"Nothing much to laugh at."
"No, sir," Billy replied. "I don't feel like laughin', sir. But 'tis so wonderful dangerous out on the Bight that I jus' can't help laughin'."
Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail were used to travelling all sorts of ice in all sorts of weather. The returning fragments of the ice of Anxious Bight had been close packed for two miles beyond the entrance to Our Harbour by the northeast gale that had driven them back from the open. An alien would have stumbled helplessly and exhausted himself; by and by he would have begun to crawl—in the end he would have lost his life in the frost. This was rough ice. In the press of the wind the drifting floe had buckled. It had been a big gale. Under the whip of it, the ice had come down with a rush. And when it encountered the coast, the first great pans had been thrust out of the sea by the weight of the floe behind.
A slow pressure had even driven them up the cliffs of the Head and heaped them in a tumble below.
It was thus a folded, crumpled floe—a vast field of broken bergs and pans at angles.
No Newfoundlander would adventure on the ice without a gaff. A gaff is a lithe, iron-shod pole, eight or ten feet in length. Doctor Luke was as cunning and sure with the gaff as any old hand of the sealing fleet; and Billy Topsail always maintained that he had been born with a little gaff in his hand instead of a silver spoon in his mouth. They employed the gaffs now to advantage. They used them like vaulting poles. They walked less than they leaped. But this was no work for the half-light of an obscured moon. Sometimes they halted for light. And delay annoyed Doctor Luke. A peppery humour began to possess him. A pause of ten minutes—they squatted for rest meantime—threw him into a state of incautious irritability. At this rate it would be past dawn before they made the cottages of Ragged Run Cove.
It would be slow beyond—surely slow on the treacherous reaches of green ice between the floe and the Spotted Horses.
And beyond the Spotted Horses, whence the path to Ragged Run led—the crossing of Tickle-my-Ribs!