Left to Die

by Gary Collins

  “Better, sir,” was Jesse’s brash answer. “Phil is a trapper an’ skins otters and such better than me.”

  Wes Kean showed one of his rare grins. He loved a man with confidence. “Haulin’ the pelts offa dem freshwater animals is one thing, and sculpin’ saltwater swiles is another thing altogether. Come with me!”

  And with that the man turned and clumped up the few steps to the office door. He entered without knocking and stepped inside as if he owned the place. He didn’t kick the snow from his boots. The three men from Newport followed him.

  They entered a bare room with a wooden floor and two tiny, frost-covered windows on either side. A small bogie near the back wall showed a flicker of flame from the cracks around its cast-iron door. Beside the stove, which the men noted gave off little heat, was a bucket half filled with lumps of coal. Sticking up over the bucket’s broad lip was a short-handled steel shovel.

  At the front of the chilly room was a large desk cluttered with ledgers and papers scrawled with ink. Behind the desk was a small man with a drooping black moustache. He wore a winter coat and a salt and pepper hat. A large glass ashtray was nestled among the many papers on one corner of the messy desk and it was filled to the brim with the grey dottle from a long-stemmed pipe resting on top of the ashes.

  The clerk squinted as though he needed spectacles. His shirt collar was buttoned tightly to his thin neck, around which was knotted a red tie stained with food. When he looked up and saw Captain Kean, he was visibly shaken. His mouth gaped open, showing tobacco-stained teeth, and his eyes opened wide.

  “G-good marnin’, Skipper Wes, I’m sure, sir!”

  To add to the man’s discomfort, Wes pulled the big ledger the clerk had been working on out of his hands. Kean didn’t acknowledge the man’s greeting. Instead, he scanned the list of names printed with care on several pages.

  “No shortage of names, I see.”

  “Oh, no, Skipper, sir. More than ye’ll be needin’, sir. The first of ’em come by wire from the main office in S’n John’s, sir.”

  “Well, here’s t’ree more men fer ye to enter in yer ledger.”

  “Indeed I will, sir! I’ll put ’em down on the last page right away, sir!”

  Kean grabbed the pen from the clerk’s fingers, dragged its nib over the first three names on the first page, and gave the book back to the startled clerk.

  “Put the names o’ the New Harbour men beside the ones I jest scratched out and put the S’n John’s names on the last page!” He turned toward the Newport men, who stood in silence. “Sign yer names or mark yer X accordin’ to yer means, my b’ys!”

  Without another word, he exited the office and closed the door behind him.

  3

  On the Northeast coast of the North American continent is a serrated edge of innumerable bays and inlets. Ancient mountain ranges, worn smooth with age or still rugged with youth, hide their formidable bases beneath the seas. It is a wild, formidable area of the earth sparsely inhabited by the planet’s most prolific of mammals—humans. For the dark-skinned ones who had finally found their way here, the journey had not been an easy one. Before history was recorded on paper or vellum, their amazing trek had begun when the northern part of the Americas was still joined to Asia by a thin bridge of land. Well north of the warm plains and beyond the tree-lined taiga, these winter clans dwelled and roamed the vast tundra of the Arctic regions. Only the immeasurable ocean could halt one of mankind’s greatest migrations and thus end their journey.

  But upon the heaving breast of that same frigid sea, where two-legged mammals dared not go, another odyssey continued. Warm-blooded seals, their numbers dwarfing the men who hunted them, were beginning their annual migration. Fierce hood seals were on the move, warring among themselves during the time of mating, the males sprouting pinkish, bulbous hoods on their broad heads. Smaller ring seals—this breed had no visible ears—which seldom roamed from the Arctic seas, were abroad in lesser numbers. But outnumbering them all, and carrying upon their backs what some have called the harp of David—the Christian king—were the gentle harp seals, whose other distinguishing marks were their black eyes.

  The harp seals spend so much time in the water they are more like fish than mammals. Maybe it is the animal’s love of open water that motivates them to wander south. More likely it is an inbred urge, a primordial sense that is beyond their control, which moves them. Whatever the reason, it is always the same. The harp seals leave the Arctic and head south when the freeze-up begins. For an animal that appears to revel in the coldest of waters and live on the ice floes, it remains a mystery, but when ice forms in the northern bays of Canada’s eastern Arctic, the seals leave.

  They come from as far north as there is open water, leaving the places that have European names; from the upper reaches of Kane Basin, which separates the icy shores of western Greenland from Ellesmere, Canada’s northernmost island. Away from the freezing bights of Baffin Bay they swim south and to the east, from the slobbed-over crevices of Lancaster Sound they come cavorting over the freezing sea. They leave the upper islands of Hudson’s Bay and Foxe Basin and are hurried along by the current of Hudson Strait to join the gathering herd. In herds of dozens, and then by the hundreds and finally thousands, they gather on the open sea and swim south, past wonderful, terrible headlands and heaving bodies of water bearing the exotic native names of the first peoples of the Americas: Ungava Bay and Akpatok Island; Cape Kakkiviak; Nachvak Fjord; and Saglek Bay. They are hunted and killed on the open sea, shot with long-barrelled rifles and shotguns, speared by harpoons, and drowned in fishing nets. The scattered sniping and swiping has as little effect on their vast numbers as a small waterway that leaves a mighty river. Without stopping they pass Kikkertavak and Tunungayualok islands on the western edge of the Labrador Sea, their numbers growing steadily, until several million have reached the suck of the Strait of Belle Isle, and here, surprisingly, they are divided.

  The Labrador Current is the name given to the movement of water that begins in the polar seas. A powerful current beginning on the east coast of Greenland, the world’s largest island, rounds its most southerly point at Cape Farewell, then heads north. The impenetrable plains of ice turn the current west and then south to become the Baffin Current, until it mixes with the North Atlantic in the Labrador Sea. Here the Labrador Current moves steadily southward outside the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Huge eddies can be seen in places, miles in length and traced by the white froth of turbulent undertows. It merges with the greatest of all ocean currents flowing northward from the world’s largest maw of ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Here the mingling of cold northern water with the warm southern currents creates the planet’s richest fishing grounds. Still farther south and west, the tide from the Labrador Sea continues, until it nears Cape Hatteras of North Carolina and its mighty flow is slowed and finally defeated.

  Large numbers of the harps break ranks with the rest of the herd and plunge into the Strait of Belle Isle. Barking, crying, and mumbling, they dip and thrash in and out of the water, most of them bearing east toward the open sea, others swimming west into the opening of the strait, but all of them headed unerringly south.

  By day they mill around the same area of ocean, resting and diving beneath calm rolling seas or wind-tossed waves. They feast on millions of fish by day. The tender, white flesh of the ground-dwelling cod is their favourite. But when night casts its shadow over the sea, they continue their quest, and the new dawn finds them miles farther south.

  The seals on the back side—or the Gulf of St. Lawrence side—of Newfoundland journey as far south as the Îles de la Madeleine and St. Paul Island, northeast of Cape North, off the coast of Cape Breton. The herd that favours the front—or east side—of the island of Newfoundland journeys farther. They have been seen as far south as Sable Island, off the southeast coast of Nova Scotia. It is here in t
hese warming waters that the harp seals’ southward migration ends, but their amazing odyssey, far from over, is really just beginning, for now the herds return northward to rendezvous with fate.

  * * * * *

  The Bonavista Peninsula is made up of the island-strewn Bonavista Bay on its north side and the windy maw of Trinity Bay on its south. The island of Newfoundland defines its northernmost end at Cape Bauld and the most southerly point at Cape Pine, the latter of which is largely treeless despite its name. The island is inundated with peninsulas. Some of them appear to be straining to break free of the immense island to which they are tethered.

  On the northeast tip of the Bonavista Peninsula, just five miles south of the jutting Bonavista Cape itself and on the Trinity Bay side of that cape, there is a long indentation leading into the granite headland where families of fishermen live. It is a place that holds little shelter from the sea. Standing to the east from this cove are two small, rocky, barren islands where nesting birds land during the short summer season. It is from the island bird colonies that the cove, in its lee, got its simple name: Bird Island Cove. By 1914, the name of the cove had been changed again. The first Methodist minster of the Bird Island Cove settlement, who bravely tried to pluck his wayward flock from the waters of sin, was William Ellis. Despite the preacher’s fruitless efforts to convert the hard-nosed fishermen to his way of thinking, out of respect the settlement was renamed Elliston.

  This windswept area with the poor anchorage had been well-known to fish merchants from Europe for hundreds of years. Other, more daring men knew about the place, too. Masterless men from Ireland, seeking freedom from an oppressed land, escaped to drungs and wooded valleys inland from the community’s shoreline.

  Here, codfish teemed in the shallow waters just off the landwash. The men who fished—as well as their families, who shared in the work of reaping and curing this market-driven bounty—were the toughest of breeds. Born on the edge of a merciless ocean and with a dubious future for them beyond it, they shouldered their load and for the most part leaned willingly into the tangled traces of outport life.

  With sharpened stakes and gnarled spikes pounded into jagged crevices—all fastened with nail-driven lungers—they constructed works of wooden genius. Laddered slipways built in the few places where boats could be hauled up on the land were swept away by autumn gales. Denied even the comfort of wharves for docking and for off-loading fish, still the intrepid fishermen demanded another favour from the ocean: a place to moor their vessels when not in use. Summer anchorages were also known as holding grounds or collars.

  Small punts and rodneys with rounded stems, and bigger boats with lone masts—called sloops—swung from their lines. Similar boats held unique outport names, like bullies and scows, knockabouts and trap skiffs. Sleek schooners with black hulls sported sails that were barked brown and tied vertically to the masts. These vessels bowed to the winds and swung with the tides “on collar” in the roads off Elliston. But when the autumn liners signalled the end of the fishing season, and the dark seas rolling up from the deep Atlantic portended gales of wind, vessels large and small were released from their collars. The smaller boats were hauled up to every available crevice on land.

  With great fanfare and much shouting, well-organized men and boys used ropes and tackles to pull the vessels out of the storms’ path. They sailed the schooners to safer ports and took them into deep bays and sheltered coves. It was a major event in coastal communities. For men who had worked hard since early spring, this time of relative inactivity was largely a time of idle hands. Few of them liked it.

  Some of them spent the late fall and winter months trapping animals on the peninsula and beyond. Many of them went looking for work in the lumber camps, some as far away as central Newfoundland. Employment opportunities such as these were few and far between yet offered ready cash to the industrious workers. But whether the fishermen were standing on stagehead or in twine loft, meeting by chance on a lonely trapline, or gathering for nightly chats in a dimly lit logging camp, their talk was the same: the coming seal hunt.

  Those who had been to the hunt before tantalized the others with tales of incredible adventure. Young men not yet sixteen years old—but with years of work behind them—listened intently. Many had lied about their ages and succeeded in getting out to the hunt, but this was a risky venture. Those who tried sometimes found themselves, after walking for days to get there, standing with their hands in empty pockets on a St. John’s waterfront and watching their would-be passage sail away without them.

  * * * * *

  Though he had wanted to go last year, Albert Crewe had no intention of risking his chance for adventure by being found as a stowaway. Now he was sixteen years old, strong with youth, and like a cat on his feet, one of the best abilities a sealer can possess. He begged his forty-nine-year-old father, a veteran sealer named Reuben Crewe, to use his influence to get him a berth to the ice, but his request fell on deaf ears. Reuben had had a frightening experience on the Arctic ice floes three years before. The near-death ordeal had turned him from the seal hunt and he had sworn to his wife, Mary, that he would never go again. Nor would he speak to the ship captains, most of whom he knew, for his young son to go. Reuben tried his best to discourage his son from going to the ice.

  But Albert would not be swayed by his doting father. All of the dangers associated with hunting seals on the open Atlantic simply added to the boy’s enthusiasm. He would go a-swilin’. Nothing would stop him. Not his father’s warnings, nor his mother’s tearful overtures. He was accoutred with the might of youth. He was invincible. In desperation, Albert approached his uncle Ben.

  Ben knew all about Reuben’s fears. He knew also about Reuben’s terrifying experience on a sealing ship in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was fresh in his memory and a tale that Reuben had recounted many times. However, Benjamin reasoned, Reuben had survived the ordeal. Not only that, Reuben had been a much older man and probably past his prime. Young Albert was flush with the boundless energy of youth. He was fleet of foot and as tough as nails. Ben listened to his nephew’s questions for weeks before finally giving in and, using his own influence, obtained a berth to the ice that coming spring for the boy. Ben never told Reuben what he had done, and for the longest time neither did Albert. The weeks went by, and Reuben suspected something had happened when his usually persistent son had not mentioned the seal hunt. He decided to confront Albert.

  “’Tis good fer me to see you’ve given up on that bert’ to the ice, my son. ’Tis not fit fer a man to be at, anyway.”

  “Well—I—’tis like—I mean . . .” Albert stammered, fearing his father’s wrath. “I’ve—I’ve got me bert’, Pop. I’m going to the ice this spring,” Albert finished, his voice resolute.

  “What do ’e mean, you’ve got a bert’? ’Tis not possible! ’Ow could a boy of sixteen get a . . . by God, ’twas that bloody Ben who spoke fer ’e, wudnit? I knowed it! Well, ’twon’t happen, I tell ’e. Yer mother will never allow it. Her ’eart will pine away when you go, I tell ’e! I’ll be havin’ a few choice words with Ben before this day dies, too!”

  “’Tis no use fer you to rage, Pop! Nor Mom, either, fer me mind’s made up! I’m a man and can make me own bed. And ’tis not Uncle Ben’s fault! I pestered him somethin’ fierce fer months before he gave in. Besides, he has wired into S’n John’s these many days ago and arranged fer me to go. I’ve only to make me mark alongside me name when I goes in there this spring. I’ll be sailin’ on the SS Newfoundland.” Albert finished in a flourish, proud yet fearing that his father’s influence with the sealing skippers could still upset his chances at getting a berth.

  It was late evening in the deep wintertime. The land was frozen and snow covered everything except the black, tarred roofs of Elliston. Lamplight shone from every house, including Mary Crewe’s, as father and son walked up the hard-packed snow trail toward her kitchen.

>   “Inside!” roared Reuben Crewe. And despite Albert’s recent statement of being a man, he stepped ahead of his stern father into his mother’s bright, warm kitchen like a boy.

  In the kitchen, with a pot filled with a steaming hot supper burbling on the wood stove, the argument continued. Albert’s mother wasn’t angry like his father. Mary Crewe was deeply hurt and begged her boy to reason it out and to understand her view. Mary remembered all too well her husband’s bare escape from the icefields in the Gulf three years ago. The event had shaken her man so badly he had not gone seal hunting again. And she was glad of it.

  She had being tired of the waiting when he was away, the nights of staring out over an empty black sea, the agony of not knowing. And now it would begin all over again. She stood at the short counter below the windowpanes and for a time stared out into the still winter night. Behind her, seated at the table, her husband and son shouted at each other with the snow from their boots melting on her clean floor. It was the first real argument she had ever seen at her kitchen table and Mary didn’t like it at all. It saddened her all the more.

  She measured flour and a touch of cherished baking powder into a brown earthen bowl, added water, rolled and fashioned the flour in her hands into several balls, and laid them in a large white plate hard by the bowl. The rolled white flour looked like snowballs. At the table opposite her husband, her son was defying Reuben for the first time. Mary picked up the plate of duff, walked to the stove, and removed the lid from the bubbling pot filled with vegetables. A cloud of sweet-smelling steam lifted into the air. The smell reached the two men at the table and they turned toward it for an instant before continuing with their argument. Mary dropped the dumplings one by one down among the yellowed turnips, pale potatoes, and softened green cabbage leaves.