ALBACORA 117 



"What's that?" Lou asked. 



"I'll let you do the cooking." 



Lou chuckled, but it took a half-hour argument for 

 me to win my point. There were plenty of places to 

 sit on the boat and there would certainly be plenty of 

 time for me to rest. 



A little before four o'clock the next morning, Lou 

 and Walt Gorman carried me down the stairs from my 

 room at the Hotel Prat. "I can walk," I announced as 

 soon as we reached the street. Then I took one step and 

 a wild Indian with a tomahawk started chopping at my 

 hip. Lou caught me before I fell. 



Without another word Lou and Walt each grabbed 

 an arm, and there was nothing to it. In the blackness 

 before dawn we three made our way to the dock. On the 

 way I sat down to rest on the handiest object. It was 

 that giant twenty-foot bleached bone that someone had 

 hauled out of the sea and left haphazardly near the 

 dock. 



As soon as I was settled and had caught one good 

 strong whiff of the iodine scent blown in from the fer- 

 tile sea, I forgot all about my hip. Around me, the 

 world was almost as it had been that first morning, 

 dawn stirring slowly out of the deep calm of an ocean 

 night. But with this brighter dawn I noticed one strange 

 difference. The birds seemed to have discovered the 

 Explorer, Where the first time we had encountered 

 flights of birds only by chance, this morning thousands 

 flew ahead of us, plainly by their own design. 



