Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North

Of course the "blowing" of the whale is one of its most remarkable performances. A whale can stay below an hour, because he puts air into his blood by spouting about sixty times, the operation taking him about ten minutes.

Grenfell helped take to pieces a "sulphur-bottom" whale ninety-five feet long, supposed to weigh nearly 300,000 pounds. A boat could row into the mouth. The jawbone was nearly eighteen feet long. "It took four of us a whole afternoon, with axes and swords mounted on pike handles, to cut out one bone and carry it to our steamer." And in order to get back far enough to start cutting at the end, where the joint came, they "had to walk almost in the footsteps of Jonah."

The whale is the one animal that lives to a great age—and it is said whales have lived to be a thousand years old. A wolf is aged at twenty, a caribou or fox at fifteen. A personal acquaintance of the Doctor was a black-backed gull which had been in captivity for thirty-two years.

The timber-wolf, which elsewhere is so fierce an animal, is comparatively mild-mannered in Labrador, and Grenfell has found no record of these wolves attacking men, though in packs they have often followed the settlers to the doors of their houses.

There is nothing good to be said of the Labrador timber-wolf. Like the eggers of Audubon's time, he seems to kill very often not for hunger's sake but for the sheer love of killing animals that cannot fight back. Often the bodies of deer are found with only the tongues and the windpipe torn out by the mean and cowardly slayer.

Sometimes the wolf bites the deer in the small of the back: or several wolves will stalk a caribou, some circling about to distract the attention of their prey while others creep up on it from behind.

The caribou are amiable and affectionate, and it is easy to tame them if they are taken in hand when they are young. They make very satisfactory pets.

Grenfell had one which went with him on his mission boat, like a dog or a cat.

If not taken ashore, it would stand crying at the rail.

It would follow him about while on land, and swim after its master when Grenfell was in a rowboat.

In the field it would come running to be petted, and if left behind within the palings would stand up on its hind legs and try desperately to butt its way out and follow the Doctor.

Sometimes the caribou has been successfully used to haul a sled.

The Labrador black bear is almost as harmless as the caribou.

Grenfell bought a cub, and in the winter-time gave him a barrel, to see if he would know what to do, having no mother to guide him.

The bear knew by instinct how to make himself a warm and cosy nest for his long winter sleep.

He found grass and moss, put them in the barrel, and trampled them down to make a padded lining such as a human being could hardly have bettered.

We all know the story of General Israel Putnam,—how he crawled into the wolf-den at Pomfret and shot a wolf "by the light of its own eyes." A trapper in Labrador, instead of crawling into a den where an animal lay, entered an empty lair, under a cliff. It seemed to have been made on purpose for campers.

He lit his small lantern, ate his supper, and then curled up as tidily as any four-footed tenant and fell asleep.

Like the bears in the fairy tale, who came back to find Goldilocks in the chair and then in the bed of one of them, the real owners of the cave appeared in the night.

The hunter was awakened suddenly by a noise like rolling thunder in the narrow entrance. He turned up his lamp, and the flare showed him a bear, so huge that it blocked the passage-way.

Nimbly the hunter reached for his gun, and before the animal could do anything more than growl and threaten, a shot had tumbled him flat.

Shoving aside the body, the trapper went out into the cold starlight, for he knew that the mate of the slain beast might appear at any moment.

Sure enough, presently over the brow of the hill there shambled in black silhouette two more bears.

He took careful aim and fired and brought them both down.

The next time he makes a tour of his traps he probably will not choose a bear's den for his night's lodging. A bear that is harmless in the open may be excused for getting violent if he finds a man asleep in the very bed he fixed for himself.

Grenfell's experience with bears for pets—he has tried to tame nearly everything animate from gulls to whales—was not so happy as with the caribou. He found that if "pigs is pigs," bears "remain bears, and are not to be trusted." He had two bear playmates for a long time, but when they hit out with their paws they dealt some "very nasty scratches," and what was fun for them was more serious for the tender pelt of a human being.

The wolverine lives by his wits.

He will turn over a trap and set it off before it can nip him.

He is the pest of the man who has fur traps, for he will go from trap to trap and grab whatever he finds therein.

He can climb trees and get meat which the owner thought was secure.

Sometimes when he is caught he will get away with the trap and chain still attached to his leg. He will even carry the trap in his mouth, to relieve the strain. Like Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy in the Sudan, he has a great way of shamming dead. He may jump up and bite the hunter, or he may make a sudden dash for freedom. Can you blame him?

One of the most satisfactory creatures of all is the beaver. I remember a pair in a pond on the west coast of Newfoundland, at Curling, where a beaver colony had a fine big house they had built in a lake with a dam of their making at one end. I didn't go into the house, which was mainly under water, but the male beaver evidently feared I would, and just as he dived he smartly slapped the water with his tail to give the danger signal to the lady who was placidly nosing about and grubbing for the roots of water-plants at the other side of the pond.

"Walking one day through thick wood," says Grenfell, "we came across a regular 'pathway,' the trees having been felled to make traveling easy. A glance at the stumps showed that it was a road cut by beavers, to enable them to drag their boughs of birch along more easily.

"The pathway led to a large house on the edge of a lake, and, fortunately for us, the beaver was at home. There were other houses on an island in the lake, and below them all a large, strong dam, some thirty yards long, and below this two more complete dams across the river that flowed out. The dams were made of large tree-trunks, with quantities of lesser boughs, and were many feet thick, and very difficult to break down. The houses were built half on land, half in the water. The sitting-room is up-stairs on the bank, and so is the 'crew's' bedroom, and the front door is made at least three feet below the surface to prevent being 'frozen out' in winter, or, worse still, 'frozen in.'

"The whole house was neatly rounded off, and so plastered with mud as to be warm and weather-proof. This is done by means of their trowel-like tails, which are also of great use in swimming. The house was so strong that even with an axe we could not get in without very considerable delay.

"In the deep pond they had dammed up, we found a quantity of birch poles pegged out. The bark of these forms their winter food, and is called 'browse.' The beaver cuts off enough for dinner, and takes it into his house. Sitting up, he takes the stem in his fore paws, and rolls it round and round against his chisel-shaped incisor teeth, swallowing the long ribands of bark thus stripped off.... When surprised they retreat to holes in the bank, of which the entrances are hidden under water. These are called 'hovels.'

"Beavers always work up wind when felling trees, and cut them on the water side, so that they fall into the pond if possible, and the wind helps to blow them home. This beaver we caught proved to be a hermit—at least he was living alone. He may have been a widower of unusual constancy. They do not destroy fish, their food in summer being preferably the stems of the water-lilies. Otters occasionally kill and eat beavers. When they call, the beaver has to try and be 'not at home.'"

While the beaver evidently has strong feelings on the subject of the otter, who seems to be a burglar and a murderer, he apparently does not mind the lowly muskrat as a summer boarder, even though the latter does not pay for his lodging.

Of course the lord of the animate creation on land in the north—as the sperm whale is monarch of the sea—is the polar bear. Grenfell gives a most interesting account of this white king of beasts whom we properly pity on warm days as he lolls and pants by the soup-like water of his tank in one of our southern Zoos. The Doctor once saw a polar bear swimming three miles out at sea, headed, by a marvelous instinct, straight for the north. There was no convenient ice-pan floating near on which he might clamber for a snooze. This bear had been shot, and he floated high in the water, so that evidently his fat was a great help to him, enabling him to stay at sea as long as he pleased.

The polar bears wander from their native shores: they seem to enjoy travel, and when they sail south on pans of ice they are looking for that toothsome morsel, the seal.

If they cannot get seals, these bears devour the eggs of sea-birds on the islands.

When they swim after ducks, they hide under water, all but the nose: and since that nose is black, and therefore a telltale, they have been seen to bury it in the snow when creeping toward a seal-herd.

The polar bear stands a poor chance against a pack of lively and determined dogs.

They have reason to fear his huge paws and tearing claws until he tires, but he cannot face all ways at once, and if there are enough dogs the struggle soon becomes hopeless.

They are not fast enough to get away from the fleet smaller animals.

In the water, where they swim slowly and dive expertly, the fishermen may easily "do for them" with a blow from an axe or an oar. Though the polar bear has a fishy taste, the Eskimos relish the meat, and the prospect of a successful bear-hunt delights the savage breast.

XV

THE KEEPER OF THE LIGHT

Once I asked Dr. Grenfell if he was tired. His blue eyes lit up as if I had thrown salt into a fire. He threw his head back and said: "Tired? I was never tired in my life!"

But I thought he was weary that September evening in 1919 when he sat with his legs unkinked to the cheerful blaze, in the big living-room of his comfortable house at St. Anthony.

The wind can go whooping around that house all it likes and it never will get in unless it is invited. That house was nailed and shingled, doored and windowed, to stand up against the stiffest blast that ever came howling across the rocks and bergs from the Humboldt Glacier or even the North Pole.

Part of the time a blind piano-tuner was at work groping for lost chords among the strings of Mrs. Grenfell's piano. The piano didn't seem to need tuning so much. But the man needed the work. You can imagine there is not much for a blind piano-tuner to do in Newfoundland. Most of the music is the canned variety of the Victrola. Or, if there is a dance, someone may squat obligingly in a corner and hum very loudly what is called by its true name—"chin-music."

Mrs. Grenfell, happy to have her husband back from the gales and fogs for a little while, was sitting in the puffy armchair with her knitting-needles, and the boys, Pascoe and Wilfred, were up-stairs with their teacher, making out jig-saw puzzles in arithmetic or knocking the tar out of the French Grammar, with various loud sounds.

What the telephone is to busy men in America, giving them no peace even in the bathtub, the telegraph is to the Doctor in Newfoundland. If it isn't a man on the doorstep with a bleeding cut or a hacking cough, then it is a boy with a message which comes from a point twenty to sixty miles off. Most of the time your doctor or mine has a few blocks to go: and we think it hard, and he thinks so too, if a patient clamors for him in the middle of the night. But the middle of the night is the heart of Grenfell's office hours. Once after conducting a late evening service in the church at Battle Harbor he had to doctor forty patients in the room off the chancel before he could get away.

So it was no surprise to him, in the midst of a tale of the old days at Oxford on the football-field, to have a rat-tat like Poe's raven at the door, and a respectful "young visitor" doffing his sou'wester.

"Please, sir, a telegram."

Grenfell tore it open.

It read: "Doctor would you please come. My throat is full up and I can't eat or sleep."

It was signed "J.N. Coté."

"That," said Grenfell, "is the lighthouse-keeper at Greenley Island, just west of the line that divides Canadian Labrador from Newfoundland Labrador. He has a big job on his hands. He has two fog-horns, each with a twelve horse-power Fairbanks gasoline engine, so that if one's put out of business he can use the other. He's had fog all summer—and a sub-tonsillar abscess, too. The big Canadian Pacific ships go by his place. It's a bad spot. The light-keeper at Forteau tried to bring out his wife and five children—and lost all but one child on the rocks. Another keeper at Belle Isle tried to bring out a family of about the same size—and they all were lost. A doctor stopped in on Captain Coté on the down trip from Battle Harbor, on his way back to Baltimore. Evidently whatever he did wasn't enough. Looks as if I must go and finish the job."

As if to settle the question, even while he spoke there came another messenger—like the first, a volunteer—bringing another telegram.

This time, as in those messages sent from Cape Norman about the woman, the tone was sharper, more imperative and anxious.

"Please come as fast as you can to operate me in the throat and save my life."

The shade of concern in the Doctor's grave face deepened.

"Coté doesn't cry out for nothing," he said. "He's a real man. We must go. Would you rather stay here and rest a few days, or will you go with me?" Who would care to toast his toes and dally with a book, while Grenfell was abroad on such a mission? I had a quick vision of the gallant run the Strathcona would be called on to make—squirming through the rocks and bucking the headwinds and the heavy seas, to save that lighthouse-keeper and keep the big, proud ships from Montreal and Quebec from running blind in the dark. Not far from that spot a British man-of-war ran aground in 1922 and was a total loss, though happily her men were saved. I have been in the wireless cabin on the topmost crags of Belle Isle when the Straits all round about, fog-bound, were clamorous with the ships, anchor-down, calling to one another and whimpering like little lost children trying to clasp hands and afraid in the dark together.

It would be a run of a hundred miles from St. Anthony to Captain Coté's strangling throat—and what miles they were! Not until the middle of June had the mail-boat—that poor, doomed Ethie of the dog's rescue—been able to pierce the ice. Where those ice-pans met at Cape Bauld the grinding, rending and heaving of their battle was worse to hear and see than all the polar bears or the tusked walruses that ever rose up and fought together.

Dr. Grenfell could be perfectly sure that he would have to run a gauntlet all the way—picking and choosing between crags on the one hand and bergs on the other: just such a risky, "chancy" course as he most relishes. While he crumpled the telegram in his hand I could see his eyes light up again with that flash they showed when I asked him if he was ever tired.

His pockets at that moment were full of pleading, piteous letters from White Bay, meant to pull him to the other side of the island. One of them, from a desperate woman, after saying her husband had caught but eleven dollars' worth of fish all season, wound up with an appeal for oddments of clothes to put on the children, for "We are all as naked as birds."

It was hard to say no to the heart-throbs of those begging letters in his pocket. But Captain Coté's life was not one life. It was the lives of thousands—men, women and children—going down to the sea in ships, faring through the St. Lawrence, and the Gulf, and then those terrible Straits of Belle Isle, to the Old Country.

So we started. But was Mrs. Grenfell going to stay home with the piano, and French verbs, and her fancy-work, while the Strathcona nosed the seething waters? Not on your life! Wilfred and Pascoe had a perfectly good governess, and while it was hard on them to remain behind with their books, their turn with Father was coming.

The big black dog, named Fritz, had no French verbs to study, and no measly sums in arithmetic to do, so—at one running jump—he was added to the passenger-list. His berth was chiefly out on the end of the bowsprit—he was more ambitious than a figurehead. There he could sniff the breeze, and see the shore, even when there wasn't any, and bark defiance at all the dogs and the sea-pusses.

The Strathcona used both steam and sail. She was ketch-rigged, with six sails—mainsail, foresail, two jibs, two topsails. One of those topsails was a fancy, oblong thing which Dr. Grenfell's crew mistrusted as though it were witchcraft. He had brought it from the North Sea; they had never seen the likes of it before, and their minds are likely to be sternly set against anything new. But the Doctor, who is restless on shipboard, climbed to the crow's nest now and then to adjust the strange contraption, and make sure that it was using the wind in such a way as to develop the last ounce of pulling power. This was no pleasure cruise. It was a run for life.

The sea was a vast blue smile as we swaggered out of St. Anthony Harbor. What a fickle creature is that northern ocean! This was the first clear day in ever so long—and now the sun and the water were in conspiracy to pretend it had always been this gay, fair weather.

The only blemish on the seascape was a troop of bergs, six in number, out yonder to starboard. But they were dim and distant as we bore in toward the headland at Quirpon Tickle. Quirpon is called "Carpoon" by the fishermen because that isn't the way to pronounce it. And Tickle has nothing to do with making you laugh. Quite the contrary. It means a very serious business of creeping and twisting snakewise through a channel that winds among the rocks. You are perfectly sure you are about to ram the face of a wall—and then, lo and behold! there is a way out at the last minute, and it leads you to another wall and another rift that suddenly and impossibly opens to let you through. You have to think of the pirates who used to run and hide in places like that, and give the slip to honest sailor men from France and England who were trying to run them down. If they didn't meet the pirates they met and fought each other, which was vastly diverting to the pirates and perhaps just as satisfying to themselves.

There were fishermen's dories bouncing about like happy children in the shallower waters near the shore. I happened to be at the wheel, and my one idea was not to hit those sharp and cruel rocks, not to strike a fisherman, and to give the widest berth I could to the distant menace of those icebergs.

Grenfell, red-booted and brown-sweatered, put his head in at the wheel-house door, and the wind ruffled his silver hair as he cried: "Run her so close to those rocks that you all but skin her!"

You see, his mind was only on Captain Coté, with the choke in his throat, strangling and struggling, but going on with his duty as the keeper of the light with the beams outflashing to the long, far bellow of his mighty horn.

In our race against time, we were burning coal, that precious commodity, then twenty-four dollars a ton,—and much more costly to-day. Spruce and fir and juniper were piled on deck—some of the wood across the barrels of whale-meat, in a vain attempt to shut off the rotten smell of the food so loved by the dogs. But, hasten as we might, the night closed down like a lid on a box as we sounded our gingerly way through the perilous twistings of the Tickle. The wind was rising, and as we looked back we saw the waves, running white and high at a mad dance in cold moonlight. If we went on, and came out into the Straits, the wind would hold us there without an inch of gain, though we had the full power of the engines going and all sails set. The Strathcona, a tiny steamer of less than fifty tons, was no match for the sea aroused in opposition. It is a miracle that this small boat, the Strathcona, lived so long, with so many attempts of ice and rock to punch the life out of her wherever she went.

Dr. Grenfell, as his habit is on shipboard, rose at two, at three and at four to study his charts and lay out his course, and at twenty minutes to five his strong hands were at the wheel, on which are the words "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

The dog Fritz had been sleeping all night on a thick blue woolen blanket in the bunk below mine. He had no business there, and he knew it, but as regularly as I turned him out into the nipping air and the frosty starlight he would return indignantly. "What's the matter with you?" his wrinkled face seemed to say. "You're just a visitor on this boat, and I belong here. What right have you to keep me out of a nice warm bed? You don't need this whole cabin, you selfish man." Finally my patience gave out and I let him have his way.

Under the red edges of the dawn, a fresh breeze blowing, we came within hail of that ugly rock named the Onion. "In that bay over there," laughed Grenfell, "we were blown across the ice—sled and dogs and all—when we were trying to round up the reindeer herd. We had the time of our lives!

"You see, we had brought a bunch of reindeer all the way from Lapland, and Lapp herders came with them, to keep off the dogs and prevent the natives from shooting them as if they were caribou. On one occasion we had a real 'Night before Christmas' celebration, and St. Nick delighted the children at the Orphanage where he came with his gifts on a big sled behind a real team of reindeer.

"But the reindeer spread all over the peninsula, and the Lapps couldn't keep track of their charges. The hunters and the dogs were hard on the trail of the herd. You couldn't blame hungry men and famished animals.

"I meant in time to persuade the people to give up their dogs and use reindeer instead. The reindeer could draw sleds, and would give milk, and meat too, if necessary, and their furs would be valuable. There wouldn't be any risk of their hurting children, or strangers, or sick people, and they wouldn't make night hideous with their howling.

"But at last, in order to save the remnant, it was necessary to move them, and I decided to load them on a fishing-vessel and take them across the Straits to the St. Augustine River country, where they could increase in peace, and the dogs would not bother them, and the Canadian Government could protect them from any Indian hunters who might come along.

"It was a fine plan, on paper. But it was like the old recipe for making a rabbit pie—'first catch your hare.' The reindeer having had the run of the open spaces so long saw no reason why they should be caught and put on a boat and carried off.

"So they gave us a run for it, I can tell you! All over the place we rushed, shouting and trying to lasso or corner the terrified animals. I never laughed so hard in my life. The wind was blowing great guns, and you simply couldn't stand up against it. We caught a great many of the reindeer. But a lot of them romped off into the woods and took to the hills and we never saw them again. Since they were moved to Canada they have done well—and some day, when the people are ready to have them, I want to move them back and see if we can't replace the dog-teams with them."

Meanwhile the little ship had turned her head away from the unsavory Onion, and was running on, over a long diagonal, to cross the straits in the bared teeth of the green and yeasty waves. That she was top-heavy was plainly to be seen, with her barrels of whale-meat and her high-piled fire-wood on deck, and almost no ballast or cargo below.

As we stood out into the middle of the channel, I thought of the great boats that must feel their way through the dense fog in evil weather. They would have to be honking like wild geese, even though the straits at their narrowest between Flower's Cove and Greenley Island are ten miles wide. Fog is a terrible deceiver. I remember coming up the East Coast on the mail-steamer Invermore in 1913. In a day after leaving Twillingate we were nearly wrecked three times. First, when we thought we were ten miles offshore, we found a tiny skiff, with two persons aboard, in our path—we nearly ran it down. Father and small son, fourteen, were fishing for cod, and had their meagre catch in a tin pail. Captain Kane had stopped our boat—we were going at quarter speed—and he had the man come up on the bridge to show us where the land lay. "Out yonder!" The ancient mariner pointed to the northwest. A rowboat was manned: in a few minutes its crew came back and reported that the rocks were not more than two hundred yards away. So we backed off, and steamed hard in the opposite direction. But only an hour or so later,—pulled steadily on and on toward the shore, by the strong, insetting tide,—we saw the grey edge of the fog lifting like a table-cloth, and there were those cruel rocks again, dragons in a lair, waiting to receive us, crush our bones and drink our blood. Again we backed away—and before long the fierce jangle of the bell in the engine room and the captain's sharp accent of command from the bridge once more halted us suddenly. There, directly before our prow, was a great white wall of ice, which had taken almost the color of the mist. It was an iceberg that barred our path, and if we had been speeding like the Titanic instead of creeping like a snail, it would doubtless have been the end of the Invermore. Only one more tragedy of a missing ship.