“Here y’are, sir,” said Smith, “right sort, and nothing wrong in it, ’cept a spot o’ blood on its back, over two o’ the feathers. I was going to pull ’em out and bring him quite clean, on’y you’re so perticler about every feather being there.”
“How could it be perfect without?” said Oliver.
“Oh, I dunno, sir. Birds got so many feathers in ’em that nobody’d miss fifty or sixty, let alone one or two. Why, many’s the time I’ve seen ’em pick out lots themselves, specially ducks.”
“I daresay,” replied Oliver, “but don’t you ever pick any out; I can always wash away the blood.”
“All right, sir, but ain’t yer going to look at it, and what Billy Wriggs got, too?”
“I will directly,” replied Oliver. “Wait till I’ve turned this skin.”
“Oh, yes, sir, we’ll wait,” said the sailor, and he dropped the butt of his gun to the earth, and stood holding a bird he had shot, while Oliver was seated by an upturned cask, whose head formed a table just under the brig’s bows, where, with a large piece of canvas rigged to a stay, he worked in shelter, skinning his specimens for hours in the early morning and late evening.
“Looks gashly nasty, now, sir,” said the man, after a few minutes’ watching, while Oliver carefully painted over the wet, soft, newly-stripped-off skin of a bird with the aromatic poisonous cream he had in a pot. Now the bristles of the brush sought out every crease and hollow about where the flesh-denuded bones of the wings hung by their tendons; then the bones of the legs were painted, the young man intent upon his work—too much so to look up when the two sailors came round from the other side of the vessel. Now the brush ran carefully along the skin, so as not to smirch the feathers at the edge; now it was passed along the thin stretched neck and up to the skull, which had been left whole all but the back, where brains and eyeballs had been carefully extracted, leaving nothing but the paper-like bone of wondrously delicate texture and strength. Here the brush was sedulously applied with more and more cream, which shed a pleasant odour around.
“Pyson, ain’t it, sir?” said Wriggs, at last.
“Yes, my man, dangerously poisonous,” said Oliver, as he worked away.