_In Which Timothy Light's Famished Dogs Are Committed to the Hands
of Billy Topsail and a Tap on the Snout is Recommended in the
Probable Case of Danger_
It is no great trick to make Tight Cove of the Labrador from the sea.
There is no chart, of course. Nor is any chart of the little harbours
needed for safe sailing, as long as the songs of the coast are preserved
in the heads of the skippers that sail it. And so you may lay with
confidence a bit west of north from the Cape Norman light--and raise and
round the Scotchman's Breakfast of Ginger Head: whereupon a straightaway
across Schooner Bay to the Thimble, and, upon nearer approach to the
harbour water of the Cove--
When Bill Pott's P'int you is abreast,
Dane's Rock bears due west;
An' west-nor'west you must steer,
'Til Brimstone Head do appear.
The tickle's narrow, not very wide;
The deepest water's on the starboard side;
When in the harbour you is shot,
Four fathoms you has got--
and there you are: harboured within stone's throw of thirty hospitable
cottages, with their stages and flakes clustered about, like offspring,
and all clinging to the cliffs with the grip of a colony of mussels.
They encircle the quiet, deep water of the Cove, lying in a hollow of
Bill Pott's Point, Dane's Rock, and the little head called Brimstone.
Winter was near done, at Tight Cove, when Doctor Luke made the lights of
the place from the north. Presently the sun and southwesterly winds of
spring would spread the coast with all the balmy, sudden omens of summer
weather, precisely as the first blast from the north, in a single night
of the fall of the year, had blanketed the land with snow, and tucked it
in, with enduring frost, for the winter to come. With these warm winds,
the ice in Schooner Bay would move to sea, with the speed of a thief in
flight. It would break up and vanish in a night, with all that was on it
(including the folk who chanced to be caught on it)--a great, noisy
commotion, and swift clearing out, this removal to the open.
And the ice would drift in, again, with contrary winds, and choke the
bay, accompanied by Arctic ice from the current beyond, and depart and
come once more, and take leave, in a season of its own willful choosing,
for good and all. When Doctor Luke made off across the bay, leaving
Teddy Brisk to follow, by means of Timothy Light's komatik and scrawny
dogs, Schooner Bay had already gone rotten, in a spell of southerly
weather. The final break-up was restrained only by an interval of
unseasonable frost.
A favourable wind would tear the field loose from the cliffs and urge it
to sea.
* * * * *
Teddy Brisk could not go at once to Doctor Luke's hospital at Our
Harbour. There came a mild spell--the wind went to the south and west in
the night; a splashing fall of tepid southern rain swept the dry white
coats in gusts and a melting drizzle; and, following on these untimely
showers, a day or two of sunshine and soft breezes set the roofs
smoking, the icicles dissolving, the eaves running little streams of
water, the cliffs dripping a promise of shy spring flowers, and packed
the snow and turned the harbour roads to slush, and gathered pools and
shallow lakes of water on the rotting ice of the bay.
Schooner Bay was impassable; the trail was deep and sticky and
treacherous--a broken, rotten, imminently vanishing course. And
sea-ward, in the lift of the waves, vast fragments of the field were
shaking themselves free and floating off; and the whole wide body of
ice, from Rattle Brook, at the bottom of the bay, to the great heads of
Thimble and the Scotchman's Breakfast, was striving to break away to the
open under the urge of the wind.
Teddy Brisk's adventure to Our Harbour must wait for frost and still
weather; and wait it did--until in a shift of the weather there came a
day when all that was water was frozen stiff overnight, and the wind
fell away to a doubtful calm, and the cliffs of Ginger Head were a loom
in the frosty distance across the bay.
"Pack that lad, mum," said Skipper Thomas then. "'Tis now or never."
"I don't like the look of it," the mother complained.
"I warns you, mum--you're too fond o' that lad."
"I'm anxious. The bay's rotten. You knows that, sir--a man as old as
you. Another southerly wind would shatter----"
"Ecod! You'll coddle that wee lad t' death."
Teddy Brisk's mother laughed.
"Not me!" said she.
A cunning idea occurred to Skipper Thomas.
"Or cowardice!" he grumbled.
Teddy Brisk's mother started. She stared in doubt at old Skipper Thomas.
Her face clouded. She was grim.
"I'd do nothin' so wicked as that, sir," said she. "I'll pack un up."
* * * * *
It chanced that Timothy Light was sunk in a melancholy regard of his
physical health when Skipper Thomas went to arrange for the dogs. He was
discovered hugging a red-hot bogie in his bachelor cottage of turf and
rough-hewn timber by the turn to Sunday-School Hill. And a woebegone old
fellow he was: a sight to stir pity and laughter--with his bottles and
plasters, his patent-medicine pamphlets, his drawn, gloomy countenance,
and his determination to "draw off" the indisposition by way of his
lower extremities with a plaster of renowned power.
"Nothin' stronger, Skipper Thomas, knowed t' the science o' medicine an'
the"--Skipper Timothy did not hesitate over the obstacle--"the
prac-t'-tie-on-ers thereof," he groaned; "an' she've begun t' pull too.
Ecod! but she's drawin'! Mm-m-m! There's power for you! An' if she don't
pull the pain out o' the toes o' my two feet"--Skipper Timothy's feet
were swathed in plaster; his pain was elsewhere; the course of its exit
was long--"I'm free t' say that nothin' will budge my complaint. Mm-m!
Ecod! b'y, but she've sure begun t' draw!"
Skipper Timothy bade Skipper Thomas sit himself down, an' brew himself a
cup o' tea, an' make himself t' home, an' feel free o' the place, the
while he should entertain and profit himself with observing the
operation of the plaster of infallible efficacy in the extraction of
pain.
"What's gone wrong along o' you?" Skipper Thomas inquired.
"I been singin' pretty hearty o' late," Skipper Timothy moaned--he was
of a musical turn and given frequently to a vigorous recital of the
Psalms and Paraphrases--"an' I 'low I've strained my stummick."
Possibly Skipper Timothy could not distinguish, with any degree of
scientific accuracy, between the region of his stomach and the region of
his lungs--a lay confusion, perhaps, in the matter of terms and
definite boundaries; he had been known to mistake his liver for his
heart in the indulgence of a habit of pessimistic diagnosis. And whether
he was right in this instance or not, and whatever the strain involved
in his vocal effort, which must have tried all the muscles concerned, he
was now coughing himself purple in the face--a symptom that held its
mortal implication of the approach of what is called the lung trouble
and the decline.
The old man was not fit for the trail--no cruise to Our Harbour for him
next day; he was on the stocks and out of commission. Ah, well, then,
would he trust his dogs? Oh, aye; he would trust his team free an'
willin'. An' might Billy Topsail drive the team? Oh, aye; young Billy
Topsail might drive the team an' he had the spirit for the adventure.
Let Billy Topsail keep un down--_keep the brutes down_, ecod!--and no
trouble would come of it.
"A tap on the snout t' mend their manners," Skipper Timothy advised. "A
child can overcome an' manage a team like that team o' ten."
And so it was arranged that Billy Topsail should drive Teddy Brisk to
Our Harbour next day.