Peter Duck

by Arthur Ransome

  “This shore simply won’t keep still,” said Roger.

  Bill laughed.

  “I seen a man fall off the quay in Lowestoft harbour once, coming ashore after a spell at sea.” He made the others laugh, too, staggering along the beach as if he were aboard ship and not yet used to the motion.

  But the shore settled down presently, though all that day first one and then another of the explorers kept feeling a little uncertain and rocky. First to one and then to another it seemed that the ground was suddenly swaying up or down like the deck of a ship.

  “We’ll get our land-legs all right if we start work,” cried Captain Flint. “Let’s get going.” He stuck his two little spades upright in the sand, and began hauling the Swallow farther up, though there was really no need. Mr Duck had already lifted the barrel out of the dinghy and slung it from an oar for the two mates, and they were carrying it, pirate fashion, towards the stream. Captain Flint lifted the empty tanks out of Swallow, and hurried after them. “No. No. Higher up,” he said, and found what he wanted in a little pool between black rocks in the very shadow of the trees. Here he knelt, scooped some of the water in his hands, and tasted it.

  BILL’S LANDING

  “Grand,” he said. “Come along and try it, Mr Duck.”

  Everybody had a drink and found the water very good, everbody except Roger, who tried it lower down, where it was running through the sand. There it was decidedly brackish.

  “Try it up here,” called Captain Flint, seeing Roger spitting the water out in a hurry. “It’s bound to be brackish down there.”

  “Come here and wash your mouth out,” said Susan.

  Roger came.

  “I don’t think much of the crabs,” he said.

  He had been thinking of nothing else, and had seen only a few of them, yellowish crabs of disappointing size.

  “Them’s the day shift,” said Peter Duck. “Smaller than what I remember them over on the other side. But you should see the night gang.”

  It was a deep little pool, under the rocks, where the stream left the trees, though only a few feet across and not big enough for bathing. But it was big enough to let them force the tanks under till they filled. This was lucky, as it would have been a long job filling them if they had had to bail the water into the tanks with a mug.

  “Come on,” said Captain Flint. “Leave them to it. Time’s going on. Two captains in charge. What more do they want? But somebody ought to be getting back to the ship. We don’t want Gibber taking her to sea.”

  “All right, Uncle Jim,” said Nancy. “Off with you. We’ll take Swallow back now for a cargo of empty tanks. John and I’ll take turns staying aboard the Wild Cat. We’ll have all the tanks full and stowed long before you’re back. Mr Duck’s shown us how to use the davits like cranes for bringing the full ones aboard. Give us a hand in pushing Swallow off. You pulled her up much too high.”

  “Now see here, Cap’n Nancy,” said Peter Duck earnestly. “Don’t forget to belay the ends of your falls while you’re hoisting them tanks aboard. You don’t want to lose one to the bottom and have a fall unrove if you happen to let it go with a run. And the same to you, Cap’n John. You’d be able to reeve another, I don’t doubt, but them sort of happenings ain’t seamanlike. We don’t want none of them aboard the Wild Cat. Now if I was to be stopping aboard along of you …”

  “We’re starting, Mr Duck,” said Captain Flint hurriedly, on hearing these last words. “They’ll make no mistakes. And we ought to be moving.”

  Nancy laughed. Susan had a last look to see that Roger had his knapsack on properly, with both the straps the same length. Captain Flint tucked the two little spades under his arm. Everybody shouted, “Goodbye!” and “Good luck!” and the exploring party went off up the stream into the forest.

  A sudden quiet fell on the beach.

  “I rather wish we were going too,” said John.

  “Rubbish!” said Nancy. “It’s the only chance we’ll ever get of being in full charge of the ship. Give me a hand down with one of these tanks. Shove along with the other, you two mates. They aren’t so awfully heavy.”

  A few minutes later the little brown-sailed Swallow was slipping out from the cove towards the anchored schooner. Susan and Peggy had settled down by the side of the stream to a thorough rinsing of the old oaken water-breaker. During the last few days of the long voyage the little barrel had certainly been giving the drinking water a remarkable smell of its own.

  *

  “It don’t look the same,” Peter Duck kept saying, as he and Captain Flint, followed by Bill, Titty, and Roger, pushed their way into the green forest. “No. It don’t look the same. My bearings is all mixed with the stream coming out at a different place. Trees is different too, seems to me. But maybe we shan’t go wrong if we follow the stream up the hill and then strike east over the shoulder.”

  Trickling along under the trees, the stream flowed in a narrow channel of dark earth and black stones, sometimes disappearing altogether under the roots of great trees. Some of the trees were very like pine trees and reminded Titty and Roger of the woods above the lake in the far-away country at home. Under these trees the ground was ruddy with burnt, brown needles, which seemed astir with the ants hurrying busily among them. There were ant-hills, too, as high as Roger and all of a tremble with the movement of the ants inside. Then there were gum trees, giant ferns, every kind of palm and many strange flowering trees the names of which they did not know. There was great delight when they came on a wild banana tree, with a heavy drooping cluster of ripe fruit. Bill, Titty, and Roger ate some as they walked along, and Captain Flint cut a big bunch and put it in his knapsack.

  “What have you people got on your feet?” he said suddenly.

  “Sandshoes,” said Titty. “Susan wouldn’t let us come barefoot.”

  “I’ve got a pair of the mate’s on, too,” said Bill.

  “She wanted to make us put on sea-boots,” said Roger.

  “She was quite right,” said Captain Flint. “Well, make all the noise you can while you’re walking.”

  “It’s not only snakes you’d best be looking for. There’s them hairy spiders. Don’t you let one of them things grapple and board.”

  “Look at this centipede,” said Titty. “It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen.”

  “Best give him a good offing,” said Peter Duck. “But he’s nothing by what I’ve seen in the Malays. You see them down there like tarred hawsers, dark as Navy Plug some of them … dangerous, too.”

  “The Malays?” said Captain Flint. “Remember that hill above Penang, the one with all those temples?” And with that the two of them were at it, talking of things they had seen long ago, just as if this wild forest on Crab Island was hardly worth looking at.

  But Bill cut a good big stick for himself, and banged on the ground and the tree stems as he walked along. Roger and Titty stamped on the ground, but soon forgot to stamp because there was so much to see.

  They met nothing really dangerous, but very many things that they had never seen before. There were gorgeous butterflies, as big as saucers, and climbing plants that draped the trees with hanging clusters of red and violet flowers. And clouds of tiny birds were buzzing round these clusters of flowers, birds so small that at first Titty thought they were biggish bees. Some of them were blue, like kingfishers, and others had a sheen of purple and dark red that changed as they caught the light or slipped into shadow flitting in and out among the leaves. And then there were big birds, too, green parrots, mostly, like Polly, and noisy chatterers, that made more noise than the parrots, except when the parrots were startled and a flock of them rose together into the air above the trees, so that the explorers could not see them, but only heard the wild screaming of them high above the green feathery screen that shut out all but small patches of the sky.

  It was hard going in places, with the thick undergrowth and the tangles of climbing plants.

  “I don’t believe we ought to have brought yo
u children,” said Captain Flint after they had worked slowly through a rather tough bit.

  “We’re not going back now,” said Roger.

  “We simply can’t,” said Titty.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Captain Flint. “We’ll be blazing our trail as soon as we leave the stream. We could leave you to camp by the stream and pick you up on the way home.”

  But nobody liked this idea, and it was forgotten a few minutes later when they found their way blocked by a great mass of loose rocks and earth, sprouting with trees and ferns, but towering above them almost like a precipice.

  “Landslide,” said Captain Flint.

  “Here’s the water, sir,” said Bill, “coming down the hill, it is.”

  “Bear to the left then. Up the hill.”

  They climbed steeply up the side of the hill along the edge of the landslide. Here the able-seaman and the ship’s boy could do as well as the skipper and the bosun, dodging under branches, and scrambling up over roots and stones. Up and up they went, Bill leading the way, and banging with his stick, following always the tiny trickle of water. They came out at last above the landslide, and could look down on the tumbled mass of earth and rocks and young trees growing in it wherever they had found foothold. They could see that all this side of the hill must have slipped down across the old course of the stream, which now trickled along the upper edge of it before twisting down the side of it to find its way into the valley.

  “I wonder when that came down,” said Captain Flint.

  “Since I were here,” said Peter Duck, “but none so long since, neither … Ten or twelve year maybe. Look at the size of them little trees growing in it.”

  Above it, too, the trees were small and new, growing out of the hillside that had been scraped bare by that great sliding mass of earth and rocks.

  Bill, Roger, and Titty rushed forward and upward through the trees. Suddenly there were no more trees. Above them was nothing but black rocks, hot to the touch.

  But it was not the rocks they noticed when they came suddenly out there above the trees. It was the sea, that seemed to stretch for ever into the distance far beneath them.

  “Hullo!” said Bill, stopping short and just saving his hat from being blown away by the wind off the Atlantic.

  “This is something like being on the peak in Darien,” said Titty, “only, of course, stout Cortez must have been looking the other way.”

  “It’s the sea,” said Roger. “You do see a lot of it from up here.”

  “Who’s fat Cortez?” asked Bill.

  “He was a Spaniard,” said Titty. “He climbed up a hill and looked at the Pacific.”

  “A dago,” said Bill. “But they mostly runs thin, aboard ships, anyway. There was one I knowed, shipped as fireman in a steam trawler. Skinny, they used to call him. There wasn’t nothing to him. Thinner and thinner he got, shovelling coal, and he used to keep making new holes in his belt so’s he could tighten it, till it wasn’t worth his while to make no more ’cos all the belt was hanging loose outside the buckle. That’s the sort of dago he was. This Cortez must have been different.”

  “He comes in a bit of poetry,” said Titty.

  “Dagos runs thin,” said Bill again, “but maybe the man what made that poetry never saw him.”

  Peter Duck and Captain Flint climbed up to them. They, too, looked down over the waving green tops of the forest to the blue, white-flecked ocean on which for so long they had been sailing.

  Captain Flint sniffed the air like a dog picking up a scent. Somewhere down there, below him, was the thing he had come so far to find. “Shallow a long way out,” said Peter Duck. “These islands mostly is, on the eastern side of them. The sea keeps piling the sand up. You can’t come close in without grounding, and there’s no sort of shelter from the trade winds. If you want to come in this side, you must wait for a lull and be off again the minute the wind pipes up. Even in a flat calm the swell breaks along them eastern shores.”

  “Not a sail to be seen,” said Captain Flint. “Let’s be getting on down.”

  The explorers went on again, a few yards above the top of the landslide.

  “That’s the end of the stream,” said Captain Flint, looking up above them at a thin trickle of water that came out from under precipices of black rock that seemed almost to lean out from the side of the hill. “I don’t like the look of that,” he added. “Too steep for my liking altogether. I shouldn’t like to be up here when there’s another bit of a shrug and the next lot comes down. Most unpleasant it would be. I remember once in Formosa …”

  “Who blazed that tree?” said Titty.

  “What tree? Where?” cried Captain Flint and a moment later was scrambling and slipping down over a slope of rock to a ragged pine-like tree, one of the forest’s outposts on the mountain-side, to look at a large scar where the rough bark had been sliced away.

  “It wasn’t a woodman did that,” said Captain Flint eagerly. “He took two blows at it from above.”

  Titty found herself wondering who it was who asked the executioner to sharpen his axe and cut boldly, when the clumsy fellow got nervous and took three blows to lop off a head of English chivalry or something like that. It was queer the way things came shooting into your mind just when you were really thinking of something quite different.

  “It might be a ship’s carpenter,” said Peter Duck, picking his way carefully down.

  “It was done after the landslide,” said Captain Flint. “No point in blazing a tree up here unless there was something to make you climb so high. Hullo. Come on. There’s another. Come on, you three, unless you’d like to wait till we come back.”

  “What for?” said Roger.

  “Well, come along then,” said Captain Flint.

  “Seems to me,” said Peter Duck, “that maybe it was Black Jake marked them trees. It’s not five year since he was here. He’d have to anchor on the western side, same as us, and he’d know well enough it would be on the east that I was throwed up after the wreck. Stands to reason that would. Follow the stream they would, same as us, up from that side, and then from mark to mark down on this, so’s to come back the same way.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Captain Flint, gripping his two spades in one hand, and going down hill with big strides.

  “What’s this?” said Roger, tugging at something that was sticking in the second of the blazed trees. It broke in his hand, and came away.

  “Old herring-knife,” said Bill. “Don’t you know that? You takes the herring this ways, and you slits it up, so …”

  “It’s East Coast fishermen use them knives and no others,” said Peter Duck, looking at the bone handle on which rust was growing like a fungus where the steel rivets came through that held the handle to the rusty blade, broken off short where Roger had twisted at it to get it out of the tree.

  “Black Jake may have stuck it there himself,” said Titty, “with a message to one of his friends, perhaps.”

  “There’s more than one of his friends have had a message from him with a knife,” said Peter Duck, “but it’s not in a tree he’d be sticking it.”

  “There’s another tree marked,” said Bill.

  “Come on,” said Captain Flint. “I’m beginning to think we owe a lot to Black Jake. If it hadn’t been for him you wouldn’t have told us the story. If he hadn’t chased us down Channel we should never have come so far. He’s given us a loan of a very good able-seaman. That’s you, Bill. And now it seems to me he’s made things easy for us by blazing a trail down to the eastern shore.”

  “You may be sorry yet you ever saw him,” said Peter Duck, and then, taking a last look at the sea, through a gap there was in the trees, he plunged down into the forest after Captain Flint, closely followed by Bill, Titty, and Roger, though Roger had got the knife back and was trying to clean some of the rust off it as he went along, before putting it in his pocket.

  “You don’t really want it,” said Titty.

  “
I do,” said Roger. “Of course I do. To put in my museum.”

  In the end the rusty knife came to pieces in his hand, but he wrapped the bits of bone and rusty steel together in his handkerchief, and made Titty stuff it in the outer pocket of his knapsack.

  “Pirate’s knife,” he said. “Jolly few museums will have got a thing like that.”

  Titty had to admit to herself that it sounded very well. As for Bill, he asked no questions. Things like that were for keeping until they came in handy for throwing at something else. If Bill had found it, he might have had a shot at a parrot with it. But wrapping it up in a handkerchief! Well, you never knew with these children. They were certainly a queer lot.

  The blazed trees clearly marked an old track, though, if there had ever been a regular path from tree to tree, there was no finding it now. Trees had fallen across the place where the path might have been, decayed, eaten by ants or rotted into reddish fibre that crumbled when it was touched. Plants of all kinds had grown up there, so thickly that if it had not been for the blazes on the trees nobody would have thought that this could be the way to anywhere. But the blazes were plentiful and easy to see, and Captain Flint and Peter Duck, going in front, cleared a way for the others, trampling underfoot the lower growths, and here and there using their knives to cut through the twisted ropes of climbing plants, like honeysuckles, which in places made a net that no one could have broken through by simply pushing. The little party of explorers moved down from the shoulder of the hill, screened from the sun by the foliage overhead but accompanied by a continuous loud screaming of startled parrots and chatterers.

  Besides the cries of the birds, which sometimes made quiet talking difficult, another noise was in their ears. All the time after they had passed the landslide and begun to follow the blazed trees down from the shoulder of Mount Gibber they had been listening to the noise of surf far away below them. They had heard it in the peaceful anchorage by Bill’s Landing, but now that they were coming down through the forest on the eastern slopes of Mount Gibber it began to be deafening, this endless rhythmical noise of the swell rolling in, turning to breaking waves and crashing into white surf that boiled along the sands. Captain Flint, hearing it, louder and louder, could hardly wait for the others. He hurried on from one blazed tree to the next, hoping always to see the trees thinning before him and the open sky and the Atlantic beating on the island shore.