Chain Locker (24 page)

The morning was grey and the ceiling bore down on them, but at least the snow had stopped falling, and was now eddying like low smoke across the ice. “The wind is after dyin' down a bit, but without the sun it's hard to tell which direction it's comin' from. My gut feeling is nor'norwest, but that could be wishful thinking on my part. You're covered in snow like a sled dog, Jack. Give yourself a shake.”

Henry stood up, brushing the snow from his arms and legs. “Anything out there this morning, I wonder?” he said as he slowly turned to scan the horizon. “What the hell! Look at that!”

“What?” Jackie turned. “Aaagh!”

The ocean lapped within six feet of where they had spent the night. “I make no wonder that crack was so loud,” Henry exclaimed. “Man, oh man. If we had walked a few feet to the left last night we would have had it.”

“We're done for,” Jackie said in a low voice, barely a murmur.

“We lost maybe half, but there's still plenty left. We're still afloat—that's what counts—but we'll have to stay close together in case she splits open again. If that break had come ten feet farther in, we would both be out there floating around on our own now.”

Jackie unconsciously grabbed hold of Henry's sleeve. “Buddy is gone, too, ain't he?”

“Yeah, I guess he must be—”

“Man! In the dark, all by himself…”

“It's okay, Jack. It was just his body; he was already gone.”

Failing Henry by falling asleep on watch was bad enough, but the thought of getting separated from him was beyond bearing.

Henry put his arms around him and clung to him in silence. He was trying not to despair as he realized how frail their existence was. By calling it an island of ice they had been fooling themselves. Islands did not have a thousand feet of water below them, and they did not break apart in the wind or melt in the sun or drift away to God knows where.

A sickening realization hit him. Their wood was gone! It had been on a pinnacle thirty feet in the direction of what was now just water.

“Oh, great! Just great!” Jackie moaned, kicking the ice in frustration. “We could've had a nice fire with that—but no! I hope you're satisfied.”

“I s'pose we could always burn the gaff if it comes to that,” Henry said wistfully, looking at the six-foot-long handle he was holding.

“Some fire that would make,” Jackie grumbled under his breath. “I'm some friggin' hungry.”

“Well, we got something else to be thankful for.”

“What in hell have we got to be thankful for? This'll be good.”

“There's no flies,” said Henry with a big grin, waving his arms like the ringmaster introducing a circus act.

“No flies? What are you talkin' about now?”

“There's always something to be thankful for, Jack,” said Henry.

“Just imagine if we were lost in the woods in the spring o' the year instead of bein' out here. They'd have us drove crazy by now. That's one of the things I always liked about the winter. I always have a hard time in the summer. The flies like to have me over for dinner, except I'm always the dinner. Remember that story I was telling you, about being in the lumber woods one winter with the Frenchmen from New Brunswick? You remember?”

“Yeah.”

“That spring, when we went on the drive to get all our logs down the river, you should have seen the flies. First came the black flies in swarms and then the nippers. They just about carried us off.”

Jackie stared at him in disbelief.

“I don't know which is worse. The nippers with their constant buzzing in your ear or the black flies crawlin' up inside your clothes. You can't open your mouth, sure. You would be standing up with a plate of beans, and every time you tried to take a forkful at least one of those bloomin' things would fly down your throat. One of them crawled into my ear and took a bite and sucked out so much blood that he couldn't get back out. You ever try listening to a fly that's inside your ear, trying to get out?”

“No.”

“Well, it's some loud, I'll tell ya. I nearly beat my brains out, whackin' at the side of my head trying to kill the miserable thing. I almost lost my mind. I was dancin' around shaking my head, when the foreman got hold of me and poured some water into my ear and drowned the little bugger. Served him right. Then he put his handkerchief on the end of a stick and rooted him out. I was up all night with that bite itchin' and me not able to get at it.”

“Hmph,” said Jackie.

“Oh, come on, now, Jack,” said Henry. “What can we do to cheer ourselves up? How about that spittin' contest we talked about last night? You wanna go first?”

“Nah. You go.”

Henry scratched a line with the tip of the gaff. “All right, you got to stand with your toes on this line.”

He swished his tongue around, trying to make some spit. Nothing came. He bit the sides of his tongue, dragged his tongue over his teeth, sniffed, snarked, and snorted, applying all the tried and true methods but to no avail. “Huh! I can't even round up enough spit to start. Some showing I'll make.”

“Me neither,” said Jackie. “Not even enough for a lousy spittin' contest. If I don't get a decent drink soon, I'm gonna shrivel up like a capelin.”

“Well, I think this will be the big day,” said Henry. “I figure somebody will be givin' us a nice hot cup o' tea before the day is out.

When we spot a ship we'll raise a flag on the gaff. I guess one of us will have to donate his shirt for that effort.”

“One of us, meaning me, I suppose?” Jackie griped.

“Only if you volunteer it. Then, when they welcome us aboard I can say, ‘If it wasn't for my buddy we wouldn't be here; he gave me the shirt off his back!'”

“I don't know if it will come off anyway; it's probably grown on by now.”

“That's nothin', sure. When we were…shhh! Shhh!” He beckoned Jackie to get down. “There's a seal just behind you.”

“Where?” Jackie whispered. “Can I turn around?”

“No, keep still. She's about fifty feet away looking right at us.”

Henry made a dash for her with his gaff forward, ready to strike, but she slithered into the water before he got halfway. Bitterly disappointed, he leaned on his gaff and stared towards the water where she had slipped in. “That was stupid,” he said. He had allowed himself to become excited; he should have stalked her, moving slowly and quietly to get her trust, and made his move when he was almost upon her. He consoled himself with the fact that adult seals are remarkably fast and the odds were probably against him, no matter what approach he had tried.

chapter twenty-eight

As he stood catching his breath, to the right he saw two big eyes nestled in a plump white body looking up at him. Ah, now there's a better target, he thought; so she did come up on the ice to pup after all. Knowing that this one would be an easy prey, he casually walked over to the whitecoat, raised the gaff above his head and brought it down with a crunch on the newborn seal's forehead. It died instantly.

Dropping the gaff and reaching for his knife he yelled, “Yeeha! Time for breakfast, Jack.”

Jackie stood immobile.

“Hmm, we should save the blood,” said Henry. “Gimme a hand here with this, Jack.”

Jackie didn't move.

“I thought you were hungry. What's wrong with you?”

Jackie cleared his throat. “Nothin'.”

“You sure you're all right?” He looked up at him and down at the seal. “You're not gettin' squeamish over this seal, are ya?”

“No,” he said faintly.

“You wanna be a sealer you got to get used to this stuff.”

As his survival instinct slowly took hold, Jackie began to feel embarrassed at his impulsive reaction. “Yeah, I'm pretty hungry. Thirsty, too,” he replied with the most enthusiasm he could dredge up.

“Well, b'y, we can take care of both o' those,” said Henry. “We'll have something for you in just a minute. First, we got to find something to drain the blood into.”

Henry hacked a chunk of ice from the top of a pinnacle and set to work scooping it out with his knife, his hand shaking with anticipation. He started to laugh as he worked.

“What's so funny?”

“I just thought up a joke.”

“Oh yeah? Tell it to me.”

“These two guys are out on an ice floe and they need a bowl, see. So the first guy says to his buddy, ‘I got good news and I got bad news. Which do you want first?' So his buddy says, ‘Well, gimme the bad news first.' ‘All right,' he says, ‘since we're stuck out on this floe there's nothing to make a bowl out of except ice.' ‘Oh, that is bad news,' his buddy says. ‘So, how about tellin' me the good news, now?' ‘The good news,' the first guy says, ‘is that we got plenty of ice, so we can have all the bowls we want.' Ha, ha, ha! Pretty good, eh?”

“Pretty lame,” said Jackie. “Is that the best you can come up with?”

“I gotta remember that one to tell the crowd on the rescue ship,” said Henry. “They'll think that's pretty funny, comin' from two guys who been stuck out on the ice.”

In a few minutes he had fashioned a crude bowl. “Well, your mother wouldn't use it for company, but I guess it'll do,” he said, licking his lips. The pain in his stomach intensified in anticipation of the upcoming meal. “We better make another one before I cut buddy's throat there, because we won't be able to stop the blood once it starts comin'.”

When he had finished he handed the two bowls to Jackie. “Okay, coopy down here and hold the bowls steady. I'm going to cut his throat and I'll try to aim the blood into the bowls. You catch as much of it as you can. And for God's sake, if the seal slips outa my hands hang onto the bowls and don't let them turn over. All set?”

Jackie nodded.

Squat down with the seal in his lap, Henry thrust the point of the knife into its throat. The gush of blood revolted Jackie. It was so red! And there was so much of it! He could feel the heat as steam rose from the two bowls and the blood spattered on his bare hands, the first warmth he had felt in nearly two days. It was glorious. He felt like shoving both hands into the seal's carcass and leaving them there for a long, long time.

When the bowls were full, Henry, more excited than Jackie had ever seen him, flung the carcass aside and lifted one of the two-inch thick bowls to his mouth, trying in vain not to spill any. He looked like a vampire lapping at it. He had blood on his chin, his unshaven cheeks and the tip of his nose, but he could not have enjoyed himself more if he were dining with the King. He paused and looked at Jackie, who was staring at him with his mouth hanging open. “Come on, Buddy; have a swig before it melts your bowl. It's better while it's warm.”

The whole exercise looked repulsive to Jackie but he knew he had to go through with it. He brought the bowl to his mouth and gagged at the strong, sickly odour as it leapt up from the warm liquid that had been coursing through the seal's veins just minutes ago. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and threw his head back, gulping as he went, like a gull swallowing a flatfish. The sensation enervated him, and as the warmth gushed into his empty stomach, he felt a great sensation of well-being come over him. He had never experienced such hunger and thirst, and now the experience of their remedy was unlike anything he had ever felt. He looked over at Henry with a big grin. “Your face is in a fine state,” he joked. “You got blood from your chin to your eyebrows.”

“Hah! Just listen to the pot callin' the kettle black,” Henry chortled. “We'll need to swab our gobs when we get through with this.”

“S'pose so.”

When the blood was all gone, they both kept slurping at the water coming from the melting bowls, wolfing down the extra liquid.

“Hey, this water's a lot better than I thought it would be,” Jackie exclaimed, smacking his lips. “I thought the water from the ice would be a lot saltier than this.”

“That's because I took it from the top of the pinnacle, where the ice is not so salty. Most of the salt settles to the bottom. Not bad, eh?”

“Mmm, a little bit salty,” said Jackie.

“It still has some salt in it but you can manage to drink it. If we had run short of water on the ship, we would have started using this stuff to make tea out of; we call it pinnacle tea. But I'll tell you where the best ice is from: what the old fellers call an island of ice.”

“An iceberg?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I've had lots of iceberg ice.”

“You have?” said Henry, with a doubtful glance. “Where?”

“Home. I've picked up lots of pieces when they drift ashore, outside the harbour.”

“I'll be darned. Ever use it to make ice cream?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I have. Many's the time I've rowed out to an iceberg on a warm day in the summer to get some ice to make ice cream. When you're still a long ways from the big ones, the air starts to turn cold.”

“I never been that close to one.”

“It's a great treat on a hot summer's day, gettin' up alongside one. They're kind of greenish blue when the sun shines on them, like a giant diamond sometimes. You can hear them sizzle from the salt in the water. And then you dip up half a puntload of ice and row home like the dickens to make some ice cream before it melts.”

“I was told in school that you should never go near one because they could roll over,” said Jackie.

“So was I,” said Henry with a wink, as he got to his feet and reached for the seal. “All right, skipper, you won't be needin' that jacket anymore.”

With a long sweep of his sculping knife he opened the seal from the bottom of its lip to the scutters of its tail, and in a short time had divested it of its valuable pelt, the blubber still attached.