Blackstrap Hawco (12 page)

‘We be da highliner dis year, Cap'n,' Critch enthused, drawing a
celebratory cigarette from his packet of Gems, a luxury soon to be exhausted.

‘A fit year,' Captain Kane barked assuredly and noticed ahead and twenty degrees starboard, the sealing ship
Ranger
passing far off, slowly heading further north, soon to cut across their path. He bit down on his cigarette holder and glanced toward the fields, bolstered by the stillness of the air outside, not a breath of wind. The seal herds might scatter at the mere scent of smoke. But it was a bright sunny day and the young seals would not move. They feared sunburn from going in and out of the water on sunny days, a sunburn that could scorch them so badly a man could pop his finger through their hides. It was their lazy fate to give themselves up to slaughter, rather than stir an inch in the mollifying sun.

‘Take over,' the captain told Critch, pulling on his long fur coat and donning his fur hat while puffing on his cigarette holder.

The second hand shifted in without comment as the captain strode toward the starboard bridge door and pulled it open, feeling the sharp northern air sting his face, stiffening the hairs in his nostrils. At once, he heard the steady progression of fleshy whacks. Meaty popping sounds that rose above the icefields, and were slightly out of rhythm with the actual movements of the gaffs coming down, for the sound took a moment to travel. Standing on the deck, with hands firmly gripping the rail, Captain Kane called to his men, ‘Yes, boys. Yes.' He stared up at the blue sky. Not a sign of a storm, yet the barometer had been dropping steadily since the previous evening. The glass did not lie.

A few of the men closer to the ship turned toward the harsh, good-humoured sound of the captain's voice, raising their arms in agreement, knowing, by the plentitude of hides, the bounty of their good fortune.

Captain Kane glanced east, monitoring the
Ranger
as she laboured forward, no more ahead than she was when he last took notice. The captain knew she was sailing toward the bulk of the pack positioned further north. At the rate the
Ranger
was travelling, his men could get to it sooner on foot.

Down on the ice, the sealers continued clubbing and skinning, avoiding the old dog hoods who could bite a man's arm or leg off. The occasional threatening beast, too sluggish to haul its six-hundred-pound hulk to the safety of open water, was done away with as a menace. One
man whacked at the dog hood's back, distracting it, while the other jammed his gaff down its throat. The hide was not worth so much as the whitecoats', yet they skinned it regardless, for every penny counted, then wiped the blood from the blades in their sleeves, hands dripping red, their faces marked as they scratched their unshaved cheeks. A number of black and white turrs and wild ducks landed in the near distance, catching the scent and hopping closer to peck at the remains.

Done with skinning the ten-foot dog, the men stood, leaning on their gaffs, and watched the seal, bloody and exposed, inch away from them. They chuckled in unison, for the humour was indisputable. The beast, not yet dead, quivered as it hunched off, groaning and lumbering its internal smear toward the edge of the ice pan, where it pushed itself into the open water, and, flipperless, writhed its body to swim away.

In time, not a seal was left living, and the men, stooped forward, dragged the pelts toward the ship, the copious trails winding and stretching long and red. And, as they neared the vessel, the joyous cry of Captain Kane resounded out over the icefields: ‘Come ashore, boys. You've done good this morning.'

The pelts were winched aboard and the men scaled the side of the vessel, hooking their gaffs on the railing and, with partially numb fingers and hands, pulling themselves up and over. In celebration, the men were given black tea, boiled from chunks of iceberg carried back to ship, the ice covered in fat and blood from their hands, a few of them offered condensed milk in their tea, the first time in their lives they had ever tasted such a luxury. Along with their tea, they were handed clumps of hard tack that they snapped bits off and worked to a doughy pulp in their mouths. Drenched in the brilliant colour of fresh slaughter, and warming themselves around the ondeck fires, they enthused over the wealth of pelts and thanked the Lord for such plentitude and blessings.

Invigorated and done with their mug up, the men were given instructions to move north, as Captain Kane had spotted more seals in his spyglass. The vessel would remain anchored where it was, not risking further journey ahead, the ice too resilient to chance damage to the hull with another push forward.

The men stood and waited, lingering a few more moments, a number
of them staring into the sky, others glancing around, north to south, the mood of celebration crushed. There were no shouts or cheers when they went over the second time, for whispered word of the barometer's continued drop was passed around. Nevertheless, the sealers were made to journey out, deeper into the icefields to master the seals before other steamers in the fleet gained a chance to reach them.

The men jumped the ice pans without comment, occasionally glancing back to see that the ship had grown smaller, and smaller again. The sky blue overhead, the sun so intense that they all feared snow blindness in the coming night.

‘Glarious day,' muttered Jesse Knee, the master watch responsible for Uncle Ace's party of men.

Not a single man gave reply.

Uncle Ace kept to himself, despite the dogging insistence of his bunkmate, Billy Gilbert from Buchans, who followed after Ace like a stray mongrel, hoping that the veteran of the slaughter might keep him out of harm's way.

 

At first, the snow was not visible, the flakes minuscule pellets that stung the skin, the sky not nearly grey. With clubs raised, a number of men stared toward the clouds, while others were bent on ignoring the downfall, refusing to believe that it was anything more than a sprinkle. Regardless, all men worked faster, keeping pace with the others, not speaking a word for fear of reprisal. Then, finally, as the bite of snow began to harm the face, and the wind purred toward a howl, the mutterings of discontent were sounded.

‘Keep at 'er, b'ys,' instructed the master watch, Jesse Knee. ‘Finish up widt dis patch o' swiles, den 'ead 'er back.'

‘Da wedder be stained widt da nip o' violence,' Uncle Ace said to young Billy Gilbert who was hunched over, slicing open a bitch; blood and milk gushed free to pool against the ice and bejewel the accumulating snow. Billy gave no reply, but simply cast his eyes up to the grey sky as a wild duck swooped in to settle beside them and drink up the milk.

The men paid heed to the master watch, skinning and peeking to see Jesse Knee staring back toward the
Terra Nova
, still able to make out a
fleck of brown. When the vessel was no longer a fleck, and merely a dot in memory, the master watch gave the order to rope the seals and make a run for it.

At once, the men secured their hides and trudged along the ice, ropes over their shoulders and wound around their arms and hands, bent forward with the weight of the steaming hides pulled behind them, the snow freezing in their beards and eyebrows, melting to run down into their eyes and along their cheeks. Freezing again. Melting. The crystals in their eyelashes clustering. Behind each man, a red trail wavered that was gradually masked by white.

Uncle Ace passed through a group of sealers paused to aid a man who had broken through a breathing hole punched by one of the seals. The sealers helped the sorry soul, pulling him out with the hooks of their gaffs, while he sputtered and trembled, but was soon warmed, as his clothes became frozen stiff, entombing him.

Jesse Knee gripped his compass from his pocket, and spied the needle that pointed east. No bob to it. He banged it against his leg. The needle stuck. The snow thickening, biting and nipping at the men's already-raw faces while they trudged ahead, drifting east and, eventually, further north without their knowing.

In time, as the fear and gnawing cold spiked their minds, the men argued about direction, some pointing one way and claiming it to be the correct direction, others professing the opposite. Fewer and fewer words were spoken as each man became enshrouded in white. Ice hung from their beards. Snow crusted on their jackets, pants and mitts. Icicles drooped from their running nostrils. The temperature dropped to a punishing, unbearable degree of feeling. Numbness soon set in, damaging limbs, so that some could not manage to raise one foot in front of the other. They collapsed.

Jesse Knee ordered the sealers under his watch to remain as one, but the men, barely able to see their hands when outreached before them, broke off into groups of family and friends, as the snow turned heavier again and lent the white wilderness the look of desolate eternity in all directions. The wind howled its way into their heads, so that each of them heard the exact animal-killing sound.

In time, as the grey began to deepen, the men discarded their hides,
and – dropping to their knees – paused to slice open the stray seals they found living along the way. Shoving their hands into the warmth of blood and grease, and keeping them there, wishing feeling back into their fingers, while the still-living seals barked or screeched. Life tingling to such an excruciating degree that they raised their hands and smeared their faces with blood and grease. Revelling in their warm bath, they cupped the blood in their palms and poured it over their jackets and pants, over their boots and caps, and scrambled to sculp other hides so that they might shut their eyes against the brutal white and feel the sweet washing ease of warmth.

Through the snow that had mounted to a wretched blast of white, the red men trudged on paths utterly unknown to them, lost in the stinging, freezing wasteland, and pausing along the way to replenish their crimson colour from head to toe. One man removed his shirt to feel the full heat of blood, others stripped naked, dipping their clothes inside the open seals, soaking the fabric through and through, then redressing in the sopping warmth.

Watching the march of bloody men through a moment's lull of wind, Uncle Ace felt his mind tremor. Halting, he let the rope drop from his shoulder and stood erect, relieved in a peculiar way to witness the red men silently drifting ahead, out of sight, out of reach. The white was more fitting if it became absolute again. Uncle Ace noticed one of the red men hesitantly inclining back toward him. Red bootprints in the snow. At first, the features – painted as they were – were astonishingly unfamiliar.

Young Billy Gilbert shielded his face from the wind, which now thrust fiercely at Uncle Ace's back. The young man waved his red hand toward Uncle Ace, encouraging him and shouting unheard words.

Uncle Ace beheld the single red man who came nearer and pulled at Uncle Ace's arm. But Ace was immovable, as though his will was frozen stiff. The young, red man spoke more words.

Uncle Ace stared with eyes that held nothing, until Billy stumbled off, weeping tears that cleared trails through the clumps of frozen snow and blood on his cheeks, and glanced back twice before he, once again, was shrouded by white.

Uncle Ace heard the calls and movements of the red men distancing
themselves from his reach. It was a trick just to stand still, to watch the red be covered in white, the white banking up around his boots and legs. Nothing to it, that feeling of being surrounded by softness and imminent enclosure as the wind ripped at his face.

How long could he stand there on his weakened, exhausted legs?

In time, out from the white, there came a soundless ruffling in the wind, a swaying akin to the flapping of a grey flag darkening toward the blackest smudge in Ace's mind. At first, he thought it might be a murder of crows, grouped together and flying as one. Yet within the squall of calamity's trickery, the black soon faded to grey again as it neared, a figure approached, at first grey, then darker grey, then brownish-red and white and upon him. A man with eyebrows and lashes frozen white. The man ventured right up to Uncle Ace then turned to point into the white.

‘Me house,' the man insisted. ‘It be t'roo dere. Come in fer a mug o' tea.' Assuredly, the man nodded and regarded Uncle Ace. ‘A fine mug o' tea, so's ye c'n collect yerself. Warm ye right up.' Then the man turned and stumbled off into the white, so that he was a darker grey, flapping, fluttering, then a lighter grey, before being buried upright and moving in the bleached wall of oblivion.

At once, there came a calling, muddled in the wind. An alert shout that could not be comprehended, until it neared and was flatly made out: ‘Da ship.' The shout, joyous in its exclamation, drifted closer, its source bodiless. Then it was in front of him, remaining unseen, ‘Da ship is comin'.' The shout was repeated and kept on, fading, so that Uncle Ace never did catch sight of who might be revelling in celebration. Again, the wind filled his ears.

Uncle Ace noticed another figure darken the air near him, becoming grey but pausing before it might gain further definition. A mere shade of itself. Gradually, the figure leaned and braced both hands against the ice. Some time later, inclined as though in pose, it sank down further, resting on its side until flat to the ice. Slowly, with a careful sweeping gesture of its arm, it drew snow toward its face, gathered a mound up higher, patting the muffling snow tighter and higher up over its head until the figure remained still. Never moved again.

With his eyes on the ice, Uncle Ace now saw a mound nearer him, a
mound of white through which there were patches of brown here and there. Soon, the wind-borne snow covered over each hint of brown, and the mound itself disappeared into the immuring plain of white.

Uncle Ace turned to his left, facing east, he suspected, yet could never know for certain, facing west, facing away, facing toward, to catch a blurry glimpse of motion, drifting across the ice a few feet away. He listened with frozen ears. No sound of movement, only the wind carrying snow. A small white dog trotting by. No, they had no dog on board. The bushy tail. An arctic fox. Could it be? Not by its tread. A cat covered in clumps of white, its fur unseen. A mascot lost from one of the sealing vessels. It simply walked by, its gait changing to convince him, that it was, in fact, a fox. Wasn't it?
If so, it knows where it be off to
, thought Uncle Ace. It lived in this, lived through weather ten times worse, as did the seals who had escaped into the water, with their nostrils poked up through their breathing holes. Half fish, half animal. Oxygen always there. No matter what.