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THE BELCHER ISLANDS
41
compass by which the helmsman kept his course. Literally, the Laddie had wound her way into land.
“’Tis no place fur us, sir,” said the skipper, and he hailed the mate and two of the crew who had gone off to the island for fresh water.
“WeVe seen big land, sir,” they called as they clambered up over the rail, and explained that they had glimpsed it when they climbed a hill on the island.
“ Big land ? ” says the skipper. “You means the mainland.”
“Naw, sir,” said the mate, “what land we seen lays to westward and there’s sixty miles or more of it, for ’tis spread over nine points of the compass, sir.”
We could see it from the rigging and of its identity there was no doubt; the blue loom which lay along the rim of that gray waste of sea could be no other than Wetalltok’s land.
With the water casks hauled up and lashed into their cradles we were out of it soon enough. Before sundown (the log read twenty miles) we hove to off the northeastern portion of the new-found coast. Cautiously sounding, we crept through a bottle neck into a small rock-bound harbour. The clank and clangour of the anchor chains pouring out through the hawse pipes sent flocks of eiders a-whirring round us. A long string of geese honked wildly as they flapped awkwardly away. A gorgeous silver fox scurried into the crevices of a great pile of rocks.
Up over the moss carpet of a valley, a shallow groove in bare rock slopes, I climbed to a vantage-point from which, as far as the eye could see, north, south, and west, lay range upon range of hills. The valleys between them were mossgrown sweeps of tawn and russet strangely like cultivated