In twenty minutes the engines were at rest, the ship was lying like a log in a mill pond, the watch paced the deck in solitude, and Archibald Armstrong was asleep in his berth in the captain's cabin--dreaming that the mate was wrong and the captain right: that the gale had abated in the night, and the morning had broken sunny.
_In Which Archie Armstrong and Billy Topsail Have an Exciting Encounter with a Big Dog Hood, and, at the Sound of Alarm, Leave the Issue in Doubt, While the Ice Goes Abroad and the Enemy Goes Swimming_
HAIR seals, which come out of the north with the ice in the early spring, and drift in great herds past the rugged Newfoundland coast, returning in April, have no close, soft fur next the skin, such as the South Sea and Alaskan seals have. Hence, they are valued only for their blubber, which is ground and steamed into oil, and for their skin, which is turned into leather. They are of two kinds, the harp which is doubtless indigenous to the great inland sea and the waters above, and the hood, which inhabits the harsher regions of the farther north and east. The harp is timid, gentle, gregarious, and takes in packs to the flat, newly frozen, landward pans; the hood is fierce, quarrelsome and solitary, grimly riding the rough glacier ice at the edge of the open sea.
Thus the _Dictator_ lay through the night with hood ice all about the sheltering berg.
"Hi, b'y! Get yarry (wide awake)!" cried the captain, in the morning.
Archie Armstrong was "yarry" on the instant, and he rolled out of his berth in hot haste, not at all sure that it was not time to leave a sinking ship in the boats. The hairy face of the old sealer, a broad, kindly grin upon it, peered at him from the door.
"Mornin' t' you, sir. An' a fine mornin' 'tis," said the captain. "Sure a finer I never saw."
"The gale's miles t' the sou'east--an' out o' sight o' these latitudes. We're packed in the lee o' the berg, an' fast till the wind changes. There's a family o' hoods, quarter mile t' starboard. Up, now, b'y! an' you'll go after them with a crew after breakfast."
When Archie reached the deck, the air was limpid, frosty and still. There was a blue sky overhead, stretching from horizon to horizon. A waste of ice lay all about--rough, close-packed, glistening in the sun. With the falling away of the wind the floe had lost its headway, and had crept softly in upon the open water. The ship was held in the grip of the pack, and must perforce remain for a time in the shadow of the berg, where shelter from the gale of the night had been sought. Save for the watch of that hour, the men were below, at breakfast. The "great white silence" possessed the sea. For the boy, this silence, vast and heavy, and the immeasurable area of broken ice, with its pent-up, treacherous might, was as awe-impelling as the gale and the night.