Winter Holiday. Arthur Ransome

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СКАЧАТЬ by the barn, resting after the hundredth climb. Time had gone at the terrible pace at which it always goes during the last few days of the holidays, and everybody was startled when Peggy’s red cap showed on the ridge. She had brought a flag with her, and began to signal.

      Dorothea and Dick, trying to remember what they had learnt the night before, stared hard.

      “Long and two shorts. d. I know that one,” said Dick.

      “Two shorts,” said Dorothea.

      “i,” said Titty.

      “d-i,” said Roger. “I know the message before she’s flapped it. It’s dinner.”

      “But it can’t be dinner already!” said Dorothea.

      “Why not?” said Roger.

      And dinner it was.

      Peggy waited for no answer, but was gone. The four of them had a last wild rush down the slope and over the ice, picked up their brooms, tied them on the sledge, and went back to the igloo at the gallop. There they found the four elders cooling down after work indoors and out. John and Nancy could do no more to the igloo, which was now a perfect dome, with a trodden path leading to the door. Susan and Peggy had been making a hot-pot, with potatoes, onions, and carrots, and a whole tin of bully beef (known by the Swallows and Amazons as pemmican). The pot itself was cooling down outside the igloo, because it was too hot for anybody to eat, and Susan was prodding at the potatoes with a fork through clouds of steam, though she had really made sure everything was ready before taking the pot off the fire.

      “It’s sure to be all right, Susan,” said Nancy. “Let’s get at it.”

      It was taken back into the igloo to be eaten. The explorers sat round it on benches and logs under the light of the lantern that was hanging from one of the poles of the roof. They had not enough spoons and forks for everybody, but fingers, as Roger said, came in useful once somebody with a fork had helped by getting something out. Dick and Dorothea were, of course, invited to share the hot-pot with the others. “After all,” said Peggy, “a hot-pot’s a hot-pot, and sandwiches are just . . . ” She stopped, but Roger helped her out. “Sandwiches,” he suggested, and, catching Susan’s eye, added, “Why not? They are.” The sandwiches came in very useful for everybody, as plates that could be eaten up after the juice had soaked into them and they had served their first purpose.

      And then, when they had just got well started with dinner, they heard steps outside the door.

      “Polar bear,” said Roger. “Smelt the food.”

      But if it was a bear it was too much out of breath to be a fierce one.

      “It’s mother!” cried Nancy, looking out. “Come on in. We’ve got room for one Eskimo, and you’re the one.”

      “Thank you for that,” said a voice, and through the low doorway Mrs Blackett came crawling into the igloo. She was a very little woman, and rather plump, and she had a cheerful, clear voice very like Nancy’s. “Well,” she said, “I must say you’ve made a very good hut for yourselves. But, pouf, isn’t it hot? Open-air life indeed! It’s like an oven. And what a pull up from Holly Howe. Easy enough to find you with all those tracks in the snow. But if I’d remembered how far it was I’d . . . I’d have sent you a message to come down and pull me up on the sledge.”

      “We’d have run you up in style,” said Nancy. “Team of six dogs, eight with Dorothea and Dick . . . Here’s a place for you on this bench . . . it won’t let you down unless you joggle it . . . and there’s lots of dinner.”

      “It’s Dorothea and Dick I came up to see,” said Mrs Blackett, looking round under the lantern. “Staying with the Eskimos at Dixon’s farm, aren’t you? . . . By the way, Nancy, do remind me to thank Mrs Dixon for that pork pie . . . Well, I wonder if you’d care to come across the fiord to an Eskimo settlement on the other side. You could join the others at Holly Howe after breakfast tomorrow, and Nancy and Peggy can pull over with the boat and bring you all across.”

      “We’d like to come very much,” said Dorothea, and managed to catch Dick’s eye, so that he said “Thank you” before it was too late.

      “The days are so short now,” Mrs Blackett went on, “you’d have to come first thing in the morning, because of getting back before dark. You might take a run up the Matterhorn – Kanchenjunga, I mean – or something like that.”

      “It’ll be quite all right,” said Nancy. “We won’t be going to the Pole till the very last day.”

      “Good,” said Mrs Blackett. “So that’s settled. Meet at Holly Howe first thing, and don’t bring any food. Better tell Mrs Dixon tonight, or she’ll be filling your knapsacks before you start. Oh, thank you, Peggy. What is it? Hot-pot? It smells very good. You’re not taking it out on the tarn . . . ?”

      “On the tarn?” said Susan.

      “I was thinking of another hot-pot,” said Mrs Blackett. “It was once upon a time when I was young, and the lake was frozen all over.”

      “If only it would hurry up and do it now,” said Nancy.

      “And a whole lot of us spent the day on the ice. A big hot-pot and a basket of other things were sent down to us from the house, and brought out to where there was figure-skating going on in the middle of the lake. And the hot-pot was put down on the ice while the basket was being unpacked to get at the plates and knives and forks. And we all came skating along very, very hungry, and found no hot-pot. Just a little cloud of steam drifting away, a pleasant smell, and a neat round hole in the ice through which the hot-pot had that moment gone to the bottom of the lake.”

      “What did you do?” asked Roger.

      “Went without,” said Mrs Blackett. “What else could we do?”

      “This one was so hot we cooled it in the snow,” said Peggy.

      “Lucky it’s a long way to the tarn,” said Roger, who thought that if the ice had been a little nearer this hot-pot might have gone the same way as the other.

      After dinner, when Mrs Blackett had admired the outside of the igloo as well as the inside, she said that she must be going, and that Nancy and Peggy must come with her.

      “Your dinner was a fairly late one, you know, and it’ll be getting dark in an hour, so it doesn’t make very much difference. I’m sorry to take them off, but I was given a lift round the head of the lake, and the boat’s the only way to get back.”

      “We’ll give you a full dog team now,” said Nancy, and they put Mrs Blackett on the sledge, and the whole Polar expedition pulled on the ropes or pushed behind as they ran the sledge along the old path through the wood until they came out of the trees and the snow stretched clear before them down to the road, with only one stone wall across it and that with a wide gap in it. Dozens of tracks showed where there had been tobogganing early in the morning.

      Peggy, Nancy, and John joined Mrs Blackett on the sledge.

      “Tomorrow won’t be wasted,” said Nancy to Dorothea. “Something always happens on Kanchenjunga. All right, mother? Tuck your feet in. John’s coming to bring the sledge up for the others. Let go at the stern there. Shove her off!”

      There СКАЧАТЬ