Near dark he lifted her down into a narrow gully and fashioned a lean-to. He set a pot of snow to boil to make a thin broth for Cassie’s supper. She managed to sit up and eat the soup herself, but could only stomach half a bowl before she handed it back to him, then stretched out beneath her blanket and fell immediately asleep.
Peyton laid junks of green wood on the fire and the sap snapped and hissed as the flame took hold. The smoke blew lazily in one direction and then another, and the smell of it in the cold air was clean as laundered clothes just brought in off the line. He looked up to the night sky and even without the vertigo of alcohol he could feel the constellations turning on the axis of the North Star. He filled his pipe and tamped it with his thumb and then lit it with the end of a stick set alight in the coals.
He was twenty-six years old and had never touched a woman or been kissed in any but the most innocent of ways. It seemed a personal failure to him somehow. He looked at the sleeping figure on the opposite side of the fire. His father was still married in the eyes of the Church even if he had not seen his wife in seven years. And Cassie was young enough to be the old man’s daughter. But for all the things that said it was impossible, Peyton could not make himself feel surprised and he had to admit now that part of him suspected this for years.
He tried to locate the seed of those suspicions, walking backward through his years on the coast until he came to his first spring in Newfoundland. They’d begun preparing for the return to the summer house on Burnt Island, setting the sloop into the water from her winter dry dock, loading the hold with nets, cordage, sheets, clothing and tools. At that time of year icebergs meandered aimlessly through the maze of tickles, bights and runs among the islands like dazed farmers set adrift in the honeycomb streets of London. But the massive fields of Gulf ice that could cap harbours closed for days or weeks at a time had largely come and gone by then.
John Senior had sent two hired men off to the summer house four days before to prepare for their arrival while he and Peyton and Cassie closed up the winter house. Shortly after the men left a late field of pack ice muscled in, a solid sheet of pans chafing island granite, the white glim of it stretching to the horizon. It was moving steadily on the Labrador current but was so featureless that it seemed completely still.
John Senior sat with his pipe and knitted twine to mend the salmon nets or whittled blindly at sticks of wood, hardly speaking to his son or to Cassie. Seeing that the only option was to wait, a surprising patience and calm came over him. Peyton couldn’t believe a man of such grimly relentless energy could give himself over so easily to dawdling. It was more than he could manage himself and he constantly went out the front door to look in on the animals, to see if there was any change in ice conditions. It was on one of these aimless reconnaissance missions that he spotted them, their dark bodies dotting the distant surface of the ice. He burst into the kitchen and grabbed his father by the arm. “Seals,” he shouted. “Hundreds of them.”
“Seals don’t come this far into the bay,” John Senior said, but he allowed Peyton to lead him out of the house nonetheless. The barking of the herd carried across the ice to the cape where they stood. Back in the kitchen John Senior turned around several times, like a dog about to lie down, as if the physical motion was a way of settling his mind. He said, “What a time to have those two men stuck on Burnt Island.”
Peyton looked at Cassie a moment and then at his father. “Cassie could come out with us.”
The older man glanced at Cassie and gave a short heavy sigh. “How do you find your leg, now?” he asked her.
“I’ll be fine.”
“She’s a fierce business on the ice. You won’t like it, first along, I can guarantee you that.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said again.
They started out across solid ice near the shore and quickly came into looser floating pans that they copied across in long loping strides, each carrying rope looped across their chests, a short wooden gaff and a sculping knife. Cassie held her long skirt in one hand to keep it clear of her legs. The animals were nearly a mile out on the water. There weren’t hundreds, as Peyton first reported, but more than enough to make work for the three of them. The seals stared as they approached, their dark delicate nostrils testing the air.
John Senior said, “The young ones is saucy as the black, they’ll come for you if you aren’t watchful.” He turned to gaffing the seals nearest him, striking down sharply and repeatedly until the animals lay still. “Take them across the bridge of the nose,” he instructed as he worked. Many of the older harps were already in motion, undulating towards the open circles of sea water that allowed them access to the ocean. Cassie limped after those closest to escape as she slipped the rope over her head and took off her heavy overcoat. She had surprisingly broad shoulders, Peyton thought, watching her swing the gaff.