The Dark Canoe Read Online Free PDF Page A

he walked past me to the door and for a long time looked out into the night.
    â€œThunder and lightning that day,” he said at last in his far-off voice, “a southeast wind blowing, stronger far than any wind that blows around the Horn. A foul and fearsome day, Nathan, the spinning world aswirl about our battered ears, our eyes cringing in their sockets. Yet well I remember where the ship went down.”
    He walked back to the table and put his finger hard upon the chart. “’Twas here. Aye, here upon La Perla Reef.”
    â€œWhen the ship went down,” I said, “you were in the cabin, out of your head with fever.”
    â€œAye, but whilst carried ashore by the raging tide, in that brief moment before my senses did depart, I didst glimpse the rocks which mark the reef.”
    He again placed a finger upon the outlines of La Perla Reef. “’Twas here, I tell thee, here. But wherever, here or there or yonder, ’twas a needless thing. Plainly I wrote in the log, which now lies lost somewhere about us. I wrote it for thy brother Jeremy, knowing that the fever hadst stealthily crept upon me. ‘Beware the southern storm,’ I wrote. ‘Do not be caught in Magdalena. Take the ship to sea. Heed my command, Jeremy, take the…’”
    Suddenly Caleb stopped. He stepped back from the chart table and passed a hand across his eyes. For a while he did not move, but stood staring straight before him.
    â€œYou had a chance to testify,” I said, “to tell Captain Wills and Captain Sterne and Mr. Reynolds what you have just told me. Yet you heard the testimony against you and spoke not a word to defend yourself. Why?”
    Caleb turned his eyes slowly toward me. They had a lost and wandering look. He said, “Why? Why? ’Tis possible, Nathan, that I didst write nothing in the log. ’Tis possible that I did dream it all.”
    Once more he passed a hand across his eyes. Then, limping to the doorway, he looked up at the evening sky. I think that he was already sorry for what he had said. It is likely that he had meant to relive that moment before the storm only for himself and not for me.
    I was about to leave when he turned around and smiled, a rare thing for him.
    â€œHath slipped my mind about thy birthday,” he said. “’Tis thy sixteenth among us. Come, I have a gift for thee.”
    I never entered my brother’s cabin without the thought that it was an old bookshop on some dusty byway of London, which Charles Dickens might have written about. Books were scattered everywhere. Stacked against the bulwarks, they framed the two portholes. They lay on the bunk and underfoot. To reach the small table where Caleb ate his meals, you had to take a crooked path and each step carefully, as if you were traveling through a thicket. And the cabin had about it the musty smell of an old bookshop, with nothing of the sea.
    Caleb swung his arms up and made a fulsome gesture. “A book, I wish to give thee,” he said. “Search and find one that suits thy temper.”
    Looking about here and there, on the bunk and under it and along the bulwarks, I at last saw a book that struck my fancy. It was called Moby-Dick: or, The Whale , a large tome bound in green and gold leather, written by an author named Herman Melville.
    â€œI like stories about whales and whaling,” I said, tucking the book under my arm. “I guess it’s natural that I do, since I’ve heard of little else from the time I was in the cradle.”
    My brother gave me a curious glance. A frown crossed his forehead and I had the feeling that I had taken a book which he especially prized. I was about to put it back and select another, when he stopped me.
    â€œâ€™Tis odd that thou like this one,” he said, “but take it with thee. ’Tis a true leviathan of a book and thou shalt learn from it much of the whale and his ways, enough to beguile the hours of