Great Northern? Read online

  “That’s the second time,” said Dorothea.

  “Two sorts of Divers,” said Dick. “At least I think so.”

  But Dorothea had no breath to spare for answering.

  They kept up a steady trot along the side of the loch, and then along the bank of the little stream that ran from the loch to the sea, and came at last to the place where with little foaming eddies it flowed out into the salt water. The Sea Bear was no longer in the little bay where they had left her standing on her legs as the tide fell. Already the tide had risen again and floated her off. There she lay at anchor. They could see Captain Flint, sitting on the cabin skylight, smoking. They could see blue puffs of smoke drifting slowly away. Nobody else was in sight, until from behind the Sea Bear John and Nancy appeared sculling round in the folding dinghy.

  “If I’d only known,” said Dick, thinking that once they had put the folding boat in the water he could have persuaded them to bring it to the loch.

  “Ahoy!” shouted Roger.

  “Half a minute,” Nancy shouted back, “we’ll bring the dinghy. No room for anybody else in this.”

  “They’ve given up the chase,” said Dorothea to Titty, looking back up the stream.

  “We did them beautifully,” said Roger. “All that stalking for nothing.”

  Nancy had climbed from the folding boat into the dinghy and came rowing ashore while John and Captain Flint were hoisting the folding boat on deck.

  “Where are Peggy and Susan?” asked Roger.

  “Cooking. We sounded the foghorn for you ages ago.”

  “We’re nearly starving,” said Roger. “We’ve been a thousand miles since we had our grub.”

  Everybody was talking at once as the shore party climbed in and the dinghy pushed off for the ship. “Savage Gaels!” “A castle!” “A young chieftain.…” “Bagpipes.…” “We’ve been stalked.…” “Hunted for our very lives.”

  “Dick,” said Dorothea, “what’s the matter?”

  “Three Divers,” said Dick, “and two of them look exactly like Great Northerns, but they can’t be.…”

  “Dick,” said Dorothea, “when did you eat your sandwiches?”

  “Oh, I say … I forgot about them. The thing is, those birds were nesting and I know my book says they don’t.”

  “Doesn’t she look a beauty?” said Nancy, resting on her oars a moment to look at the Sea Bear. “We made a proper job of it. We worked like slaves. We only just had time to do it before the tide came up.”

  CHAPTER VII

  IS IT OR ISN’T IT?

  NOTHING COULD HAVE fallen flatter than the explorers’ tale of their adventures. Captain Flint and the four scrubbers were thinking only of their ship. They had done a solid job of work. They had scrubbed and scraped the whole of the Sea Bear below the waterline. They had slapped on two coats of anti-fouling paint and done it with a minute or two to spare. They had floated their ship off and moored her with anchor and kedge in the old place. And now, very pleased with themselves, and hungry for a well-earned supper, they were not in the least interested in stories of savage Gaels, ferocious dogs, mysterious whistles and what not, which they thought were no more than what might be expected when Dorothea and Titty and Roger had been off by themselves and ready to make romance out of anything.

  “Oh yes,” said Peggy, almost as if she had not been listening to Titty’s story of how first she came to feel that the empty valley held a secret watcher.

  “Oh yes,” said John, when Roger had told of the charging dogs, pulled up, only just in time, by a whistle from their invisible master.

  “Not bad,” said Nancy between mouthfuls, when Titty had told of a huge and savage Gael roaring strange words and striding after them as they fled.

  “But it’s all true,” said Dorothea. “We were stalked like deer, and at the end there were whistles going all over the place and furious natives yelling their war cries.”

  “Every bit of it’s true,” said Roger, “and before that I found a prehistoric house. You can see it from our deck.”

  “Oh yes,” said Susan. “Pass the salt to Captain Flint.”

  “Dick’s got some sense,” said John. “How many savage Gaels did you see, Dick, scientifically speaking?”

  “I didn’t see any,” said Dick.

  “I thought so,” said John.

  “Dick was looking at birds,” said Dorothea, “and you know he doesn’t see anything else when he’s doing that. He didn’t even hear the Sea Bear’s foghorn the first time.”

  “What birds did you see?” asked Captain Flint.

  “Divers.”

  “What sort of Divers?”

  “That’s just what I don’t know,” said Dick. “I was just looking them up in my book, only supper got in the way.”

  “Ungrateful young hound,” said Captain Flint.

  “I don’t mean that,” said Dick, “only Dot made me put away the book till afterwards.”

  “Well,” said Dorothea, “you know you forgot to eat your sandwiches.”

  Dick looked rather sheepishly at Susan. “I’d have remembered them if I’d been hungry,” he said.

  “Come on,” said Nancy. “What really did happen? You were prowling about and some of the natives told you you were trespassing.”

  “Much much more than that,” said Roger. “They were creeping and lying low so that we couldn’t see them until they were ready to charge.”

  “They stalked us,” said Titty.

  “There’s a young chieftain,” said Dorothea. “We all saw him, except Dick.”

  “Complete with claymore?” said Captain Flint.

  “Well, we didn’t see that,” said Roger. “He was a long way off.”

  “There really were natives?” said Captain Flint.

  “Lots of them,” said Roger.

  “I bet they weren’t interested in you at all,” said John. “Just rounding up sheep or something.”

  “I don’t care what you say. We were stalked,” said Titty.

  After supper it was “All hands to wash up!” so as to get the table clear. Nancy lit the stove in the cabin, more for pleasure than for warmth. Peggy lit the cabin lamp although it was still light outside. The big chart was spread on one end of the cabin table where everybody who wanted could have a look at it. John and Captain Flint were working out tides. At the other end of the table, Dick settled down with his bird-book. Titty lay on her stomach in her bunk, writing up a log of the day’s adventures that was a good deal more lurid than it would have been if anybody besides herself had been going to read it. Dorothea, sitting as usual in her corner by the mast, was busy with an exercise book, sometimes writing down a sentence or two, sometimes scratching one out and writing it again.

  Dick had the bird-book open at the page with pictures of the Divers. His notebook was open beside it at the page with the drawing he had made that afternoon. He was more and more puzzled to know what he had seen. The book was clear enough: “Nests abroad. Usually seen solitary.” But his birds were not solitary. There were two of them. And they were not nesting abroad, but nesting here. Therefore, they could not be Great Northerns. Then he looked at the picture in the book and compared it with his sketch. The sketch was very rough, but there could be no mistaking it for the head and neck of any other bird than the one shown in the book labelled “Great Northern Diver”. On the same page was the account of the Black-throated Diver: “Colymbus arcticus. Length 28 inches” and the account of the Great Northern Diver: “Colymbus immer. Length 31 inches.” Yes, he had noticed himself that the Great Northerns, if they were Great Northerns, were bigger than the Black-throated. His sketch of the Black-throated was just as unmistakable. He was sure he had seen both kinds that day. And yet … He looked from his sketch to the picture in the book and was sure they showed the same bird. Then, looking not at the pictures but at what was written, he read those two words, “nests abroad”, and was full of doubt once more. He did not hear a word of the talk that was going on close beside him a
mong the mariners looking at their chart.

  “Aren’t you jolly glad we came in here?” Nancy was saying.

  “We were well enough in here during that fog,” Captain Flint admitted. “Better luck getting in than we deserved.”

  “And we’ve scrubbed her,” said Nancy. “And I bet she liked being scrubbed here where Mac used to scrub her instead of being taken into a beastly harbour.”

  “All very well,” said Captain Flint. “But it’s costing us a lot of time.”

  “Why? We can sail across from here in the morning.”

  “Just what we can’t,” said Captain Flint, with his finger on the chart. “I’m not going to take the risk of being held up in those narrows with a head wind or a calm. We might lose two days instead of one. We’ve got to go into port first to get a can or two of juice for Roger and his engine. We used very nearly the last we had getting in here. If we’d gone to the harbour we could have filled up last night.”

  “How soon shall we be starting in the morning?” asked Roger.

  “Good and early,” said Captain Flint. “Two or three in the morning, if we can. I’d start now if there was any wind, but there isn’t, and we want the tide with us round the Head and up the other side into harbour. And I don’t think we’ve juice in the tank for more than a mile.”

  “Well,” said Nancy, “that’s all right. It won’t take ten minutes filling up. We dash into the harbour, get the cans filled, and sail for the mainland right away. We won’t have lost any time at all.”

  “And what if there’s no wind? This morning’s draught has blown itself out. There hasn’t been a breath since tea-time.”

  “There’s always some,” said John. “We haven’t been stuck for a calm on the whole cruise.”

  “We would have been, but for the engine,” said Roger. “Twice. That day getting out of Tarbert and the other day getting into Portree. We’d have been stuck each time if it hadn’t been for the engine.”

  “Oh well,” said Nancy, “we found a good wind outside, and that day at Portree we were close to before the wind dropped. We could have towed in with the dinghy.”

  “Roger’s right,” said Captain Flint, “and you’re wrong. You never know when you may want the engine and want it badly. If our tanks were full now, we could start straight away, wind or no wind. Hullo! What’s the matter with Dick? Worried about something?”

  “Wake up, Ship’s Naturalist!” said Nancy.

  “Hey, DICK!” said Roger.

  Dick looked up from his book with a start.

  “What’s the matter, Professor?” said Captain Flint.

  “I can’t make out about those birds,” said Dick.

  “What birds?”

  “The ones I saw today,” said Dick. “The book says they don’t nest here, only abroad, and the ones I saw were nesting.”

  “Different sort of birds,” said Captain Flint.

  Dorothea looked up from her exercise book. “Didn’t you say they were Divers?” she asked. “The ones you’d been wanting to see?”

  “They were Divers,” said Dick. “One of them was a Black-throated Diver. It’s the other two I can’t make out. I thought they were Great Northerns, and they can’t be.”

  “Let’s have a look at the pictures,” said Captain Flint.

  Dick handed over the bird-book, and, when Captain Flint had looked at the pictures of Red-throated, Black-throated and Great Northern Divers, he pushed his own notebook across the table, open at the page on which he had made his sketches.

  “They’re not very well drawn,” he said, “but I’m sure I got the markings about right.”

  “Your bigger one’s certainly like the Great Northern Diver in the book,” said Captain Flint, “and the other’s obviously a Black-throated.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Dick.

  “Had you got the book with you when you made the drawings?”

  “No. That’s why I made them,” said Dick.

  “You seem to have changed your mind several times,” said Captain Flint. The page of the notebook had turned over, and he was looking at that other page where Dick had written “A pair of Black-throated Divers on the lower loch. Nesting,” had crossed out “Black-throated” and written “Great Northern”, had crossed out that and written it in again, besides dotting question marks all over the place.

  “They all look very much alike to me,” said Nancy.

  “Divers Divers,” said Roger. “Or Diverse Divers. Several different Divers. Divers because they’re diverse or Divers because they Dive.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Roger,” said John.

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t see that it matters,” said Nancy. “They’re all Divers, and it’s Divers you wanted to see. The whole of the first ten days you talked about nothing else.”

  “But it matters most awfully,” said Dick. “Those birds were nesting and the book says they don’t.”

  “Of course it matters,” said Dorothea, who had been listening and now came to the support of her brother. “It’s just the sort of thing that does matter.” She knew very well what a question like that meant to Dick. She knew that he would not be happy until he had settled it one way or the other. She had not minded the pooh-poohing of the story of the explorers’ adventures, and by now had begun to doubt whether those Gaels had not really been busy with something of their own and not concerned with explorers at all. The adventures had been good fun while they lasted. But this was different. She was not going to have anybody, even Nancy, pooh-poohing the work of the Ship’s Naturalist. “Of course, Dick’s got to make sure. It’s like Father’s diggings,” she said. “Once, in Egypt, when he couldn’t be sure whether a tomb was third or fourth dynasty, or something like that, he couldn’t think of anything else at all until he’d found out.”

  “How soon are we going to be home?” asked Dick.

  There was a horrified silence in the cabin. It was almost blasphemy. They all knew the Cruise was over, except for taking the Sea Bear across to the mainland to hand her back to her owner, but they could hardly believe their ears when they heard one of the crew talking as if he were in a hurry to leave the ship.

  “There’s a man at the Natural History Museum,” explained Dick. “He’d know in a moment. You see, there may be all kinds of changes between moults that this book says nothing about. They may look quite different at different times of year.”

  “It’s an awful pity Dick didn’t see the Divers at the beginning of the cruise,” said Dorothea. “He could have asked that man in the bird-boat.”

  “It may not be too late yet,” said Captain Flint. “We may see him again tomorrow. He was going straight for the Head when he barged across our bows yesterday. We may find him in harbour tomorrow if he hasn’t gone off again somewhere else. What was the name of his boat?”

  “Pterodactyl,” said everybody at once.

  “Do you think I could go and ask him?” said Dick.

  “Of course you could,” said Nancy. “Good excuse too, for you to have a look at your boat.”

  “Look here,” said Captain Flint, “we shan’t be in port for a minute longer than we can help, but if your Pterodactyl’s still there, we’ll put you aboard while John and I go ashore to fill up the cans. How’s that?”

  “Thank you very much,” said Dick, thinking that the bird-man would settle his doubts one way or other, and thinking too of seeing the inside of a boat fitted out for the very purpose for which, some day, he hoped to have a boat of his own.

  “Of course she may have sailed,” said Captain Flint.

  “Pushed off with her beastly motor, you mean,” said Nancy.

  ‘It’s a jolly good motor,” said Roger.

  “How soon do we start?” said Dick, half getting up.

  Captain Flint laughed. “Not now,” he said. “But as soon as tide and wind’ll let us.”

  Dick had one more look at the picture in the book and at his ow
n sketch, and then put bird-book and pocket-book resolutely away. Tomorrow, if things went well, he would know for certain.

  Presently Susan, backed by the skipper, began to urge people to go to bed. As usual, when this happened, the whole crew wanted to go on deck for a last look round and a smell of the night air before turning in. Late though it was, they could still see the dark shore and the way out between the cliffs and rocks into the open sea. There was no breath of wind and the Sea Bear lay hardly stirring in the still water, sparkling with reflections of the stars. John and Nancy hoisted the riding light up the forestay, according to custom, though even if another boat did come into the cove, which was unlikely, there was no fear of her not seeing the Sea Bear in that northern night that was never wholly dark. John went below through the forehatch. Nancy came aft along the deck to find Dorothea, Titty and Roger still lingering in the cockpit.

  “Lights out in five minutes.” Susan’s voice came from below.

  “Coming, coming,” said Roger, and explained to the others. “It’s not that I’m sleepy but I’ve got to be up early in case he wants the engine.”

  “Look here, Dot,” said Nancy, after he had gone. “Was it all a story of yours and Titty’s about being hunted through the valley?”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” said Titty.

  “No,” said Dorothea, and suddenly grabbed Nancy’s arm. “There’s one of the Gaels watching us NOW.” Not fifty yards away, in the shadow of the shore under the cliff, all three of them saw the flicker of a match. Someone was lighting a pipe. The tiny spark quavered and died. They could see nothing where it had been but the dark mass of the cliff against the sky.

  “What’s he there for?” said Dot.

  “Why shouldn’t he be?” said Nancy.

  “Hostile natives,” said Titty. “We told you and you wouldn’t believe us.”

  “Um,” said Nancy regretfully. “Well, anyway, we’re sailing in the morning. It’s too late to do anything with them now. But if they’re really hostile it’s an awful pity we’ll never be seeing them again.”