When he was about to dress, his glance chanced to pass over the water. The mail-bag—it could be nothing else—was floating twenty-yards off the ice. It had been prepared with cork for such accidents, which not infrequently befall it.
“’Tis Her Majesty’s mail, b’y,” Billy could hear the mailman say.
“But ’tis more than I can carry t’ Ruddy Cove now,” he thought.
Nevertheless, he made no move to put on his shirt. He continued to look at the mail-bag. “’Tis the mail—gov’ment mail,” he thought again. Then, after a rueful look at the water: “Sure, nobody’ll know that it floated. ’Tis as much as I can do t’ get myself safe t’ Gull Cove. I’d freeze on the way t’ Ruddy Cove.”
There was no comfort in these excuses. There, before him, was the bag. It was in plain sight. It had not sunk. He would fail in his duty to the country if he left it floating there. It was an intolerable thought!
“’Tis t’ Ruddy Cove I’ll take that bag this day,” he muttered.
He let himself gingerly into the water, and struck out. It was bitter cold, but he persevered, with fine courage, until he had his arm safely linked through the strap of the bag. It was the country he served! In some vague form this thought sounded in his mind, repeating itself again and again, while he swam for the ice with the bag in tow.
He drew himself out with much difficulty, hauled the mail-bag after him, and proceeded to dress with all speed. His clothes were frozen stiff, and he had to beat them on the ice to soften them; but the struggle to don them sent the rich blood rushing through his body, and he was warmed to a glow.
On went the bag, and off went the boy. When he came to the firmer ice, and Creepy Bluff was within half a mile, the wind carried this cheery song up the bay:
Lukie’s boat is painted green,
The finest boat that ever was seen;
Lukie’s boat has cotton sails,
A juniper rudder and galvanized nails.
At Creepy Bluff, which the wind strikes with full force, the ice was breaking up inshore. The gale had risen with the coming of the night. Great seas spent their force beneath the ice—cracking it, breaking it, slowly grinding it to pieces against the rocks.
The Bluff marks the end of the bay. No ice forms beyond. Thus the waves swept in with unbroken power, and were fast reducing the shore cakes to a mass of fragments. Paul was cut off from the shore by thirty yards of heaving ice. No bit of it would bear his weight; nor, so fine had it been ground, could he leap from place to place as he had done before.
“’Tis sprawl I must,” he thought.
The passage was no new problem. He had been in such case more than once upon his return from the offshore seal-hunt. Many fragments would together bear him up, where few would sink beneath him. He lay flat on his stomach, and, with the gaff to help support him, crawled out from the solid place, dragging the bag. His body went up and down with the ice. Now an arm was thrust through, again a leg went under water.
Progress was fearfully slow. Inch by inch he gained on the shore—crawling—crawling steadily. All the while he feared that the great pans would drift out and leave the fragments room to disperse. Once he had to spread wide his arms and legs and pause until the ice was packed closer.
“Two yards more—only two yards more!” he could say at last.
Once on the road to Ruddy Cove, which he well knew, his spirits rose; and with a cheery mood came new strength. It was a rough road, up hill and down again, through deep snowdrifts and over slippery rocks. Night fell; but there was light enough to show the way, save in the deeper valleys, and there he had to struggle along as best he might.
Step after step, hill after hill, thicket after thicket: cheerfully he trudged on; for the mail-bag was safe on his back, and Ruddy Cove was but three miles distant. Three was reduced to two, two to one, one to the last hill.
From the crest of Ruddy Rock he could look down on the lights of the harbour—yellow lights, lying in the shadows of the valley. There was a light in the post-office. They were waiting for him there—waiting for their letters—waiting to send the mail on to the north. In a few minutes he could say that Her Majesty’s mail had been brought safe to Ruddy Cove.
* * * *
“Be the mail come?”
Billy looked up from his seat by the roaring fire in the post-office. An old woman had come in. There was a strange light in her eyes—the light of a hope which survives, spite of repeated disappointment.
“Sure, Aunt Esther; ’tis here at last.”
“Be there a letter for me?”
Billy hoped that there was. He longed to see those gentle eyes shine—to see the famished look disappear.
“No, Aunt Esther; ’tis not come yet. Maybe ’twill come next—”
“Sure, I’ve waited these three year,” she said, with a trembling lip. “’Tis from me son—”
“Ha!” cried the postmaster. “What’s this? ’Tis all blurred by the water. ‘Missus E—s—B—l—g—e—l.’ Sure, ’tis you, woman. ’Tis a letter for you at last!”
“’Tis from me son!” the old woman muttered eagerly. “’Tis t’ tell me where he is, an’—an’—when he’s comin’ home. Thank God, the mail came safe the night.”
What if Billy had left the mail-bag to soak and sink in the waters of the bay? What if he had failed in his duty to the people? How many other such letters might there not be in that bag for the mothers and fathers of the northern ports?
“Thank God,” he thought, “that Her Majesty’s mail came safe the night!”
Then he went off home, and met Bobby Lot on the way.
“Hello!” said Bobby. “Got back?”
“Hello yourself!” said Billy. “I did.”
They eyed each other delightedly; they were too boyish to shake hands.
“How’s the ice?” asked Bobby Lot.
“Not bad,” said Billy.
CHAPTER XVIII
In Which Billy Topsail Joins the Whaler Viking and a School is Sighted
Of a sunny afternoon the Newfoundland coastal steamer Clyde dropped Billy Topsail at Snook’s Arm, the lair of the whaler Viking: a deep, black inlet of the sea, fouled by the blood and waste flesh of forgotten victims, from the slimy edge of which, where a score of whitewashed cottages were squatted, the rugged hills lifted their heads to the clean blue of the sky and fairly held their noses. It was all the manager’s doing. Billy had but given him direction through the fog from Mad Mull to the landing place of the mail-boat. This was at Ruddy Cove, in the spring, when the manager was making an annual visit to the old skipper.
“If you want a berth for the summer, Billy,” he had said, “you can be ship’s boy on the Viking.”
On the Viking—the whaler! Billy was not in doubt. And so it came to pass, in due course of time, that the Clyde dropped him at Snook’s Arm.
At half-past three of the next morning, when the dark o’ night was but lightened by a rosy promise out to sea, the Viking’s lines were cast off. At half speed the little steamer moved out upon the quiet waters of the Arm, where the night still lay thick and cold—slipped with a soft chug! chug! past the high, black hills; factory and cottages melting with the mist and shadows astern, and the new day glowing in the eastern sky. She was an up-to-date, wide-awake little monster, with seventy-five kills to her credit in three months, again composedly creeping from the lair to the hunt, equipped with deadly weapons of offense.
“’Low we’ll get one the day, sir?” Billy asked the cook.
“Wonderful quiet day,” replied the cook, dubiously. “’Twill be hard fishin’.”
The fin-back whale is not a stupid, passive monster, to be slaughtered off-hand; nor is the sea a well-ordered shambles. Within the experience of the Viking’s captain, one fin-back wrecked a schooner with a quick slap of the tail, and another looked into the forecastle of an iron whaler from below. The fin-back is the biggest, fleetest, shyest whale of them all; until an ingenious Norwegian invented the harpoon gun, they wallowe
d and multiplied in the Newfoundland waters undisturbed. They were quite safe from pursuit; no whaler of the old school dreamed of taking after them in his cockle shell—they were too wary and fleet for that.
“Ay,” the cook repeated; “on a day like this a whale can play with the Viking.”
The Viking was an iron screw-steamer, designed for chasing whales, and for nothing else. She was mostly engines, winches and gun. She could slip along, without much noise, at sixteen knots an hour; and she could lift sixty tons from the bottom of the sea with her little finger. Her gun—the swivel gun, with a three-inch bore, pitched at the bow, clear of everything—could drive a four-foot, 123-pound harpoon up to the hilt in the back of a whale if within range; and the harpoon itself—it protruded from the muzzle of the gun, with the rope attached to the shaft and coiled below—was a deadly missile. It was tipped with an iron bomb, which was designed to explode in the quarry’s vitals when the rope snapped taut, and with half a dozen long barbs, which were to spread and take hold at the same instant.
“Well,” Billy Topsail sighed, his glance on the gun and the harpoon, “if they hits a whale, that there arrow ought t’ do the work!”
“It does,” said the cook, quietly.
All morning long, they were all alive on deck—every man of that Norwegian crew, from the grinning man in the crow’s nest, which was lashed to a stubby yellow mast, to the captain on the gun platform, with the glass to his eyes, and the stokers who stuck their heads out of the engine room for a breath of fresh air. The squat, grim little Viking was speeding across Notre Dame Bay, with a wide, frothy wake behind her, and the water curling from her bows. She was for all the world like a man making haste to business in the morning, the appointment being, in this case, off a low, gray coast, which the lifting haze was but then disclosing.
It was broad day: the sea was quiet, the sun shining brightly, the sky a cloudless blue; a fading breeze ruffled the water, and the ripples flashed in the sunlight. Dead ahead and far away, where the gray of the coast rocks shaded to the blue of the sea, little puffs of spray were drifting off with the light wind, like the puff of smoke from a distant rifle: they broke and drifted and vanished.
From time to time mirror-flashes of light—swift little flashes—struck Billy’s eyes and darted away. Puff after puff of spray, flash after flash of light: the far-off sea seemed to be alive with the quarry. But where was the thrilling old cry of “There she blows!” or its Norwegian equivalent? The lookout had but spoken a quiet word to the captain, who, in turn, had spoken a quiet word to the steersman.
“W’ales,” said the captain, whose English had its limitations. “Ho—far off!”
CHAPTER XIX
In which the Chase is Kept up and the Captain Promises Himself a Kill
The number of whales was less than the captain of the Viking had thought. When the vessel came up with the school, however, there were twenty or more fin-backs to pick and choose from. They lay on every hand, wallowing at the surface of the sea and spouting thick, low streams of water with evident delight: whales far and near, big and small, in pairs and threes, rising and gently sinking, blowing and hon-g-king, and, at last, arching their broad, finned backs for the long dive.
The breathing spell was of two or three minutes’ duration, the dive of five or ten, and might last much longer. Billy was told that as the whales went thus, rising and diving, they travelled in a circle, feeding on young caplin and herring, squid and crustaceans. He had never thought to admire the grace of a whale; but his admiration was compelled: the ponderous, ill-proportioned monsters were so perfectly adapted to the element they were in that the languor and grace with which they moved was a delight—particularly when they arched their glistening black backs and softly, languidly vanished.
But meantime the Viking was lying silent and still; and—
“Hon-g-k!” from off the port bow.
“Ha!” exclaimed the captain.
A big whale had risen. The long “Hon-g-k!” as he had inhaled a small cyclone of breath was sufficient to tell that. He was big and he was near.
“Full speed!” quietly from the captain in Norwegian.
The steersman had already spun the wheel without orders. The Viking swung in a half circle and made for the whale at top speed. There was just a quiver of excitement abroad—a deepening glitter in the eyes of the crew, and silence. The rush was upon the whale from behind—instant, swift, straight: the engines chug-chugged and the water swished noisily at the bows. There was no lying in ambush, no stalking: it was sight your game and make for him.
The captain leaned lazily on the gun, which he had not yet swung into position for firing; his legs were crossed, though the whale was not a hundred yards away, and he was placidly smoking his pipe. The fin-back lay dead ahead now, apparently unconscious of the Viking’s approach, and she was soon so near that his escape seemed to Billy to be beyond the barest chance. The captain waved his hand, calmly looked over the sea, and fell again into his careless position, with one eye on the whale.
At once the engines stopped and the Viking slipped softly on with diminishing speed. When she was within thirty yards of the whale, each separate muscle of Billy’s body was tight with excitement—but the whale arched his back and slipped down deep into the water with a contemptuous swing of his broad, strong tail.
“Psh-h!” exclaimed the captain, giving one slippered foot a kick with the other. “Psh!”
They were running over a stretch of frothy, swirling water, where the whale had lain a moment before.
“Hon-g-k!” from off the starboard quarter.
The captain signaled the steersman, who shouted “Full speed!” down the wheel-house tube. In a flash they were chug-chugging in haste after another whale—which eluded them at once, with no more fuss than the first had made: no blowing and frantic splashing; just a lifting of the back and a languid swing of the tail. Thus the third, the fourth, the fifth: again and again, through the hours of that quiet morning, they gave chase; but all to no purpose—on the contrary, indeed, with the bad effect of alarming the whole school. The whales made sport of them; the flash of their fins, as they slipped away beyond pursuit, was most aggravating.
Soon the captain’s “Psh!” became guttural, and communicated itself to the man in the crow’s-nest and the engineer who was off duty; the elusive fin-backs were too much for the patience of them all. But for hours the “old man” leaned on the gun and smoked his pipe, intent on the chase through every moment of that time. He kicked his right foot with his left; his broad back shook with rage; strange ejaculations drifted back with the clouds of tobacco smoke: that was all. Repeated disappointment but heightened the alertness and eagerness of the crew. Every lost whale was dismissed with a “Psh-h!” and quite forgotten in the pursuit of the next one.
Nine hours out from Snook’s Arm and six with the school without pointing a gun!
“Agh!” the captain exclaimed, jumping from the gun platform, at last, “the whale captain have the worst business of all men. Agh! But I wish for rough seas. But I wish I had my harpoon in the back of some whale.”
All days are not blue. Before the summer was over, Billy Topsail learned there were times when the Viking put out from the shelter of Snook’s Arm to a sea that is rough. A gale from the northeast, gray and gusty, whips up the white horses, and frost gives new weight to the water. Wind and fog and high seas and sleet make the chase perilous as well as bitter. She stumbles through the waves and wallows in the trough with a clear-cut duty before her—to catch and kill a whale: the little niceties of dodging breaking waves cannot be indulged in when all manœvering must be directed towards coming up with the quarry from the proper firing-quarter.
But Billy’s first day was clear and quiet; and the whales were having a glorious innings with the enemy.
* * * *
By noon the prospects for a kill had faded to a bare possibility; the school had been well scattered. Down the coast and up the coast, out to sea and far a
way across the bay, puffs of spray made known the various directions the whales had taken. About two o’clock—ten hours out from Snook’s Arm, with no let up in duty—the crew were attracted by the deep, long hon-g-k of a big fellow out to sea and by the spouting of his two companions: a group of three, male and female, doubtless, with a well-grown young one. They gave chase. Captain and crew had come to that pass when fury gets the better of patience.
It was determined to hunt that little school to the death or until deep night put an end to the chase.
“I get ’im,” said the captain between his teeth. “He is big. I get him—or none.”
It was not easy to get him. They were led twenty miles to sea in short rushes, each of which ended in disappointment and elicited a storm of guttural ejaculations; they were lured inshore, where submerged rocks were a menace; they were taken up the coast and back again towards the islands of the lower shore and once more to sea. Mile after mile—hour after hour! They came near—they could have hit the beast with a stone. Occasionally the captain swung the gun into position and put a hand on the trigger; but the arching back always gave notice, in good time, that he had been balked again. They tried to guess the point where the quarry would rise; they steamed near that point, and lay there waiting.
“Hon-g-k!” from half a mile astern.
“Agh!” cried the captain, chagrin twisting his face. “The whale captain have pos—ee—tiv—lee the worst—! Full speed!”
Off again in persistent chase. Meantime the sun had declined; evening was drawing on, with gray clouds mounting in the west, and a breeze rising inshore. The sea was spread with shadow, and all the ripples grew to little waves, which, hissing as they broke, obscured the swish of water at our bows. The opportunity was better, and the whales, it may be, had acquired the inevitable contempt that familiarity breeds. The Viking crept nearer. Each time, a little nearer; and, by and by, when she had come within range—within range for the first time that day—and was running at half speed, with the grayish-black backs most temptingly exposed, the captain dropped the muzzle of the gun, took swift sight, and—swung the gun around with impatient force! The whale was gone on the long dive before a vital spot had been exposed.
The Sea-Story Megapack: 30 Classic Nautical Works Page 21