it seems, went along tranquilly with him the following winter. As
usual he kept his watch and ward on the cliffs by the Red Island
Shoals. Then the fatal 10th of April came round. Once again it broke
upon the solitary figure of the old man straining his eyes from his
coign of vantage on the dread shoals of the Red Islands.
Unquestionably he saw again reenacted there the weird tragedy that
nearly half a century before had broken his life, bringing home with a
strange fascination the moving picture to his very heart. But with it
this spring he witnessed also a scene that for many years every man on
the coast had prayed for, but no man had been privileged to take part
in. The wind had come out of the Straits and the Gulf ice was driving
swiftly towards the great Atlantic, exactly as it had done on the
memorable day now forty years before. Once again there was ice in huge
sheets jammed against the great cliffs of Belle Isle, and clear water
between. Suddenly the straining eyes of the old sailor shone with a
totally new light. He jumped to his feet, and with hands shading his
starting eyes, stood motionless like a statue on the pedestal of his
lookout, now white as the purest marble in its winter mantle.
Was it age? Or the final break-up of his mind? No, neither--he was
certain of it. There were black things moving on the white ice, and
driving with it once more, just as the Manxman had, straight for the
shoals of the Red Islands. Nearer and nearer they came. There could be
no doubt now. They moved. They could be no land debris, no shadows
from the rafted ice sheets. So quickly was the floe running that just
as he remembered it, before anything could be done, clip! and the
advancing edge had again struck the standing ice, and woe betide
anything that was in or on it, anywhere near the line of contact. As a
dazed mouse watches the cat that is toying with it, the rigid figure
on the hilltop gazed at the impending tragedy--too far off for his
material brain correctly to interpret the image on his actual retina.
He was seeing, though he failed to realize it, the same impress that
emotion had recorded on the tablets of his very soul.
The realism of it was too much for human nature, and Uncle Rube, his
hands covering his face, started running homewards over the familiar
pathway he had trodden so often. Even as he reached the cottage in the
gulch he was aware of loud shouting, and of a team of huskies
literally tearing over the snow. They were making as if to pass his
house without stopping, as no man ever did that lonely spot, if only
for the cup of tea and the moment's "spell," and the kindly stimulus
of the old man's company. Yes, the driver was shouting, shouting to
him. "Ships, Uncle Rube!"--"What is it?"--"Ships on the ice!" the old
man heard. Didn't he know it only too well?
Another moment and the modern Paul Revere, with dogs for horses and
ice and snow for a highway, was flying on his self-imposed journey,
carrying his slogan from house to house and village to village along
the sparsely inhabited coast-line. As Uncle Rube opened his door and
peered into the little room, to his infinite joy he saw the golden
curls in their proper place on the old settle by the stove, while the
regular quiet breathing assured him that the child had not yet waked
from sleep. As he softly tiptoed around, seeking the outfit he needed
for his great adventure, the barrenness of the house, the poverty of
it, struck him for the first time. God knows he had never thought of
"things," except as he had needed them for himself or others; and now
he wished suddenly that he had more of them for the child's sake.
Suppose, now that his "day" had at last arrived, he should not return
from the long-looked-for quest. He became strangely conscious that he
had nothing laid up for his darling, the child who now filled the
whole horizon of his cramped life. Her very clothes were in tatters.
The Indian shawl, that I had seen pressed into the service against his
enemy the Frost King, was now only a thing of rags and patches. Were
it not for his own big coat, even at this moment his Princess would be
shivering with cold. Furtively he glanced round for his rope and gaff,
relics of the last time he had gone on the ice. All these years he had
kept them ready for "the day," never able to break the spell woven
around them on the ill-fated Manxman. There was his nonny-bag, in it
already the sugar and oatmeal, the ration of pork, and the small
bottle of brandy, that each year he kept ready when the 10th of March
came round--the day on which the sealers leave for the ice fields. The
new idea that his life was of value for the child's sake sent a
half-guilty feeling through him, lest he be caught looking at these
implements, where they lay with his old converted flintlock gun on the
rack above the still glowing stove. Sh! The child on the settle
muttered something in her sleep, and the old man, rigid as an ice
block, stood listening to her breathing, as if he were a burglar
robbing a rich man's bedroom, in which the owner himself lay sleeping.
But she quieted down again, and once more he breathed freely.
At last he was ready, all but the big coat. Well, he could do without
that. If he were not back before dark the difference it would make
would anyhow be negligible. There was no time to delay. He must go now
or never; and the indomitable old warrior stooped over to kiss the
child good-bye, though he dare only touch with his lips the golden
hair, for fear of waking her. Then in his simple way he breathed a
wordless prayer, committing her to God's keeping, and, stealthily
letting himself out, made straight for the likeliest part of the
headland from which to take the ice.
As one thinks now of that old man setting out alone over that endless
ocean of ice, one wonders if one has one's self ever attempted
anything heroic. But Uncle Rube thought only of one thing that
morning--of foiling his arch enemy on the Red Island Shoals; and
though nearly fourscore years had passed over him, he felt like a lad
of twenty as he strode rapidly along towards the landwash.
Of course he must haul his boat, but that he could easily do. Had he
not built her himself expressly, small, and of half-inch planking over
the lightest of frames, with two bilge streaks to act as runners, and
flat-bottomed that she should drag well over snow? When at length he
had launched her over the "ballicater" ice, and had pulled her clear
of the cracks by the landwash, he stopped and spent a grudgingly
spared moment in lighting his pipe. Then, heigho, and away for the
open sea--out on to which he marched with his head erect and his old
heart dauntless, like the peaceful Minute-Men of 1776.
Meanwhile an ever-increasing crowd of men, women, and even children
were pouring from apparently nowhere out on to the floe. The young men
were "copying," as we say, over the ice, that is, jumping from pan to
pan as they ventured far out from the land seeking the seals which the
running ice, driving out before the wind, had brought down from the
Gulf, and then killing them, and hauling them back into safety.
It was from them that I subsequently learned the story of the day.
Before night fell the wind had risen, and blew directly from the land.
Snow began to fall soon after midday, and by sundown a living blizzard
howled over the frozen ocean. None of the distant neighbors had seen
Uncle Rube set out; none of them even knew that he had left his
house; no one before ever heard of his doing such a thing as start
out on the ice alone. Nor was it till the next day that a half-frozen
little girl, who was heard crying in the snow in front of a neighbor's
house, disclosed the secret that Uncle Rube was missing.
How had they known at all that there were seals on the ice that day?
Known? Why, Mark Seaforth had gone all along the coast telling them
early in the morning. He had got the news from the lighthouse, and it
was the oldest of customs to give all hands a chance whenever the
seals were sighted driving alongshore.
It had not been the material ear drum to which the old man had
listened for his sailing orders. On that day especially he had heard
with other ears, and all the coast freed Mark from any blame for the
old sailor's having understood "ships" instead of "seals."
Late in the sealing season of that same year the good ship Artemis, a
stout, steel-sheathed ice hunter, a unit of the modern fleet that have
long ago displaced the wooden schooners that once in hundreds followed
the seal herds, was steaming north to finish up shooting old harps in
the swatches, having lost a number of her pans in bad weather farther
south. Seals were scarce on the west side, and the wireless had warned
the skipper that a patch of old seals was passing eastward through the
Straits. Cape Bauld Light had been sighted, and so also had the new
light on Belle Isle. The barrelmen were eagerly scanning the ice for
any signs of the expected herd.
"Something black on the ice on the port bow!" shouted the man from the
foretop.
"Where away?" answered the master of the bridge.
"About four points to the northwest."
"Hard astarboard!" from the bridge.
"Starboard hard!" from the wheel, and the big ship wheeled a course
direct for the Red Island Shoals.
"Steady!" from the bridge.
"Steady it is!" And the Artemis wheeled a little more, and leaving the
shoals on her right, steamed towards the object that had attracted the
attention of the watch. The bridge master, viewing it through his
glasses, suddenly stopped short, fixing his gaze on the spot with far
more than his wonted intensity.
"What is it, John?" he said to the watchman. "Seems queer to me. It's
no seal, I'll swear."
John took the glasses, and, putting them to his eyes, made out at once
what the object was.
"'T is a small boat upside down--and yes, there's a man's body for
certain, stretched out beside it," he announced in a subdued voice.
"Go slow!" to the engine man.
"Slow!" rang back the watchful engineer.
"Stop her!" and over the side went half a dozen men.
"Take that hatch over, and bring in the man off the ice."
All the crew, some three hundred blackened figures, were now leaning
over the rail to see the evidence of this latest tragedy. No one knew
him, or could even guess where he and his boat had come from, or on
what strange quest he had been bound. Those ice pans might have come
from anywhere along the hundreds of miles between Anticosti and Cape
Chidley. To these men, it was just the body of an old man, a stranger.
Not much loss. He could not have lived many more years, anyhow.
Probably no one would miss him. No need to trouble over it. A prompt
burial at sea, thought the captain, would be as good as on the land,
where a grave was an impossibility now, anyhow. Besides, he was
obviously an old seaman, and what could be more appropriate? Moreover,
the crew would rather have it so than to carry the corpse around while
they were seal-hunting.
There was no parson aboard, but the skipper was a God-fearing man. So
the flags were hauled to half-mast, the ship hove to the wind, the
crew called on deck just as they were, and when the skipper had read a
brief prayer, "in sure and certain hope" the body of Uncle Reuben
Marston, vanquished by his enemy at last, was committed to the deep
within a biscuit toss of the Red Island Shoals.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.
End of Project Gutenberg's Labrador Days, by Wilfred Thomason Grenfell