We’ll sing while we bait, and we’ll sing while we haul,
For the deeps of the Haaf have enough for us all.”
Norway Fishing Song.
The dawn was yet grey upon the mountains, and the light steaming mist was still resting on the glassy surface of the harbour, when the three boats slipped off noiselessly from the dockyard point. The fishing rods, now useless, had been landed, and the guns and rifles had taken their places, while the after-lockers were stored with cod lines and their gear, to say nothing of the långref that had done such good service at Mosse Eurd, and which was now converted into a spillet. The boats were well provisioned—that is almost an invariable rule in Norway, so far as quantity goes, but on this occasion, they were provisioned with all the delicacies the fair Marie could lay her hands upon; nay, so interested was she in the subject, that she came down with the party, in the grey of the morning, to superintend the packing herself; and, after carrying on a lively conversation with Birger, on the road, endeavoured, in vain, to make the Captain understand something or other; her anxiety to convey her meaning brought her cheek very much closer to his lips than perhaps she intended—how close it was impossible to say, for the morning light was still very faint,—in all probability, Birger might have come in for a share of the secret, whatever it was, but he was rude enough to burst out laughing, and to add something in Swedish, about bribery and corruption, which put the young lady to immediate flight.
“You need not look so conceited,” said he, (possibly the grapes were sour); “it was not you, it was the eider down she was thinking of.”
No one knows what silence is, who has not been in the North—what we call silence, is a perpetual recurrence of a thousand familiar sounds, so familiar that the ear does not notice them; the chirp of hundreds of birds, and millions of insects go to make up English silence;—perhaps within the Arctic circle it may be deeper than that which, at that early hour, brooded over the harbour of Christiansand; but even that was a silence which made itself to be felt; and the regular and steady roll of the oars in the rowlocks, as the boats shot out into the fjord, fairly echoed among the cliffs like grumbling thunder. Nothing could be more calm and unbroken than the water, which seemed to be hot, for a slight steam kept slowly rising from the whole surface, and hung upon it like a veil which now began to whiten in the increasing light; every here and there a seal would put up his head, like a black oily bead, take a steady view of the boats, and then dip under, without a ripple to show where the surface had been broken.
“Oars!” said the Captain, in a whisper, as one of these sheep of Proteus evinced a little more indiscreet curiosity than his neighbours, and as his boat, which had been leading, lost her way, he rose quietly, and his rifle thundered through the still air of the morning, as if it had been a six-pounder, while its echoes were caught and repeated, crack after crack, by a dozen sharp cliffs and wooded islands.
The surface was sufficiently disturbed this time—for the Captain’s rifle seldom spoke in vain,—and the seal was struggling in the agonies of death; the men stretched out on their oars as if they were racing, but before the boat could reach the spot, all was quiet again, and a slight red stain in the water was all that remained to tell of the Captain’s accuracy of aim. The Captain gazed on the deep blue below.
“It is of no use,” said the Parson, “they always sink, and it is a great shame to be firing at that which you cannot get when you have killed it.”