Doctor Luke of the Labrador | Page 2

into the
gloomy seas of the east, and the sun was out, shining warm and yellow,
and the sea, lying in the lee of the land, was all aripple and aflash.
When the spring gales blew--the sea being yet white with drift-ice--the
schooners of the Newfoundland fleet, bound north to the fishing, often
came scurrying into our harbour for shelter. And when the skippers,
still dripping the spray of the gale from beard and sou'wester, came
ashore for a yarn and an hospitable glass with my father, the trader,
many a tale of wind and wreck and far-away harbours I heard, while we
sat by the roaring stove in my father's little shop: such as those which
began, "Well, 'twas the wonderfullest gale o' wind you ever
seed--snowin' an' blowin', with the sea in mountains, an' it as black as a
wolf's throat--an' we was somewheres off Cape Mugford. She were
drivin' with a nor'east gale, with the shore somewheres handy t' le'ward.
But, look! nar a one of us knowed where she were to, 'less 'twas in the
thick o' the Black Heart Reefs...." Stout, hearty fellows they were who
told yarns like these--thick and broad about the chest and lanky below,

long-armed, hammer-fisted, with frowsy beards, bushy brows, and
clear blue eyes, which were fearless and quick to look.
"'Tis a fine harbour you got here, Skipper David Roth," they would say
to my father, when it came time to go aboard, "an' here, zur," raising
the last glass, "is t' the rocks that make it!"
"T' the schooners they shelter!" my father would respond.
When the weather turned civil, I would away to the summit of the
Watchman--a scamper and a mad climb--to watch the doughty little
schooners on their way. And it made my heart swell and flutter to see
them dig their noses into the swelling seas--to watch them heel and leap
and make the white dust fly--to feel the rush of the wet wind that drove
them--to know that the grey path of a thousand miles was every league
of the way beset with peril. Brave craft! Stout hearts to sail them! It
thrilled me to watch them beating up the suddy coast, lying low and
black in the north, and through the leaden, ice-strewn seas, with the
murky night creeping in from the open. I, too, would be the skipper of a
schooner, and sail with the best of them!
"A schooner an' a wet deck for me!" thought I.
And I loved our harbour all the more for that.
* * * * *
Thus, our harbour lay, a still, deep basin, in the shelter of three islands
and a cape of the mainland: and we loved it, drear as it was, because we
were born there and knew no kinder land; and we boasted it, in all the
harbours of the Labrador, because it was a safe place, whatever the gale
that blew.

II
The WORLD From The WATCHMAN

The Watchman was the outermost headland of our coast and a
landmark from afar--a great gray hill on the point of Good Promise by
the Gate; our craft, running in from the Hook-an'-Line grounds off
Raven Rock, rounded the Watchman and sped thence through the Gate
and past Frothy Point into harbour. It was bold and bare--scoured by
the weather--and dripping wet on days when the fog hung thick and
low. It fell sharply to the sea by way of a weather-beaten cliff, in whose
high fissures the gulls, wary of the hands of the lads of the place,
wisely nested; and within the harbour it rose from Trader's Cove, where,
snug under a broken cliff, stood our house and the little shop and
storehouse and the broad drying-flakes and the wharf and fish-stages of
my father's business. From the top there was a far, wide outlook--all sea
and rock: along the ragged, treeless coast, north and south, to the haze
wherewith, in distances beyond the ken of lads, it melted; and upon the
thirty wee white houses of our folk, scattered haphazard about the
harbour water, each in its own little cove and each with its own little
stage and great flake; and over the barren, swelling rock beyond, to the
blue wilderness, lying infinitely far away.
I shuddered when from the Watchman I looked upon the wilderness.
"'Tis a dreadful place," I had heard my father say. "Men starves in
there."
This I knew to be true, for, once, I had seen the face of a man who
came crawling out.
"The sea is kinder," I thought.
Whether so or not, I was to prove, at least, that the wilderness was
cruel.
* * * * *
One blue day, when the furthest places on sea and land lay in a