The Sea Wolf by Jack London (best classic literature .txt) 📖

and crackling as it laid hold of the smaller chips and sticks.  To be cast away on an island had not entered into my calculations, so we were without a kettle or cooking utensils of any sort; but I made shift with the tin used for bailing the boat, and later, as we consumed our supply of canned goods, we accumulated quite an imposing array of cooking vessels.

I boiled the water, but it was Maud who made the coffee.  And how good it was!  My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled sea-biscuit and water.  The breakfast was a success, and we sat about the fire much longer than enterprising explorers should have done, sipping the hot black coffee and talking over our situation.

I was confident that we should find a station in some one of the coves, for I knew that the rookeries of Bering Sea were thus guarded; but Maud advanced the theory—to prepare me for disappointment, I do believe, if disappointment were to come—that we had discovered an unknown rookery.  She was in very good spirits, however, and made quite merry in accepting our plight as a grave one.

“If you are right,” I said, “then we must prepare to winter here.  Our food will not last, but there are the seals.  They go away in the fall, so I must soon begin to lay in a supply of meat.  Then there will be huts to build and driftwood to gather.  Also we shall try out seal fat for lighting purposes.  Altogether, we’ll have our hands full if we find the island uninhabited.  Which we shall not, I know.”

But she was right.  We sailed with a beam wind along the shore, searching the coves with our glasses and landing occasionally, without finding a sign of human life.  Yet we learned that we were not the first who had landed on Endeavour Island.  High up on the beach of the second cove from ours, we discovered the splintered wreck of a boat—a sealer’s boat, for the rowlocks were bound in sennit, a gun-rack was on the starboard side of the bow, and in white letters was faintly visible Gazelle No. 2.  The boat had lain there for a long time, for it was half filled with sand, and the splintered wood had that weather-worn appearance due to long exposure to the elements.  In the stern-sheets I found a rusty ten-gauge shot-gun and a sailor’s sheath-knife broken short across and so rusted as to be almost unrecognizable.

“They got away,” I said cheerfully; but I felt a sinking at the heart and seemed to divine the presence of bleached bones somewhere on that beach.

I did not wish Maud’s spirits to be dampened by such a find, so I turned seaward again with our boat and skirted the north-eastern point of the island.  There were no beaches on the southern shore, and by early afternoon we rounded the black promontory and completed the circumnavigation of the island.  I estimated its circumference at twenty-five miles, its width as varying from two to five miles; while my most conservative calculation placed on its beaches two hundred thousand seals.  The island was highest at its extreme south-western point, the headlands and backbone diminishing regularly until the north-eastern portion was only a few feet above the sea.  With the exception of our little cove, the other beaches sloped gently back for a distance of half-a-mile or so, into what I might call rocky meadows, with here and there patches of moss and tundra grass.  Here the seals hauled out, and the old bulls guarded their harems, while the young bulls hauled out by themselves.

This brief description is all that Endeavour Island merits.  Damp and soggy where it was not sharp and rocky, buffeted by storm winds and lashed by the sea, with the air continually a-tremble with the bellowing of two hundred thousand amphibians, it was a melancholy and miserable sojourning-place.  Maud, who had prepared me for disappointment, and who had been sprightly and vivacious all day, broke down as we landed in our own little cove.  She strove bravely to hide it from me, but while I was kindling another fire I knew she was stifling her sobs in the blankets under the sail-tent.

It was my turn to be cheerful, and I played the part to the best of my ability, and with such success that I brought the laughter back into her dear eyes and song on her lips; for she sang to me before she went to an early bed.  It was the first time I had heard her sing, and I lay by the fire, listening and transported, for she was nothing if not an artist in everything she did, and her voice, though not strong, was wonderfully sweet and expressive.

I still slept in the boat, and I lay awake long that night, gazing up at the first stars I had seen in many nights and pondering the situation.  Responsibility of this sort was a new thing to me.  Wolf Larsen had been quite right.  I had stood on my father’s legs.  My lawyers and agents had taken care of my money for me.  I had had no responsibilities at all.  Then, on the Ghost I had learned to be responsible for myself.  And now, for the first time in my life, I found myself responsible for some one else.  And it was required of me that this should be the gravest of responsibilities, for she was the one woman in the world—the one small woman, as I loved to think of her.

CHAPTER XXX

No wonder we called it Endeavour Island.  For two weeks we toiled at building a hut.  Maud insisted on helping, and I could have wept over her bruised and bleeding hands.  And still, I was proud of her because of it.  There was something heroic about this gently-bred woman enduring our terrible hardship and with her pittance of strength bending to the tasks of a peasant woman.  She gathered many of the stones which I built into the walls of the hut; also, she turned a deaf ear to my entreaties when I begged her to desist.  She compromised, however, by taking upon herself the lighter labours of cooking and gathering driftwood and moss for our winter’s supply.

The hut’s walls rose without difficulty, and everything went smoothly until the problem of the roof confronted me.  Of what use the four walls without a roof?  And of what could a roof be made?  There were the spare oars, very true.  They would serve as roof-beams; but with what was I to cover them?  Moss would never do.  Tundra grass was impracticable.  We needed the sail for the boat, and the tarpaulin had begun to leak.

“Winters used walrus skins on his hut,” I said.

“There are the seals,” she suggested.

So next day the hunting began.  I did not know how to shoot, but I proceeded to learn.  And when I had expended some thirty shells for three seals, I decided that the ammunition would be exhausted before I acquired the necessary knowledge.  I had used eight shells for lighting fires before I hit upon the device of banking the embers with wet moss, and there remained not over a hundred shells in the box.

“We must club the seals,” I announced, when convinced of my poor marksmanship.  “I have heard the sealers talk about clubbing them.”

“They are so pretty,” she objected.  “I cannot bear to think of it being done.  It is so directly brutal, you know; so different from shooting them.”

“That roof must go on,” I answered grimly.  “Winter is almost here.  It is our lives against theirs.  It is unfortunate we haven’t plenty of ammunition, but I think, anyway, that they suffer less from being clubbed than from being all shot up.  Besides, I shall do the clubbing.”

“That’s just it,” she began eagerly, and broke off in sudden confusion.

“Of course,” I began, “if you prefer—”

“But what shall I be doing?” she interrupted, with that softness I knew full well to be insistence.

“Gathering firewood and cooking dinner,” I answered lightly.

She shook her head.  “It is too dangerous for you to attempt alone.”

“I know, I know,” she waived my protest.  “I am only a weak woman, but just my small assistance may enable you to escape disaster.”

“But the clubbing?” I suggested.

“Of course, you will do that.  I shall probably scream.  I’ll look away when—”

“The danger is most serious,” I laughed.

“I shall use my judgment when to look and when not to look,” she replied with a grand air.

The upshot of the affair was that she accompanied me next morning.  I rowed into the adjoining cove and up to the edge of the beach.  There were seals all about us in the water, and the bellowing thousands on the beach compelled us to shout at each other to make ourselves heard.

“I know men club them,” I said, trying to reassure myself, and gazing doubtfully at a large bull, not thirty feet away, upreared on his fore-flippers and regarding me intently.  “But the question is, How do they club them?”

“Let us gather tundra grass and thatch the roof,” Maud said.

She was as frightened as I at the prospect, and we had reason to be gazing at close range at the gleaming teeth and dog-like mouths.

“I always thought they were afraid of men,” I said.

“How do I know they are not afraid?” I queried a moment later, after having rowed a few more strokes along the beach.  “Perhaps, if I were to step boldly ashore, they would cut for it, and I could not catch up with one.”  And still I hesitated.

“I heard of a man, once, who invaded the nesting grounds of wild geese,” Maud said.  “They killed him.”

“The geese?”

“Yes, the geese.  My brother told me about it when I was a little girl.”

“But I know men club them,” I persisted.

“I think the tundra grass will make just as good a roof,” she said.

Far from her intention, her words were maddening me, driving me on.  I could not play the coward before her eyes.  “Here goes,” I said, backing water with one oar and running the bow ashore.

I stepped out and advanced valiantly upon a long-maned bull in the midst of his wives.  I was armed with the regular club with which the boat-pullers killed the wounded seals gaffed aboard by the hunters.  It was only a foot and a half long, and in my superb ignorance I never dreamed that the club used ashore when raiding the rookeries measured four to five feet.  The cows lumbered out of my way, and the distance between me and the bull decreased.  He raised himself on his flippers with an angry movement.  We were a dozen feet apart.  Still I advanced steadily, looking for him to turn tail at any moment and run.

At six feet the panicky thought rushed into my mind, What if he will not run?  Why, then I shall club him, came the answer.  In my fear I had forgotten that I was there to get the bull instead of to make him run.  And just then he gave a snort and a snarl and rushed at me.  His eyes were blazing, his mouth was wide open; the teeth gleamed cruelly white.  Without shame, I confess that it was I who turned and footed it.  He ran awkwardly, but he ran well.  He was but two paces behind when I tumbled into the boat, and as I shoved off with an oar his teeth crunched down upon the blade.  The stout wood was crushed like an egg-shell.  Maud and I were astounded.  A moment later he had dived under the boat, seized the keel in his mouth, and was shaking the boat violently.

“My!” said Maud.  “Let’s go back.”

I shook my head.  “I can do what other men have done, and I know that other men have clubbed seals.  But I think I’ll leave the bulls alone next time.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“Now