Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North Part 8

"It hurts something wonderful!" they would cry, brave men as they were. "Can't ye give me something to stop it? 'Twere better dead than this!"

It was hard to get down into the hold at all, for the ladders were gone, and as the vessel rocked the seals and the coal were sloshing about below-decks where the men lay sprawled among them.

"Is anybody here?" the Doctor would call, as he poked into a dark angle.

No answer.

He would try again. "Any one in here?" There might be a fitful wail from a far corner. Then the Doctor would have to clamber over and round the casks and throw aside potato sacks and boxes. Sometimes his patients, in a sodden stupor, hidden away at the bottom of everything, could not be found at all.

In these filthy, reeking holds, enduring all discomforts for the sake of perhaps a hundred dollars payable weeks hence, the men somehow recovered from their ailments and throve and grew fat on pork and seal meat, fried with onions. Whenever the rats were especially noisy, the wise ones said it meant a gale: but sometimes the rats and the wise men were wrong. It was no place for a man with a weak stomach, that gallant little sealing-steamer!

On Sunday the men religiously refused to go out on the ice, though the seals tantalizingly frolicked all about them. The seals seemed to know how the pious Newfoundlander observes the Lord's Day. The animals stared at the ship and the ship stared back at them. Then in great glee the seals took to their perpetual water-sports, in which they are as adept as the penguins of the Antarctic.

"I have marveled greatly," Grenfell says, "how it is possible for any hot-blooded creature to enjoy so immensely this terribly cold water as do these old seals. They paddle about, throw themselves on their backs, float and puff out their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, flapping their flippers like paws over their chests."

While they lay off Fogo Island, watching the seals, the great pans of ice, rising and falling with the heaving of the sea, beat on the stout sides of the _Neptune_ as on a drum-head. Sometimes to avoid an awful drubbing the _Neptune_ would steam a little ahead, very much as a swimmer dives into a breaker to cleave it before it combs over and carries him off his feet. Grenfell himself, loving a bout with "the bright eyes of danger," left the ship and went out on the ice and tried to climb one of the bergs, stranded in the midst of the ice-pack. It was like a living thing striving to fight its way out--something like a polar bear surrounded by "husky" dogs worrying him and trying to pull him down.

As a sky-sc.r.a.per gives to the wind, the berg was rocked to and fro--eight feet or so with every wave that struck it. It fell on the pans like a great trip-hammer, backed away and came on again, the ice groaning as though it were a living creature in mortal agony. As pieces fell off into the sea the waves leapt up, the way wolves might leap about a running caribou. In such a battle of the ice with the ice, a man knows what a pigmy he is, measured against the mightiest natural forces.

The _Neptune_ escaped a ramming--but her neighbor, the _Wolf_, was not so lucky. The _Wolf_ had rounded Fogo Island in an offsh.o.r.e wind that treacherously offered her a clear channel close to the land. As soon as she got round, the north wind, as though a demon impelled it, brought the ice crashing back and pinned her fast. An immense floe of ice, ma.s.sing in upon the doomed ship, piled higher and higher above the bulwarks.

"Get the boats onto the pans!" Captain Kean shouted to his men. It is just what they have had to do on many an Arctic expedition when the ice has nipped them.

They took their food and clothes--but Captain Kean, the last to leave the ship, of course--saved nothing of his own except his life. And it was the closest possible call for him. Just after he jumped, the ice opened like the Red Sea parting for the hosts of Pharaoh. Down went the _Wolf_ like a stone, and as she tossed and heaved and gurgled in her death-throes the ends of her spars caught on the edges of the ice and were broken off as if they were match-wood. The sea seems to dance above such a wreck with a personal, malicious vengeance.

It was the old, sad story for the captain and his men. They would have to walk ash.o.r.e, three hundred of them, over the miles of cruel ice. At home, their wives and children would be waiting and hoping for a grand success and a good time. Instead, after a forced and weary march of days,--going perhaps three hundred miles,--with much rowing and camping, father or brother would stagger in, his little pack of poor belongings on his sore shoulders, and throw it down, and say with a great sob: "'Tis all I've brought ye!"

It is a pitiful thing indeed for a man to have traveled hundreds of miles to board a ship, in the hope of a few dollars for the risk of his life, and then to have the sea swallow up his chance, and turn him loose to the ice and snow, a ruined man. When a captain loses his ship, whatever the reason, it is almost impossible for him to obtain a command again.

IV

HAULED BY THE HUSKIES

There was great excitement at the little village of St. Anthony, on the far northern tip of Newfoundland.

Tom Bradley was coming back from a seal-hunt, and his big dogs Jim and Jack were helping him drag a flipper seal big enough to give a slice of the fat to every man, woman and child in the place.

Tom had a large family, and for nine days they had tasted nothing but a little roasted seal meat.

Finally Tom took his gun down from the nails over the door. It was a single-barrel muzzle-loader, meant for a boy, but he was a good shot, and had often wandered out alone over the frozen sea and come back with a nice fat bird or even a seal to show for it.

"Where be you goin', Tom?" asked his anxious wife.

"Out yonder." He jerked his thumb toward the wide white s.p.a.ce of the ice-locked ocean.

She ran to get his warm cap and mittens. "When'll you be back?"

"I dunno. Not till I get a seal. Us has got to have somethin' to eat, an' have it soon."

She found an old flour-bag, and tied up in it a few crusts of bread.

"You'd ought to keep this here," said Tom.

"No, Tom. You can't hunt without nothin' to eat. We'll manage somehow.

We'll borrow."

"Ain't n.o.body to borrow from," answered Tom. "Ain't n.o.body round here got nothin'. We uns is all starvin'. Hope Sandy Maule's letter gits to that there Dr. Grenfell."

"Who's Dr. Grenfell?"

"He's a doctor comin' out here from England. He's goin' to help us."

"Will he have anythin' to eat?"

"Yes--he'll have suthin'. But he's got lots o' friends in England an'

America--an' he can get 'em to send things."

"What'd Sandy Maule write?"

Tom was poking a bit of greasy cloth through the gun with a ramrod.

Everything depended on the way that gun worked. He mustn't miss a shot--there was no fun in that long, hard hunt on the ice that lay ahead of him.

"Sandy Maule wrote, 'Please, Doctor, come and start a station here for us if you can. My family and I are starvin'. All the folks around us are starvin' too. The fish hain't struck in and bit like they should.

We're cuttin' pieces outa the sides o' our rubber boots an' tyin' 'em on for shoes.' Things like that, Sandy writ to the Doctor."

Mrs. Bradley drew the sleeve of her thin, worn calico dress across her eyes. She was a brave woman, but her strength was nearly gone. She did not want her husband to see her cry.

"It's all of it true," she said. "If I could only get a little fresh milk to give the baby! Might as well ask for the moon."

She did not speak bitterly. She would stay by her man and live for her children to the end.

"Well," said Tom, trying to sound matter-of-fact, "we'll go out with the ole gun an' see what we get." Not one of the little boys was old enough to go, but the dogs Jim and Jack leaped up, wagging their tails and fawning upon their master.

Tom had only part of a dog-team: when he or his neighbors made a long trip they borrowed from one another. What one had, they all had.

As Tom stood looking at the dogs, he couldn't help thinking: "One of those dogs would keep the family alive for a while. But I sure would hate to kill one of the poor brutes. They've been the best friends we ever had." His wife knew what he was thinking, though the dogs did not.

Then he spoke. "Gimme a kiss, wifey." He smiled at her brightly.

"Cheer up. This little ole gun and me'll bring ye enough to eat for a long time."

She kissed him, and off he trudged, the dogs leaping beside him and trying to lick his mittened hands.

Away out yonder on the ice was a little black speck. He strained his eyes to see.

"There's one!" he muttered. "Now, how to get up near enough. If the dogs comes with me they'll sure scare it away--it'll go poppin' into its old blow-hole afore I kin git it."