LITMIR.BIZ

CHAPTER I

      THE SEA BEAR

      ON A HILL above the cliff a boy in Highland dress turned from watching the deer in the valley to look out over the sea. He saw a sail far away. It was no more than a white speck in the distance and presently he turned his back on it and settled down again to watch the deer.

      The Sea Bear, with Nancy at the tiller, was lolloping comfortably along in bright sunshine, heading towards the rocky coast of one of the islands of the Hebrides. She was an old Norwegian pilot cutter and had been borrowed by Captain Flint (Nancy’s and Peggy’s Uncle Jim) for himself and his crew of Blacketts, Walkers and Callums. The Minch can be a stormy sea, but they had been lucky in their weather and now after a happy fortnight of good sailing with almost every night spent in a different harbour they were going to put her aground in a sheltered cove, scrape off the barnacles and weed, put a fresh coat of paint on her below the water-line and take her back to the port on the mainland from which they had started, to hand her over to her owner all spick and span and ready for him to take to sea again at once.

      “Nobody much likes lending boats,” Captain Flint had said. “The least we can do is to let Mac have her back better than before we had her.”

      “Then, perhaps, he’ll lend her to us again,” Roger had agreed.

      Nancy was at the tiller. Peggy, her mate and sister, was in the cockpit beside her, ready to give a hand with a rope if need be. Captain Flint was smoking a pipe, sitting on the cabin skylight, watching for the square-topped hill that would show them the way to the cove they had to find. Roger was sitting on the forehatch, keeping a look out and wondering how soon the others would agree that the wind, which had been dropping since the early morning, had weakened so far that it would be worth while to start the engine. The rest of the crew were down below, in the cabin, except for Susan, who had been keeping an eye on the clock and had just gone forward into the fo’c’sle, to light a Primus stove and to put a kettle on it for the ship’s company’s tea.

      The cabin had been little changed since the days when the Sea Bear had been a working pilot cutter. There were still the six berths of the pilots, built as it were in the walls of the ship, above the long settees. Going to bed, as Titty had said, was like getting into a rabbit hutch. But, once you were in, you could shut yourself off from everybody else by pulling a curtain across. Many a tired pilot must have slept in one of those bunks while the other pilots, only a yard or two away, were playing cards with each other under the cabin lamp. Further aft were two more bunks, one on each side, close to the companion ladder and handy for going on deck. They had been used in old days by the men whose business it was to take the cutter to sea to meet the big ships coming in, put pilots aboard them and pick up other pilots from the big ships outward bound. John and Captain Flint slept in these bunks. Nancy, Peggy, Susan, Titty, Dorothea and Dick had each one of the cupboard bunks in the main cabin while Roger, being the smallest, had a bunk in the fo’c’sle which once upon a time, no doubt, had belonged to a Norwegian ship’s boy.

      John, feet wide apart to steady himself, was leaning over the chart table by the companion ladder, looking now at the big chart that showed the coasts on both sides of the Minch, the Scottish mainland and the Outer Hebrides, and now at a much smaller chart that showed in detail the tiny cove for which the ship was making. Mac, the owner of the Sea Bear, had left a lot of these little charts aboard her. John and Nancy spent happy hours looking through them and, when Captain Flint had said that he meant to give the ship a scrub before handing her over they had brandished this particular chart before him. “Look at this,” Nancy had said.

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