Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [106]
"There!" Langman said. "There's some food that's better than mussels!" He was proud of himself, and with good reason.
We crowded around that enormous gull, fondling it, burying our fingers in its beautiful warm white breast, and sniffing its dusty clean smell. It was a black-backsnowy white on belly, head, neck and tail, but with black wings and a black saddle: largest of all gulls; almost twice the
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size of ordinary large gulls with pale blue backs: nearly three times that of young gray ones.
"I'll skin him," Langman said importantly, "and we'll eat him. I wish you could have seen how I got him. I cut enough seaweed to cover me, and then I raked up a mussel and put it on a flat place, right near the hole I'd picked to squat in. Then I hung the seaweed all over me, so I looked like a boulder. When that old gull came overhead, twisting his neck and squinting at that mussel from all sides, he looked as big as a goose! Yes, sir! Then he stuck out his feet and came down all sprawling, a regular ostrich, and I just put out my hand and grabbed him. That was the surprisedest gull that ever landed on this island!"
For a moment I almost liked Langmanalmost forgot his effort to oust Captain Dean; his almost certain plot to seize the Nottingham; his insistence that Captain Dean had purposely wrecked the ship; his stubborn refusal to admit the well-established fact of Sir Isaac Newton's reflecting telescope; his willingnesseagerness, evento blacken Captain Dean's reputation and by implication to damage the reputation of all who sided with the captain; his persistence in observing the wrong Sunday. Yes, for a moment, but only for a moment, I forgot that persistence in wrong-headedness is the most dangerous of all human failings.
Langman skinned that gull with loving care, making an incision at the top of the head and running the cut all the way down the center of the back to the tail.
"We can make ear muffs with this," he said as he worked. "We can fasten feather pads inside spun-yarn caps, so that those who go out on patrol can have better protection for their ears and noses. We can make a pair of feather-lined gauntlets and take turns wearing 'em."
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I was amazed to hear such helpful thoughts from Langman. Sometimes it's hard to remember that the leopard never changes his spots: that the most hardened criminal has endeared himself to someone, but is no less dangerous.
Langman peeled the wings back to the first joint, leaving all the wing-feathers attached to the skin. When the skinning was finished, he had a rude square of feathers almost three feet long and three feet wide.
''How'll we dry it?" he asked Captain Dean.
"Tie it around Neal before it freezes," Captain Dean said. "His skin's smoother, and chances are he isn't as lousy as the rest of us."
So that was what was done. Swede took the big black and white skin and went with Neal to the tent, to be out of the wind.
The division of that bird's body among thirteen men wasn't easy, and I was glad Langman turned over the task to Captain Dean.
First the captain gutted it, finding two six-inch tommy cod in its gullet. The intestines and the small fish he placed on a board to freeze, along with the thigh joints, the wing joints, the thick neck, the feet, and the skull.
"We can chew 'em later," he said.
Then he laid off the breasts, still warm, and cut them into thirteen lengthwise strips, taking a little from the long, thick center strips to add to the thin side strips.
The men watched the division with jealous eyes, each one certain, after the manner of hungry men, that his was the smallest portion.
Chips Bullock wouldn't come from the tent, even for meat, so the captain called for Neal to take Chips's portion to him.
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"Make him eat it," the captain told Neal.
Langman was derisive. "I suppose," he said, "you don't trust any of the rest of us to take that to Chips."
"I don't even