by Robert Ruark
The Ordinary Seaman Number Two was a little over twenty years old. He had been a college graduate on the bum for nine months. The year was early 1936. The Ordinary Seaman Number Two was me.
After I had my coffee I warmed my hands over the fiddley heat again, and then I got the suji bucket and the rags and went into the passageway to freeze my hands and open up the cuts the lye had already made in my fingers. I closed my mind to the freezing cold and the burning lye and began to think. I had found on the foc’sle head, where you weren’t allowed to smoke, that I could control my thinking, and by channeling it along pleasant lines I could make the time pass more swiftly. Mostly I thought about the Old Man—not the captain of the ship, but my Old Man, dead now for six years.
“The Old Man got me into this,” I used to say aloud. (You got used to talking aloud when they switched the watches to four on, four wheel watch and stand-by.) “He got me into it, and I might as well make him pay part of my passage.”
He had, too, in a way. He had a master’s license in sail and steam, and once he was on a trip around the Cape of Good Hope that took three years. He bottle-fed me on seafaring stuff. He told me all the hardships, all about the lousy food and some of the lousier people, and I refused to believe it wasn’t romantic. I had one thing in mind: when I finished school I was going to sea. I was going to see the world.
“You ain’t going to like it,” the Old Man had said. “But you might as well try it and get it over with. You won’t be happy until you do.”
Oh brother, thought I, taking half a foot of paint off a plank with the suji rag and the same amount of skin off my hands, he didn’t tell me the half of it. He didn’t tell me that the second mate was going to wake me up once ninth a kick in the belly or that I would ever entertain a serious idea about killing a squarehead bosun named Svendsen in an alley with my bare hands.
I guess the Old Man saved me from being hanged for murder at that, for when the mutinous madness came on I could drive it off with the thinking. I thought of all the nice things we had ever done together: the first shotgun, what Christmas cooking smelt like. I thought about the first double on quail and the first deer and how to make a good camp and how a bird dog looked winding a covey in the broom grass. I thought about the quiet of a Carolina swamp with the bass biting, and an autumn afternoon on a lonely beach with the blues ravenous and the wind howling pleasantly outside a snug cabin whose walls shook with the gale and trembled from a roaring fire, with ham spitting in the skillet. But I never thought about it all at once. I rationed it. I would say: “All right, Ordinary, what do we think about tonight?” and then I’d pick one thing and think about every little bit of it. I suppose people in prison do the same thing.
This particular cold night I was back in Louisiana, where the Old Man took me on a duck-hunting trip. I was down a bayou. We were living on a big boat with some of his friends, mostly Cajuns, and I never saw duck hunting like this before. You hunted in a singlet, and your face got sunburned, and all you worried about was mosquitoes. We went to a lot of fuss over blinds in the Carolinas, but here in the Louisiana marshes you went to no trouble at all. You just climbed into a pirogue, with the Cajun who poled it standing, from the stern, and the decoys jumbled together in front of you. The Cajun could push that flat-bottomed pirogue over solid mud, if it had a bead of moisture on it.
There were four pirogues in all, two men to a boat. We—or rather, they—poled slowly down the bayou, letting the tide take the boat, until we came to a kind of track that led into what appeared, in the gray of the early morning light, to be a broad sweet-water pond set in the middle of the marsh.
My Cajun, named Pierre, shoved us into a patch of roseaux or reeds. He got out, in his boots, and then pulled the pirogue up onto a grassy tussock, where he braced her with the pole athwartships, each end of the skiff jammed into the reeds. Then he pulled the roseaux in bunches round us until we were beautifully hidden. He waded out into the finger-shallow water and flung the weighted decoys here and there. Across the pond I could hear the skush of the other pirogues as they slid across the ooze, and occasionally a muffled Cajun “By gar” drifted across the quiet water as the poler got his pole fouled in a water lily root. Then the splash of the decoys, and silence until the sky began to pink at the edges.
The most exciting sound in the world cut the stillness, and you forgot the persistent mosquitoes as the high wings whispered through the sky and dim shapes made faint marks against the low gray clouds as they passed out of range overhead. The torture was heightened by the thin whistle of teal coming by, low and turning, and the faint splashes as they set down among the decoys and the tiny gurgle as they swam. Then the watery flap of wings as one drake stood on his tail to challenge the world made the semidarkness well-nigh unbearable.
But the pink spread to red and crowded higher in the sky, and suddenly an enormous gray blur darted past the blind. I shot the blur more or less in the pants as it passed, and it fell with a soggy bump onto the water-covered ooze.
“Must of been a goose,” I whispered to Pierre.
“Non, man, dat no goose,” he whispered back. “Dat beeg bull peentail. Beeg lak a goose, though. Look, you, here come some more.”
A flight of pintails came in and swirled, and I raised the gun, but Pierre touched me on the arm. “Non, don’t shoot yet,” he said. “Dey mak one more turn, den come seet down weeth decoy.”
Pierre was right. They went away, turned, came in low and perfectly, and locked their wings. I shot at the feet of one big drake as he dropped his legs, dumped him, and pulled away to a fast-climbing bird—another drake. I aimed at his sky-seeking bill and dropped this fellow, too. I was out of breath—three big pins on the deck in half a minute—the most beautiful of all the ducks, with russet head and herringbone gray suit, showing white-breasted as they lay belly up, feebly kicking in shallow water. Pierre seemed impressed, although he said nothing, just nodded. He had a gun but hadn’t fired.
Now the boom of guns was coming from the other blinds, and ducks were dropping out of the sky. You could hear the splash as they hit, and the rattle of shot on wing as some carried lead. It was full light now, the sun a red ball, a light breeze freshening and rippling the water, making the water lily pads bow their edges in a tiny little minuet. High against the cloud-gray were black strings of ducks, wedges of ducks—big mallards, more pintails. And higher still were enormous, endless V’s of blue geese, honking mournfully as they passed.
The teal were working low, and Pierre touched my arm again. “When de teal dock come een, een a beeg ball,” he said, “shoot de meedle. Teal docks don’ count like beeg docks, but dey eat good for breakfast and mak’ fine col’ lunch. Shoot plenty teal docks for de cook.”
A literal swarm of greenwings buzzed in and I fired across their bows with both barrels, and felled what seemed to be a bushel.
Pierre grinned a big gold-toothed grin. “Bon, bon,” he said. “Now we forget teal docks, shoot only beeg docks. De cook, he be plenty happy, you bet.”
“Who’s the cook?” I asked.
“De cook?” He punched himself in the chest. “I’m de cook, me.”
A flight of mallards stuck their heads down as Pierre called plaintively. They turned, circled to reconnoiter, and Pierre called again. They swept behind us in a great curve and came around, intent now on decoying. Keeping my head down I moved the gun up higher and slipped the safety catch....
A shrill whistle from the bridge hauled me swiftly out of Louisiana and back to a suji bucket on the hungry ship “Sundance” bound for northern European ports from Savannah. I ran up to the bridge. The mate was bending over the ladder, looking down at me.
“We’ve changed course,” he said. “Trim the ventilators.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” I said, and went off to trim the ventilators that led to the cargo holds so that no nasty ocean damp would damage our lovely cargo of sheep manure, sulphur, phosphate rock, nails, and scrap iron for the Germans to make war with. The waves crashed
over the decks as the ship changed course, and all the ventilators appeared to have rusted fast since they had been trimmed an hour ago. I thought, as I wrestled in the wet cold with the jammed ventilators, that Louisiana duck hunting was too good for this kind of work, and I would save the rest of it for the last two hours before dawn on that (unlimited stream of profanity) water-drenched, windswept, sea-tortured foc’sle head.
The foc’sle head was even colder, windier, and wetter after the change of course, and I had to wedge myself between the anchor chains to keep from being washed ten feet straight down into the well deck and onto the deck cargo of logs. It was still a couple of hours until dawn, the coldest, most miserable time of the waning night, when cold gray sky would merge with cold gray sea and there was nobody alive on the Atlantic but you. What they needed a lookout for I couldn’t say, because you couldn’t have seen the “Queen Mary” fifty yards ahead of you.
It was time to go back, mentally, to where it was warm, to the roseaux-reed blind off the Bayou Philibert in Louisiana, squatting in a flat-bottomed pirogue with a Cajun named Pierre. The sun was coming up, the mosquitoes were departing, and across the little lily-studded, sweet-water pond the Old Man’s gun was booming. The sky was full of big ducks, and higher up a million geese were working. I wiped a gallon of cold Atlantic Ocean off my face with the back of a glove and longed then and there for Louisiana.
Somehow you don’t associate fine duck hunting with warm weather and pleasant surroundings, but this Louisiana hunt the Old Man took me on was about the best I had ever seen up to then. We were living on a big clean launch moored at a Cajun oyster dock that stuck out of the levee, and poling out in the pirogues to hunt. There were eight of us—the Old Man and me, two of his friends, and four Cajuns who served as guides, cooks, and assistant gunners.
I thought Cajuns were just fine. They were originally the French people that the British deported from Acadia in the middle 1700’s (Acadia now being Nova Scotia, the Old Man told me), and they still spoke a French-English patois that was pretty funny to the outsider. They were magnificent hunters, trappers, fishermen, and marshmen. A Cajun in hip boots could walk a marsh as though it were a sidewalk, when you would bog to your neck in the ooze.
My friend Pierre, my mate in the pirogue, was little, dark-sallow, bushy black-headed, and fox-faced. He wasn’t shooting much, only when a big bunch of ducks came in to the decoys and then I could feel the rattling blast of his rusty old pump gun. Those were the days before you plugged them down to three, and Pierre could spout five out of that old sliphorn faster than most people play an automatic.
After the pintails quit flying the mallards took over. The Cajuns call a mallard a “French duck,” possibly because the yellow bill and vulgar yellow shoes and green head and purple-blue wing feathers appeal to a certain Gallic appreciation of gaudiness. There was a sight of ducks flying, and we weren’t having anything to do with little ducks or trash ducks. We let the shovelers and the goldeneyes and the broadbills alone, even though, there wasn’t much attention paid to limits in the marshes in those days. A marsh was a far piece away from a warden. Wardens didn’t have much truck with Cajuns anyhow, Cajuns being notably pepper-tempered and the malarial swamps and marshes where they lived a bit tricky for law enforcement. A fellow can get lost easy in those Louisiana swamps.
The French ducks were decoying well that morning. Allowing for the misses you make foolishly in an abundance of riches, by ten o’clock the marsh line, which surrounded the pond, was studded with dead ducks that the wind had wedged gently into a lee shore. Some of the ducks we would lose, as always—the runners that made the marsh only to meet a mink or a coon. Once that morning we saw a mink tiptoe daintily out onto the mud, seize a mallard by the neck, and disappear into the marsh.
It was almost pickup time when Pierre pointed to a lonely dot in the sky. The dot was making mournful noises and seemed to be mixed up in its directions. “Young goose. Lost hees mama,” Pierre whispered. “You watch. I play the mama, call heem right eento blind. Hees eat very good, young goose. Not so tough lak hees papa, heem.”
The seduction of a lost young goose is one of the simplest Cajun tricks, and one I was to see a great many times, but the first time is always the most impressive. Pierre talked that yearling goose out of the sky and down to the blind, which it circled three times. You might have killed it with a stick, but I settled for the shotgun. It fell with a crash, but I swear it wasn’t any bigger than the first pintail I had taken in the early light.
“Bon, bon,” Pierre said again. “Dat cook, he be plenty happy, you bet you. I guess we pick up now and go back to boat.” Pierre said as we watched the other pirogues snouting out of the impromptu blinds. “We got plenty dock today. Dees afternoon we go shoot plenty goose on de flat. I show you some treek, eh?”
It was tough poling—or it would have been for me, who couldn’t even stand up in the skinny almond shell that is a pirogue—but Pierre leaned on his pole, standing erect in the stem, and shoved his boat full of boy, decoys, guns, and dead ducks along the bayou, against the surging tide, without working up a sweat. We pulled up alongside the launch and I looked at my dollar watch. It was just 10:30.
The Old Man was in high humor. “What do you think of this for duck hunting?” he asked himself, more than me. “Beats that freezing to death, don’t it? You hungry?”
“I could eat a muskrat, me,” I said. I was already about half-Cajun myself by this time. “What have we got for lunch?”
The Old Man winked at Pierre. “Well, the ducks won’t be ready to eat before tonight. All we got is some sandwich truck and coffee and eggs and such as that. It seems to me it’s up to you to provide the lunch, unless you’d rather stay aboard and gut about fifty ducks. Not that there’s much trick to it, the way these fellows do it. Show him, Dedée”—this to another Cajun, the one who’d poled the Old Man’s pirogue.
Dedée picked up a mallard and extended the anal vent with the point of his knife. He crooked a finger, stuck it inside the duck, and hauled the whole innards clear with one jerk. He shrugged, threw the guts over the side, and wiped the finger on the mallard’s back feathers.
“Simple when you know how, ain’t it?” the Old Man said. “But then, most things are. Tell you what. I’ll go provide half the lunch if you and Pierre will furnish the main course. No, I forgot. Pierre’s the cook and he’ll have to stay aboard. You go with Anatole. But first—Dedée, where’s that yellow stuff? “
Dedée grinned and went below. He came back with a half-gallon jar of light yellow liquid.
“That’s Cajun orange wine,” the Old Man said. “Have a sip, but don’t let it get to be a habit. These boys make it, and it’ll bust your skull if you take too much.”
Dedée poured me out a dram in a coffee cup and I sipped it. It tasted innocent enough, and I drained the cup. Whatever it was it burnt a firebreak right down my gullet. My eyes must have popped and I broke into a light sweat.
“I told you,” the Old Man said. “That’s powerful stuff. Now get over the side and into that pirogue with Anatole. Whether you know it or not you’re going fishing. Me, I got other chores. Come on, Dedée, let loose of that jar and we’ll get to work.”
Anatole and I drifted down the bayou a few hundred yards, and he worked the pirogue over to what looked like an enormous straight chair built into the water at the mouth of a smaller, excited stream, which came from a man-chopped cut about twelve feet wide that wound out of sight through the marshes. The rushing, eddying water made a roll where the stream met the bayou. Anatole jabbed at the bottom, and his pole went nearly its full length before he hit mud.
“You go ‘long top,” he said. “Here, tak’ pole an’ stringer.” He handed me up a light rod with a small reel and a hook with a buckshot sinker. “You wait a meenit,” he said. “I be back with bait.” He let the pirogue drift and unfurled a cast net. Then he disappeared around a bend in the bayou, but I could hear the cast net splash, once, twice, three times. In a moment
he came poling back. The pirogue’s bottom was full of kicking, bucking little shrimp. He took a bailing bucket and filled it three-quarters full of the shrimp, and passed the bucket up to me.
“What are we fishing for?” I asked, perched on a crosspiece on the platform that obviously was intended to serve as a seat.
“Redfeesh,” he said. “Red drum. Best feesh we got in bayou. You just steek shreemp on the hook, let her float in current and haul in feesh. Maybe you get a trout, maybe not. I be back in mebbe-so one hour, me. ‘Voir.” And he was off, around the bend again in his pirogue.
I baited a hook, paid out the line, settled back on the comfortable plank seat, braced my feet on the rough rails that surrounded three-quarters of the platform, smiled at the sun and fumbled in my pocket for a pack of cigarettes. I had been smoking about a year—legally, that is—but somehow I never smoked in duck blinds. I had just managed to get a cigarette lit when a bolt of lightning struck my shrimp and headed, I guess, for the Mississippi River. I fiddled with him a bit, but not wanting to foul up dinner I fetched him back as fast as I could. He was a big redfish, three or four pounds, well-hooked and swimming around at the foot of the platform.
I didn’t have a net or a gaff, so I climbed down the crosspieces that made steps up to the fishing chair, holding the rod with the line taut in my left hand, the left arm crooked under a crosspiece to hang on. I managed to swim the fish in to where I could gaff him with my hooked fingers in the gills and jerked him kicking out of the water. I climbed backward upstairs to the platform and strung him on the stringer, then let him back into the water, where he seemed to be happy.
The sun was pounding down now and I took my undershirt off. I could almost feel the freckles pop again on my shoulders, where old-time blisters had been replaced by big blotchy brown spots. My nose and forehead were already beginning to pink. I threaded another shrimp on the hook and repeated the performance. When Anatole came poling back about an hour later I had six or eight big reds swimming on the stringer, and I’d lost as many as I caught.