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Updated: June 24, 2025
Thousands and thousands of them perch and chatter on the rocks and fly screaming in the air, amongst them being guillemots, kittiwakes, gulls, terns, cormorants, puffins, and eider-ducks, for which latter St. Cuthbert is said to have had great affection; certainly they are the gentlest of these wild sea-fowl.
The birds soon afterward came back from the south, the eider-ducks and the little auks, which we had caught in the summer time when upon the island; and then, as soon as the snow was all gone, the moss and stunted grass grew green, and plants sprouted up here and there, and the butterflies with bright yellow wings went gathering the honey from flower to flower, and you cannot imagine how glad we were once more to come out of the dreary winter into this bright sunshine and this pleasant summer.
They might have been taken for eider-ducks sailing in consort before the wind.
Very few chickens are kept only the higher officials or merchants have them; eggs of eider-ducks and other birds may often be had, but more are never collected than are wanted for the daily supply, and then only in spring; for potatoes the season was not advanced enough. My readers have now a picture of the luxurious life I led on board the ship.
"Yes, and several other things: he asked whether I had ever heard that the islets in the fiord were so many prison-houses." "And what did you say?" "I wanted him to explain; so I said they were prison-houses to the eider-ducks when they were sitting, for they never stir a yard from their nests.
There was, likewise, plenty of drift-wood all along the coast; not the large Greenland timber, but small trees and roots, evidently carried out of the great rivers of the Ungava by the ice. We had, of course, fire-wood enough, without robbing the graves of their superstitious furniture. Our Esquimaux pitched their tent on shore, and we supped with them on a mess of seal's flesh and eider-ducks.
Now Liveing was the servant of Ælric, the hermit who next dwelt in Cuthbert's cell. And one day while Ælric was gone away to the mainland, Liveing killed and ate one of the eider-ducks who still lived and built their nests near the hut where the Saint had lived. Liveing knew the promise of Saint Cuthbert's Peace, but he thought that no one would find out his crime.
If one of these inlets, mere fissures to the eyes of the eider-ducks, is wide enough for the sea not to freeze between the prison-walls of rock against which it surges, the country-people call the little bay a "fiord," a word which geographers of every nation have adopted into their respective languages. Though a certain resemblance exists among all these fiords, each has its own characteristics.
He sent his sons to Oxford; he made them travel; he was delighted when the youngest two took to the sea as naturally as the eider-ducks fledged in a sea-sand nest. Good fortune did not spoil the old, cautious family. It went "cannily" forward, and knew how "to take occasion by the hand," and how to choose its friends.
"And then the birds came back, the eider-ducks, and the little auks, that I have told you of, and great flocks of geese and gulls, all looking out for places in which to make their nests; and they fairly kept the air alive with the flutter of their wings, and their 'quack, quack, quack, and their gladsome screams, as they hurried to and fro.
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