take you all the way home.”

  Oona had spent many nights looking at the stars in Nordlor. But she hadn’t realized they had names, and she didn’t know they could guide you all the way around the world.

  “Do you know,” Haroyld said after he refilled his pipe. This time yellow smoke drifted up into the sky. “In fifty years I’ve never let a ship hit anything. I’m pretty sure that’s a record. And no ship I navigate has ever come close to an iceberg. I’ve got a knack for navigating around them. It’s all in here.” He tapped his pipe against his nose. “I can smell them on the air.”

  Oona was about to ask Haroyld what icebergs smelled like when her eyes caught sight of something in the sky. Up amongst the distant stars, there came a flash of rainbow.

  “The Northern Lights,” she said. It was just a tinkling to the north, but it was still the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  “You’ll see more of them, no doubt,” Haroyld said. “They grow bigger and brighter the further we head north.”

  “Really?” Oona’s eyes lit with excitement. If that was true, she bet she’d see a nardoo. She could put up with the pots and pans and broken brooms that made it take twice as long to sweep the floor just as long as she got to see that.

  “You really wanted to come,” Haroyld said.

  “Of course. Didn’t you?”

  “I used to have sea legs when I was younger, but now these old things—” Haroyld pointed to his legs. “Just yearn for dry land.” He took another puff of his pipe and confided a secret to Oona. “This is my last trip north before I retire. Don’t know what I’ll do after that. But I’m looking forward to it very much. Perhaps even more so than my wife. She’s been asking me to retire for thirty years. Truth is, I never thought I’d get to retire. Always imagined I’d drown at sea.” Despite the thick coat he wore, the navigator shivered. “It’s terribly dangerous on a whaler, even a whaler as fine as the Leopard. Let me tell you, Oona. If you think the air is cold, it’s even worse down there.” He pointed to the black water below. “The water in the North feels like ice and it cuts into you like a knife. They say that if you go far enough north, further than we’ve ever sailed, the water is cold enough to freeze your bones and dark enough to make you blind. They say, Oona Britt, that if you go far enough north even the whales freeze in the long, dark night.”

  This time, it was Oona who shivered. She’d always thought that being from the North somehow protected her from its dangers. But if whales could die in the Northern Sea, that meant she could die too. For the first time since leaving Nordlor, Oona Britt was afraid.

  While the girl, the cat and the navigator were up on deck looking at the stars, the men of the Plucky Leopard were nine feet below.

  “Bets! Place your bets!” Olf the cook yelled. As soon as the girl had left the galley he had pulled out a large board and was now scribbling down numbers as quick as the men could yell them.

  “Three weeks!” yelled one man before slapping six coppers on to the table.

  “Three weeks for Anders!” Olf yelled back.

  “I’ll go with four!” yelled someone else. He was so confident he offered up a whole silver.

  “Four and a half!” yelled one of the others.

  “Five!” screamed another.

  The men continued to place their bets until only one remained.

  “Captain?” Olf said. “What about you?”

  The captain looked down at what bets had already been placed: bets on how long his daughter would last. The men weren’t betting on Oona drowning or dying. They were betting on how long before she asked to be put on a ship heading south instead of north: how long until she wanted the safety of solid ground beneath her feet instead of the wild, churning sea.

  The captain studied the other bets and then drew a golden crown from his pocket. “Two,” the captain said. “I bet she lasts two days.”

  A MAP OF THE NORTH

  It wasn’t long before things went wrong for Oona Britt on board the Plucky Leopard. The morning after she met the navigator she awoke to find the door to the storeroom locked. She had to bang and yell for two hours before a crewman opened it. She was so late to the galley that Olf had to make breakfast by himself. Except for her father, she had never seen one man so angry.

  “Fifty blasted fish I had to debone!” he yelled when Oona finally reached the galley. “I’m going to have fish guts under my nails for weeks.”

  Oona had wanted to say he still had fish guts under his fingers from their first week at sea, but she decided against it.

  The next day, when Oona sat down for lunch, she discovered a pile of fish bones in her soup. And they weren’t the bones she had removed that morning. These bones were at least five days old. They were grey and green and slimy all over. If she hadn’t spotted them she might have choked to death.

  But the cruel tricks weren’t over yet. The following morning when Oona went to put on her favourite coat she found eight holes cut into the sleeves. They were so large it took her three hours to sew them back up. And then, to top it all off, the morning after that she awoke to find a pile of hair beside her bed. During the night, someone had sneaked into the storeroom and cut off a chunk of her hair.

  Oona wondered which of the men was behind it. She really hoped it wasn’t her father.
But surely he wouldn’t do that. Would he?

  While Oona spent her days below deck slaving away in the galley, at night she was free to go up and stand beneath the stars. The navigator would always be there too: his eyes locked on the sky as he plotted their course ahead.

  One night he showed something special to Oona.

  “Here.” Haroyld patted the bench beside him. The smoke billowing out of his pipe was pink tonight. “Arctic strawberries. My favourite flavour,” he explained to Oona when she asked.

  Once Oona was sitting beside him, Haroyld reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and drew out a thick square of parchment. With Oona’s help, he unfolded the paper and laid it out on the deck. They had to place buckets on each corner to stop the parchment flying away. The wind was gusty tonight and very warm. Despite the fortune teller’s prediction, not a sign of winter was upon it.

  The parchment held a great map. It was so large Oona could have used it for a blanket. Marks made from green and gold and silver ink were scattered all over the top. Oona had no idea what any of them meant.

  “It’s my map of the Northern Sea,” Haroyld said. “I drew it myself. It’s taken fifty years. Do you know where we are?”

  Oona studied the map. Right at the base was the town of Mournful Harbour. She placed her hand on the ink that marked it and moved her finger north. Then, she stopped.

  “Are we here?” she asked.

  “Close.” Haroyld gave an approving nod. “Very close.” He pointed to a spot less than an inch north of Oona’s finger. “We’re just here.”

  Oona leant across the map. A great expanse of sea billowed out around them. A shiver ran down her spine. The waters were so vast that if something bad happened it could take weeks for another boat to reach them.

  “Now, Oona,” Haroyld said to the girl sitting beside him. “Every golden star you see on this map marks a place where a whale has been caught.”

  “The Plucky Leopard has caught that many whales?” Oona couldn’t believe it. Thousands of gold stars dotted the map, all far further north than where they were.