Great Northern?. Arthur Ransome

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СКАЧАТЬ outward bound. John and Captain Flint slept in these bunks. Nancy, Peggy, Susan, Titty, Dorothea and Dick had each one of the cupboard bunks in the main cabin while Roger, being the smallest, had a bunk in the fo’c’sle which once upon a time, no doubt, had belonged to a Norwegian ship’s boy.

      John, feet wide apart to steady himself, was leaning over the chart table by the companion ladder, looking now at the big chart that showed the coasts on both sides of the Minch, the Scottish mainland and the Outer Hebrides, and now at a much smaller chart that showed in detail the tiny cove for which the ship was making. Mac, the owner of the Sea Bear, had left a lot of these little charts aboard her. John and Nancy spent happy hours looking through them and, when Captain Flint had said that he meant to give the ship a scrub before handing her over they had brandished this particular chart before him. “Look at this,” Nancy had said. “Mac didn’t bother about taking her to a harbour for scrubbing. Look at that anchor and look at that cross and what he’s scribbled in pencil in the margin … ‘Scrubbed Sea Bear’ … Let’s do the same. She’s got her own legs. There’s no need to take her into a harbour and lean her up against a pier.” Rather unwillingly, Captain Flint had agreed.

      Titty was lying on her stomach in her cupboard bunk, sucking a pencil and bringing up to date her private log of the voyage, a rather different log from the business-like one kept by John and Nancy, which was all courses and distances run and remarks on changes of wind and weather. It was a good deal easier to write lying on your stomach in a bunk than sitting at the cabin table while the Sea Bear was crashing her way to windward. (Not that she was crashing very hard at the moment, with only a failing wind to drive her, but there had been times when she had crashed very hard indeed and Titty had got into the way of writing her log in her bunk.) Dorothea was also writing, but her writing had nothing to do with what happened aboard ship. She had wedged herself into a corner by the mast, leaning back against the bulkhead that divided cabin from fo’c’sle, and was making up her mind whether the villain in her new story should have a black beard and earrings or be clean-shaven with a scar across his cheek.

      Dick, who had been appointed Ship’s Naturalist, was sitting on the starboard settee, with a pencil in one hand while with the other he was keeping the Pocket Book of Birds and his notebook from sliding off the cabin table. He was making a list of the birds seen during the cruise and telling himself that the voyage had been a success in spite of his disappointment at not seeing the particular birds for which he had been keeping a look-out. “I say,” he had said when he had first heard of the northern port from which they were sailing and the islands they were to visit, “we’ll be seeing Divers.” “With brass helmets,” Dorothea had said, “going down under the sea and coming up with bars of gold from sunken wrecks.” “Not that kind of Diver,” he had explained. “Birds. Red-throated and Black-throated. We might even have a chance of seeing a Great Northern, though they’ll most of them be in Iceland by now.” All through the cruise he had been watching for them, and now, with the cruise all but over, he was consoling himself by remembering how many others he had been able to add to the list of birds he had seen with his own eyes … gannets, guillemots, terns, petrels, fulmars, puffins, razorbills, mergansers, and so tame some of them. He was almost sure that some of his photographs of gulls would come out all right, and perhaps, though it had been taken from a long way off, that one of a shag in the act of swallowing a fish. But he had seen no Divers, and if, tomorrow, they were all going to be hard at work scrubbing the ship, there would be no other chance.

      “I say, John,” he asked, “you know the lakes shown on that chart? How far are they from the place where we’ll be anchored? Can I have a look?”

      John dropped on the settee beside Dick and held the little chart so that they could look at it together. It showed an inlet in the coast-line, divided into two by a promontory and a line of rocks. There was flattish country to the south, a cliff and hills to the north, and inland were a number of small lochs, two of them drained by a stream that came out at the head of the cove that was marked with an anchor and a cross on the shore. On those lochs, Dick thought, there might be Divers to be seen. John was interested not in the lochs but in a neat sketch at the head of the chart showing the outline of the hills behind the coast, with a dotted line ruled straight down from one corner of a square-topped hill, and a note written beside it, “N. end of Sq. Top bearing W. ½ N. leads to cliff on N. side of Entrance.”

      MAC’S CHART OF THE COVE

      We put in some of the names. (Not very well. Sorry.) N.B.

      There was a sudden stamp of feet on the foredeck. Roger’s voice shrilled out, “Sail HO! … At least, not sail. Motor boat … Starboard quarter …”

      It was the first vessel to be sighted that day. John, the little chart still in his hand, was up the companion ladder in a flash. Dorothea wriggled round the table to follow him. Titty rolled out of her bunk and made a dead heat of it with Dorothea. Even Susan, after a careful glance at the stove to see that the flame was neither too high nor too low, banged at the underneath of the forehatch, in case Roger was on the top of it, pushed it up and climbed out. Dick, who had glanced back to his bird-book, where it said that Black-throated Divers were to be found on mountain lochs near the coast, looked up to find that he had the cabin to himself. Everybody else was on deck.

      There was a lot of chatter up there. People were taking turns with glasses and telescope. “Look here, it’s my turn now. I spotted her first.” That was Roger. “Only a motor boat, anyway.” That was John. “She’s going to pass us pretty close.” That was Nancy. “You carry on, Nancy. We’ve the right of way. You’ve nothing to worry about. She’ll pass under our stern.” That was Captain Flint. “She’s coming up a terrific lick.” That was Roger. “Probably carrying dispatches.” That was Titty. “Or taking a doctor to one of the lighthouses.” That was Dorothea.

      Dick hardly heard the chatter. He was looking at the coloured pictures in his bird-book, showing the Divers he had never seen. Tomorrow would be the very last chance. The chatter on deck meant nothing to him until, suddenly, he heard his own name.

      “It’s Dick’s boat.” That was Peggy’s voice. “Dick! Take a look. Where is he? Hey! Dick!”

      Dorothea called down the companion ladder. “Dick! Dick! Hurry up. It’s your bird-man and he’s going to pass us quite close.”

      Dick was already working his way along the slanting cabin floor and reaching for the ladder. Dorothea pushed the glasses into his hand as he came on deck. He had no need of them to recognize the bird-man’s boat. He knew her the moment he saw her, but, balancing as best he could and trying to hold the glasses steady, he used them to read at least some of the many letters of her name. “P.T.E.R….” The Sea Bear lurched and the glasses were pointing at sky instead of boat … He swung them down and read the last lot of letters … “A.C.T.Y.L.” Yes, she was the Pterodactyl all right, on her way back. Earlier in their cruise they had seen her in that harbour on the other side of the cape and Dick had told the others what her name meant, PTERODACTYL, a sort of half-bird half-lizard, prehistoric, of course, and extinct. And then, while they were ashore, coming along the quay, all laden with provisions, they had seen her moving out, and had stopped to watch her. “Off again after his birds,” a longshoreman had said. “Shetlands, he’s bound for. Looking for birds. His fourth trip this year.” “What did you say he was?” Dick had asked. “One of those bird chaps,” the man had said. “Tell him of a rare bird and he’ll go five hundred miles, they say. Pays good money, too, to anybody who tells him where to find one.” Dick had watched the big motor yacht slip away beyond the pierheads and, after they were back aboard their ship, he had climbed the rigging to the cross-trees and caught just a glimpse of her outside, already no more than a white speck of flying spray, on her way to the far northern nesting places of the sea birds. Some day, perhaps, he too would СКАЧАТЬ