Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [102]
Nobody answered. We were too intent on the long swells rolling toward uson waiting for the large one, the third wave, after which we might expect two rollers that would be less troublesome.
The captain raised his hand and shouted, "Now!"
"Push her in," Langman cried. He dropped the axe in the stern, bawled at the captain to get aboard, and signaled Neal to climb in as well. White tossed the hammer after the axe.
She slipped easily enough over the thick layer of seaweed we had spread beneath her. Her bow floated and rose up. With the canvas strip we had stretched above her sides, she had only eighteen inches freeboard.
We waded in with her, up to our knees, up to our middles. The shock of the water on my feet and legs was indescribable, because pain cannot be described.
Captain Dean, looking seaward, waved his arms wildly. "Hold her!" he screamed. "Back her!"
Ahead of the boat I saw a long swell moving in from the south. On its crest were the heads of a dozen seals, all staring down at me.
"Pull her back!" Captain Dean cried. "Pull!"
The boat was sluggish and immovable in my hands, and the icy water around my middle drove the wind from me. I had no strength to pull.
I felt her rising and rising. I caught her gunnel to rise with her. She turned sideways and loomed, tilted, like a slanted roof, before my face. I saw Captain Dean and Neal
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slide down against the gunnel, with oars tumbling all around them. I made a despairing, fruitless clutch at the axe, caught among the oars.
Then the wave broke, the boat turned over and above me, and I was buried in a choking smother of foam through which I struggled while icy thoughts darted like needles in my brain.
This was the end of it! Our precious axe was lost again; the hammer as well; all the oakum we had picked so endlessly; all the oars that had tortured us; all the planks and boards so painfully and hopefully pieced together; the stanchions, the canvas, the nails and spikes so arduously assembled! Everything was goneeverything but life itself.
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December 22nd, Friday
Our clothes froze that night, though we lay close together.
Probably we had thoughts, in spite of the shudderings that racked all of us when we crawled back to the tent after getting ourselves from the water. If I did have thoughts, I can't recall them, though I remember cursing Langman for putting the axe in the boat.
Nor can I remember what I thought when Swede came in alone, after we were bedded in our nest of dank oakum.
"She's gone," Swede said. "Lock, stock and barrel. I tried to hold her, but the tide pulled her out and the waves broke her into a tangle. She floated off to the south."
He hunted for Neal and wedged himself down beside him.
"It's started to snow," Swede said. "Thick: from the south. You couldn't have made it!"
He said no more. In that frigid tent there was silence that was almost tangible, like a fog. Even Captain Dean lay there, staring up at the peak of the tent, above which
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hung the canvas flag that had failed us as utterly as had all our puny but excruciating efforts.
With the coming of daylight Swede pulled himself to the tent flap. ''The snow's stopped," he said. "The whole world's plastered with it."
He looked helplessly from the tent, made an effort to get to his feet, fell to his hands and knees.
"It's got to be scraped off the tent," he said.
"Why has it?" Langman asked. "Don't Eskimos make houses out of snow? I say leave the snow on the tent. It'll protect us from wind."
Swede rolled over clumsily to look at Langman. "Langman," he said, "you're a whoreson, beetle-headed, flapear'd knave! You're against everyone and everything, and you keep right on telling lies to try to prove you're right. If we leave the snow on the tent and get more snow, the canvas will split, or it'll fall down on us. Snow's heavy! And you talk about Eskimos!"