Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [95]
Early in the afternoon, at low tide, Captain Dean and George White left the shipyard to patrol the island for scraps of wreckage and our daily repast of seaweed and ice. The captain carried his broomstick with the saucepan handle wrapped to the end by rope yarn and strips of linen.
In cutting seaweed, they uncovered a pool in which a mussel was attached to the hard-packed mixture of shell and rock fragments that lay at the bottom of all such depressions.
It was one of the big mottled sea mussels, unlike the clean blue ones that grow in beds on gravel spits near the mouths of rivers. This one was an old, old mussel, survivor of countless storms such as those through which we had passedsurvivor, too, of the crashing blows of countless millions of breakers, exactly like those that had thundered
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in our ears for six long days and nightsor was it fiveor was it seven, as Langman said?
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Even in the writing I am constantly uncertain of dates when I trust to memory.
The days seemed endless: the nights were a torment of aching cold, of fear, of trepidationah, those nights, with the breakers thundering at our very shoulders! Always, in the night, I had thoughts of eternity: of death, and of never ending punishment that might continue forever, forever, forever, forever ... No wonder our companions cried aloud to God so frequently! No wonder Langman thought Saturday was Sunday! No wonder I must so often go back to the calendar I reconstructed with the help of Captain Dean and Neal Butler. Sometimes even the captain couldn't remember, and both of us had to rely on Neal's proficiency as a "quick study."
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Old as the mussel looked, however, it was unquestionably a mussel, and a mussel is food, no matter how overgrown and thickened it is with pink and gray encrustations, with sprigs of seaweed.
Captain Dean prodded at it with the stick to which the saucepan handle had been lashed, and when the shell was free of the trash in which it grew, White snatched it from the water. So Captain Dean and White, crawling to other pools, raked the weed back from the edges. In the end they uncovered thirty-nine. A few were young and blue: mostly they were ugly, encrusted, ancient.
The captain said he and White could have got more if
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their hands could have stood it; but the pain that results from repeatedly immersing hands in icy water, even when the immersion is momentary, is such as to agonize the most hardened sailorman. It can't be borne.
When White and the captain returned, the captain held his hands behind his back, White doled the mussels into them one by one, and the captain passed them around, picking us at random, so that there was no way of telling who would get which mussel.
There were three apiece, repulsive-looking, lumpy, with hard, mottled fungus growths upon them, and with a sort of beard attached to one end. We opened them by forcing a knife-point between the tight shells, then sliding the blade around through the hinge. In spite of their looks, they seemed savory enough to usonce we had learned how to rid them of the infinitesimal pearls with which they were infested. The pearls could only be removed by squeezing them out; by rubbing the meat between the tongue and the roof of the mouth.
Certainly I have never wanted another mussel since those days, but they gave our seaweed a fishy juiciness wholly lacking when the seaweed was eaten alone.
Langman, protesting that in all likelihood they were poisonous, for a time refused to eat them; but when he saw Mellen and White swallowing them avidly, he ate them too, sneering at all of us.
I think they must have given us a little strength, for after I had choked them down I returned more hopefully to my labors on that hopeless boat.
For the bottom of the boat we stretched an oblong of canvas