_In Which the Wind Goes to Work, the Ice Behaves in an Alarming Way,
Billy Topsail Regrets, for Obvious Reasons, Having to Do with the
Dogs, that He Had Not Brought an Axe, and Teddy Brisk Protests that
His Mother Knew Precisely What She was Talking About_
Well, now, Teddy Brisk fell asleep, and presently, too, Billy Topsail,
in his wolfskin bag, got the better of his anxious watch on the wind and
toppled off. The dogs were already asleep, each covered with a
slow-fashioning blanket of snow--ten round mounds, with neither snout
nor hair to show. The fire failed: it was dark; and the wind blew
up--and higher. A bleak place, this, on Schooner Bay, somewhere between
the Thimble and the Scotchman's Breakfast of Ginger Head; yet there was
no hardship in the night--no shivering, blue agony of cold, but full
measure of healthful comfort. The dogs were warm in their coverings of
snow and Billy Topsail was warm in his wolfskin bag; and Teddy Brisk,
in his dogskin robes, was in a flush and soft sweat of sound sleep, as
in his cot in the cottage by Jack-in-the-Box, at Tight Cove.
It was a gale of wind by this time. The wind came running down the bay
from Rattle Brook; and it tore persistently at the ice, urging it out.
It was a matter of twenty miles from the Thimble, across Schooner Bay,
to the Scotchman's Breakfast of Ginger Head, and a matter of thirty
miles inland to Rattle Brook--wherefrom you may compute the area of the
triangle for yourself and bestir your own imagination, if you can, to
apply the pressure of a forty-mile gale to the vast rough surface of the
bay.
Past midnight the ice yielded to the irresistible urge of the wind.
Crack! The noise of the break zigzagged in the distance and approached,
and shot past near by, and rumbled away like a crash of brittle thunder.
Billy Topsail started awake. There was a crackling confusion--in the
dark, all roundabout, near and far--like the crumpling of an infinitely
gigantic sheet of crisp paper: and then nothing but the sweep and
whimper of the wind--those familiar, unportentous sounds, in their mild
monotony, like dead silence in contrast with the first splitting roar of
the break-up.
Billy Topsail got out of his wolfskin bag. The dogs were up; they were
terrified--growling and bristling; and they fawned close to Billy, as
dogs will to a master in a crisis of ghostly fear. Billy drove them off;
he whipped them into the dark. The ice had broken from the cliffs and
was split in fields and fragments. It would move out and go abroad with
the high southwest wind. That was bad enough, yet not, perhaps, a mortal
predicament--the wind would not run out from the southwest forever; and
an escape ashore from a stranded floe would be no new thing in the
experience of the coast. To be marooned on a pan of ice, however, with
ten famishing dogs of unsavoury reputation, and for God only knew how
long--it taxed a man's courage to contemplate the inevitable adventure!
A man could not corner and kill a dog at a time; a man could not even
catch a dog--not on a roomy pan of ice, with spaces for retreat. Nor
could a man escape from a dog if he could not escape from the pan; nor
could a man endure, in strength and wakefulness, as long as a dog. Billy
Topsail saw himself attempt the death of one of the pack--the pursuit
of Cracker, for example, with a club torn from the komatik. Cracker
would easily keep his distance and paw the ice, head down, eyes alert
and burning; and Cracker would withdraw and dart out of reach, and
swerve away. And Smoke and Tucker and Scrap, and the rest of the pack,
would all the while be creeping close behind, on the lookout for a fair
opportunity.
No; a man could not corner and kill a dog at a time. A man could not
beat a wolf in the open; and these dogs, which roamed the timber and
sprang from it, would maneuver like wolves--a patient waiting for some
lapse from caution or the ultimate moment of weakness; and then an
overwhelming rush. Billy Topsail knew the dogs of his own coast. He knew
his own dogs; all he did not know about his own dogs was that Cracker
had been concerned in a dubious affair on the ice off the Tall Old Man.
These dogs had gone on short rations for a month. When the worst came to
the worst--the pan at sea--they would attack.
Teddy Brisk, too, was wide awake. A thin little plaint broke in on Billy
Topsail's reflections.
"Is you there, Billy?"
"Aye, I'm here. You lie still, Teddy."
"What's the matter with the dogs, Billy?"
"They're jus' a bit restless. Never you mind about the dogs. I'll manage
the dogs."
"You didn't fetch your axe, did you, Billy?"
"Well, no, Skipper Teddy--no; I didn't."
"That's what I thought. Is the ice broke loose?"
"Ah, now, Teddy, never you mind about the ice."
"Is she broke loose?"
"Ah, well--maybe she have broke loose."
"She'll move t' sea in this wind, won't she?"
"Never you mind----"
"Won't she?"
"Ah, well, she may take a bit of a cruise t' sea."
Teddy Brisk said nothing to this. An interval of silence fell. And then
Teddy plaintively again:
"My mother said----"
Billy Topsail's rebuke was gentle:
"You isn't goin' t' cry for your mother, is you?"
"Oh, I isn't goin' t' cry for my mother!"
"Ah, no! You isn't. No growed man would."
"All I want t' say," said Teddy Brisk in a saucy flash of pride, "is
that my mother was right!"