Left to Die

by Gary Collins

  The two greatest natural forces on the earth came together to create this phenomenon. First, the relentless north wind blew upon each hummock and rise of ice. Every piece of snow and ice above sea level became a sail against which the wind pressed with all its might. And then, below the surface of ice, the greatest force of all was exerted: the power of moving water. Once in motion, nothing can stop it. Along its ordained route to the south, the ice will rise up over countless reefs and atolls. It will be pulverized by wind and wave and heaved against merciless headlands. Millions of gallons of water will melt off it and flow back into the sea.

  But for now it is still ice. The pounding it takes, while decreasing its height and weight, merely increases its area. Eventually it will be destroyed by the same forces that bring it south for man to see. The frigid winds and demanding tides that had created and befriended the plain and forced it from static to kinetic energy will gradually turn from cold to warm. And that is little more than a seasonal relief, for even as the fields of ice finally succumb to warmer climes, already the land of its birth will prepare to freeze the northern ocean all over again.

  Ice in motion is a spectacular feature of the polar seas that is unsurpassed by any other natural movement on earth. The constant pull and press of wind and tide is finally rewarded by the release of ice from the land. It begins at the edges of frozen bays and offshore islands encased in ice, until the hundreds of miles of ice becomes, as a whole, the Great White Plain. Down from the northern bays and inlets, the ice is gathered and moved as if by some hidden director. It is torn from shingled beaches and muddy coves where it tears kelp beds away in its haste to be a part of the icy roundup. The ice is driven away from the Arctic coasts and out into the ice roads of the North Atlantic. It slides beyond Hatton Headland and Button Island, past Ryan’s Bay and the Hebron shore, until it pushes to the very edge of Labrador at Battle Harbour, where the maw of the Strait of Belle Isle and the currents of the Labrador Sea and the colliding tides from the St. Lawrence Gulf will debate and ultimately decide its fate.

  From windy headlands and kitchen windows, in Cook’s Harbour and Wild Bight, in the shadow of Cape Norman and across the mouth of the shallow Pistolet Bay, to Savage Cove in the western lee of the oddly named Cape Onion, and farther east to Quirpon, sheltered behind the naked Cape Bauld, that northernmost point on the mainland of Newfoundland, the hunters of seals are watching and waiting. For those in the know, the clouded cast of white that appears on the horizon above a strangely untroubled sea is the portent of a welcome spring visitor. The ice is coming! Days earlier, great sludgy masses of slob ice had come out of the north. It is a grey mass of pounded ice crystals on the sea, too thick for a man to row a punt through. It always comes ahead of the main ice pack. Eider ducks by the thousands had come at the first light of dawn in swirling flocks, looking for open water. The marauding fields of ice behind them had crowded the birds away from the shoals and bays where they had been feeding.

  For days small clumps of pure white ice appear, scattered and derelict from the main patch of ice. The salty tang of the open sea is replaced by a knifing wind that burns a man’s face and waters his eyes. With all the signs of its approach, and with a tangible feel of it in the sea air, the greatest migration on earth has begun. And with it will come the harp seal herd, the largest population of migratory mammals.

  The people who have lived long and who have watched for the Arctic ice’s annual arrival say there is a place where the Great White Plain stops. It is that huge stretch of the Labrador Sea at the north end of the Belle Isle Strait, usually between Battle Harbour, on the Labrador side, and Belle Isle itself on the Atlantic side. It is said that here it is decision time for the ice floes. It is not a matter of if, but how much of its weight will be pushed down into the Strait if Belle Isle and the ever-widening St. Lawrence Gulf, and how much of it will flow down the open, Atlantic side of the island of Newfoundland. The wedge-shaped Belle Isle is the equalizer. It will turn huge tracts of ice east and west. Little more than nine miles long and barely three miles wide, the island itself lords out over the ocean just a dozen miles or so north from where the island of Newfoundland ends. From its beginning thousands of miles away in the United States, Belle Isle’s north head is the northernmost end of the Appalachian chain of mountains.

  Hidden beneath and swirling around its snarl of coastline, two great ocean currents are at work. Here the cold Labrador Current, pouring steadily out of the northwest, collides with the smaller and much warmer tributary pushing up through the Belle Isle Strait from the St. Lawrence Gulf. The two mighty ocean rivers collide and torment the waters around Belle Isle.

  Then, without warning, the Great White Plain advances toward the island of Newfoundland. It stills the seas and calms the waters with a surface that is spattered with the black heads of seals. Now the Strait of Belle Isle is clogged with ice from shore to shore, and for a while Newfoundland is not an island. It is connected to the rest of North America by a bridge that surrounds the north of the island like a white caul.

  It pushes into Red Bay, beneath the vermilion granite cliffs where, 500 years before, the Basque adventurers of France and Spain had dwelled. And in that quiet bay, resting below the threatening, scouring ice, the remains of the Basque whalers’ ancient chalupas with blubber-soaked ribs await discovery.

  Into Jellyfish Cove the vanguard of the ice is forced onto shore-lined rocks and against solid landwash. Rising over the irregular, unpredictable ice surface and looking like embattled parapets are larger pieces of ice. Away from the edge of the invasive ice and across the salted flats of dead grasses and tangled gorse, standing mutely over the wintry scene are several large oval mounds with sod tops drifted bare of snow. Hidden and preserved beneath the grassy mounds are hundreds of artifacts that predate the Basque hunters on the other side of the strait by hundreds of years. The knolls are the long-deserted sod houses of seafaring Norsemen who ventured over the North Atlantic Ocean to this point of land 2,000 years before. In Jellyfish Cove and L’Anse aux Meadows, these markings of European exploration, which no one yet believes in and which will change the history of the Americas, also remain to be discovered.

  The north headlands of the island of Newfoundland shudder with the impact of hundreds of square miles of moving ice pressing on them. The island shoulders the ice aside, dividing the immense ice floe which will keep coming for weeks, sending it east and west. Seals approach the moving plain, their numbers increasing by the millions. They appear with heads bobbing and flippers clawing, clumsily hauling themselves out of the sea. They crowd the miniature dark-water bays and sea-ponds held within the icefield. They peer up through ice rents and bobbing-holes and squeeze their sleek, supple bodies around the edges of countless ice pans. Their numbers increase until, on the Great White Plain, the largest colony of mammals adrift on any ocean has gathered. With the exception of juvenile seals of last year’s birth among the herd, they are all adults. Hollow grunts, a few deep, throaty rumbles, and sometimes vibrating clicking sounds come from the scattered herds. Adult males sometimes snarl and spit with clacking teeth at smaller females with swollen bellies as much as they do at rival males, but for the most part the huge rookery is strangely quiet.

  In the harsh mid-winter of 1914, this incredible spectacle of one of nature’s wonders is lost on the hunters who wait on land. For hard-bitten men who watch their women try to make table from bare cupboards, who have to reach into near-empty flour barrels to feed hungry bellies, the ice and its visitors mean only one thing: meat! Rich, tasty, fatty, sustaining meat in abundance.

  Tough men with steely nerves venture off the land and out onto the ice with heavy wooden gaffs in hand. They spring and leap across dangerous swatches of open water between shifting pans of ice. It is extremely dangerous work. It is so demanding that sometimes a man must make decisions in mid-jump. The slob between the pans, though frozen and beckoning, is not to be trusted. Every move is a ch
allenge. It is work that would tire a mountaineer. The ice is uneven and slippery. It moves and swells underfoot. The pans are deceiving. It takes a quick, knowing eye to decide which of them will take the weight of a burly man. To land on one that will not could mean death. And all the while a man must keep a careful eye for the safety of the land behind him and a hunter’s eye on the wary seals ahead. The sealer sweats as much from the surge of hunter’s adrenaline as from the exertion of the stalk.

  For all but a few scarred adult seals that had survived previous ocean migrations, it is their first glimpse of a creature standing on two limbs. The old seals rise up on their bellies, for a better look at what is coming for them, before slumping back on the ice. With the weight of their bodies, their fat is splayed flat and level beneath them on the ice surface. Their black eyes roll. Their nostrils flare, seeking the smell of the intruders. And when the stench of the beasts with two legs sprinting toward them invades their senses, they flee. They make great, lumbering lunges, their fat bodies wallowing as they dive head first into nearby blowholes. They sink tail first into open swatches and crevices, rising back up out of the water for one last look, before disappearing beneath the ice. They flee by the thousands, but not all of them make it. Black-clad hunters with raised clubs suddenly appear around the high edges of ice and they bludgeon the skulls of seals with one sure blow. The successful hunters trudge homewards with bent backs, towing the bloody carcasses of meat behind them.

  And when the winds die and the tide slackens, the ice pressure loosens from the land and miles of black lakes of open water appear for men to row out in small boats for the harvest. They fire volleys of shot from long heavy guns at the bobbing heads of seals in the water. They kill unwary seals basking on the pans. They haul the bodies of seals in over the gunnels of their punts, where the slain animals’ dark blood runs along the timbers toward the stern of the boat. Back on shore the seals are quickly butchered. Now it is cut-and-come-again until the entire village, starving for fresh meat, is satisfied. This method of seal hunting will continue for the landsmen until the ice floe has passed, taking the seal herds with it.

  Now the Great White Plain has been stained with its first blood and the death of mammals. But it pales when compared to the deadly hunt to come.

  6

  “The ice hunters are comin’!” Young children, who were always the first to see the sealers, shouted excitedly around the frozen harbours of Trinity, Dover, and Hare Bay on the north side of Bonavista Bay. The annual swilers’ walk had begun! Every late winter they watched for the ice hunters, a dark line of men coming up over the bay ice from Butchers Cove at Hare Bay harbour’s east end, always in the late evening. They were considered fearless hunters, adventurers as strong and invincible as Vikings. It would continue for days—they would walk for miles out of the northern coastal outports and make their way to the railhead at Gambo and from there to the sealing ships in St. John’s harbour.

  Some of the sealers were luckier than others. Word had come that the sealing ship Newfoundland would make a stop in the small seaport of Wesleyville this year. For seal hunters who had secured berths on the Newfoundland from as far away as Notre Dame Bay, this was good news. But if you lived elsewhere along the coast, getting to St. John’s on her sail date was your problem. They walked over logging roads, through deep forests, and across frozen ponds. They struggled through deep, unbroken snow, over trackless bogs and windy barrens, over bays and inner coves, to get the train to St. John’s.

  Some walked the whole distance to St. John’s over the railbed. Others took their chances and snuck aboard unheated freight cars. One would-be sealer, after travelling a full day in a freight car, arrived at the St. John’s station, jumped out of the car, and landed on frostbitten feet. By rail or horse-drawn sleigh, by dog team or on their own two feet, 1,500 men, seasoned sealers and neophytes alike, made it to St. John’s harbour in the winter of 1914.

  Most of the swilers who walked into Hare Bay towed small sleds carrying their duffle bags. Other sleds had wooden boxes tied to them. Some of the ice hunter boxes were painted and some were not. They were rectangular, small but sturdy, and for the most part looked battered and worn with use. Their covers were fastened with thick leather straps and a loop of rope for carrying them hung from either end. Many of the seasoned sealers used the boxes year after year, not trusting their few valuables to canvas bags. The boxes were mysterious things that contained all manner of secrets for boys with adventurous minds: seal daggers by the dozen; fancy tow ropes braided like lariats; playing cards with the queen of every suit clad in fancy underwear—or wearing no clothes at all!—tiny bottles filled with secret ingredients, known only to sealers, that kept them immune from frost. Every boy knew that ice hunters never got cold. The boxes, like the bags, also contained bare essentials: a shift of clothes, needle and thread, a razor, a Bible.

  Tow ropes extended from the front of the sleds and were draped over the sealers’ shoulders. Those who didn’t haul sleds carried their duffle, or nunny bags, on their backs. When curious boys approached them, laughing and shouting with glee, and crackies ran yapping around their feet, the men straightened their backs, kicked at the snapping dogs, and shouted rough yet friendly greetings to their young followers. Inspired by the boisterous welcome, the men lengthened their stride until the youngest of the children found themselves running to keep up. They manoeuvred around the tidewaters that flushed up through the baddy catters where the harbour ice met the landwash. Once on the land, the swilers dispersed down long lanes hemmed in on both sides by fences and went inside welcoming houses for the night.

  The boys who followed the ice hunters hoped to get their hands on one of the swilers’ sleds. As a rule, they weren’t much to look at. For the most part they were hastily built sleds used to get the sealers’ gear to the train at Gambo and then to be discarded. But some of them were crafted by hand, and to a boy who was used to dragging heavy handcarts up steep “slidin’ hills,” they were a prize. All of them were lightweight, no more than three or four feet long. And no matter if it wasn’t the fastest sled on Uncle Robert’s Hill, just to be the proud owner of a genuine ice hunter’s sled was enough. Sadly, though, despite the pleadings of brazen young boys and the rashings of food followed by Mom’s partridgeberry tarts, it was rare for the sealers to part with their sleds; the ice hunters still had fifteen or more miles to walk to the railhead. There the swilers’ walk ended and, much to the envy of the Hare Bay boys, the men might just as soon give their sleds to the Gambo boys.

  * * * * *

  The city of St. John’s, Newfoundland, had heard the soft footfalls and later the booted tramp from the countless feet of men for hundreds of years. In the beginning, a stalwart, handsome people with red-stained skin had come here, when the hills above St. John’s harbour were unscarred and the pure waters issuing inside its sheltered canyon washed upon virgin shores. They chose calm days to paddle their fragile barks past the grey mountains guarding the entrance to the harbour. They bound their feet with the skins of animals and lived off the land. After a time, they left, and their footprints were not found on this shore or any other shore again.

  Other explorers and adventurers came here over the years, their massive, wind-driven vessels dwarfing the canoes of the native inhabitants. They took riches from the land and pulled far more than they needed out of the boundless sea. And they would never go away. Wars were fought over this city harbour by countries far beyond its walls. Soldiers and sailors prepared for battle here for hundreds of years, but none of them came with the same fortitude and fighting spirit as the ice hunters.

  They were a fierce group of men who entered the city with springing step. They came for days until more than 1,500 of their kind had claimed the waterfronts of the city. The roadstead outside the city’s natural walls was its surest avenue, but few came from that direction; the North Atlantic Ocean in mid-winter was a daunting place and not well-travelled. Inste
ad, chunky railway engines, laboriously belching coal, pulled them into the west end of the old city aboard rocking railcars. Or they walked into the city on foot, with packs on their backs or towed behind them on slides. Some came on horse-drawn sleds from the nearer outlying settlements, while others arrived by teams of one or two dogs—rarely more. A few of the lucky ones had walked for no more than a day to get here, but most of the hunters had come from great distances. Some had travelled to railway connections from all along the northeast coast of the island, out of Notre Dame Bay and up from the trackless north side of Bonavista Bay to the railhead at Gambo. Others came from the south side of that bay, around its barren headland into Trinity Bay, from Elliston and Catalina, riding on a spur line barely three years old to connect with the main trunk at Clarenville, and on east into St. John’s. And those who had empty pockets walked through snow-choked forests and followed logging trails and travelled across the frozen bights of the inner bays. Many of the hunters were from within the city’s limits, but the greater number came from the isolated outports of rural Newfoundland, most of them from the northeast coast. It was an annul exodus out of the bays to the city.

  Most of the sealing captains hailed from Bonavista Bay. The captains from the small island community of Greenspond preferred to crew their ships with men from their own area.

  They had arrived in St. John’s and the city was waiting for them. The ship owners were expecting them. These were the men who would crew their ships, and without them there would be no hunt. Without exception, all of them crowded and milled around the docks in the lower part of the harbour. They sought out their vessels and the offices of the merchants who owned them. Even those sealers who had their berths confirmed by telegraph or mail or by word of mouth were always anxious. Until he marked his X or wrote his name in a company’s ledger, a sealer’s berth was not secure.