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they had lured with such effort from the sea, the trappers drove it back
toward the lake. Some of them attacked the pirates, splintering their short
paddles with their own heavier blades. The dark-faced leader beat one man to
his knees, snapping the bony shaft of his paddle with his foot, then clubbed
another across the face, knocking him into the shallows. Warding off the
flying blades, the pirates stumbled to their feet, pushing the water between
their attackers' legs. Their leader, an older man with a red weal on his
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bearded face, shouted to them and they darted off in all directions, dividing
the water into half a dozen pools, which they drove away with their paddles
and bare hands.
In the melee, the main body of the lake had continued its gliding progress to
the shore. The defenders broke off the attempt to recapture the water and ran
after the lake, their rubber suits streaming with the cold salt.
One or two of them stopped to shout over their shoulders, but the pirates had
disappeared among the dunes. As the gray morning light gleamed in the wet
slopes, their footfalls were lost in the streaming salt.
Nursing his cheek against the rubber pad on his shoulder, Ransom made his way
carefully among the watery dunes, steering the small pool through the hollows.
Now and then, as the pool raced along under its own momentum, he stopped to
peer over the surrounding crests, listening to the distant cries of
Jordan and his men. Sooner or later the sternfaced captain would send a party
over to the beaches, where the outcasts lived, on a punitive expedition. At
the prospect of smashed cabins and wrecked stills, Ransom rallied himself and
pressed on, guiding the pool through the dips. Little more than twenty feet
wide, it contained half a dozen small fish. One of them was stranded at his
feet, and Ransom bent down and picked it up. Before he tossed it back into the
water, his frozen fingers felt its plump belly.
Three hundred yards to his right he caught a glimpse of Jonathan Grady
propelling his pool through the winding channels toward his shack below a
ruined salt-conveyer. Barely seventeen years old, he had been strong enough to
take almost half the stolen water for himself, and drove it along untiingly.
The other four members of the band had disappeared among the saltflats.
Ransom pushed himself ahead, the salty air stinging the weal on his face. By
luck Jordan's paddle had caught him with the flat of its blade, or he would
have been knocked unconscious and carried off to the summary justice of the
Johnstone settlement. There his former friendship with the Reverend Johnstone,
long-forgotten after ten years, would have been. little help. It was now
necessary to go out a full mile from the shore to trap the sea--the salt
abandoned during the previous years had begun to slide off the inner beach
areas, raising the level of the offshore flats--and the theft of water was
becoming the greatest crime for the communities along the coast.
Ransom shivered in the cold light, and tried to squeeze the moisture
from the damp rags beneath his suit of rubber strips. Sewn together with
pieces of fishgut, the covering leaked at a dozen places. He and the other
members of the band had set out three hours before dawn, following Jordan and
his team over the gray dunes. They hid themselves in the darkness by the empty
channel, waiting for the tide to turn, knowing that they had only a few
minutes to steal a small section of the lake. But for the need to steer the
main body of water to the reservoir at the settlement, Jordan and his men
would have caught them. One night soon, no doubt, they would deliberately
sacrifice their catch to rid themselves forever of Ransom.
As Ransom moved along beside the pool, steering it toward the distant tower of
the wrecked lightship whose stern jutted from the sand a quarter of a mile
away, he automatically counted and recounted the fish swimming in front of
him, wondering how long he could continue to prey on Jordan and his men; By
now the sea was so far away, the shore so choked with salt, that only the
larger and more skillful teams could muster enough strength to trap a sizable
body of water and carry it back to the reservoirs. Three years earlier, Ransom
and the young Grady had been able to cut permanent channels through the salt,
and at high tide enough water flowed down them to carry small catches of fish
and crabs. Now, however, as the whole area had softened, the wet sliding salt
made it impossible to keep any channel open for more than twenty yards, unless
a huge team of men were used, digging the channel afresh as they moved ahead
of the stream.
The remains of one of the metal conveyers jutted from the dunes ahead.
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Small pools of water gathered around the rusting legs, and Ransom began to run
faster, paddle whirling in his hands as he tried to gain enough momentum to
sweep some of this along with him. Exhausted by the need to keep up a brisk
trot, he tripped on to his knees, then stood up and raced after the pool as it
approached the conveyer.
A fish flopped at his feet, twisting on the salt slope. Leaving it, Ransom
rushed on after the pool, and caught up with it as it swirled through the
metal legs. Lowering his head, he whipped the water with the paddle, and
carried the pool over the slope into the next hollow.
Despite this slight gain, less than two-thirds of the original pool remained
when he reached the lightship. To his left the sunlight was falling on the
slopes of the salt tips, lighting up the faces of the hills behind them, but
Ransom ignored these intimations of warmth and color. He steered the pool
toward the small basin near the starboard bridge of the ship. This narrow
tank, twenty yards long and ten wide, he had managed to preserve over the
years by carrying stones and pieces of scrap metal down from the shore, and
each day beating the salt around them to a firm crust. The water was barely
three inches deep, and a few edible kelp and water anemones, Ransom's sole
source of vegetable food, floated limply at one end. Often Ransom had tried to
breed fish in the pool, but the water was too saline, and the fish invariably
died within a few hours. In the reservoirs at the settlement, with their more
dilute solutions, the fish lived for months. Ransom, however, unless he chose
to live on dried kelp five days out of six, was obliged to go out almost every
morning to trap and steal the sea.
He watched the pool as it slid into the tank like a tired snake, and then
worked the wet bank with his paddle, squeezing the last water from the salt.
The few fish swam up and down in the steadying current, nibbling at the kelp.
Counting them again, Ransom followed the line of old boiler tubes that ran
from, the tank to the fresh-water still next to his shack. He had roofed it in
with pieces of metal plate from the cabins of the lightship, and with squares
of old sacking. Opening the door, he listened for the familiar bubbling
sounds, and then saw with annoyance that the flame under the boiler was set [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]