The Sea-Wolf
“I should prefer going with you,” she said in a low voice, in which there
was just a hint of appeal.
“I might be able to help you a—” her voice broke,—“a little. And if
anything should happen to you, think of me left here alone.”
“Oh, I intend being very careful,” I answered. “And I shall not go so
far but what I can get back before night. Yes, all said and done, I
think it vastly better for you to remain, and sleep, and rest and do
nothing.”
She turned and looked me in the eyes. Her gaze was unfaltering, but
soft.
“Please, please,” she said, oh, so softly.
I stiffened myself to refuse, and shook my head. Still she waited and
looked at me. I tried to word my refusal, but wavered. I saw the glad
light spring into her eyes and knew that I had lost. It was impossible
to say no after that.
The wind died down in the afternoon, and we were prepared to start the
following morning. There was no way of penetrating the island from our
cove, for the walls rose perpendicularly from the beach, and, on either
side of the cove, rose from the deep water.
Morning broke dull and grey, but calm, and I was awake early and had the
boat in readiness.
“Fool! Imbecile! Yahoo!” I shouted, when I thought it was meet to
arouse Maud; but this time I shouted in merriment as I danced about the
beach, bareheaded, in mock despair.
Her head appeared under the flap of the sail.
“What now?” she asked sleepily, and, withal, curiously.
“Coffee!” I cried. “What do you say to a cup of coffee? hot coffee?
piping hot?”
“My!” she murmured, “you startled me, and you are cruel. Here I have
been composing my soul to do without it, and here you are vexing me with
your vain suggestions.”
“Watch me,” I said.
From under clefts among the rocks I gathered a few dry sticks and chips.
These I whittled into shavings or split into kindling. From my note-book
I tore out a page, and from the ammunition box took a shot-gun shell.
Removing the wads from the latter with my knife, I emptied the powder on
a flat rock. Next I pried the primer, or cap, from the shell, and laid
it on the rock, in the midst of the scattered powder. All was ready.
Maud still watched from the tent. Holding the paper in my left hand, I
smashed down upon the cap with a rock held in my right. There was a puff
of white smoke, a burst of flame, and the rough edge of the paper was
alight.
Maud clapped her hands gleefully. “Prometheus!” she cried.
But I was too occupied to acknowledge her delight. The feeble flame must
be cherished tenderly if it were to gather strength and live. I fed it,
shaving by shaving, and sliver by sliver, till at last it was snapping
and crackling as it laid hold of the smaller chips and sticks. To be
cast away on an island had not entered into my calculations, so we were
without a kettle or cooking utensils of any sort; but I made shift with
the tin used for bailing the boat, and later, as we consumed our supply
of canned goods, we accumulated quite an imposing array of cooking
vessels.
I boiled the water, but it was Maud who made the coffee. And how good it
was! My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled sea-biscuit and
water. The breakfast was a success, and we sat about the fire much
longer than enterprising explorers should have done, sipping the hot
black coffee and talking over our situation.
I was confident that we should find a station in some one of the coves,
for I knew that the rookeries of Bering Sea were thus guarded; but Maud
advanced the theory—to prepare me for disappointment, I do believe, if
disappointment were to come—that we had discovered an unknown rookery.
She was in very good spirits, however, and made quite merry in accepting
our plight as a grave one.
“If you are right,” I said, “then we must prepare to winter here. Our
food will not last, but there are the seals. They go away in the fall,
so I must soon begin to lay in a supply of meat. Then there will be huts
to build and driftwood to gather. Also we shall try out seal fat for
lighting purposes. Altogether, we’ll have our hands full if we find the
island uninhabited. Which we shall not, I know.”
But she was right. We sailed with a beam wind along the shore, searching
the coves with our glasses and landing occasionally, without finding a
sign of human life. Yet we learned that we were not the first who had
landed on Endeavour Island. High up on the beach of the second cove from
ours, we discovered the splintered wreck of a boat—a sealer’s boat, for
the rowlocks were bound in sennit, a gun-rack was on the starboard side
of the bow, and in white letters was faintly visible _Gazelle_ No. 2.
The boat had lain there for a long time, for it was half filled with
sand, and the splintered wood had that weather-worn appearance due to
long exposure to the elements. In the stern-sheets I found a rusty
ten-gauge shot-gun and a sailor’s sheath-knife broken short across and so
rusted as to be almost unrecognizable.
“They got away,” I said cheerfully; but I felt a sinking at the heart and
seemed to divine the presence of bleached bones somewhere on that beach.
I did not wish Maud’s spirits to be dampened by such a find, so I turned
seaward again with our boat and skirted the north-eastern point of the
island. There were no beaches on the southern shore, and by early
afternoon we rounded the black promontory and completed the
circumnavigation of the island. I estimated its circumference at
twenty-five miles, its width as varying from two to five miles; while my
most conservative calculation placed on its beaches two hundred thousand
seals. The island was highest at its extreme south-western point, the
headlands and backbone diminishing regularly until the north-eastern
portion was only a few feet above the sea. With the exception of our
little cove, the other beaches sloped gently back for a distance of
half-a-mile or so, into what I might call rocky meadows, with here and
there patches of moss and tundra grass. Here the seals hauled out, and
the old bulls guarded their harems, while the young bulls hauled out by
themselves.
This brief description is all that Endeavour Island merits. Damp and
soggy where it was not sharp and rocky, buffeted by storm winds and
lashed by the sea, with the air continually a-tremble with the bellowing
of two hundred thousand amphibians, it was a melancholy and miserable
sojourning-place. Maud, who had prepared me for disappointment, and who
had been sprightly and vivacious all day, broke down as we landed in our
own little cove. She strove bravely to hide it from me, but while I was
kindling another fire I knew she was stifling her sobs in the blankets
under the sail-tent.
It was my turn to be cheerful, and I played the part to the best of my
ability, and with such success that I brought the laughter back into her
dear eyes and song on her lips; for she sang to me before she went to an
early bed. It was the first time I had heard her sing, and I lay by the
fire, listening and transported, for she was nothing if not an artist in
everything she did, and her voice, though not strong, was wonderfully
sweet and expressive.
I still slept in the boat, and I lay awake long that night, gazing up at
the first stars I had seen in many nights and pondering the situation.
Responsibility of this sort was a new thing to me. Wolf Larsen had been
quite right. I had stood on my father’s legs. My lawyers and agents had
taken care of my money for me. I had had no responsibilities at all.
Then, on the _Ghost_ I had learned to be responsible for myself. And
now, for the first time in my life, I found myself responsible for some
one else. And it was required of me that this should be the gravest of
responsibilities, for she was the one woman in the world—the one small
woman, as I loved to think of her.
CHAPTER XXX
No wonder we called it Endeavour Island. For two weeks we toiled at
building a hut. Maud insisted on helping, and I could have wept over her
bruised and bleeding hands. And still, I was proud of her because of it.
There was something heroic about this gently-bred woman enduring our
terrible hardship and with her pittance of strength bending to the tasks
of a peasant woman. She gathered many of the stones which I built into
the walls of the hut; also, she turned a deaf ear to my entreaties when I
begged her to desist. She compromised, however, by taking upon herself
the lighter labours of cooking and gathering driftwood and moss for our
winter’s supply.
The hut’s walls rose without difficulty, and everything went smoothly
until the problem of the roof confronted me. Of what use the four walls
without a roof? And of what could a roof be made? There were the spare
oars, very true. They would serve as roof-beams; but with what was I to
cover them? Moss would never do. Tundra grass was impracticable. We
needed the sail for the boat, and the tarpaulin had begun to leak.
“Winters used walrus skins on his hut,” I said.
“There are the seals,” she suggested.
So next day the hunting began. I did not know how to shoot, but I
proceeded to learn. And when I had expended some thirty shells for three
seals, I decided that the ammunition would be exhausted before I acquired
the necessary knowledge. I had used eight shells for lighting fires
before I hit upon the device of banking the embers with wet moss, and
there remained not over a hundred shells in the box.
“We must club the seals,” I announced, when convinced of my poor
marksmanship. “I have heard the sealers talk about clubbing them.”
“They are so pretty,” she objected. “I cannot bear to think of it being
done. It is so directly brutal, you know; so different from shooting
them.”
“That roof must go on,” I answered grimly. “Winter is almost here. It
is our lives against theirs. It is unfortunate we haven’t plenty of
ammunition, but I think, anyway, that they suffer less from being clubbed
than from being all shot up. Besides, I shall do the clubbing.”
“That’s just it,” she began eagerly, and broke off in sudden confusion.
“Of course,” I began, “if you prefer—”
“But what shall I be doing?” she interrupted, with that softness I knew
full well to be insistence.
“Gathering firewood and cooking dinner,” I answered lightly.
She shook her head. “It is too dangerous for you to attempt alone.”
“I know, I know,” she waived my protest. “I am only a weak woman, but
just my small assistance may enable you to escape disaster.”
“But the clubbing?” I suggested.
“Of course, you will do that. I shall probably scream. I’ll look away
when—”
“The danger is most serious,” I laughed.
“I shall use my judgment when to look and when not to look,” she replied
with a grand air.
The upshot of the affair was that she accompanied me next morning. I
rowed into the adjoining cove and up to the edge of the beach. There
were seals all about us in the water, and the bellowing thousands on the
beach compelled us to shout at each other to make ourselves heard.
“I know men club them,” I said, trying to reassure myself, and gazing
doubtfully at a large bull, not thirty feet away, upreared on his
fore-flippers and regarding me intently. “But the question is, How do
they club them?”
“Let us gather tundra grass and thatch the roof,” Maud said.
She was as frightened as I at the prospect, and we had reason to be
gazing at close range at the gleaming teeth and dog-like mouths.
“I always thought they were afraid of men,” I said.
“How do I know they are not afraid?” I queried a moment later, after
having rowed a few more strokes along the beach. “Perhaps, if I were to
step boldly ashore, they would cut for it, and I could not catch up with
one.” And still I hesitated.