Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [109]
He lifted the gull breast from his head and studied it. "If you take off the large parts of each wing," he said, "you could run spun yarn through them and tie one over each ear. They'd be big enough to protect your ears and your cheeks, too."
Langman took the skin from him and examined the wings. "What about the ends of the wings?" he asked.
"Well," Neal said, "you could cut off the stiff quills and weave the feathers in and out of our oakum ear muffs. You could weave 'em in on a slant. They'd cover your ears a little, and stick out over your eyes and nose and mouth."
In the end we used the black back-strips to thicken the
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backs of mittens. The beautiful white breast, after long discussion and the drawing of diagrams on the skin with the points of knives, we cut into strips long enough to pass from ear to ear across the nose.
At the base of the breast were the tail feathers. Captain Dean looked up at Langman. "This tail doesn't fit much of anywhere," he said. "How about giving it to Neal for a Christmas present?"
Langman sneered, but nodded his head in acquiescence.
All that Christmas morning we wove and patched our oakum headgear and mittens with those strips of seagull skin. There were enough to make five feather-lined helmets that would let five men work at one time in the teeth of that northwest wind.
The captain took the first helmet we finished. When he had clumsily tied it on with spun yarn, he said abruptly, "Low tide's about now. We've got to eat something! That something's going to be seaweed, and we can't stay alive unless we eat it."
He went out after the seaweed, and when he returned, four more helmets were finished.
We choked down the seaweed. Then Swede crawled on his hands and knees to the captain, to Langman, to George White, to me. All he did was take us by the shoulders and look into our faces; but that was enough to shame the four of us into following him out into that searing wind.
We had no hammer: no spikes: no nails. We had to build that raft out of four lengths of plank that Swede and Neal had somehow worried from the junk the day before.
All we had to fasten the planks to the spars was rope that
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could be cut into desired lengths and slapped against ledges until, freed of ice, they were flexible.
We must, the captain explained, do everything with cordage, so he showed us how to haul cordage into place, thread it beneath the two pieces of spar in such a way that the pieces were four feet apart; then bring the ends of each piece of cordage together and splice them. Thus the spars were joined loosely by a series of rope loops.
Into these loops we thrust the four lengths of planks. Spun yarn was knotted from side to side of the loop and between the planks to prevent the planks from folding against each other. Then each loop was tightened as is a tourniquet. With one man on each end of a loop, a stick was thrust through the slack and twisted and twisted, until the loop was as tight as it could be made.
When any one of us reached the limit of his endurance, which was often, he told Swede, who went back to the tent with him, helped him relinquish his feathered headgear to another, who crawled reluctantly into that whistling, spume-laden blast. Swede was the only one who had faith in what we were doing. The rest of us were helping him rather than ourselves.
By dark of that Christmas Day the planks were laced in place: the tourniquets that held the lacing were fastened so they couldn't slip or come loose. When even Swede was willing to stop, and went from one of us to the other, patting our backs and thanking us for the work we'd done, I had a momentary thought that Christmas was truly Christmas, even on Boon Island.
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December 26th, Tuesday
Our lives depended on the weather, and if that northwest wind had blown another day, if for another twenty-four hours the combers, each