II
On the night of Saturday, January 1st, it was almost pitch dark along the coast. In the murk, the eye of Nauset Light had a reddish tinge, and, turning, revealed a world shaped like a disk and pressed between a great darkness of earth and a low, black floor of cloud. The wind was on shore and blowing strong. Some time after midnight, a surfman from Cahoons Hollow Coast Guard Station, patrolling south, discovered a schooner in the surf, with the seas breaking over her, and the crew hollering in the rigging. I write “hollering” here without shame, for “hallooing,” or whatever the proper spelling of the verb may be, simply would not tell the story, or convey the sound heard in the night. After holding up a red signal flare to tell the men on the wreck that they had been seen, the surfman hurried on to Cahoons and gave the alarm. The crew of the station, under command of Captain Henry Daniels, then dragged their cart of life-saving apparatus down the beach through a surf running to the bank, and took off every single man safely in the breeches buoy. The prompt and gallant rescue had been no easy task, with the tide thus running high and the seas breaking over the schooner.
I had my first view of her the next afternoon. She turned out to be the two-masted, motor-auxiliary fishing schooner A. Roger Hickey, Boston-bound from the fishing grounds. Her compass had been at fault, they said. When I caught sight of her from the top of a path descending the great earth cliff of the Cape, the vessel lay on the open sand a mile up the beach to the north, a typical Boston fisherman with a red bottom and a black hull. A vessel, I judged, something over a hundred feet long. The whole vast view was really a picture of singular and moving beauty; it would be hard to forget, I think, that immense and jade-green ocean under a fine sky, the great, sepia-brown beach with its overhanging haze of faintest violet, the bright ship so forlorn, and the tiny black figures moving round and about it. The beach had already begun to break up its prize. Along it, on my way to the ship, I saw splintered wood, an undamaged hatch cover painted white, and several bunches of water-logged manila tags with a fish merchant’s name printed on them in large black letters.
Presently there came walking toward me three ladies of Wellfleet, good, pleasant New England housewives, each one with a large haddock under her arm rolled up in a sheet of newspaper, the three dead-eyed haddock heads protruding as from paper collars, the three fish tails visible behind. Apparently the fish which the Hickey had on board when she struck were being given away.
Arriving at the wreck, I found that her rudder had already carried away, and that her timbers were badly wrenched, and her seams opened. The ship’s dog, who had been thrillingly rescued in his master’s arms, sat shivering on the beach, a most inoffensive and unromantic brown dog with what looked like an appalling case of mange. A handful of visitors, men and boys in workaday clothes and rubber boots, were wandering round the vessel, their boot prints making a chain about her on the beach, and other men were busy puttering round the steeply tilted deck. Finding Captain Henry Daniels of Cahoons aboard, an old friend of years’ standing, I heard that the crew of the Hickey, two or three excepted, had already returned to Boston by train, and that the vessel was so badly damaged that she was to be stripped as soon as possible of all gear worth saving, and abandoned.
Midships, a discussion was going on round the open mouth of one of the fish holds. The Hickey’s catch was still there, a mass of big greyish fish bodies, haddocks with staring eyes, cod with chin whiskers, flounders, and huge lemon soles. The discussion concerned the possibility of the fish having had a bath in fuel oil when the seas washed into the Hickey at high tide. No one took serious alarm, and the fish, handed out to all comers by a member of the crew, proved excellent eating.
So they stripped the A. Roger Hickey, took out her engine and such gear as they could, and then someone set fire to the hulk. By the end of the winter, there was not even a splinter of this vessel on the beach. She was the third wreck, and there were others to come.
As the winter closed in upon the beach, I began to look forward to days when I might see what took place there during icy weather, but such opportunities proved even rarer than I had expected. Thrust forth as it is into the outer Atlantic, the Cape has a climate of island quality and island moderation. Low temperatures may occur, but the thermometer almost never falls as low as it does on the inner Massachusetts coast, nor do “spells” of cold weather “hang on” for any length of time. Storms which are snowstorms on the continental mainland turn to rainstorms on the Cape, and such snowstorms as do arrive form but a crust upon these Eastham moors. Two days after the storm the snow has thinned to great decorative patches on the slopes of sedgy hills; in another day only fragments, drifts, and stray islets remain. There is even a difference of temperature between the mainland moors of Eastham and the dunes. It is warmer on the bar. On a casual winter day I have noted a difference of eight degrees.
The work of cold weather—I mean weather when the temperature sinks toward zero—is thus to be observed only on occasion along this beach. When it comes, it comes all at once, creates a new world overnight, and vanishes overnight. The agency that brings it is the northwest wind sweeping down on us across Massachusetts Bay from the forests and frozen lakes of northern Canada. I remember one of the nights of its coming, a Thursday night early in January with great winter clouds moving out to sea, opening and closing over the cold stars, the wind on the beach so icy that I found myself, when I first went out into it, breathing it in little reluctant breaths. The next day was as cold and desolate a day as I have ever seen upon the beach. The ocean was purple-black, rough, and covered with sombre whitecaps; the morning light was pewter dull, and over earth and sea and the lonely sands hung a pall of purple-leaden cloud full of vast, tormented motion as it crossed the Cape on its way to the Atlantic. Looking off to sea, as I walked down my dune to go exploring, I saw a solitary freighter hugging the coast for shelter from the northwest wind; she was plunging heavily in the great seas and flinging up tons of spray with each plunge, and her bow and her forward deck were already thick with ice. Gulls flew along the iron-black and sombre breakers of the ebb, their white plumage chalky in that impure and arctic light. The wind was a thing to search the marrow of one’s bones.
Two beaches had formed in the icy night, best seen and studied at low tide. The upper beach occupied the width between the dunes and the line of the night’s high tide; the lower beach sloped from this high-tide mark to the open sea. The upper beach and the dunes were frozen hard. The frozen sand was delightful to walk upon, for the tiny congealed grains afforded a safe, sustaining footing, and the surface, though solid, had the resiliency of thick, unvarnished linoleum on a good floor. It was an odd, an unnatural experience, to hit one’s foot on a ridge of frozen sand. Fragments of wreckage imbedded in the sand, wreaths of imbedded seaweed—all these were as immovable as so many rocks. At the very foot of the largest of the dunes, I found a male surf scoter or skunk coot frozen stiff. A few solid kicks dislodged it, and I picked it up, but could find no wound. The lower beach, that is to say the width that had been covered by the tide during the night, was frozen solid at its junction with the upper beach, but the fine slope down to the breakers, though frozen firm, was not frozen through and through. Along the edge of the breakers, it was not frozen at all.
Between these two beaches, one above, one below, one frozen solid, the other crusted over, there ran a kind of frontier some eight or ten feet wide, a no-man’s-land of conflicting natural forces. At the height of the night tide, the seething foam rims of the sliding surf, flung by the ocean into the face of the night cold, had frozen on the sloping beach in layers of salt ice which preserved all the curves and foamy ridges of the captured edge of the sea. The brim of a high tide, that very spirit of energy and motion, lay there motionless on a beach itself deprived of motion; the scalloped edges, the little curls of foam, the long, reaching, rushing tongues, all these were to be seen enchanted into that ocean ice which is so much like a kind of snow. At its upper edge this image of the surf brim was but a glaze of ice on the beach; at its lower edge it was twelve to fifteen inches in height and fell off sheer, like an ice cake, to the beach below. And north and south it ran, mile upon icy mile, as far as the eye could see.
The subsequent history of this ice is not without interest. After two days of bitter cold the wind changed in the night, and that night’s tide quietly removed every vestige of the ice cakes from the beach. The swathe on which the ice had lain, however, remained half visible, for there water and sand had mingled and frozen deep. Presently the upper beach thawed, the cold crumbling drily out of the sand, and the lower beach, which had yielded its frozen surface to each succeeding tide and frozen again during the ebb, remained as the last tide left it. Between the two beaches, the width of buried ice lingered for a fortnight, resisting sun and whole days of winter rain. It had a way of coming suddenly to an end, and of beginning as suddenly again; sand drifted over it, the tide edge seeped through to it, the moving beach, forever adjusting itself to complex forces, burst it open, yet it lingered on. For all of us who used the beach, this buried width of ice became a secret road. The coast guards knew it well and followed along it in the night. As I set down these words, I think of the times I have come to a blind end and prodded the sand with my beach staff in search of that secret footing. Little by little the sun and the tides wore down its resistance, and so it disappeared, and our searching feet knew it no more.
The great marsh was another desolation on that same overcast and icy day. Salt ice had formed in wide rims along the edges of the great level islands, the shallower channels had frozen over, and the deeper ones were strewn with ice cakes sailing and turning about in the currents of the tides. The scene had taken on a certain winter unity, for the ice had bound the channels and the islands together into one wide and wintry plain.
On the next morning—it was sunny then, but still freezing cold—I chanced to go out for a moment to look at the marsh. About a mile and a half away, in one of the open channels, was a dark something which looked like a large, unfamiliar bird. A stray goose, perhaps? Taking my glass, I found the dark object to be the head of a deer swimming down the channel, and, even as I looked, there came to my ears the distant barking of dogs. A pair of marauding curs, out hunting on their own, had found a deer somewhere and driven the creature down the dunes and into the icy creeks. Down the channel it swam, and presently turned aside and climbed out on the marsh island just behind the Fo’castle. The animal was a young doe. I thought then, and I still believe, that this doe and the unseen creature whose delicate hoofprints I often found near the Fo’castle were one and the same. It lived, I believe, in the pines on the northern shore of the marsh and came down to the dunes at earliest dawn. But to return to its adventures: All afternoon I watched it standing on the island far out in the marsh, the tall, dead sea grass rising about its russet body; when night came, it was still there, a tiny spot of forlorn mammalian life in that frozen scene. Was it too terrified to return? That night a tide of unusual height was due which would submerge the islands under at least two feet of water and floating ice. Would the doe swim ashore under cover of darkness? I went out at midnight into my solitary world and saw the ice-covered marsh gleaming palely under a sky of brilliant stars, but could see nothing of the island of the doe save a ghostliness of salt ice along the nearer rim.
The first thing I did, on waking the next morning, was to search the island with my glass. The doe was still there.
I have often paused to wonder how that delicate and lovely creature endured so cruel a night, how she survived the slow rise of the icy tide about her poor legs, and the northwest gale that blustered about her all night long in that starlit loneliness of crunchy marsh mud and the murmur of the tides. The morning lengthened, the sun rose higher on the marsh, and presently the tide began to rise again. I watched it rising toward the refugee, and wondered if she could survive a second immersion. Just a little before noon, perhaps as the water was flooding round her feet, she came down to the edge of her island, and plunged into the channel. The creek was full of ice mush and of ice floes moving at a good speed; the doe was weak, the ice cakes bore down upon her, striking her heavily; she seemed confused, hesitated, swam here, swam there, stood still, and was struck cruelly by a floe which seemed to pass over her, yet on she swam, bewildered, but resolute for life. I had almost given up hope for her, when rescue came unexpectedly. My friend Bill Eldredge, it appeared, while on watch in the station tower the day before had chanced to see the beginning of the story, and on the second morning had noticed the doe still standing in the marshes. All the Nauset crew had taken an interest. Catching sight of the poor creature fighting for life in the drift, three of the men put off in a skiff, poled the ice away with their oars, and shepherded the doe ashore. “When she reached dry land, she couldn’t rise, she was so weak, and fell down again and again. But finally she stood up and stayed up, and walked off into the pines.”