4 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



like jet, and the short grass scurries like the sea in a light breeze and 

 casts back a miasmic paleness. 



Comes now an eerie luminosity and the satin of the sky turns 

 lucid. From everywhere at once an electric blueness floods the air. 

 The pale strand picks up the ghostly light, but the grass-covered 

 land melts into nothingness and the waters turn inky and heave in 

 pallidness, reflecting the half-light. Birds stir in the air. A skein of 

 huge black geese hurry by overhead, their leader honking orders 

 that seem to echo in the dome of the sky. Great, snowy eider ducks 

 and little back scooters stream across the water, dripping lines of 

 black droplets upon its glassy surface. Scurries of petrels wheel 

 about the channel and vanish out upon the ocean. Cruel brown 

 skuas scream raucously aloft and plummet to earth behind the rim 

 of the horizon. The little spike-winged terns are busy, endlessly 

 rising and falling where the ripples break upon the beach, flapping 

 always, whining shrilly, never getting anywhere but up and down 

 upon their forked tails. A little procession streams by, cutting arrow- 

 heads upon the waters, hardly visible in the half-light — a family of 

 mergansers headed for the places of unwary fish. False dawn in the 

 north is a time of stirrings, of soundless hurrying movements, of end- 

 less comings and goings, of strange cries high in the silent crystal air, 

 of armies taking their places, of feathered cohorts shifting about. 



Then, round a low rampart of jagged rocks, a procession of large, 

 black, pointed things sweeps out upon the immensely heaving waters 

 of the channel. They are shaped not unlike great two-ended ducks. 

 They scud across the oily waters and then deploy. More come from 

 behind the low promontory. They cut swaths on the water. They 

 are sharp, black forms in the blue Hght that isn't light. A rhythmical 

 dipping and scraping they make, and lines of tiny water-drops spurt 

 from them. They move silently across the channel, and the hurrying 

 bird cohorts split before them and wheel aside to pass on in broken 

 streams. They are little boats and they have men in them. 



They are boats made of skins neatly sewn and stretched upon a 

 light frame of bent and lashed sticks. They are pointed at both ends 

 and are partly decked over fore and aft. They are very light and sit 

 upon the water like dried leaves despite the husky men that squat 

 in them and propel them with short paddles. They shoot forward 

 smoothly, little ripples lapping against their sharp prows and swish- 



