"Fetch your gaff, lad!" Topsail called after him. "Make haste! There's Joshua Rideout with his sail up. 'Tis time we was off."
"Looks more'n ever like snow," Bill Watt observed, while they waited. "I'm thinkin' 'twill snow."
"Oh, maybe 'twon't," said Topsail, optimistic in a lazy way.
The ice-floe was two miles or more off the coast; thence it stretched to the horizon—a vast, rough, blinding white field, formed of detached fragments. Some of the "pans" were acres in size; others were not big enough to bear the weight of a man; all were floating free, rising and falling with the ground swell.
The wind was light, the sea quiet, the sky thinly overcast. Had it not been for the threat of heavy weather in the northeast, it would have been an ideal day for the hunt. The punt and the rodney, the latter far in the lead, ran quietly out from the harbour, with their little sails all spread. From the punt Billy Topsail could soon see the small, scattered pack of seals—black dots against the white of the ice.
When the rodney made the field, the punts of the harbour fleet had disappeared in the winding lanes of open water that led through the floe. Tom Topsail was late. The nearer seals were all marked by the hunters who had already landed. The rodney would have to be taken farther in than the most venturesome hunter had yet dared to go—perilously far into the midst of the shifting pans.
The risk of sudden wind—the risk that the heavy fragments would "pack" and "nip" the boat—had to be taken if seals were to be killed.
"We got to go right in, Bill," said Topsail, as he furled the rodney's sails.
"I s'pose," was Watt's reply, with a backward glance to the northeast. "An' Billy?"
"'Tis not wise to take un in," Topsail answered, hastily. "We'll have un bide here."