Dr. Grenfell's Parish Part 9

"'Tis hard t' believe, zur," he said. "Terrible hard."

"We were silent while he thought it over.

"What's the last harbour in the world?" he asked.

I hesitated.

"The very last, zur! They do say 'tis St. Johns. But, sure, zur, they must be something beyond. What do it be?" After a silence, he continued, speaking wistfully, "What's the last harbour in all the whole world, zur? Doesn't you know?"

It had been a raw day--gray and gusty, with the wind breaking over the island from a foggy sea: a sullen day. All day long there had been no rest from the deep harsh growl of the breakers. We were at tea in Aunt Amanda's cottage; the table was spread with dried caplin, bread and b.u.t.ter, and tea, for Aunt Amanda, the Scotsman who was of the harbour, and me. The harbour water was fretting under the windows as the swift gusts whipped over it; and beyond the narrows, where the sea was tumbling, the dusk was closing over the frothy waves. Out there a punt was reeling in from the Mad Mull fishing grounds; its brown sail was like a leaf driven by the wind. I saw the boat dart through the narrows to the sheltered water, and I sighed in sympathy with the man who was then furling his wet and fluttering sail, for I, too, had experienced the relief of sweeping from that waste of grasping waves to the sanctuary of the harbour.

"Do you think of the sea as a friend?" I asked Aunt Amanda.

She was a gray, stern woman, over whose face, however, a tender smile was used to flitting, the light lingered last in her faded eyes--the daughter, wife, and mother of punt fishermen. So she had dealt hand to hand with the sea since that night, long ago, when, as a wee maid, she first could reach the splitting-table by standing on a bucket. As a child she had tripped up the path to Lookout Head, to watch her father beat in from the grounds; as a maiden, she had courted when the moonlight was falling upon the ripples of Lower Harbour, and the punt was heaving to the spent swell of the open; as a woman she had kept watch on the moods of the sea, which had possessed itself of her hours of toil and leisure. In the end--may the day be long in coming--she will be taken to the little graveyard under the Lookout in a skiff.

Now, at my suggestion, she dropped her eyes to her ap.r.o.n, which she smoothed in an absent way. She seemed to search her life--all the terror, toil, and glory of it--for the answer. She was not of a kind to make light replies, and I knew that the word to come would be of vast significance.

"It do seem to me," she said, turning her eyes to the darkening water, "that the say is hungry for the lives o' men."

"Tut, woman!" cried the old Scotsman, his eyes all a-sparkle. "'Tis a libel on the sea. Why wull ye speak such trash to a stranger? Have ye never heard, sir, what the poet says?"

"Well," I began to stammer.

"Aye, man," said he, "they all babble about it. But have ye never read,

"'O, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried, And danced in triumph o'er the waters wide, The exulting sense, the pulse's maddening play, That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?'"

With that, the sentimental old fellow struck an att.i.tude. His head was thrown back; his eyes were flashing; his arm was rigid, and pointing straight through the window to that patch of white, far off in the gathering dark, where the sea lay raging. It ever took a poet to carry that old Scotsman off his feet--to sweep him to some high, cloudy place, where the things of life rearranged and decked themselves out to please his fancy. I confess, too, that his enthusiasm rekindled, for a moment, my third-reader interest in "a wet sheet and a flowing sea" and "a wind that follows fast." We have all loved well the sea of our fancy.

"Grand, woman!" he exclaimed, turning to Aunt Amanda, and still a-tremble. "Splendid!"

Aunt Amanda fixed him with her gray eye. "I don't know," she said, softly. "But I know that the say took me father from me when I was a wee maid."

The Scotsman bent his head over his plate, lower and lower still. His fervour departed, and his face, when he looked up, was full of sympathy. Of a sudden my ears hearkened again to the growling breakers, and to the wind, as it ran past, leaping from sea to wilderness; and my spirit felt the coming of the dark.

[Footnote 4: A scolding.]

[Footnote 5: Some miles distant.]

[Footnote 6: Sealing.]

XI

_WINTER PRACTICE_

It is, then, to the outporter, to the men of the fleet and to the Labrador liveyere that Doctor Grenfell devotes himself. The hospital at Indian Harbour is the centre of the Labrador activity; the hospital at St. Anthony is designed to care for the needs of the French sh.o.r.e folk; the hospital at Battle Harbour--the first established, and, possibly, the best equipped of all--receives patients from all directions, but especially from the harbours of the Strait and the Gulf. In the little hospital-ship, _Strathcona_, the doctor himself darts here and there and everywhere, all summer long, responding to calls, searching out the sick, gathering patients for the various hospitals. She is known to every harbour of the coast; and she is often overcrowded with sick bound to the hospitals for treatment or operation. Often, indeed, in cases of emergency, operations are performed aboard, while she tosses in the rough seas. She is never a moment idle while the waters are open. But in the fall, when navigation closes, she must go into winter quarters; and then the sick and starving are sought out by dog-team and komatik. There is no cessation of beneficent activity; there is merely a change in the manner of getting about. Summer journeys are hard enough, G.o.d knows!

But winter travel is a matter of much greater difficulty and hardship.

Not that the difficulty and hardship seem ever to be perceived by the mission-doctor; quite the contrary: there is if anything greater delight to be found in a wild, swift race over rotten or heaving ice, or in a night in the driving snow, than in running the _Strathcona_ through a nor'east gale. The Indian Harbour hospital is closed in the fall; so intense is the cold, so exposed the situation, so scarce the wood, so few the liveyeres, that it has been found unprofitable to keep it open. There is another way of meeting the needs of the situation; and that is by despatching the Battle Harbour doctor northward in midwinter. The folk know that he is bound towards them--know the points of call--can determine within a month the time of his arrival. So they bring the sick to these places--and patiently wait. This is a hard journey--made alone with the dogs. Many a night the doctor must get into his sleeping bag and make himself as comfortable as possible in the snow, snuggled close to his dogs, for the sake of the warmth of their bodies. Six hundred miles north in the dead of winter, six hundred miles back again; it takes a man of unchangeable devotion to undertake it!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE HOSPITAL AT BATTLE HARBOR"]

The Labrador dogs--pure and half-breed "huskies," with so much of the wolf yet in them that they never bark--are for the most part used by the doctor on his journeys. There would be no getting anywhere without them; and it must be said that they are magnificent animals, capable of heroic deeds. Every prosperous householder has at least six or eight full-grown sled-dogs and more puppies than he can keep track of.

In summer they lie everywhere under foot by day, and by night howl in a demoniacal fashion far and near; but they fish for themselves in shallow water, and are fat, and may safely be stepped over. In winter they are lean, desperately hungry, savage, and treacherous--in particular, a menace to the lives of children, whom they have been known to devour. There was once a father, just returned from a day's hunt on the ice, who sent his son to fetch a seal from the waterside; the man had forgotten for the moment that the dogs were roaming the night and very hungry--and so he lost both his seal and his son. The four-year-old son of the Hudson Bay Company's agent at Cartwright chanced last winter to fall down in the snow. He was at once set upon by the pack; and when he was rescued (his mother told me the story) he had forty-two ugly wounds on his little body. For many nights afterwards the dogs howled under the window where he lay moaning.

Eventually those concerned in the attack were hanged by the neck, which is the custom in such cases.

Once, when Dr. Grenfell was wintering at St. Anthony, on the French sh.o.r.e, there came in great haste from Conch, a point sixty miles distant, a komatik with an urgent summons to the bedside of a man who lay dying of hemorrhage. And while the doctor was preparing for this journey, a second komatik, despatched from another place, arrived with a similar message.

"Come at once," it was. "My little boy has broken his thigh."

The doctor chose first to visit the lad. At ten o'clock that night he was at the bedside. It had been a dark night--black dark: with the road precipitous, the dogs uncontrollable, the physician in great haste. The doctor thought, many a time, that there would be "more than one broken limb" by the time of his arrival. But there was no misadventure; and he found the lad lying on a settle, in great pain, wondering why he must suffer so.

"Every minute or two," says the doctor, "there would be a jerk, a flash of pain, and a cry to his father, who was holding him all the time."

The doctor was glad "to get the chloroform mask over the boy's face"--he is a sympathetic man, the doctor; glad, always, to ease pain. And at one o'clock in the morning the broken bone was set and the doctor had had a cup of tea; whereupon, he retired to a bed on the floor and a few hours' "watch below." At daylight, when he was up and about to depart, the little patient had awakened and was merrily calling to the doctor's little retriever.

"He was as merry as a cricket," says the doctor, "when I bade him good-bye."

About twelve hours on the way to Conch, where the man lay dying of hemorrhage--a two days' journey--the doctor fell in with a dog-train bearing the mail. And the mail-man had a letter--a hasty summons to a man in great pain some sixty miles in another direction. It was impossible to respond. "That call," says the doctor, sadly, "owing to sheer impossibility, was not answered." It was haste away to Conch, over the ice and snow--for the most of the time on the ice of the sea--in order that the man who lay dying there might be succoured. But there was another interruption. When the dog-train reached the coast, there was a man waiting to intercept it: the news of the doctor's probable coming had spread.

"I've a fresh team o' dogs," sir, said he, "t' take you t' the island.

There's a man there, an' he's wonderful sick."

Would the doctor go? Yes--he would go! But he had no sooner reached that point of the mainland whence he was bound across a fine stretch of ice to the island than he was again intercepted. It was a young man, this time, whose mother lay ill, with no other Protestant family living within fifty miles. Would the doctor help her? Yes--the doctor would; and did. And when he was about to be on his way again----

"Could you bear word," said the woman, "t' Mister Elliot t' come bury my boy? He said he'd come, sir; but now my little lad has been lying dead, here, since January."

It was then early in March. Mr. Elliot was a Protestant fisherman who was accustomed to bury the Protestant dead of that district. Yes--the doctor would bear word to him. Having promised this, he set out to visit the sick man on the island; for whom, also, he did what he could.

Off again towards Conch--now with fresh teams, which had been provided by the friends of the man who lay there dying. And by the way a man brought his little son for examination and treatment--"a lad of three years," says the doctor; "a bright, healthy, embryo fisherman, light-haired and blue-eyed, a veritable celt."

"And what's the matter with him?" was the physician's question.

"He've a club foot, sir," was the answer.

And so it turned out: the lad had a club foot. He was fond of telling his mother that he had a right foot and a wrong one. "The wrong one, mama," said he, "is no good." He was to be a cripple for life--utterly incapacitated: the fishing does not admit of club feet. But the doctor made arrangements for the child's transportation to the St. Anthony hospital, where he could, without doubt be cured; and then hurried on.