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There was no limit to this boy's hardihood and daring. The more furious the gale the more congenial the task. Returning from these frequent baptisms of salt water, his Saxon fairness and Norman freshness aglow with spray, he would loiter on the beach to talk to the kelp gatherers raking amid the breakers, and to watch the mackerel boats, reefed down, flying to the harbour for shelter.
An oil can was over some ashes, and there were some queer, big kettles near. In another place were Chinese children eating their breakfast. One child had a Chinese cup, out of which she ate with chop-sticks. Jo sat down on the edge of the village, and watched three women who were setting off in a boat, intending to row out into the surf to get kelp.
This hunting is the very incarnation of the storm spirit itself, for the wilder the gale, the more sea-otter have come ashore; the less likely they will be to see or hear or smell the hunter. Gaff or paddle in hand, the Aleut leaps from rock to rock, or dashes among the tumbling beds of tossed kelp. A quick blow of the bludgeon; the otter never knows how death came. This is the club hunt.
Do go, that I may dance with you." "You do not mind waltzing with me, then?" he said. The glance she gave him was answer sufficient. He could not kelp feeling flattered. "I shall be there, Philippa," he said; and then she promised herself on that evening she would try to discover what his sentiments were with regard to her.
The eyes were two gray pebbles; the neck and arms of larger, white shells; and the dress of sea-weed, red, green, purple, and yellow; very splendid, for Fancy emptied her garden to dress her mermaid. "People say that mermaids always have tails; and I might make one out of this great leaf of kelp.
Often as I recurred to a branch of the kelp, I never failed to discover animals of new and curious structures.
The "stuffs" are certainly excellent, very evenly woven; and the patterns, all devised, I am told, by the women themselves, very simple and tasteful. The only dyes used are got by the women also from the sea-weeds and the kelp, which must be counted among the resources of the place.
At length one morning the schooner, which for the preceding twenty-four hours had been heading eastward, raised the land, and by the middle of the afternoon had come up to within a mile of a low, sandy shore, quivering with heat, and had tied up to the kelp in Magdalena Bay. Charlie now took over entire charge of operations.
Glancing around as if to assure himself that no one was within hearing, he hitched the barrel on which he was seated nearer his visitor. "There's a sight of plague with motor-boats among these shoals," he went on eagerly. "What with the eel-grass that grows along the inlets an' the kelp that's washed in by the tide after a storm, the propeller of a motor-boat is snarled up a good bit of the time.
All around them tossed and streamed and writhed long, black aprons of kelp. They were passing over a sunken ledge. Soon it lay behind them; the kelp vanished and the waves grew lower. Three o'clock went by; then four. The afternoon was waning. The thick, woolly gray that surrounded them assumed a more somber shade.
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