The battles that occurred that month between huge fish out in the bay, their terrible, mysterious, black arms that beat the water with a sound like cannon, the plunge into the depths of the poor, frantic, wounded whale, and his return again for air; again the thunder sound and flying foam and spray as the dread black arm is beating on the sea; then calm. You shudder at that huge death. That was a drama for Fox Islanders.
And later the poor magpie’s death. Real tears were shed from a poor boy’s half-broken heart.
Two strangers come these days and stop with Olson. They’re on the search of that small craft that we saw driving seaward in a tempest.
THE DAY’S WORK
There is mystery! Was she adrift unmanned, broke from her moorings, or was there life aboard as we had thought? In that case she’d been stolen, and who were the men and where? Wrecked safely on some island, drowned, or driven out to sea? No man shall ever know.
A porcupine is captured wandering near our house. We build for him a cozy home—he doesn’t like it much but still he should. We care for him day after day, he twines himself, about our hearts. Then at last one day when we’d pastured him in freedom out in the new fallen snow, trusting his tracks to lead us to him, the goats cut in and spoiled the trail and he was lost to us.
Olson has gone to Seward: days of waiting, days of waiting! How many times do we travel down the cove to the point from whence Caine’s Head is seen, going in hope, returning gloomily.