Great Northern?

by Arthur Ransome

  Then, almost in the harbour mouth, after letting the Sea Bear show what she could do when newly scraped and scrubbed, the wind dropped again.

  “Get your engine going, Roger,” said Captain Flint. “There, may be a pack of boats inside. And even less wind. Stand by to lower sails. We’ve enough in the tank to take us in now.”

  The sails were lowered and, with the engine chugging, the Sea Bear moved in between the piers. John, after bringing in the jib, ran up the ratlines to the cross-trees. Dick watched anxiously. John looked down at the cockpit, nodded, and pointed at something they could not see from the decks.

  “He’s there,” cried Dick. “Oh, good.” And his hand flew to the pocket where he kept his notebook with his sketches of the Divers.

  “Steamers coming up astern,” shouted John.

  They looked aft. Far out at sea, a line of smoke and a dark blob showed on the horizon.

  “Bit of luck,” said Captain Flint. “That’ll be the mailboat. Just time to get the letters done. She’ll have them across long before we can do it. Save a few posts anyway. Now then. Nancy and John on the foredeck. Stand by for letting go.”

  The Sea Bear had passed the pierheads and was in harbour.

  “There he is,” cried Dorothea. “We’re in time after all.”

  “We’ll bring up near him,” said Captain Flint. “It’s not too far from the quay. Ready with that anchor, forrard?”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  The engine faltered, went on again, and faltered once more.

  “Not one drop too much,” murmured Captain Flint, looking into the engineer’s startled eyes. “Tank’s empty. Lucky we didn’t turn it on a minute sooner. She’ll do now. Finished with engines.”

  The engine coughed and stopped. The Sea Bear slipped on in silence towards the big white motor yacht that everybody called “Dick’s ship”.

  She rounded up perhaps forty yards away.

  “Let go!”

  There was a splash and a rattle of chain. Captain Flint lashed the tiller and went forward. “Now then, all hands! Stow sails. Let’s show these fishermen we know our jobs. All right, Dick. We’ll have the dinghy over for you the moment we’ve got the decks clear and all ship-shape.”

  With everybody working together and everybody knowing what to do, in a very few minutes the Sea Bear, with her headsails neatly furled, tyers on her mainsail, ropes coiled, was a model of what a ship in harbour ought to be. John, Nancy and Captain Flint were lowering the dinghy into the water. Dick, his notebook in his hand, was waiting, looking across at the motor yacht and suddenly fearing that the bird-man might not be aboard.

  “Now then, Dick,” said Captain Flint. “Better let John take you across. Don’t be too long. I’ll be writing a word to all the parents warning them to bear up under the news that I haven’t drowned you and that they’ll have to put up with seeing you again. And then John and I will take the cans ashore for petrol, put the letters aboard the mail-boat, and send a wire to Mac to tell him his ship’s still afloat and that we’ll be bringing her across tomorrow.”

  “Don’t tell him we’ve scrubbed her,” said Peggy.

  “I won’t,” said Captain Flint. “He’ll be pleased as Punch about that. She was sailing like a witch today, whenever the wind gave her half a chance.”

  “What’s going to happen now?” asked Roger, coming up on deck and wiping his hands on a bit of cotton waste after putting his engine to sleep.

  “Dick’s going across to the Pterodactyl to ask his bird-man about the Great Auk.”

  “Great Northern Diver,” said Dick gravely, and was surprised at Nancy’s chuckle.

  CHAPTER IX

  CROSS PURPOSES

  “PTERODACTYL, AHOY!”

  John held the dinghy steady a few yards from the accommodation ladder that hung between fenders on the shining white side of the motor yacht.

  A sailor with “Pterodactyl” in red letters on his blue jersey came to the side and looked down on them.

  “Tell him what you want,” said John.

  “Can I speak to the owner?” asked Dick. “It’s about birds.”

  “Have you got news for him?” asked the man. “What is it? Buzzards? Another eagle? I’ll tell him.”

  “It’s just a bird I’m not sure about,” said Dick.

  “He’s busy,” said the man. “But I’ll ask him.”

  “What did he mean by news about buzzards and eagles?” said John, when the man had gone into the deckhouse.

  “Perhaps he’s been watching some,” said Dick, “and is waiting to get a photograph when the young ones have hatched out.”

  “You can come aboard.” The man was back again, looking down at them from the deck. “But he can’t give you more than a few minutes.”

  John put the dinghy neatly alongside the hanging fenders. Dick climbed the ladder.

  “Aren’t the both of you coming?” asked the man.

  “I’ll hang on here,” said John, who was not the least interested in motor boats and thought that Dick would manage his bird business best by himself.

  “This way,” said the sailor, and showed Dick into the deckhouse. There was no one in it. “Down there,” he said, and Dick, feeling his pocket to make sure he had his note-book handy (though he had taken it out and put it back only a moment before) went down a flight of steps into the saloon.

  The saloon was full of light and seemed enormous after the cabin of the old pilot boat, and the first thing Dick saw was that there were pictures of birds the whole way round the walls. That, of course, was just the sort of thing he would have some day when he had a ship of his own in which to visit all the famous sanctuaries. The next thing he saw was that, in spite of the daylight that came through a row of portholes, there was a powerful electric lamp over a table at the far end of the saloon. The lamp lit up the thin reddish hair of a man, the bird-man himself, who was busy at something on the table. The lamp was close to his head. A reflected glitter of white skin showed through the thin hair. The man was writing in a large book. Dick waited silently for him to finish. The man looked up. Dick saw clever eyes behind spectacles rather like his own, a long, narrow nose, and a straight, thin-lipped mouth.

  “Who are you?” asked the man.

  “I’m Dick Callum.”

  “You’re not one of my regulars, are you?” said the man. “Never mind. Never too soon to begin. What is it you’ve found?”

  IN THE CABIN OF THE PTERODACTYL

  Dick tried to pull out his notebook. It stuck in his pocket.

  “Well?” said the man.

  The notebook came out with a jerk and fell on the floor. Dick picked it up and went forward to show his drawing. The man, whom he had interrupted when he was busy, had not waited before taking up his work again. In one hand he held an egg, in the other a pair of micrometer callipers. He was measuring the egg.

  “I wanted to ask you … You’ll know at once what it is …” Dick stopped short. He had seen that beside the egg that the man was measuring, there were a lot of others in a long rack in front of him. All eggs of the same kind. “I … I say … You’re not an egg-collector?”

  It was instantly clear that Dick could not have said anything to please his host better. He put the egg he had been measuring in the rack with the others, and twiddling the micrometer between his fingers, smiled at Dick.

  “You’ve heard of the Jemmerling Collection,” he said, almost as if he were speaking of St. Paul’s Cathedral. “Well, I’m Jemmerling. I’ve the biggest private collection in England … probably in the world. British birds only, of course. It would take more than one man’s lifetime to do as much for the foreigners….”

  Dick’s mouth fell open. It was the very last thing he could have expected. He thought of his friends of the Coot Club and their long struggle to protect the birds. He remembered their fight with George Owdon, who took eggs and sold them to collectors. Why, this man was a George Owdon, only grown-up and worse. This man of whom, without knowing him, Dick had
begun to make a hero, was an enemy. A bird-man! He was as dangerous an enemy as birds could have.

  Mr Jemmerling laughed. He mistook Dick’s horror for admiration.

  “Yes,” he went on. “I have eggs of every bird known to nest in the British Isles and some, indeed, of those that used to nest but do so no longer.”

  “Here?” stammered Dick, looking round at the row of cupboards that lined the walls of the saloon below the pictures.

  Mr Jemmerling laughed again. “No room here for a collection like mine,” he said. He got up from the table, came out from behind it, took Dick by the shoulder and marched him up to a bookcase.

  “Look at that,” he said, and pointed to a large fat book bound in crimson leather. On the back of it in gold lettering were the words, “Jemmerling Collection. Preliminary Catalogue.”

  “‘Preliminary’, mind you,” said Mr Jemmerling.

  “All those eggs …” stammered Dick, glancing back at the table.

  “Just a bit of what I’m working on this trip. Measurements. Average and extreme. There’s greater variety than you would think. I have eighteen Golden Eagle’s eggs. No other collection has such a range. And no two of those eggs are exactly alike.”

  Dick glanced away at the steps up out of the saloon. Never again would he be able to think of the Pterodactyl as of the sort of ship he and Dot would one day have for themselves. He almost wished he had never come aboard. His eyes went back to the table, to that long rack of eggs, puffins’ eggs, he thought they were, and he saw in his mind the puffins themselves, with their bright eyes and comic beaks. It was dreadful to think of them. And eighteen eggs of the Golden Eagle. Eighteen dead and empty shells with labels instead of those eighteen noble birds.

  “Are you a collector, too?” asked Mr Jemmerling kindly.

  “No,” said Dick.

  “Then what was it you wanted to say to me?”

  Dick hesitated only for a moment. He was a scientist first of all. He had to know. It was horrible to think that the owner of the Pterodactyl was an egg-collector, but the very pictures round the walls of the saloon told Dick that no one would be better able to settle his doubts about those birds. For twenty-four hours he had been waiting to ask his question. There could be no possible harm in asking it. The birds were far enough away and there was no need to say where he had seen them. He had only to show the picture in his notebook.

  “It’s this,” he said. “It’s a bird I saw. I wanted to be sure what it was. It’s a Diver. I know that, but … That’s what it looked like … Its head, I mean …” He opened his notebook and held it out for Mr Jemmerling to see. “It was a long way off,” he added. “I watched it through a telescope.”

  Mr Jemmerling looked at Dick’s drawing.

  “Great Northern Diver,” he said at once.

  “I thought it was,” said Dick, “but the picture in my book is very small.”

  “I can do better than a picture,” said Mr Jemmerling, and touched a bell-push at the side of his table. A bell rang somewhere in the ship and a moment later a sailor with “Pterodactyl” on his jersey came through a door into the saloon.

  “Great Northern Diver,” said Mr Jemmerling, and the sailor turned and went back into the forward part of the boat.

  “Yes,” said Mr Jemmerling, “I can do better than that. We’ve had three on this trip. One a very good specimen indeed.”

  The sailor was in the saloon again, handing to Mr Jemmerling the dried skin of a large bird. It was like a feathered balloon from which the air had escaped. There could not have been anything deader. Dick did not like looking at it, remembering the live bird he had seen, swimming, diving and fishing in the loch. But Mr Jemmerling had laid it flat on the table and was turning the neck for him to see.

  “There are your two sets of white markings. Yours is a good drawing. Nobody could mistake it. Far away? Pity you couldn’t let me know about it earlier. I leave for Glasgow tomorrow. Yes. It’s a Great Northern Diver all right. There are always a few stragglers hanging about. If you saw it well enough to make that drawing you must have had a pretty good view. What made you doubtful about it?”

  “I thought they didn’t nest further south than Iceland,” said Dick. “It says that in the big book I’ve got at home.”

  “No more they do,” said Mr Jemmerling. “That’s why we never see more than single birds. Migrants, staying late.”

  “But I saw two,” said Dick. “And they were nesting. I’ve only got a little book with me, and it says ‘Nests abroad’. That’s why I didn’t think they could be Great Northerns.”

  “WHAT?” exclaimed Mr Jemmerling.

  His whole attitude changed. He had been a great man, showing off to a visiting boy. Now he was something different. He looked hard at Dick, sat down, half stood up and sat down again. One of his hands, lying on the table, kept opening and closing.

  “Did I understand what you said?” he asked. “You saw a pair of Great Northern Divers nesting? Let me see that drawing of yours again.”

  Dick held out his notebook with the picture.

  “That other is a Black-throated Diver,” said Mr Jemmerling. “Did you make these drawings from the birds or did you copy them from a book?”

  “I made the Great Northern while I was looking at him,” said Dick.

  “What have you done with the eggs?” said Mr Jemmerling suddenly.

  “I didn’t actually see the eggs,” said Dick. “They were too far off. But I’m sure I wasn’t mistaken about the nesting. One of the Divers was sitting on the shore, close to the water….”

  “Mainland or island?”

  “Island.”

  “On the sea?”

  “No. In a loch.”

  “It’s impossible, but … Go on. What made you think they were nesting?”

  “One was sitting on the shore of the island, and the other one was fishing. I saw the fishing one first. Then I saw the one that was sitting move….”

  “How did it move?”

  “I thought at first it had been hurt,” said Dick. “It didn’t walk very well. It seemed to help itself with its wings.…”

  “They do, they do,” said Mr Jemmerling. “And then?”

  “It flopped down into the water, and after a bit one of them went back and struggled up out of the water and sat in the exact same place. I’m not sure if it was the same one or the one that I saw swimming first.”

  “How long were you watching them?”

  “I didn’t look at my watch,” said Dick.

  “An hour?”

  “Much more than that.”

  “And the bird that was sitting kept still all that time?”

  “All the time except that once when it came into the water.”

  “Where are they? I’ll come back with you at once….”

  “But … but …” Dick suddenly wished he had never asked his question. He picked up his notebook. “Thank you very much for telling me,” he said. “I’d been wanting to see them and then when I saw them I thought it was impossible because of the nesting.”

  “It is impossible … but it sounds to me as if it was true.” Mr Jemmerling’s eyes were glittering. “Credo quia impossibile. I believe you because it’s impossible. We won’t waste a minute. We’ll go there at once.”

  “But …” Dick wished more than ever that he had never come aboard the Pterodactyl.

  “Most important to prove it,” said Mr Jemmerling, “and we can’t do that without the eggs.”

  “But you wouldn’t take them?” Dick blurted out.

  “Eggs of the Great Northern Diver, found here for the first time! Don’t you see, man? Unique. Absolutely unique. It’ll mean that every bird-book so far written is out of date … Witherby, Coward, Morris, Evans … all the lot of them, confuted by the Jemmerling Collection … I’ll have the eggs, the actual nesting site, copied exactly … the birds themselves, shot in the presence of witnesses. You shall be a witness yourself and have your place in history. Proof. Proof. That is ev
erything. The incredible thing must be proved beyond all manner of doubt….”

  “But if you take the eggs and kill the birds they won’t be nesting here any more.”

  “What matters is to prove the new scientific fact that they have nested. There is an old saying, ‘What’s hit’s history: what’s missed’s mystery.’ We must have the proof, once and for all … In the Jemmerling Collection.”

  “Wouldn’t photographs prove it?” said Dick.

  “Certainly,” said Mr Jemmerling. “A photograph of the bird on the eggs would settle the point for ever … We’ll have a photograph and an exact model of the nest, the actual eggs and the actual birds. We’ll leave no loophole for any busybody in fifty years’ time to question authenticity.”

  Dick stood first on one foot and then on the other. He had got his answer and now he was only wanting to get away from the Pterodactyl as soon as he could.

  “I must go back now,” he said. “They told me to be as quick as possible because the dinghy’s wanted.”

  “Don’t you live here?” asked Mr Jemmerling.

  “No,” said Dick, glad to change the subject. “We’re on a cruise, and we’re going across tomorrow to give up the boat.”

  Mr Jemmerling went to a porthole and looked out across the harbour.

  “That cutter your ship?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Dick.

  “I’ve seen her before. Passed you at sea the day before yesterday.… And when did you see your birds?”

  “Yesterday,” said Dick before he could stop himself, and went on hurriedly. “Thank you very much for telling me what they were. I must go now.”

  But he had already said too much. Mr Jemmerling was between him and the way up out of the saloon.

  “They can’t be far away,” said Mr Jemmerling. “My boat does fifteen knots. I can bring you back as soon as you’ve shown me the place. Or how would you like to stay aboard? I was going to Glasgow tomorrow but a discovery like this alters any plans. You can sleep in the Pterodactyl and I’ll take you to Glasgow as soon as we’ve done our business. You’ll be there as soon as you could be in any sailing yacht.”