A Treacherous Country

by K. M. Kruimink

  I cannot say that the leaves rustled nor that twigs snapped, as one might expect of a wood at night. No, it was silent as any silent thing. In this instance, and as the adage would have it, the grave was the silent thing that happened to come to mind. My hands had inconveniently begun to perspire, despite the cold, and my hold of the harpoons slipped a little. I did not pause to readjust my grip.

  It began to seem impossible that there were fellow men of any kind somewhere in this inky wild. Or anywhere in the world! Cold blackness expanded out over the Isle and its rude hearths, across the seas, and subsumed my England and everywhere else, even Spain, until the whole world was night.

  When I was a child, I had been afraid of the sound of the beating of my heart in my ears at bedtime, for it had sounded like footsteps in the quiet house, and my young mind had created a frightful man in a black suit who paced in the wall behind my bed. I think he was some deformation of my father. I had not thought of him in some years, but the power of my heartbeat in that quiet night brought him back to me. This did not seem idle fancy, as when I had tried to furnish the forest. He stalked on long legs behind me and tickled the back of my neck. And so there we went, the only two people in the entire world. And one of us was a phantasm. I rather wished to raise trembling fists against the Darkness, but my fists were occupied with the harpoons, and so I began to sing All Jolly Fellows that Follow the Plough instead, which was not quite so powerful as fists. Perhaps there would soon come a path, which might lead me to the station, whatever it might be. I held a flame of hope in my heart that I might come to a cheery sign, lantern-lit, painted with the words WHALING-STATION THIS WAY, ALL WELCOME (KANGAROO STEAMER AVAILABLE), and a great finger pointing towards some warm and friendly place.

  It was a silly flame of hope, as so often they are.

  Finally, it grew so dark I could not see enough to place my feet surely upon the road. I could do nothing but halt and let the harpoons slip with a clumsy crash. I cast my eyes to Heaven. I had never been quite obsessed with religion, but if I had, I might now have had assistance from above. An Angel might have come, or a scroll with some helpful advice, or a tree might have caught fire, or whatever it is that occurs at such moments.

  I felt that the frightful man in the black suit had evaporated, and I looked behind me to assure myself that he was indeed not there. And he was not! A soft glow arose from the trees behind me, and a ball of warm light drifted gently into the sky. Not the Moon! I glanced about to remind myself the cold Moon hung elsewhere above. No, here was a second night-time Body, near and gently flickering—perhaps some extraordinary Southern Star? A sea of leaves rippled golden above me. I cast a perplexed but thankful glance Heavenwards, gathered my harpoons, and made my way for the path, now gently illuminated, which I had passed moments before in the darkness.

  My vision of the sphere of light was cut short, for it grew dark once more as I waded into the woods. But I had not gone far when ahead there was the whisper of a calm sea, and a fire with men around: a little spark of home in the land of the strange.

  ‘I had thought you would come to-morrow,’ said my Cannibal, looking up from the flames.

  I HAVE BECOME QUITE LOST

  The sun did not rise, but instead presented as the suffusion of light behind thick cloud, like a flame behind a paper screen. There was a complete lack of shadow and variety. Everything about me glowed with equal import or insignificance, depending upon one’s point of view, and whether one was an optimist or not. Ringlets of fog like girls’ hair were emerging from the trees and coiling down the bank.

  Nobody knows where I am, I thought. Nobody who loves me knows where I am.

  Rather freeing, really.

  It was cold, and I was alone, except for the tiny figure of a man high on the cliffs at the end of the bay. I stood upon the grassy rise above the sand. I thought of poor Tigris with a pang of affection and wondered where she might be. I liked her better now that we were separated, and I was disposed to think well of her. I had decided perhaps she was a retired carriage horse, her hair rubbed away from long years in the harness. Although she was the wrong colour, her build was akin to my father’s Cleveland Bays, which in fact spoke well to her heritage. Dear creature! All she deserved was a gentle Retirement.

  My previous night’s accommodation had been a very rude place called a ‘slab hut’ with a fire-pit and a hole for a chimney. Even so, it had been more agreeable than the terrible inn of my first night in the island colony, for at least the hut made no pretensions to anything other than a mean hovel for sleeping in, and did not promise breakfast and then withhold it. My Cannibal had bundled me into this slab hut almost as soon as I had presented myself at the campfire, pausing only long enough to make me quite drunk on rum, which had taken perhaps three cautious sips, and to ask how I had lost Tigris. I believe I delivered a quantity of Lunatic raving about Beasley as my Cannibal deposited me onto the poor cousin of a bed and covered me with a blanket like a shard of ice. It was surrounded by these nice comforts that I had plunged into an embarrassment of sleep. This torpid state had been so profound that after the lapse of hours untold, when it was time for me to awaken, I was in great Confusion, having quite lost my bearings in the stupor of the night. I blinked at the men in postures of repose on the pallets around me and could not at once discern where, or indeed whom, I was.

  The hinges had been iced over when I opened the door from within, and I had had to use some force to crack the ice and get out, and thus did I burst forth with a great report and heroic leap onto the empty beach. I hoped I had not awoken the other men. A lone gull hovered above the sand, casting no shadow.

  By the hut was another hut, shut up tightly and, by its silence and precarious state of near-collapse, apparently unoccupied. Beside that was a well-made little stone house whose chimney leaked and melted smoke into the white air. Fingers of orange light slid from behind the shutters.

  My Cannibal’s distinctive head, in shape like a floret of broccoli, presented from behind the slab hut door. The body followed. ‘They like to go about their business in there for hours before they emerge,’ he said to me, gently closing the door behind him, just as if we were in the middle of a conversation and he were responding to some remark of mine.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The house. The stone house. Mr Heron’s house. He will come and talk to you about buying the station.’

  ‘I do not wish to buy the station, good sir, but only to sell my harpoons,’ I said, and became aware as I said it that I did not know the whereabouts of those burdensome items. ‘I am pleased to see you,’ I added.

  ‘Thank you! Charmed to see you, also.’ He said this with a kind of friendly irony about him. ‘As to Heron—you will speak to him, nevertheless.’

  ‘I was visited by the strangest vision as I walked in the woods last night, my friend,’ I said to him.

  ‘I am fond of hearing of visions.’

  ‘It was terribly dark, and I had dropped my harpoons, and was about to give in to despair, and was even thinking of praying, when a Glorious Little Sun arose above the trees and lit the path for me!’

  ‘Ah,’ said my Cannibal, looking disappointed. I gave him the encouragement of an attentive nod, and he went on, ‘That was nothing but Mrs Heron’s Balloon.’

  The fog of the night was now thickening. So much for my floating Platform of a station! Along with the three accommodations I have mentioned, there was a small, windowless building, also tightly closed, back towards the tree line. A little away from the stone house was a construction of some practical use, perhaps a workshop, and a Platform with great cauldrons before.

  ‘What Balloon?’ I asked, but my Cannibal was not listening.

  The stillness of the place, the cold knifing into my joints, and the weird light, made me think I was rather in a dream. It was the same dream that had descended upon me at the black river. I began to wander hither and yon without real purpose, looking here and there about me. Nothing was of any consequence. I was
in my bed in Norfolk, probably, and all my experiences on that Isle were taking place in my sleeping head.

  Freedom upon Freedom.

  Five large rowing-boats listed together high on the white sweep of sand. Great orange-and-grey rocks nosed and slumbered heavily, piled together like puppies. The waves slinked, gelid and black, a greasy film upon a hollow sea. Hulking great empty spaces lay heavily all up and down the beach, and phantom indentations in the sand warm with the memory of old blood and fat. The cauldrons were gaping seven times larger inside than out, and the boats were curling into themselves for want of use. Spades and knives and harpoons and all the appurtenances of the business were felted with moss. I could feel the ruin of the place seeping into my joints.

  And I was come to buy this confluence of empty spaces? It did not seem likely.

  I turned to look back at my Cannibal, who surveyed the scene with an air of satisfaction, his hands in his pockets and his head high.

  Several coarse-looking men with sacks over their shoulders detached themselves from the tree line and glided, knee-deep in fog, down the bank. Two also carried a huge double saw between them, much like the one with which we would fell trees on the farm. The men did not acknowledge me, even when I stood back to allow them to pass me and go into the workshop. One of their number, an old fellow with an odd way of shrugging his shoulders as he walked, moved from the group and into my Cannibal’s arms.

  ‘William,’ called another, dropping his sack to place his hands on his hips. ‘Your beard astonishes.’

  ‘Aye,’ responded my Cannibal through the tears in his eyes, as he gripped the old man with rough and gentle hands.

  A grinding filled the air. Someone had begun to sharpen the sawblade.

  I moved back towards my Cannibal and the old man. ‘What are the cauldrons for?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trypots,’ said someone.

  ‘Oh, they are the trypots,’ my Cannibal said.

  He indicated not with word or gesture but with an air of purpose that we would go together to the little box of a building towards the trees. He put an arm delicately over the old man’s awkward shoulders.

  ‘Jack!’ he shouted, and there was an answering cry from within. A stinking golden light pooled over the threshold when my Cannibal opened the latch. We pressed ourselves through the stench that made my eyes water and into a simple square room. It was as much a moment of mythic illusion as it had been when I first beheld Tigris in that low alleyway, for there stood a young man pooled in the light of an Argand lamp, posed with a javelin over his shoulder in the manner of a Greek hero. It took no small exertion of my mental faculties to make sense of what I was seeing. The javelin was one of my own American harpoons, and the stinking box was a store-room, lined with shelves and crates and an array of Tools and other Objects.

  My Cannibal made a deep inhalation. ‘Mark that delightful fume,’ he said to me. ‘Black oil: our very Raison d’Être.’

  He had called the young man Jack. I wondered how this person would disappoint me; Jacks often do not live up to one’s expectations. Perhaps that is my own fault, for having expectations of a Jack in the first instance.

  Jack jabbed at the air and looked around gravely at me.

  ‘It’s no use,’ he said. ‘It won’t fly straight, I am sure.’

  He was quite sober-looking, and without the disorder and slovenliness of dress of my Cannibal and the old man, and the other men I had seen outside. His chestnut hair was neatly combed, and his chin shaven, and his dress relatively clean. He was possessed of a calm-looking face, undistinctive, but nicely proportioned, as if an English person had visited a strange country and met a foreigner there who said, ‘Sketch me an ordinary young man of your land.’

  This ordinary young man stood looking at me with some expectation. I supposed I was now to sell him that which neither of us wanted.

  ‘I have been told they are the latest Technology,’ I said. ‘From America. I have been told the flue is soft.’

  ‘Yes, I perceive that it is,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I am told that is a boon, in harpooning—a soft flue.’

  ‘How could that possibly be so?’ he asked. ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘The man I got them from,’ I said miserably.

  ‘I imagine it bends like a fishhook,’ said my Cannibal. ‘It would thus contend with the problem of the barb not catching in the whale’s flesh, instead slipping out in the course of the chase.’

  Jack received this remark with interest, which I was encouraged to observe. Perhaps he had real use for the harpoons. It would be pleasing for them to become useful after having been so agonisingly inconvenient. ‘That is true,’ he said. ‘But does that mean one could not use the harpoon again? Or: if it can be practicably straightened, will the flue not eventually weaken with use?’ All three looked at me.

  The conversational fog had already descended, as thick and tangible as the fog gathering outside. ‘I imagine a smith could easily bend it back,’ I said. ‘I cannot testify to that, nor to its longevity.’

  ‘You are exceedingly honest,’ said Jack.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, with a short bow.

  ‘It was not necessarily meant well,’ said my Cannibal.

  ‘It was meant well,’ said Jack calmly. He had an air about him of natural command, much like the sailor I had met who looked like Richard III. That person, I recalled, had also been a Jack. Perhaps I was wrong in thinking so little of Jacks; perhaps it was only that my second brother was John, called Jack by many, and often disappointed my young hopes of brotherly treatment.

  ‘We do have a smith. Mochrie would need to see these,’ Jack said to my Cannibal and the old man. And, to me: ‘How much are you asking for them?’

  ‘How much are you offering?’

  ‘That is no way to do business,’ said my Cannibal. ‘Father?’

  The old man concurred.

  ‘Yes, you must name a price,’ said Jack.

  There was a brace upon the back wall, stocked with harpoons of a different kind to my own, for these were closer in look to huge iron arrows. I supposed that if my harpoon had a single flue, these must be ‘double-flued’. They looked long, long untouched, like ruins in a jungle, sinking into the thick walls of that store-room. ‘How much is one of those?’ I asked.

  ‘A pair?’ said Jack, and he named a price that seemed quite low.

  I told him I would sell him a pair of the latest American harpoons for double that sum.

  ‘That is too much.’

  ‘You told me to name a price, and I have done.’

  ‘Well. Indeed. Will you permit me to try them?’ asked Jack. ‘Mark that I am not agreeing to your price, which I ridicule.’ His demeanour remained serious.

  ‘Jack is an harpooner,’ said my Cannibal.

  ‘I had discerned that, at least,’ I said. ‘I will let you try them so long as your man agrees he can restore them to their current state after use. If the flue bends and will not be unbent, they are not of much use to me, and I suggest that, such being the case, you must buy them for the price I have mentioned.’

  ‘In that case, I will buy them for one quarter of the price you have mentioned, for it means they were never much good to begin with.’

  I conceded this point, and acquiesced, and Jack absently shook my hand, turning over the harpoon in the light.

  ‘I cannot believe they are for only a single use,’ said he.

  ‘No, that would not be reasonable,’ said my Cannibal.

  ‘Well, let us have your man look at them, and then we shall see, and you might try them when next you …’ I trailed off. Go whale-hunting?

  A significant glance darted amongst the men.

  ‘Indeed,’ said my Cannibal.

  ‘What is the matter?’ I asked.

  My Cannibal shook his head at Jack, who said, nevertheless: ‘It is mid-winter at Montserrat Station, and there has been no whale in nearly a month.’

  ‘I
suppose that is not favourable,’ I said. Would Jack the harpooner allow me to give him the harpoons? I wished nothing more than to be rid of them.

  ‘Indeed not,’ said Jack. ‘Once, days were that you could walk from here to Hobart-town on the backs of the whales choking up the sea. Harpooning was like spearing fish in a barrel. Easier! Stabbing fish on your plate with a knife!’

  ‘Yes, and if the fish on your plate were so thickly laid you could not see the crockery,’ said my Cannibal.

  The old man said some words which I took to mean that Jack and my Cannibal could not remember those days.

  Jack flushed quite red. ‘I can!’ he said. ‘I remember them well—although I was a boy—the great seasons when the sea was more whales than water!’

  ‘I allow that I was not here in those days,’ said my Cannibal, with his apparently eternal unperturbedness. ‘I have heard the stories. From Jack. And Mary. That is all. My friend is a possible buyer, here,’ he went on.

  I understood myself to be the friend and felt unexpectedly warmed to be named so. I had been lonely, perhaps.

  Jack and the old man looked aghast.

  ‘You will buy the station?’ Jack asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘Why have you come all this way? Have you more of these irons to sell—are these a sample?’

  ‘No, I have only the pair.’

  ‘And you have come so far only to sell them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am afraid it is not worth such effort,’ Jack advised me.

  ‘Well, it is done, now,’ I said.

  ‘He had little else to do,’ said my Cannibal.

  ‘That is not true,’ I said. ‘I have a great Purpose here, which I am neglecting, and which every minute I spend thinking about these damned harpoons—please, please forgive my coarseness—is a Betrayal.’ My Cannibal had warmed me by calling me Friend, but voicing my Purpose now sent a shard of guilt into my heart. ‘If there has been no whale in so long, how will you try the harpoons?’ I asked. ‘I cannot stay here.’