Wild Adventures in Wild Places

“I think he is getting on famously. He’s curing nicely.”

“I declare,” said Frank, laughing, “you talk of me as if I were a ham or something; and Chisholm asks about me in the same tone of voice he would use if he wanted to know how your meerschaum coloured.”

“’Cause we’re interested in you, dear boy,” said Chisholm, feeling Frank’s arm. “But, bless my heart,” he continued, “there is a biceps for you; why, it’s as hard as a hawser! And there’s a sunburnt face for you! Waiter, bring the beef. And what are you doing, boys?”

“Well,” said Fred, “you know we’ve been two months now under canvas, so we thought we would try a week of civilisation. But we’ve had rare sport enough, fishing in river and fishing in lake, and shooting almost whatever we came across – rabbits, leverets, pigeons, plovers, anything.”

“Bad boys,” said Chisholm. “But never mind, we’re off to-morrow.”

“Where away?”

“To the Highlands, the stern Scottish Highlands,” said Chisholm. “I’m promised a week among the deer. You’re hard enough for that now, Frank.”

“What a ubiquitous trio we are, to be sure!” said Fred.

They certainly seemed so, reader; for two days after the foregoing conversation they were dining at a quiet little hotel in Beauley, and by four of the clock next morning they were on their way to the house of Duncan McPhee, the head keeper of the great forest of Cairntree, one of the wildest tracts of country in the wild North. Though termed a forest, it is only partially wooded; for gigantic hills, bare and rugged, tower skywards every here and there from amidst the pine-trees, and there are, too, vast tracts of bare brae or moorland, covered only with heather, the home of the grouse and the ptarmigan. Deer abound in this forest in countless herds; but, saving the houses of the keepers, you might journey for days in all directions without seeing the smoke from a single habitation.

Early as our heroes were abroad, Duncan and his dogs were there to meet them. But their first day was a blank, and they returned very tired and somewhat disheartened to the keeper’s house, where, putting up with Highland fare, they determined to stay all night. The next day they were rewarded with the sight of deer in hundreds, but that was all; the deer were too wild and wary to reach. More than once that day, as some noble stag stood for a moment on knoll or brae-top, scenting the wind, then dashing wildly off adown the glen, the words of Walter Scott came to Frank’s mind —

“The crested leader, proud and high,Tossed his beamed frontlet to the sky,A moment gazed adown the dale,A moment snuffed the tainted gale;Then, as the headmost foe appeared.With one brave bound the copse he cleared,And stretching forward free and far,Sought the wild heaths of Uam Var.”

But the third was a never-to-be-forgotten day, for Frank brought down his first stag, and it was a “royal.” Luck seemed to set in after this. It never rains but it pours, you know, and nobody had any reason to be dissatisfied with that week spent among the red deer in the wilds of Cairntree.

I wish I had space wherein to tell you of one-half of the delightful sporting adventures our heroes had during the many months Frank was “bein’ broke,” or of the many happy, pleasant days they had to look back to, when afterwards sojourning with wild beasts and wilder men – of days spent among the partridges, or with the cockers at work, or following the pheasants. They all agreed that there was but little true sport attached to pheasant-shooting, the birds are so tame.

“It’s just like shooting hens,” Chisholm remarked.

But perhaps their dearest recollections went back to the time they spent in duck shooting. These were days they might have marked in their diaries with a red cross – spent entirely under canvas they were, in true gipsy fashion; for although the season was autumn, the weather was still bright and warm, and the nights just cool enough to be pleasant. By marshes or lonely moorlands, by inland lakes and ponds, or by wooded friths and estuaries, following up the wild-fowl never failed to give them the very greatest of pleasure and sport. In these adventures their chief companion was a dog of the Irish water-spaniel type, and Pattie by name. Red all over was Pattie, and one mass of ringlets, which even a whole day’s swimming in sea or river failed to unravel; he even had a fringe or top-knot over his bonnie brow, which quite set off his peculiar style of beauty. Pattie’s style of beauty was what would be designated in Scotland “the daft.” Mind, you couldn’t help loving Pattie – I defy you not to love him if you tried; but he had such queer ways, and such a funny face, that you couldn’t look at him long without laughing. Pattie was truly Irish, but grand at his work nevertheless, whether retrieving a dead duck or a maimed one. When plunging into the water after the latter, “Be quiet wid yer skraiching,” Pattie would seem to say. “Sure I’ll fetch you out, and you’ll never feel it at all, at all.” But you ought to have seen Pattie coming up out of the river with a dead duck that he probably had had to swim a long distance against the tide for; there was a pride in his beaming eye that my pen would attempt in vain to depict. “What do ye think av me now?” Pattie would seem to say.

But summer and autumn and the first months of winter wore away, and, after spending a whole fortnight at the white hare-shooting among the mountains of Perthshire – and harder work I defy you to find – Frank was at last declared thoroughly broken in, completely hardened off.

“A man,” said Chisholm, “that can stand a week or two among white hares, and not feel too tired to sleep at night, is fit for anything. Now, boys,” he added, “what do you say to a run right away up to the polar ice-fields?”

“I’m in,” said Fred quietly.

“Oh!” said Chisholm, “you’re always in for anything. If I asked you to take a trip to the moon you’d jump at it.”

“Or over it,” said Fred, smiling, “like the cow in the poem of ‘Hey, diddle diddle;’ but are you in earnest about the ice-fields?”

“Downright.”

“Well,” said Frank, with assumed modesty, “if you think I’m ‘broke’ enough, please I’d like to go too.”

“Bravo!” cried Chisholm O’Grahame, “that settles the question.”

They made arrangements to sail in a seal-and-whale ship in February. They got an introduction to a captain of one of these, and he gladly undertook to convey them to Greenland and back, “free, gratis, and for nothing, except the pleasure of their company, and the skins and blubber they would no doubt kill.” That was how the captain expressed it. “But, mind you,” he said, “you’ll have to rough it a bit.”

“We don’t mind that,” said Chisholm.

Before he left for the far distant north, Frank Willoughby spent some weeks at General Lyell’s castle. Happy, happy weeks they were, and how quickly, too, they fled away! I could make you feel very sentimental and “gushive,” reader, if I told you all that passed between the lovely young Eenie and our hero Frank, but I never tell tales out of school, so there. I may just say, however, that, when the last moment did come, poor Eenie could hardly breathe the fond “good bye” for the tears that she could not repress.

The General’s adieu was a hearty one.

“Good-bye,” he said, “keep up a good heart, and,” he added laughingly, as he patted Frank on the back, “remember —

“‘None but the brave deserve the fair.’”

Chapter Four

Part II – The Polar Ice-Fields

Outward bound – Night in the Pack – The Aurora – The awful Silence of the Ice-fields – Seals! Seals! – The Battle with the Bladder-noses – Jack in the Box with a Vengeance – A Fight with Walruses

The good ship Grampus slipped away from her moorings on the 13th of February, 18 – , and steamed slowly seaward from the port of Peterhead, North Britain, hound for the wild and desolate regions that surround the pole. She steamed slowly away in the very teeth of a breeze of winds that might have frightened a man of less daring and pluck than Captain Anderson, for the sea was grey and stormy, the sky was leaden and threatening, and the very sea-birds that screamed around the vessel’s bows seemed to warn him that there was danger on the deep. But the Captain heeded them not. He had said he would sail on this day, and he did, for well he knew what his vessel could now do, and had done before; besides, he was a true sailor, and had all a sailor’s impatience to begin the voyage.

“It looks a bit squally,” he said to the pilot as he bade him adieu, “and we may have a dirty day or two, but the Grampus can stand it, and I’m not the man to linger in the harbour one half-hour after I’m ready to start. Good-bye, old man.”

The Grampus was a steam brig of some three hundred and fifty tons, fitted with powerful engines, and a screw that could be hoisted up out of the water when sail was on her. Built of wood, she was as stout and strong a ship as ever clove the waves. And she needed all her strength too – there was a wide and stormy ocean to cross, and there was ice to plough through that no fragile ship dare ever face. The captain was the owner of the vessel; and many a voyage, and not unsuccessful ones either, had he made to the polar ice-fields, but the present one was fated to be the most eventful of all.

From the very commencement of the cruise, until the first ice was sighted, the wind kept steadily ahead, and the seas kept washing over the brave brig from stem to stern. But she was not to be daunted, so steadily she steamed on northwards, ever northwards.

A week after the last of the lonely isles of Shetland had sunk like a little cloud beneath the southern horizon they were far away at sea – indeed, there was nothing to be seen from the masthead, only the great tumbling seas that dashed their sprays high over the funnel. Even the birds had left them, all save that strange mysterious creature that is ever seen wheeling around ships sailing over the broad Atlantic, or crossing the northern seas, and which naturalists call the stormy petrel, and mariners Mother Carey’s chicken. No wonder sailors look upon this bird with something akin to superstition and awe, so dark and dusky is the creature, the very little white about it serving but to make its blackness visible; it flits from stormy wave to stormy wave like a veritable evil spirit.

Our friend Frank, in his voyage to the polar ice-fields, suffered somewhat from mal de mer– it sounds far nicer in French than in English – but he bravely stuck to the deck. He was more than once washed into the lee scuppers, but he had on an oilskin suit of fear-nothing dimensions; so he just scrambled up again, or in other words, like the cork leg of the merchant of Rotterdam, he got up “and went on as before.”

The farther north the Grampus got, the shorter grew the days. Indeed, they seemed to be sailing into the home of eternal night, only it must be remembered that the season was yet early, and that in the polar regions for three months of the year the sun never appears above the horizon. If the nights were long, however, it cannot be said they were dark; they were lighted up with a magnificence never seen in more southern latitudes. The sky itself was at times of a deep and indescribably dark-blue colour, and the stars were great wheels of sparkling light. This was in itself a beautiful sight, and our heroes used to linger on deck till far on in the night, as if under some pleasant spell. But what pen can describe the gorgeous splendour of the northern lights, or Aurora. Imagine if you can a vast and broad bow, or arc of a circle, stretched athwart the heavens, twenty times as broad as any rainbow, and seeming to be ever so much farther away; imagine this bow to be composed of spears or needles of light – green, blue, crimson, and yellow – and imagine these spears in constant motion, shooting upwards and downwards, changing places incessantly, changing colours constantly, and this too with inconceivable rapidity, and you will be able to form some faint notion of the wonderful sight the Aurora presented to the eyes of our astonished travellers.

Reader, I have been alone in the ice-fields by night, while the Aurora was playing in the heavens above. You cannot conceive of the solitude and lonesomeness of such a situation, nor can you form any conception of the deep, the indescribable silence that reigns in the frozen ocean. Well, upwards as I gazed at the northern lights, I have heard sounds emanating from them. That I do not remember having ever read of anywhere. A line of spears would advance from the east and another from the west; they would meet and commingle with a subdued clashing and hissing noise, such as you might make by rubbing the palms of the hands rapidly together. What this strange sound can be is a mystery that may never be revealed.

Captain Anderson told our heroes that he never thought the voyage had begun until the crow’s-nest, or out-look barrel, was hoisted to the mainmast head.

One morning our travellers were awakened by the sound of singing and shouting, and on going on deck they found the brave skipper rubbing his hands with glee, as he gazed up at the ascending nest.

“Cheerily does it!” he was crying. “Heave, lads! heave, heave, and she goes. Now, young gentlemen,” he continued, “are your rifles in order? In two days more, if all goes well, I’ll show you such sport as you couldn’t even have dreamt of before.”

And sure enough, in two days’ time they had made “the country,” as the ice-fields are termed. If, however, any one on board had expected to find wealth, in the shape of plump seals, lying thereon ready for the gathering, he was much mistaken. There was the ice, to be sure, but never a seal in sight, neither in the water nor out of it, for it seemed that the country was unusually open that year.

“Well,” said Anderson, one day, “I’m tired of this north Greenland work; I’ll bear away for the west land.”

A week’s steaming through fields of slushy ice and floating snow, and streams of flat snow-clad bergs, brought them into open water, and they sighted the lofty and desolate shores of Greenland West, and much to their surprise, found a large three-masted Dutchman quietly lying at anchor in a bay, sails all clewed up, and men away on the ice. It was not long ere the Grampus had followed her example, so far as letting go the anchor went, and making all snug and ready for action. A great bear – always a sign seals are about – stood sniffing on the edge of a floe. Perhaps he had never seen a steamship before, or perhaps he was wondering what the crew were having for breakfast. Frank got his Henri-Martini up, and began potting at him with a long-range sight, and presently Master Bruin remembered an appointment he had, and made tracks to keep it.

It was a glorious morning when the boats were called away. All hands were half frantic with joy at the thought they would soon be among the seals. In they trundle, and down go the boats with a splash into the water, and next moment they are off. Frank and Chisholm are in one boat, Fred Freeman in another, and there is a grand race between the two to see who shall first touch the ice and fire the first shot. The boats seemed to fly over the water, and when they at last ran alongside the floe and the crew jumped on shore, there was hardly a yard’s length between them; but Fred was declared winner.

And now the day’s work was begun. Warily at first, the riflemen had to creep towards their prey on hands and knees, taking advantage of every hummock or boulder to screen themselves from view. On each piece of ice some forty or fifty seals lay, and each “patch” had a sentry set. When they succeeded in killing him, the others were very much at their mercy; but oftentimes the seal on watch would succeed, even before his eyes closed in death, in giving his companions warning. Then, almost ere another bullet could reach them, they had leapt helter-skelter into the water. But when the sun got higher, the seals seemed to get almost too lazy to move; they could then be approached very much more closely, and the work of death was carried on with an earnestness and energy that was terrible to behold. Indeed, a kind of madness to shed blood seemed to take possession of every man on the ice. There was no thought but to slay. The excitement was intense – awful in its intensity. The sun went slowly round and down, and as he set behind the rugged hills, his disc seemed to reflect the blood on the ice. Even his parting beams had borrowed the self-same hue, and the tops of the highest icebergs looked as if dipped in gore.

When the shadows fell, tired and weary enough now, our heroes went slowly back towards the boats.

“Oh! boys,” cried Fred, “don’t you remember how bright and lovely the snow was in the morning? Behold it now!”

“Ay, behold it now,” said Chisholm. “Indeed, Fred, this is murder. I don’t feel I can call it by any other name, and I’m half ashamed of myself.”

“So am I,” said Frank, “for a seal can’t defend itself.”

“But the bladder-nosed seals can,” said the first mate, who had just joined the trio. “They are terrible beasts to deal with. I’d rather fight a bear single-handed than I would one of these. Once they fill that kettle-pot-like bladder over their noses, they mean mischief, I can tell you. A rifle bullet has no more effect on it than a pea from a pea-shooter.”

“Is that so?” said Fred.

“Five years ago,” continued the mate, “I was one of the crew of a boat, of ten men in all, that were attacked by these monsters of the deep. They seemed mad with rage and fury; they swarmed up from the sea to the ice where we stood, with blazing eyes and flashing teeth, by the dozen and by the score. We all fought like fiends; we fought with spears and axes and our rifles clubbed, but the faster we killed them the faster – they came. Our shouts brought assistance from the ship, but not before a whole hour was spent in this battle with the bladder-noses, and not until we were quite exhausted, with three of our number lying dead on the ice.”

They were walking over a floe of thick bay ice as the mate told his story. No sooner had he spoken the last words than —

“Down, men, down!” he cried; “the ice is rising ahead.”

They followed the mate’s advice, and threw themselves on their faces.

In two places the ice was heaving and rising. Then all at once it gave way, with a noise like the firing of great guns, and up from the depths of the dark sea rose two gigantic forms, with wild eyes and yard-long tusks, and of such fearful aspect that Frank’s heart almost stood still with dread.

“By George!” cried Chisholm, “this is playing at Jack in the box with a vengeance.”

Bang, bang, bang went the rifles, and down sank the apparitions, leaving the broken ice all red with blood.

“They are only wounded,” said the mate; “they’ll have revenge if it is a month hence, depend on that.”

The Grampus, sealing intent, steamed farther and farther north, and the nearer to the pole they got, the heavier grew the ice. There was shooting every day now for three months and more – seals and bears, and sometimes a fox – and, when there was nothing else to go for, they brought down gulls for their feathers, and looms for the sake of fresh meat. Sometimes they were rewarded by the sight of the lonely narwhal, or giant unicorn of the sea – a creature which always makes direct for a boat as soon as it spies one, and has been known to attack and sink a whaler or gig.

They were after the looms one day, Chisholm and Frank being as usual in one boat, with the first mate steering.

Suddenly, “Stand by your clubs and guns, men!” cried the mate; “Here they come. Now we’re in for it. I knew they’d seek revenge.”

The sea around them seemed alive with the great tusked heads of walruses, coming from all directions and making straight for the boat.

“In oars, and keep cool, lads,” said the mate, seizing an axe; “but for mercy’s sake keep the boat trimmed. If she capsizes we are all dead men.”

How long they fought with those desperate brutes Frank could never tell; but it seemed to him an age ere the other boats came to their relief, and poured volley after volley into the midst of the pack of walruses. Then they disappeared, and but for the sea around them, all reddened with blood, and the floating corpses – which, however, speedily sank – there was not a sign of the fearful hand-to-hand and all-unequal contest.

Chapter Five

The West Land of Greenland – A Fall! a Fall! – Danger on all Sides – “Man the Ice-saws” – Working for Life – Beset in the Dreary Pack

“I feel,” said the captain one day, at breakfast, “that I am making a dangerous experiment. I am keeping far in to the west land; I am all but hugging the shore; and if it were to come on to blow from seawards, we would – Steward, I’ll have another cup of coffee.”

“You think,” said Chisholm, “our chances of further cups of coffee wouldn’t be very great, eh?”

“I don’t think they would,” said the captain. “Well, lads, I’ve shown you a bit of sport, haven’t I? And if we had only a little more blubber in her, troth, I’d bear up for bonnie Scotland. I’ve just come down from the crow’s-nest, and what do you think I’ve spied? Why, open water for miles ahead, stretching away to the north as far as eyes can reach. There are whales there, boys, if we can but wait for them.”

After breakfast it was, “All hands assist ship!”

Up sprang the men, and ere one could wink, so to speak, half the crew were at the side with poles, pressing on the ice to make room for the Grampus. It was strange work, and it seemed at first impossible that twenty men with a spar could move a floe. But they did, and three hours afterwards they were in this mysterious open sea.

“Why,” cried Frank, “I declare there is the Dutchman dodging yonder with foreyard aback. A sailing ship beat a steamer!”

“Ay, she’s got the pull on us, boys,” the captain said. “And see, she is flenshing (skinning) a whale; the crang (the skinned corpse) lies beside her. She has met with a lane of open water, and taken advantage of it.”

Just at that moment came the cry, “A fall! a fall! on the weather quarter!”

“A fall! a fall!” Surely never was excitement seen like this before, thought Frank.

There was no waiting for orders. The ship seemed to stop of her own accord, and the escaping steam roared uselessly through the funnel.

“A fall! a fall!” Up tumble the men, many undressed, with their clothes in a bundle. They spring to the boats, our heroes follow the example, and in three minutes more are tearing through the water towards the coveted leviathan. The Dutchman has spied the monster too, and her boats are soon afloat. Who shall be first?

(The origin of this cry is this, I think. “Whaol” is the ordinary Scotch for “whale,” but Aberdonians use the “f” instead of the “wh” in such words as “what,” “where,” etc, which they pronounce “fat” and “far.” Hence “whale” would become “faul,” or “fall.”)

“Pull, lads, pull! Hurrah, lads, hurrah! We’ll never let a Dutchman beat us!”

Is the whale asleep, that she lies so quietly? Nay, for now she scents the danger, and, lashing her tail madly skywards, is off; but not before the roar of the harpoon gun from the foremost boat has awakened the echoes of the Greenland sea.

“A fall! a fall! She is struck! she is struck!” Vainly now she dashes through the surging sea; another boat pulls around to intercept her, and again she is struck; the lines whirl over the gunwale of Frank’s boat till it smokes again. There is blood now in the great beast’s wake, and her way is not so swift; she dives and dives again, but she is breathless now. Dreadful her wound must be – for see, she is spouting water mingled with blood; and now she lies still on the surface of the ocean.

“In line, men!” cries the mate, springing up and seizing his long lance, and standing bravely up in the bows. “Pull gently alongside, and stand by to back water the moment I spear the fall.”

“How bold and daring he looks!” thinks Frank; all thought of danger swallowed up in admiration of the man who stands, spear in hand, in the boat’s bows.

They are close now. Swish! Quick as lightning the spear is sent home; quickly it is turned, to sever the carotid; next moment the backing boat is almost swamped in blood. But not quickly enough can they back, I fear, to save the boat from destruction, themselves from speedy death. High, high in air is raised that dreadful tail; half the animal seems out of the water; they are under the shadow of it; and now it descends, and every oar on the port-side of the boat is broken off close to the rowlocks. But the boat is saved. For fully half an hour the whale flaps the sea in her dying agony, and the noise may be heard for miles around, while the waters around her are churned into crimson foam. Then there is one more terrible convulsion; her great jaw opens and shuts again. The leviathan is dead. The men of the brig and the men in the boats answer each other with boisterous cheers; but the Dutchman fills her sails, puts about, and bears sullenly up for the south.