The foaming fore shore/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
HAULING THE TRAP
IN THE blaze of the rainbow dawn across the glittering facades of the scores of scattered icebergs the Graywing hove to by Taylor's trap berth in the strait, and seven of the eight dories dropped overside.
Ever quick to progress, it was the Americans themselves that had introduced seines into the haunts of the cod. In place of the ancient method of taking the fish by hook and line or jigger, Captain Norman of Brigus had brought the cod-trap down on the Labrador. No longer men with the ready money to purchase a trap bothered with the hook and line or jigger or puttered with the trawl.
With the great seines rich harvests were drawn from the icy deep, and Taylor himself on more than one occasion had gathered an even hundred quintals at one haul. Of the customary two hauls a day, this was the lucky morning haul, and with song and shout the Graywing's crews in the dories raced expectantly for the moorings of their berth.
Dead ahead of them, shining blood-red upon the sapphire sea, bobbed the four anchored buoys that buoyed the corners of the vast square-topped bag of meshed twine. The bag itself, invisible in the watery depths of the strait, was open at the top, its edges, full fifty feet to the side, supported by long lines of cork floats streaking from buoy to buoy.
From one corner branched a leader, a single wall of net that walled the Belle Isle currents across and inveigled up or down- swimming fish into a funnel-like opening in the trap. Once in, they never found the small end of the funnel again, but swam imprisoned 'round and 'round their huge elastic cell.
Underrunning the agitated edges of the trap, the seven dories sculled in place and, laying aside their oars, the seven rowers seized the floating edges of the pound. Standing up to their work, swaying to the heave of the swell through the strait, timing their pull to a fisherman's chanty, they hauled their trap, lusty giants reaping their finny harvest as fishers of all ages, ever since the day of Peter, have cast forth their nets and harvested the sea.
Heaving thus in the sudden glare of golden sunlight, etched starkly against the round blue hills of the Atlantic beyond, every man stood out, his individuality fixed, like a row of cleanly-sculptured bronze statues poised against the azure sky: the Viking Taylor, the adolescent Hughie Hay, the expectorating Irish Kerrigan, the parson-like Boston Jim, the lopped-off Titan Patterson, the braw McCaig, the battered sealer, Halifax!
To the drone of their chanty they pursed and pursed the trap, rising and falling, heaving and holding, quivering there in a web of striking color, color of indigo ocean, crimson buoy, green-painted dory, sun-gilded oilskins, diamond-dewed net—a blood-pulsing picture all vivid as a startling seascape hung upon dun walls.
Lustily they heaved and lustily they sang.
And in the center of the picture, rimmed 'round by the dripping, scintillating net that sagged with the weight of its catch, boiled a maelstrom of quicksilver, the packed cod, mobile twenty-pounders lashing furiously as they were pocketed tightly in a solid mass.
"By the ribs o' sunken Spanish galleons!" cried Irish Kerrigan at the sight, "Ye've topped wan hundred quintal this toime, Capten!"
"That she is, men—an' a quarter," calculated the lopped-off Titan Patterson. "Ain't it a record for the coast?"
"I believe you, Patty," beamed Boston Jim. "I reckon one hundred and ten was all—"
But the rest of their calculations was lost in Taylor's roar.
"Alongside, Brown!" he bellowed, freeing one bronzed hand and waving it to the wheelsman of the Graywing who, with the exception of the Cuban cook, Bolero, was the only man left aboard. "Walk her up in a hurry!"
"Right-o, Cap'n!" twanged Brown in acknowledgment. "Araound an' araound she goes!"
Holding hard, they could see Bolero dive like a dark snake for the jib to back it over, could mark Brown give and take his spokes with sureness and serenity, and almost before Taylor's waving hand returned to its grip on the net the silver-gray schooner, graceful as a gull, breasted lightly down on the dories.