“What for goodness’ sake is that in his mouth?” asked Harry.
“That’s the bone,” replied Joe; “and a fine head of bone it is. Some of the slabs are eight or nine feet long.”
“Well, I never thought whalebone looked like that,” said Harry, gazing in astonishment at the black slabs varying in length from one foot to eight that extended down from the upper jaw. They were flattened, nearly a foot in greatest diameter at the base, and tapering to a thin tip. This was fringed far up on the sides with what resembled horsehair.
“Can he shut his mouth with all that in it?” asked Harry.
“Oh, yes,” replied Joe. “The tips fit into the groove between the tongue and the lip, and point backward when he shuts his jaws. They are very elastic, as you know, and they spring and bend close together.”
The boatswain and the mate busied themselves cutting out these slabs of bone, which were piled away to be cleansed before stowing them. The boatswain was jovial and talkative. He sang snatches of sea songs, made jokes, and tried to draw out his companion as they worked; but the taciturn mate was as silent as ever. Not so Harry and Joe, who put on oil-skins and worked with them. After the bone was removed, the head was tipped overboard, and floated away with the stripped and abandoned carcass. Arctic gulls had gathered in troops from no one knew where, and dogfish were already nibbling at it. It would not be many days before the meat would be stripped from the bones, and the latter resting on the shallow bottom of Bering Sea.
“Pity the mersinkers could not have that meat,” said the boatswain. “It would make a feast for a whole village for a week.”
“Who are the mersinkers?” asked Harry.
“The natives over at East Cape,” said the boatswain; “that’s what they call themselves. You’ll see them in a day or two, probably.”
The twilight of early June lasts in Bering Sea until almost eleven o’clock; then flares were lighted of scraps and blubber in wire baskets, making torches that lighted up the gloom with weird, fantastic glare, and still the work of trying out went on. The men loomed in and out of the shadows like strange goblins at uncanny sport. The fires illumined a brief circle of the desolate ice, and showed only a part of the rigging which made ladders into an unknown gloom, and the whole was like a midnight assembly of goblins of the strange ice world, working spells about witch kettles that far outdid the wild work of the witch sisters in “Macbeth.” The brief night had passed, and the morning sun was shining on the ice again, yet the incantations did not cease, and it was two days before the last of the bowhead’s oil was stowed in casks below decks. Then only the weary crew had a brief rest, before the ship was cleaned and scrubbed down. Nearly a thousand pounds of whalebone was the most valuable result of this first catch, and as the market price of bone at San Francisco was something over three dollars a pound, Harry had matter of interest to jot down in his report as to the methods and profits of the pursuit of the bowhead.