Seacrow Island

by Astrid Lindgren

  They did not boast about their knowledge. Apparently they thought it was something you were born with if you were an island girl, just as a duck is born with webbed feet.

  “Aren’t you afraid of growing fins?” their mother used to ask them, when she needed help with the telephone exchange or in the shop, and as usual had to fetch her daughters out of the sea. They were there in all weathers, and they moved in the water just as easily as they jumped about on the jetties or climbed up the masts of the old shipwrecked trawlers in the creek.

  Johan had blisters on his hands when at last they reached the island. They smarted, but he was happy, for he had rowed well. It was quite enough to make him happy and excited, almost too much so.

  “Poor boy, he’ll be just like his father,” Melker used to say. “Up and down all the time.”

  Just now Johan was very “up.” All four were. If Bosun was, he hid it very well. He wore the same melancholy look as always, but perhaps he was happy somewhere deep down in his dog’s soul, as he lay comfortably on the warm rock with his back against the gray, sun-warmed wall of an old boathouse. From where he lay he could see the children in the boat, taking up the nets. They shrieked and shouted so much that Bosun became anxious. Were they in danger and needing help? It sounded as if they were, and Bosun could not possibly know that they were simply shrieking with delight over their catch.

  “Eight perch!” said Niklas. “Malin won’t like this. She said that she wanted to have perch with mustard sauce for supper tonight, but not for a whole week!”

  Johan grew more and more excited. “Oh, wonderful!” he shrieked. “Who can possibly say that fishing for perch isn’t fun?”

  “Only the perch,” said Freddy quietly.

  For a short moment Johan was sorry for the perch, and he knew someone who would have been even sorrier for them if he had been there. “It’s lucky we haven’t got Pelle with us,” said Johan. “He wouldn’t have liked all this.”

  Bosun up on his rock cast one last anxious look toward the boat and the children, but he realized that they did not need his help, so he yawned and let his head sink down between his paws. Now he could sleep.

  And if it was true, as Teddy and Freddy insisted, that Bosun could think and feel like a human being, perhaps he wondered before he fell asleep what Tjorven was doing at home and whether she was awake yet.

  She was. Very much awake. When she discovered that Bosun was not beside her bed as usual she began to wonder. And when she had wondered for a while she realized what had happened, and then she was extremely angry, exactly as Freddy had foreseen she would be.

  She climbed crossly out of bed. Bosun was her dog. No one had the right to take him out to sea. But Teddy and Freddy were always doing it—and without even asking her. It couldn’t go on like this.

  Tjorven marched straight to her parents’ bedroom to complain. Her parents were asleep, but Tjorven burst in anyway, went straight to her father and began to shake him.

  “Daddy, do you know what?” she said furiously. “Teddy and Freddy have taken Bosun out to the island with them.”

  Nisse opened an unwilling eye and looked at the alarm clock. “Must you come at six o’clock in the morning to tell me that?”

  “Yes, I couldn’t come before,” said Tjorven. “I’ve only just found out about it.”

  Her mother moved sleepily. “Don’t make such a fuss, Tjorven,” she murmured. It would soon be time for Marta to get up and begin a new day of hard work. This last half hour before the alarm clock rang was as precious to her as gold, but Tjorven did not understand that.

  “I’m not making a fuss. I’m just angry,” she said.

  No one, unless they were stone deaf, could go on sleeping in a room where Tjorven was being angry. Marta felt herself becoming grimly wide awake and she said impatiently, “What in the world are you making this fuss about? I suppose Bosun’s not allowed to have a little fun now and again!”

  Then it burst out. “But what about me!” shrieked Tjorven. “Aren’t I ever going to have a little fun? It’s not fair!”

  Nisse groaned and buried his head in the pillow. “Go away, Tjorven. Go somewhere else if you’re going to be angry—somewhere where we can’t hear it.”

  Tjorven stood in silence. She was quiet for a few seconds and her parents began to hope that the silence would continue. They didn’t understand that Tjorven had only just begun.

  “Well, all right then!” she shouted at last. “I will go away. I’ll go and never come back again! But you’ll be sorry when you start to moan about not having your Tjorven any more.”

  Then Marta understood that this was a serious matter and she stretched out her hand toward Tjorven in an attempt to calm her down. “Surely you won’t disappear altogether, little Bumble?”

  “Yes, I will. That’ll be the best thing,” said Tjorven. “Then you can sleep and sleep all you want.”

  Marta explained to her that they wanted their own little Tjorven always—but perhaps not at six o’clock in the morning in their bedroom. But Tjorven would not listen. She stormed out, slamming the door behind her.

  She went out into the garden in her nightgown. “Go on, sleep, then!” she muttered, and there were tears of bitterness in her eyes.

  But then it began to dawn on her that she had woken up too early. The day seemed very new. She could feel it in the air and in the dewy grass that chilled her bare feet and she could see that the sun was not yet where it ought to be. Only the seagulls were awake and screaming as usual. One of them sat at the top of the flagpole and looked as if he owned the whole of Seacrow Island.

  Tjorven did not feel quite so furious now. She stood there thoughtfully, pulling up little bits of grass with her toes. It annoyed her when she had behaved so childishly. Run away from home—only babies did that sort of thing, and Daddy and Mummy knew it as well as she did. But it would be impossible to turn back now, not just like that. There must be some honorable way of getting out of the difficulty. She thought hard and pulled up a great many tufts of grass before she finally realized what she must do. Then she ran to her parents’ open bedroom window and poked in her head. Her parents were dressing and were as wide awake as she could wish.

  “I’m going to be Söderman’s maid,” announced Tjorven. She thought it was a very good suggestion. Now Mummy and Daddy would understand that this was what she had meant all the time and nothing as childish as running away.

  Söderman lived alone in his cottage down by the sea. And he often complained that he had no help in the house.

  “Can’t you be my maid, Tjorven?” he had said to her once. But Tjorven had not had time then. What a good thing that she had remembered it now. You wouldn’t need to remain a maid for very long. Then you could come home to Mummy and Daddy again and be their own Tjorven as if nothing had ever happened.

  Nisse stretched out a fatherly hand through the window and stroked Tjorven’s cheek. “So you’re not angry any longer, little Bumble?”

  Tjorven shook her head shyly. “No.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Nisse. “It’s no good losing your temper, you know, Tjorven. It doesn’t get you anywhere.”

  Tjorven agreed.

  “Do you think that Söderman really wants a maid?” asked Marta. “He’s got Stina.”

  Tjorven had not thought of this. It was last winter when Söderman had asked her and then there had been no Stina, for then she had been living in town with her mother. Tjorven thought, but not for long. “A maid has to be strong,” she said, “and I’m that.”

  And then she set off at a run to tell Söderman about his luck as soon as possible. But her mother called her back.

  “Maids can’t go to work in their nightgowns,” she said, and Tjorven understood that.

  Söderman was behind his cottage sorting his nets when Tjorven at last appeared.

  “They have to be strong, tra-la-la,” she sang. “Fantastically strong, tra-la-la.” She interrupted herself when she saw Söderman. “Söderman, do y
ou know what?” said Tjorven. “Guess who’s going to wash up for you today?”

  Before he had had time to guess a head popped out of the open window behind him. “I am,” said Stina.

  “No,” Tjorven answered her, “you’re not strong enough.”

  It took quite a long time to convince Stina of this, but at last she had to give in.

  Tjorven had a very hazy idea of the duties of a maid. Such a being had never set foot on Seacrow Island as yet, but she believed that they must be strong, iron-hard people, something like the icebreakers which came when the ice had to be broken up for the boat in winter. She began to wash up with just about the same sort of strength in Söderman’s kitchen.

  “You have to break something,” she assured Stina, as Stina exclaimed when a couple of plates fell to the ground.

  Tjorven emptied a liberal supply of soap into the basin so that everything became one glorious mass of froth. She washed up energetically and sang so loudly that her voice traveled as far as Söderman, while Stina with a sour face sat on a chair, watching. She was the lady of the house, Tjorven had declared.

  “They do not need to be so strong. Not so fantastically strong at any rate,” sang Tjorven. Then she suddenly announced, “I’m going to make pancakes too.”

  “How do you do that?” Stina wondered.

  “You just stir and stir,” said Tjorven. She had finished the washing up and she quickly emptied the basin out of the window. But underneath the window Matilda, Söderman’s cat, lay sunning herself. She jumped up with a terrified yowl and rushed through the kitchen door, enveloped in a cloud of froth.

  “You shouldn’t wash cats,” said Stina sternly.

  “It was an accident,” said Tjorven. “But if you do wash them you have to dry them too.”

  She took the dish towel and they both began to dry Matilda and calm her. It was clear that Matilda thought she was being shamefully treated because she yowled angrily now and again and afterward she went off to sleep.

  “Where’s the flour?” asked Tjorven when she finally got around to thinking about her pancakes again. “Get it out!”

  Stina obediently climbed up on a chair and pulled out the flour tin from the cupboard. It was difficult because she had to stretch to reach it and it was heavy. And really Tjorven was right; Stina was not strong enough.

  “Help! I’m dropping it!” she shrieked. The flour tin tipped in her weak hands so that most of the flour showered on Matilda, who had just fallen asleep on the floor below.

  “Looks like a different cat,” said Tjorven, amazed.

  Normally Matilda was black, but the animal that now flew shrieking out of the door was as white as a ghost and its eyes were wild.

  “She’ll frighten the life out of every cat on the whole of Seacrow Island,” said Tjorven. “Poor Matilda, she’s really having a bad day.”

  The raven, Hop-ashore Charlie, was shrieking in his cage; it sounded as if he was laughing at Matilda’s misfortunes. Stina opened the cage and let the raven out.

  “I’m teaching him to speak,” she said to Tjorven. “I’m going to teach him to say ‘Go to blazes.’ ”

  “Why?” asked Tjorven.

  “Because Pelle’s grandmother can say it,” said Stina. “And her parrot can too.”

  Then they saw someone standing in the doorway, and it was none other than Pelle himself.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Making pancakes,” said Tjorven. “But Matilda has run away with almost all the flour, so I don’t think we can do much.”

  Pelle came in. He felt at home in Söderman’s cottage as all children did. It was the smallest cottage on the island, only a kitchen and a little bedroom, but there were so many things to look at, not only Hop-ashore Charlie, although for Pelle he was the most important, but a stuffed eider duck and a couple of bundles of old comics and a strange picture of people in black clothes driving coffins on sleighs over the ice. Cholera is raging, said the caption underneath. And then Söderman had a bottle with a whole sailing ship inside it. Pelle never tired of looking at it, and Stina never tired of showing it to him.

  “How did they get the boat into the bottle?” Pelle wondered.

  “There, you see!” said Stina. “Your grandma can’t do that!”

  “No, because it’s one of the most difficult things to do,” said Tjorven. “Look at me,” she added.

  And then they forgot the ship in the bottle as they looked at Tjorven. She was standing in the middle of the floor and on her head sat the raven. It was a wonderful fairy-tale sight which struck them quite dumb.

  Tjorven felt the bird’s claws in her thick hair and she smiled happily. “Just think if he lays an egg in my hair!”

  But Pelle soon dashed her hopes. “He can’t. It has to be a female for that, you know.”

  “But,” said Tjorven, “if he can learn to say ‘Go to blazes’ then he can learn to lay an egg.”

  Pelle looked longingly at the raven and said with a sigh, “How I wish I had an animal. I’ve only got some wasps.”

  “Where are they?” asked Stina.

  “At home at Carpenter’s Cottage there’s a wasps’ nest right under the eaves. Daddy’s been stung already.”

  Stina smiled a contented, toothless smile. “I’ve got lots of animals—a raven and a cat and two little lambs.”

  “But they aren’t yours,” said Tjorven. “They belong to your grandfather.”

  “I have them as mine when I’m here with him,” said Stina. “So there.”

  Tjorven’s face clouded over and she said gloomily, “I’ve got a dog. If only those beasts would bring him home.”

  Her Bosun! At that moment he was wandering around the island entirely on his own. And those so-called beasts had not even noticed he was gone.

  They were having a wonderful morning. “Let’s swim first,” Teddy had said and so they did. The water was as it always is in the month of June. Only lunatics of twelve and thirteen would throw themselves voluntarily into anything so bitterly cold. But they were lunatics and they did not die of it. On the contrary they thrived on it. They threw themselves into the water from the rocks and dove and swam and played and raced in the water until they were quite blue with cold. Then they lit their campfire in a sheltered spot and sat around it and felt in their blood all the Indians, settlers, head-hunters, and Stone Age men that have ever sat around campfires as long as the human race has lived on the earth. They were fishers and hunters now, living the free life of the wild country, and they grilled their prey over the glowing ashes while seamews and seagulls shrieked above them and tried to tell them that all fish on the island were really theirs.

  But the trespassers stayed there regardless, eating their delicious fish and making the most appalling noise. “Craak, craak, craak,” they croaked like cormorants, for they had just formed a secret club, the secret name of which was to be the Four Seacrows, and it was to remain a secret forever. But their war cries were not secret. All the seamews and seagulls heard it and did not like it. “Craak, craak, craak!” echoed over the islets, islands, and creeks, but no one heard anything else for the rest was secret.

  The glow from their fire turned into ashes. Then Freddy caught sight of a drifting boat out in the bay. It was so far away that they could scarcely see it, but it was empty, they could make out that much.

  “How some people tie up their boats!” said Johan.

  Then Teddy stood up as a grim thought occurred to her. “You can say that again,” she said when she had taken a look. In the little creek into which they had dragged their boat there was no boat to be seen. Teddy looked sternly at Johan. “Yes, you can say that again. How do you tie up a boat actually?”

  It was Johan who had said that he would see to mooring the boat—and he had added that it would be done properly.

  “Isn’t it odd how a boy can be so exactly like his father?” Malin used to say of Johan. And it certainly was odd.

  They could still see the boat far out in
the sunshine. Freddy stood up on a stone and waved to it with both hands. “Good-by, good-bye, little boat. Give our love to Finland!”

  Johan had become very red in the face. He looked shamefacedly at the others. “It’s all my fault. Are you very angry with me?”

  “No,” said Teddy. “That sort of thing can happen to anyone.”

  “But how are we going to get away from here?” wondered Niklas, trying not to sound as anxious as he felt.

  Teddy shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose we will have to wait until someone passes. Although that may be a couple of weeks,” she said. It was a temptation to frighten everyone just a little.

  “Bosun will starve to death by then,” said Johan. He knew the vast amount Tjorven’s dog could eat.

  That made them think of Bosun. Where was he? They had not seen him for a long time, it suddenly occurred to them.

  Freddy shouted for him but he did not come. They all shouted so that the seagulls flew away terrified, but no dog appeared.

  “No dog and no boat. Tell me what else we haven’t got,” said Teddy.

  “No food,” said Niklas.

  But then Freddy pointed triumphantly to her knapsack, which she had put in a cleft in the rock.

  “We’ve got that, though! A whole knapsack full of sandwiches! And seven fish!”

  “Eight,” said Johan.

  “No,” Freddy reminded him, “we’ve eaten one.”

  “No, there are eight,” said Johan. “You can count me in. The biggest silly fish in the whole archipelago.”

  They all stood there not knowing what to do next. Something of the glamour of the day began to fade and now they began to long to get home.

  “Besides,” said Teddy, and she suddenly looked anxious, “besides, I think there’s a mist coming up out there.”

  But at that very moment they heard the friendly dunk, dunk, dunk of a motorboat out on the sea, very faint at first but getting stronger and stronger.

  “Look, it’s Björn’s boat,” said Freddy, and both she and Teddy began to jump and shriek like wild things. “And, look, he’s towing our boat!”