Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [134]
Protesting, Saver and Graystock stumbled out into the snow. There was a pallid gray light in the east, so that they could see where to put their feet. How Saver had made that journey in the pitch-dark is something Saver himself couldn't have answered. Perhaps if a man has an animal's craving for something, a mysterious inner sense guides him safely to it.
What with the snow and the high seas and the thick slabs of meat that Captain Dean gave us, we hardly moved from the tent all day. We took turns roasting slivers of
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meat, stoking the fire, and dozing in its faint glowa mere breath of nothing to anyone who has known a real fire in a real fireplace; colder, far colder than the Bodleian at its coldest; but a bit of heavenly radiance to us who had lived so long in a frigid hell.
We looked, of course, toward shore, but not in hopefulness. No vessel could have approached Boon Island in that abominable storm, and we were afraid, even, to speculate as to when Nason might reach Portsmouth. We knew in our hearts that he and his little sloop, with that unexpected wind to harry them, might never have reached Portsmouth at all.
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January 4th, Thursday
The snow stopped, the wind dropped, the tent was warm, and we must have slept like logs; for when I woke, we were sitting up, all ten of us, wild-eyed, hair on end. I was vaguely conscious, in the recesses of my mind, that a gun had been fired: that I was still hearing its echo.
The tide was almost dead low: the sea had fallen: the wind was a light breeze, offshore, so that the tops of the swells had a slick lookand rising and falling on those rollers was a craft so sturdy, so smart, so daring in the way she slipped around those brown ledge-fingers, almost touching them, that I couldn't shout, or even speak. All I could do was stand there, empty of thought, devoid of sensation, barely alive.
The little vessel was odd-looking. She had a high sharp bow and an even higher sharp stern, and under her boom rested a broad, high-sided skiff with a narrow, flat bottom. There were five men on her deck, one lying out on the short bowsprit watching for ledges, one at her tiller, one reloading the musket that had aroused us, and two wrestling the skiff over the side.
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"That's a pink," Captain Dean said in a strangled voice.
"Nothing like 'em to nose in and out of a rocky coast."
Captain Dean lowered himself halfway down the seaweed.
The man on the pink's bowsprit jumped up and let go an anchor: then joined those at work on the skiff. The man at the tiller left it, took two coils of rope and tossed them into the skiff: then four men slid her into the water and jumped in.
One made fast a rope to the bow: another did the same in the stern, tossing the unattached end of the rope to the man who had held the tiller.
The man in the bow stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted to Captain Dean. His voice carried strongly to us on that gentle but frost-laden land breeze. "The dory's made fast astern. We'll pay out easy. When we're close enough, we'll throw the bow rope ashore. Get some men down there with you and lay onto that bow rope. Hold it taut so we can't be swamped."
Two of the men in the dory stood up, pushing at oars. They faced in the direction they were rowing, which seemed strange and awkward. It wasn't right, I thought numbly, for a rower to be able to see where he was going, instead of turning his back to his objective and seeing nothing, as do rowers in England.
I wondered why these Americans had to be so different, sailing something called a pink, sharp at both ends: recklessly approaching ledges in a flat-bottomed dory instead of a skiff: standing up to row so to face forward.