Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/551

Rh lives whenever the team came near, crying: "Look out! The harses is comin'!" The caribou are too far inland for most of the settlers; but at various seasons (excluding such times as there is no game at all) there are to be had grouse, partridge, geese, eider-duck, puffin, gulls, loon and petrel, bear, arctic hare, and bay seal, which are shot with marvellously long and old guns—some of them ancient flintlocks.

Notwithstanding all, the folk are large and hardy—capable of withstanding cruel hardship and deprivation.

The sealing-schooner Right and Tight struck on the Fish Rocks off Cape Charles in the dusk of a northeast gale. It is a jagged, black reef, outlying and isolated; the seas wash over it in heavy weather. It was a bitter gale; there was ice in the sea, and the wind was wild and thick with snow; she was driving before it—wrecked, blind, utterly lost. The breakers flung her on the reef, broke her back, crunched her, swept the splinters on.

Forty-two men were of a sudden drowned in the sea beyond; but the skipper was left clinging to the rock in a swirl of receding water.

"Us seed un there in the marnin'," said the old man of Cape Charles who told me the story. "He were stickin' to it like a mussel, with the sea breakin' right over un! 'Cod! he were!"

He laughed and shook his head; that was a tribute to the strength and courage with which the man on the reef had withstood the icy breakers through the night.

"Look! us couldn't get near un," he went on, Twas clear enough t' see, but the wind was blowin' wonderful, an' the seas was too big for the skiff. Sure, I knows that; for us tried it.

Leave us build a fire !' says my woman. 'Leave us build a fire on the head!' says she. Twill let un know they's folk lookin' on.'

Twas a wonderful big fire us set; an' it kep' us warm, so us set there all day watchin' the skipper o' the Right an Tight on Fish Rocks. The big seas jerked un loose an' flung un about, an' many a one washed right over un; but nar a sea could carry un off, 'Twas a wonderful sight t' see un knocked off his feet, an' scramble round an' cotch hold some-