MORNING SERIAL
ON Agattu Island he saved the life of an Aleutian boy. Those are my words. Grandfather told it differently.
He wrote in his log that he was beachcombing on Agattu Island when he came across an Aleut boy straddling a dead walrus; he had just finished cutting out the ivory tusks of the beast.
Grandfather estimated that he was some five to ten yards from the boy who stood up smiling and waving his prize. What the boy could not see approaching from behind him was a huge polar bear, its jaws dripping wet with fresh, red blood and staining its sleek white fur, intent it appeared to savage any intrusion to his prey.
The boy sensed Grandfather’s stare and turned towards the threat. Frightened, he began to run. Grandfather grabbed his arm and pushed him behind his back and told him not to run as it would incense the animal into attack.
Instead, Grandfather began to sing. He knew that all creatures responded to music. He sang that wonderful Welsh lullaby ‘Myfanwy’ in his best chapel baritone as he backed the boy and himself slowly away. The polar bear paused in its approach, listening, and with a wary eye and a grunt of satisfaction laid itself over the carcass.
Grandfather added in his log how unusual an experience it was to see a walrus, although they are common in Alaska at certain times of the year, and also a polar bear, carried this far south probably on an ice floe.
The boy insisted that Grandfather have one of the tusks and would not take no for an answer. That is the tusk from which grandfather carved the net needles.
The next full moon the boy took Grandfather night-fishing to a deep tidal inlet, in his small open boat. They caught the fabled silver tube.
Grandfather wrote that he had heard of the silver tube from other herring fishers but had never experienced it himself.
There were so many fish, Pacific herrings, that as the boy hauled the net the fish were so tightly packed it appeared like a silver tube rising from the dark depths surrounded by a myriad of silver scales drifting from the moonlit sky like Alaskan snowflakes.
> The Herring Man by Cyril James Morris is published by Parthian at £7.99
> www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW