by Gary Collins
“Duff’s in!” Mary announced loudly.
She dropped the boiler lid onto the stove where it clattered noisily on the hot cast-iron surface. Father and son turned toward the noise without speaking. Mary’s back was to them, but they could see her deft fingers touching the floating dumplings and settling them among the hot vegetables according to her liking.
The argument was over. Reuben knew it was rare for his nimble-fingered woman to drop anything, and even if she did she certainly wouldn’t let the pot lid lie there. As if reading his thoughts, Mary picked up the cover by its wooden knob and placed it back on the pot. Reuben knew, too, that her cry of “Duff’s in!” wasn’t so much to let them know that supper was almost done as it was to tell them to stop arguing in her kitchen.
Albert placed his hands on the table edge, pushed himself to his feet, and walked toward the door. He stepped quietly out into the winter night. Just past the kerosene light from his mother’s kitchen window, he stopped and looked back at the house. He felt bad about the fierce disagreement he had just had with his father, but at the same time he was glad. The discussion was done. His mother had ended it. Albert knew it would not be brought up again. Framed in the lamplit window, his mother’s head was bent as if examining her cooking, but inside the quiet kitchen, Mary’s eyes had misted over in worry for her son who would go a-sealin’.
The winter night crept down over the village of Elliston by the sea. A frothy white spindrift licked at the layers of sedimentary shoreline, the only semblance of light on an otherwise black ocean.
* * * * *
The seals scatter as they range farther south from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and out from the southwest coast of Newfoundland, breaking their ranks into smaller herds and strings. When it reaches the shallow waters off Sable Island, the depleted vanguard suddenly stops its southward migration. They reach waist high out of the seas, treading the water with their scutters, appearing to be studying, with black, shifting eyes, this tiny lace of land mass adrift in the open sea.
Sable Island is an atoll, in the shape of a new moon, that dares above the Atlantic waters more than 100 miles southeast of the coast of Nova Scotia. The island is settled down low in the sea. It is little more than twenty-six miles long and at its broadest point is barely three-quarters of a mile wide. It looks as though it should have vanished beneath the sea long ago, and the waters continue to try to erode its very foundation. Yet it remains defiant of wind and wave. For hundreds of years mariners have called it the graveyard of the Atlantic, and with good reason. Its treacherous coastline has taken many ships and men who had sailed too close. It is good for sailors to be wary.
The harp seals do not travel farther south. The sound of wave upon land is a hissing, crashing cacophony. The pounding surf snarls angrily as it tries to erase what little piece of land is left, and it has startled the seals from their southward campaign. Turning as one, they bend northward.
Now begins a frenetic pace unique to the animal world. The seals forge north from Sable and from the shores of the Magdeline Islands and away from Cape North. They stop infrequently for food now. They dive deep into the water, bursting forth again as sleek as dolphins, their flippers bunched in mid-air for the next onward thrust. They give off an eager coughing, barking sound as they forge ahead. And sometimes there is no sound at all save for the rush of water on their bodies. They swim north by instinct. North to the oncoming fields of ice and to the pains of birth. North to home. North to death.
4
He was nineteen years old and had never killed a seal. In fact, Cecil Mouland had never killed much of anything outside of a few seabirds and didn’t consider himself to be a hunter. He was a crack shot with the shotgun, though, and considered himself good with a rifle, which he used at target shooting on the rare occasion he could get his hands on a few bullets. He was living where he had been born, in the fishing hamlet of Doting Cove. It was a wild cove sparsely populated by hardy fishermen and their families on the southern part of Notre Dame Bay. Many of the locals considered Muddy Point, just to the windward of Doting Cove, to be the real southern beginning to Notre Dame Bay, and not Cape Freels, which lies at the end of a straight shore of white, sandy beaches more than twenty miles south of Doting Cove. Wherever its defined points, “Our Lady Bay” is the pride of Newfoundland bays. Not only is it the largest of all the many bays around the island’s coastline, it holds the greatest number of smaller islands in any of Newfoundland’s bays, and into its salt water flows the mightiest of Newfoundland’s rivers, the Exploits.
Cecil was bursting with the joy of life, filled with energy, eager to please, and something more. Young Cecil was in love with the pretty Salvation Army schoolteacher who had just been stationed at Doting Cove. Her name was Jessie Collins. She was an eager young cadet in the Salvation Army movement and would be the very first teacher in a brand new schoolhouse under construction. Nineteen-year-old Jessie was from the logging and lumbering community of Hare Bay, which lay in the sprawling forested hills on the north side of Bonavista Bay. This was her first teaching position and she was very nervous. And now she had the handsomest young man in the cove asking to walk out with her, which only added to her unease.
She hadn’t told him yet, but Jessie loved Cecil. She had never met anyone quite like him. He was good-looking and always kept himself meticulously groomed, especially his thick head of hair—even when she caught glimpses of him working around the busy shoreline. He always had a ready smile, and it was this that made the attractive schoolteacher flash her dark eyes his way the first time they passed each other on the gravel road of Doting Cove. Word around the community was that Cecil was the real devilskin, always drivin’ works and doing anything for a laugh. He reminded her of Tom Sawyer, another devilskin Jessie had read about.
For Cecil’s part, he was quite willing to give up all of his youthful antics if such devilish antics were cause for Jessie to stop looking his way. The first time he had seen the young woman walking by the fences lining the road near his home, he had been enamoured with her. She had been wearing store-bought gloves and a new coat. But it was her dark, secretive eyes that had enthralled him. They became sweethearts in that wonderful autumn of 1913. Their love flourished, with the warmth of simply holding hands, and the bliss of sweet kisses stolen in the hidden places that lovers knew. The name of the little village was not lost on the couple. Cecil believed the warmth of Jessie’s touch, her lingering scent, and the very taste of her mouth would sustain and strengthen him enough to get through any ordeal.
* * * * *
Winter began before its due date in 1913. Long before Christmas, the fresh waters froze solid and deep snows covered the land. George Tuff was from Templeman, a shallow, rocky, islet-bound cove in the lee of the point of land on which loomed the scattered houses of Newtown. Tuff had seen many early winters in his time, and now, walking along the road in Templeman, last night’s snowfall barely slowed his stride. At this early hour there were no other tracks but his own on the path he was following. George was an early riser. Neither warm summer dawns nor cold winter mornings would find him in bed. The land around him was relatively flat, with humps of land to the west over which a low drift of snow was carried by a cold, moderate west wind. Amid the light snow, tall yellow grasses bent and rustled over the bawns.
To the east, the open blue sea lay broken and dented near the shoreline by hundreds of rocks and tiny islands, all of them worn smooth by eons of pounding seas. In the offing, many hidden reefs betrayed their danger when they breached among the waves. This morning, the ocean was displaying its calmer side. The wind from the west and northwest had blown away from the land for days, easing some of the otherwise unruly winter seas. Lanes of deep navy and some softer blues on the water scunned away from the land, the colours changing whenever the clouds overhead allowed the morning sun through.
Templeman was a fishing community of rugged beauty, but George
Tuff barely gave the scene a glance as he trudged by. He was a lean, work-hardened man of thirty-two years. His face was stern, sculpted, clean-shaven, weathered, and tough. His eyes were pellucid, steel grey, and intense. His rough appearance throughout could be attributed more to a harsh way of life than to any genetic profile in his lineage. Tuff had a voice that was as clipped and curt as was his appearance. Seeing two men step onto the path ahead of him, he said:
“Ready to go to the telegraph office in Newtown, are ye, b’ys?” He added, “Checkin’ yer names off fer a bert’ to the ice!” He knew the answer. Last evening they had talked about going across to Newtown.
“Oh, we’re ready, a’right. Seen ya comin’ down the road, Jarge b’y,” said James Howell in his slow, pleasant voice.
“Fine civil marnin’ ’tis, too, Jarge,” Henry Dowding joined in. “Can’t wait to get me name down fer swilin’, I can’t! More’s the better to be shippin’ with you, Jarge b’y. Are we walkin’ down or shovin’ across the arm in punt?” Henry was an eager, talkative man. All three men were good friends.
“Punt!” George said, the lone word hanging in the air as if he had been insulted.
Tuff came from a breed of men who would walk over the roughest ice floes without complaint for hours, but given the chance, no matter how short the crossing, like all outport men, he would go in boat rather than walk. The three men shoved a punt down a rickety slip greased with snow. The boat rocked with their weight as they stepped aboard. They swept the seats free of snow with mittened hands and Tuff sat facing the bow on the middle thwart. James shipped the after oars and, with Henry pulling from the bow oars, the punt shot away from the land. Small waves appeared at her bow, and frothy bubbles rose up from her heart-shaped counter to disappear again in her wake. The two rowers kept up a lively conversation despite their vigorous rowing. Their voices rose and fell, but the figure seated in the middle didn’t say much as his body moved instinctively with the rhythm of the boat.
With seventeen years of hard experience at the icefields, George Tuff was one of the most seasoned and respected sealers to be found anywhere around the coast of Newfoundland. For ten of those years he had been given the job of master watch, a position of leadership up the greasy rungs of the sealing ladder. For the last three springs Tuff had been hunting seals with Captain Westbury Kean, the youngest son of Abram Kean, on the old wooden ship SS Newfoundland.
Wes Kean, as pleased with Tuff’s easygoing, take-it-as-it-comes manner as he was with his ability to handle men, had recently told Tuff he wanted him to ship with him again in the spring of 1914 as first mate, or, as it was better known, his second hand. George should have been very pleased with himself. It was an amazing accolade for an uneducated, unassuming man to have the captain’s ear, and in fact to have control of the ship and her crew. But, in reality, George Tuff hadn’t been asked; he had been told he was to take the position as second hand. It irked him, but he accepted the job without comment. His old reluctance to resist authority figures, which had plagued him in his youth, was alive and well throughout his manhood. Secretly, Tuff preferred to follow, to work without responsibility, than to carry the burden of leadership.
Tuff had sailed and hunted with Westbury’s father and had earned Abe Kean’s grudging respect. Abe wanted his son, who was eagerly striving to make a name for himself in the sealing industry, to have the best of men around him. There was no one better to teach, and more importantly to serve, his ambitious son than George Tuff.
George was born in another century, in the year 1882. He was little different from other lads of his age and era, save for one trait. Tuff took orders from authority without question. Shortly after ten years of age he was doing the work of men. He learned the way of ropes and boats, sails and oars, wild seas and calm waters, and the catching and curing of all fish. Under the tutelage of parents and elders, George excelled without complaint. He loved being on the open sea. While his muscles were yet soft, he endured the kick of the muzzleloader against his shoulder, proudly bearing the bruises as a rite of passage toward being a gunner.
Tuff loved it all but yearned for more. He wanted to go seal hunting, and not searching for the scattered heads poking out of calm seas while he waited with gun in hand. He wanted to go to the Arctic ice floes and hunt the seals where they lived and gave birth by the millions. When he was fifteen, he was tempted to try and stow away aboard one of the sealing vessels, but tales of unpaid menial tasks heaped upon stowaways deterred him. When he went to the hunt, as he was determined to do, he would go not only as a man but as a paid hunter.
And so it was. In the spring of 1897, when George Tuff was sixteen years old, he went to the ice. From the first day when he was ordered over the side with the rest of the sealers, Tuff relished the hunt and quickly mastered the killing of seals and the ability to think on his feet. With his bloodied skinning knife he ran swiftly over settling ice pans as deftly as the best of them. And the very next spring, aboard the SS Greenland in 1898, George Tuff would give witness to a living nightmare that has been recorded as one of Newfoundland’s worst disasters at sea.
The punt approached a wharf in Barbour’s Tickle, Newtown. With a quick flip of their forearms, both rowers shipped the oars from the thole-pins and flicked them inside the boat. The long wooden oars rattled as they came down against the thwarts. Henry sprang out of the boat with painter in hand, climbed up the wharf lungers, and secured the bow to the wooden grump. James pulled the stern of the boat parallel to the high wharf, tied it off, and scrambled up. By the time he stood on the worn wharf planking, the fleet-footed Tuff was striding away.
They hurried down the road to the post office and were met by other men who had seen the punt coming down the bight. One of them was Mark Howell, also from Templeman, and the others were seal hunters from Newtown who had secured tickets to the ice. They stopped and talked for a while until the impatient Tuff, eager as always to get the job done, walked away.
* * * * *
Along the entire Northeast coast, the Christmas month of 1913 was an unusually cold one, even for Newfoundland. Woodland valleys were choked with snow which fell almost daily, and save for the occasional black outcropping that stared out of the headlands, the landscape was white.
In all the “places,” as everyone called the communities of coastal habitation, there was little activity on the sea. A few small boats were seen rowing outside the frozen harbours to hunt seabirds. The one true sign of spring on the northeast coast—the Arctic ice floes—was still three months away, but wherever fishermen gathered, the seal hunt was the main point of discussion. News was trickling back from the north of an exceptionally cold winter. Ice conditions were expected to be heavy for the coming spring and were predicted to come early. The snow and heavy frost on the island kept on coming, making the talk of a bad spring all the more believable.
The frozen harbour of Newport was now a well-travelled bridge used by young and old to visit both sides of the community. Dogs ran barking behind yelling children, who raced down hillsides and out onto the icy harbour on homemade sleds. Below the cliffs at the harbour entrance, where the ice ended and the open sea began, the ice edge was several inches thick. A beaten snow path led from the inner harbour out to the very edge. Three punts had been hauled out of the water and now rested on their sides several boat lengths away from the edge. The boats were used to hunt turrs, puffins, eider ducks, and even the little bull birds, which the locals enjoyed in bird soup. The same boats would be used to hunt seals when the first of them appeared. For many in these isolated outports, the migrating mammals would provide the first welcome source of meat for the entire year.
But for now the sturdy little boats that played such a role in outport life lay in wait. It was Christmas Eve.
The harbour was quiet now, save for the barking of a single dog, chained and sounding hungry. A brisk west wind that had come with the dawn now faded as west winds som
etimes do when the sun goes down behind the long hills. It lessened to a gentle but much colder night wind. A bright moon halved by a single dark cloud appeared over the hills of the outer harbour. Heat rising from each blackened funnel turned to grey smoke when it hit the night air. The soft wind seemed to play with the smoke for a time and furled it above each rooftop before carrying it away.
A sparsely decorated fir Christmas tree tied with twine was in a corner opposite the stove in Phillip Holloway’s warm kitchen. The heat from the kitchen stove sent the tree’s rich smell to every corner of the room. Phillip’s wife, Maryann, had placed every trinket on the tree as delicately as if they were all store-bought breakables. She had precious few such items, so for the most part the tree was adorned with her own creative ideas. Twisted lengths of colourful worsted wool and spirals of rare orange peels—saved for this very day—hung from the tips of limbs. Pieces of coloured yarn were lovingly wound through the branches. Several rabbit bladders, long since pricked and drained, blown tight with air and painted with gay colours, hung like vellum pouches, along with pairs of hand-knitted baby’s booties long out of use, pieces of blue mussel shells, their pearly insides glistening in the lamplight as they slowly spun with the heat from the stove, pine cones yawing open to the heat to reveal the silvery gossamer seed inside and pieces of paper and scraps of materials that dangled and twirled. A few rare Christmas cards from past years were draped like tents over the twine that held the tree upright. On top of the lovingly decorated tree was a silver star Phillip had made from a piece of pine board and painted with Silver Dazzle, a shiny paint used to bedeck kitchen stoves.
Their children tucked in bed, Maryann and Phil talked over a cup of tea and a slice of bread smeared with partridgeberry jam. Phil assured Maryann they were going to have a bright future. When the cod fishery started up this summer they would have a cod trap, a bigger boat, and for once a better chance at making a go of it. But their immediate future hinged on the spring seal hunt and the cash money Phillip would bring home. Reports of this spring’s bad ice meant nothing to him. After all, he was to ship out with Jesse Collins, a seasoned seal hunter, and best of all he had secured a berth aboard the SS Newfoundland with Captain Wes Kean, the son of the most famous seal killer of all.
