Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [108]
"I figure there's about as much in one of the thighs as there is in two wings, so I'm giving Henry Dean one of the thighs and Harry Hallion the other.
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"Then there's the back: that hasn't got much on it, but the bone is thin and can easily be pounded; so I've divided it into two parts and White gets one part and Mellen gets the other.
"There's a good deal of nourishment in the skull and in the neck, so I've split the skull in two and cut the neck into three parts, one of them a little larger than the other two. I'm giving Swede half the skull and one of the small pieces of the neck.
"Whitworth gets the other half of the skull and the other small piece of neck. Neal gets the large piece of neck."
As he talked, he passed around these fragments of bone and gristle.
"That seems fair," Captain Dean admitted. "What's left for you?"
"Well," Langman said, "I may seem to have a little more than some of you, but I really haven't. I'm taking the windpipe and the intestines. They're frozen; and when they're pounded up together, they'll probably be about the same thing, in the long run, as a piece of neckespecially when they're mixed with seaweed."
By the grace of God, when that cutlass-saw had chewed its way half through the spar, we lifted it and banged it against the edge of a ledge.
To our triumphant amazement it cracked and split; so that when four of us took one end and four took the other, and we put our weight on it, it broke all the way acrossjaggedly, it's true; but it broke.
So when we crawled into the tent for the last time on
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that false Christmas, the two pieces of spar lay side by side on the flat ledge, ready to be joined together in a raftthough my half-frozen brain was incapable of knowing how it could ever be done.
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December 25th, Monday
Christmas on Boon Island!
I write the words reluctantly because they deny each other. They're unreal and don't belong together. Christmas belongs with warmth, with love, with good cheer, with feasting, with happiness, with gratitude for years past and years to come, with an understanding of the meaning of Christmas....
There were spittings of snow and a northwest wind that drove snow-dust beneath the tent and through every crevice, no matter how solidly we packed oakum along the tent-bottom.
Swede, when he went out at dawn to work on the raft, crawled back in again, baffled.
"The wind's so cold the whole sea's smoking," he said. "That wind cuts like a knife. Let's see that seagull's breast."
He fumbled at the oakum wrappings that Neal, like all the rest of us, wore inside his coat; and when he pulled out the beautiful black and white skin, it had lost its stickiness. It wasn't dry, but it was flexible, like parchment.
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"If we could cut this apart," Swede told Captain Dean, "we might make protectors for our ears and noses. Then some of us could stand this wind."
The captain took the skin from him, stretched it over his knees and stroked it.
"It's a shame to cut that breast," Swede said. "We could make a whole helmet out of it."
"Only a helmet for one man," the captain reminded him.
"What would do us the most good," Swede said, "is to cut it into pieces to fasten inside our oakum mittens so our hands won't get numb. Of course, we ought to have some for our ears and noses."
Taking the skin from the captain, Neal pressed it tight over his head. He was the only one among us who didn't have a grizzled beard; and his face, beneath that soft, white gull breast, with the black wings hanging down on either side, reminded me poignantly of how he