Billy Topsail, M.D.: A Tale of Adventure With Doctor Luke of the Labrador

by Norman Duncan

  CHAPTER V

  _In Which the Wind Goes to Work, the Ice Behaves in an Alarming Way, Billy Topsail Regrets, for Obvious Reasons, Having to Do with the Dogs, that He Had Not Brought an Axe, and Teddy Brisk Protests that His Mother Knew Precisely What She was Talking About_

  Well, now, Teddy Brisk fell asleep, and presently, too, Billy Topsail,in his wolfskin bag, got the better of his anxious watch on the wind andtoppled off. The dogs were already asleep, each covered with aslow-fashioning blanket of snow--ten round mounds, with neither snoutnor hair to show. The fire failed: it was dark; and the wind blewup--and higher. A bleak place, this, on Schooner Bay, somewhere betweenthe Thimble and the Scotchman's Breakfast of Ginger Head; yet there wasno hardship in the night--no shivering, blue agony of cold, but fullmeasure of healthful comfort. The dogs were warm in their coverings ofsnow and Billy Topsail was warm in his wolfskin bag; and Teddy Brisk,in his dogskin robes, was in a flush and soft sweat of sound sleep, asin his cot in the cottage by Jack-in-the-Box, at Tight Cove.

  It was a gale of wind by this time. The wind came running down the bayfrom Rattle Brook; and it tore persistently at the ice, urging it out.It was a matter of twenty miles from the Thimble, across Schooner Bay,to the Scotchman's Breakfast of Ginger Head, and a matter of thirtymiles inland to Rattle Brook--wherefrom you may compute the area of thetriangle for yourself and bestir your own imagination, if you can, toapply the pressure of a forty-mile gale to the vast rough surface of thebay.

  Past midnight the ice yielded to the irresistible urge of the wind.

  Crack! The noise of the break zigzagged in the distance and approached,and shot past near by, and rumbled away like a crash of brittle thunder.Billy Topsail started awake. There was a crackling confusion--in thedark, all roundabout, near and far--like the crumpling of an infinitelygigantic sheet of crisp paper: and then nothing but the sweep andwhimper of the wind--those familiar, unportentous sounds, in their mildmonotony, like dead silence in contrast with the first splitting roar ofthe break-up.

  Billy Topsail got out of his wolfskin bag. The dogs were up; they wereterrified--growling and bristling; and they fawned close to Billy, asdogs will to a master in a crisis of ghostly fear. Billy drove them off;he whipped them into the dark. The ice had broken from the cliffs andwas split in fields and fragments. It would move out and go abroad withthe high southwest wind. That was bad enough, yet not, perhaps, a mortalpredicament--the wind would not run out from the southwest forever; andan escape ashore from a stranded floe would be no new thing in theexperience of the coast. To be marooned on a pan of ice, however, withten famishing dogs of unsavoury reputation, and for God only knew howlong--it taxed a man's courage to contemplate the inevitable adventure!

  A man could not corner and kill a dog at a time; a man could not evencatch a dog--not on a roomy pan of ice, with spaces for retreat. Norcould a man escape from a dog if he could not escape from the pan; norcould a man endure, in strength and wakefulness, as long as a dog. BillyTopsail saw himself attempt the death of one of the pack--the pursuitof Cracker, for example, with a club torn from the komatik. Crackerwould easily keep his distance and paw the ice, head down, eyes alertand burning; and Cracker would withdraw and dart out of reach, andswerve away. And Smoke and Tucker and Scrap, and the rest of the pack,would all the while be creeping close behind, on the lookout for a fairopportunity.

  No; a man could not corner and kill a dog at a time. A man could notbeat a wolf in the open; and these dogs, which roamed the timber andsprang from it, would maneuver like wolves--a patient waiting for somelapse from caution or the ultimate moment of weakness; and then anoverwhelming rush. Billy Topsail knew the dogs of his own coast. He knewhis own dogs; all he did not know about his own dogs was that Crackerhad been concerned in a dubious affair on the ice off the Tall Old Man.These dogs had gone on short rations for a month. When the worst came tothe worst--the pan at sea--they would attack.

  Teddy Brisk, too, was wide awake. A thin little plaint broke in on BillyTopsail's reflections.

  "Is you there, Billy?"

  "Aye, I'm here. You lie still, Teddy."

  "What's the matter with the dogs, Billy?"

  "They're jus' a bit restless. Never you mind about the dogs. I'll managethe dogs."

  "You didn't fetch your axe, did you, Billy?"

  "Well, no, Skipper Teddy--no; I didn't."

  "That's what I thought. Is the ice broke loose?"

  "Ah, now, Teddy, never you mind about the ice."

  "Is she broke loose?"

  "Ah, well--maybe she have broke loose."

  "She'll move t' sea in this wind, won't she?"

  "Never you mind----"

  "Won't she?"

  "Ah, well, she may take a bit of a cruise t' sea."

  Teddy Brisk said nothing to this. An interval of silence fell. And thenTeddy plaintively again:

  "My mother said----"

  Billy Topsail's rebuke was gentle:

  "You isn't goin' t' cry for your mother, is you?"

  "Oh, I isn't goin' t' cry for my mother!"

  "Ah, no! You isn't. No growed man would."

  "All I want t' say," said Teddy Brisk in a saucy flash of pride, "isthat my mother was right!"