Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes Read Online Free PDF

expected to find the two men perhaps injured, but clinging to the wreckage of the catamaran. When a boy cried out that he saw the second corpse in a sea of blood, it was instantly and unanimously decided that they would turn back.
    “Don’t look at the boat!” yelled one man. “Turn your eyes away!”
    They turned their eyes away, the catamaran turned, paddles were plied until arms ached and the men gasped for breath. A man not rowing recited chants to ward off evil spirits. Back on the island, they told their story in frightened bursts, their knees shaking with a collective awe. The rest of that day and evening, the others on the island were afraid to touch any of the four men.
    So that story spread, and was enlarged. The famous magically appearing and disappearing piece of boat had merely touched a catamaran and it had cracked in half! And the two men on board had been instantly killed as if struck by an evil spirit.
    The half-boat was sighted off other islands and avoided. The possibility that the half-boat might be being towed by a shark or whale was actually uttered, but if so, it was the spirit of a whale or shark, impossible to kill, yet able to kill anything with ease, and to destroy any craft merely by its evil will.
    The whale swam on in the temperate waters, irked less and less by the dull pain just above his tail, caused by the harpoon which passed into his coat of blubber and out, like a pin. The floating boat was the nuisance. The whale glided past rough underwater coral, thinking to wear the rope through or bump the boat from the rope, but so far he hadn’t succeeded. He endured a sullen melancholy, all alone. He encountered three whales like himself, one a young female, the others males, and he might have joined them for company for a while, but one of the males shied at the boat that dragged behind him under the water. The whale was shunned.
    So the whale sang alone in the deeps: “Hoo-wa-a-aaah-ou” in a rather high-pitched tone, talking to himself. He used to communicate with his mate like that, telling her where he was, warning her of an enemy, or with another tone telling her that food was in sight where he was swimming.
    One morning when he was floating hardly below the surface, bobbing up now and then to get an easy store of air, he heard the plash of a paddle.
    The whale’s left eye saw a tiny boat with a single figure in it, making not for him but for the wooden wreck which the whale knew floated to one side and behind him now. The little craft was no challenge, but the whale scanned the horizon for other boats, for an island, and saw a pale line of land quite a distance away. He swam a bit deeper.
    The boy in the boat saw the whale, shuddered and half stood up, gripping his paddle in both hands. He had come out on a dare, and minutes ago he had said to himself, I don’t care if I live or die. This had given him a crazy courage. He had imagined being struck dead by magic, by something he would not be able to see or understand. Now he had seen, and that was a whale bigger than any he had ever heard about. He saw the shiny grey monster circling his boat just under the surface. His boat rocked wildly. The boy fell backwards, and without thinking shipped his long paddle for safety. The rope that held the half-boat to the whale glided past the prow of the boy’s boat and touched it, making his boat turn. With his right hand the boy fended off the half-boat that might have damaged his canoe. The monster was still circling. The boy saw the long shining lance that passed through the whale’s skin. It had a splendid point. It was made of metal, and was longer by far than the boy was tall. The boy coveted that spear. Could he capture it?
    The madness that he had felt on his island returned: he did not care if he lived or died! As the rope slid by on the left side of his boat, the boy seized it just under the water. He felt the terrifying pull of the whale, and he took a tighter grip on the rope with