"Mowat, Farley - A Whale For The Killing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mowat Farley)

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

Ч from The Secret Sits, by Robert Frost

Chapter 1

A torment of sooty cloud scudded out of the mountainous
barrens of southeastern Newfoundland. Harried by a furi-
ous nor'easter, eddies of sand-sharp snow beat against the
town of Port Aux Basques; an unlovely cluster of wooden
buildings sprawled across a bed of cold rock and colder
muskeg. White frost-smoke swirled up from the waters of
the harbour to marry the cloud wrack and go streaming out
across Cabot Strait toward the looming cliffs of Cape Breton
and the mainland of North America.

January deals harshly with Newfoundland. It had just
dealt harshly with me and my wife, Claire, and the hundred
or so other passengers who had endured the crossing of the
Cabot Strait to Port Aux Basques aboard the slab-sided.
floating barn of a car ferry, William Carson. The passage
from North Sydney, in Nova Scotia, normally takes six
hours. This time the storm had extended it to twelve, and
the Carson, savaged by that surging sweep of wind and
water, had meanly revenged herself on passengers and cargo.
A ten-ton bulldozer, lashed to the deck with half-inch cables,
had been pitched right through the steel bulwarks into the
green depths. Grey-faced and desolate, most of the passen-
gers lay helplessly asprawl in cabins reeking with the stench
of vomit.

When the Carson eventually wallowed into Port Aux

11

Basques harbour and managed to get her lines ashore, there
was a grateful if unsteady exodus down her gangplank. Most
oE the debarking passengers clambered aboard the anti-
quated coaches ot a narrow-gauge railway which dawdled its
way for six hundred miles to St. John's, the island capital,
on the eastern coast. However, for a score of men, women
and children (Clairc and I among them) Port Aux Basques
was not the end of the ordeal by sea. Our destinations were
a scattering of sea-girt fishing villages - outports they are
called - thinly spread along the hundreds of miles of bold,
bald headlands and canyoned fiords of the island's Soii'west
Coast. There was only one way to reach any of these places -
the weekly coastal steamer.