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Updated: May 20, 2025
The oars were shipped. The dory's speed dwindled. "Out your paddles, sit on the gun'l, and paddle ee-asy." The hands obeyed. The Captain's voice dropped to a whisper. His back was toward them and he gestured with one free hand.
It led us into a lake seven miles across; not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the long water weed known as mermaid's hair but deep enough for trouble when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the width of one's hand, and the fact that you can't offer the gun'l of a canoe to the broadside of a big wave.
Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe the big, white banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch craft with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake. That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake.
First one gun'l goes under, then the other. Then they lift and sink again, and both go under at once. All at once there's a noise like a cannon that's the air blowing up the deck.
He took his compass with him, but that didn't make much odds. The boat was lighter now, an' we hadn' to bale. Pretty soon I got too weak to notice how the men went. I was lyin' wi' my head under the stern sheets an' only pulled mysel' up, now an' then, to peer out over the gun'l. I s'pose 'twas the splashes as the men went over that made me do this. I don't know for certain.
Sir, I reckon she went down inside o' five minutes. We'd but bare time to get out one boat and push clear o' the whirl of her. All hands jumped in; she was but a sixteen foot boat, an' we loaded her down to the gun'l a'most. There was a brave star-shine, but no moon. Cruel things happen 'pon the sea."
There was a twinkle o' dew 'pon the thwarts an' gun'l, an' I managed to suck my shirt-sleeve, that was wringin' wet, an' dropped off dozin' again belike. The nex' thing I minded was a sort o' dream that I was home to Carne again, over Pendower beach that's where my father an' mother lived. I heard the breakers quite plain. The sound of 'em woke me up. This was a little after daybreak.
Looking out over the water from his seat on the gun'l, Wilbur could make out a round, greenish mass like a patch of floating seaweed, just under the surface, some sixty yards ahead. "Easy sta'board," whispered the Captain under his elbow. "Go ahead, port; e-e-easy all, steady, steady." The affair began to assume the intensity of a little drama a little drama of midocean.
"Step lively, brother, and see if you can run across any fresh water, so's to pour a little down his throat," Jack went on to say. "I can dip up some salty stuff by reaching down over the gun'l and mop his forehead so's to fetch him around." "Okay, boss!" snapped the ever ready Perk, "kinder guess I spied a barrel with a faucet hope now she don't hold spirits instead o' water.
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