“It’s worse than that,” said Dick. “If the Gaels see me going to the island they’ll start shouting, and that’ll tell the egg-collector just where to look.” He paused a moment as a new thought came into his worried head. “Look here,” he said. “There’s something else. If the natives see what I’m doing, the egg-collector’s only got to wait till we’ve gone. Then he’ll ask them. They’ll take his money and show him where the nest is and we won’t be able to do anything about it.”
“Great Auks for ever!” exclaimed Nancy. “Well done, Professor. Of course that’s what we’ll do. We’ve got to use one lot of enemies against the other. Simple. We’ve got to find a way of making those Gaels do all their shouting in the wrong place.”
“But if they see me.”
“They mustn’t,” said Nancy, “and they shan’t. Look here Titty. About that stalking the other day. Let’s hear exactly what happened.”
Titty, Roger and Dorothea, interrupting each other, told once again the story of the explorers and how they had felt they were being watched but could see nobody watching them, and how, at last, far up the valley, the stalkers had shown themselves, with their dogs, and how, with shouts in what could only be Gaelic, a foreign language anyhow, they had sent the explorers hurrying back to the safety of their ship. This time, now that John and Nancy had themselves been shouted at, the able seamen had an audience that was ready to believe them. It made all the difference to the telling of the story.
“What we’ve got to do,” said Nancy, “is to get them stalking again.”
“We don’t want trouble with natives,” said Captain Flint. “What sort of people are they?”
“There’s a young chieftain,” said Dorothea.
“And a huge old giant with a grey beard,” said Titty.
“You saw him yourself,” said Roger. “The dogmudgeon who wouldn’t wave back when we waved to him as we sailed away.”
“And there were others,” said Dorothea. “All savage Gaels shouting Gaelic war cries on their native hills.”
After supper, John went up to the cross-trees and reported that the Pterodactyl’s dinghy was still in the davits. Nobody was showing on deck. Nobody had gone ashore.
“Lying low,” said Nancy. “All the better.”
“But what about the Gaels?” said Dick, coming on deck after doing his share in the washing up.
“They won’t be out so late,” said John. “And once we get to the loch, that shore shelves so that you can’t see the ridge when you’re down by the water. The only danger from that side is when you’re rowing out to the island. It’ll be nearly dark, and tomorrow you’ll have to be there before people get up.”
With many hands at work, the net was soon ready. They spread it flat, folded it and rolled it up for easy carrying, with a rope round it to keep it from coming undone. With the heather on it, it made a big bundle, but, of course, weighed very little more than the string that had gone to its making.
“What about starting?” said Susan. “Nobody’s had much sleep except Captain Flint … and Roger.”
“Susan!” said Roger angrily.
“Never you mind, Roger,” said Captain Flint. “Susan’s yawning herself. She’s envious of us, that’s all.”
“Not yet,” said Dick. “I ought to go as late as possible, so long as it’s just light enough to see.”
“You can’t go now anyhow,” exclaimed Nancy. “Don’t all turn round at once. There’s someone coming down to talk to us.”
The sun was dropping behind the hills, but high up by Roger’s Pict-house two figures had shown for a moment on the skyline. They were now coming down the slopes above the cove.
“One’s the dogmudgeon,” said Roger.
“I do believe the other’s the young chieftain,” said Dorothea.
“It’s a boy,” said Captain Flint. “Um, I wonder if he’s Roger’s ingenious friend. That message didn’t sound quite like a ghillie.”
“I’m going ashore,” said Roger. “I want to talk to him.” He jumped up and was going to unfasten the dinghy’s painter that was made fast astern.
“No,” said Nancy. “Sit tight. They’re coming here. Wait and see what happens.”
But the tall old dogmudgeon and the boy in his Highland dress were not at the moment interested in the Sea Bear. They were coming down the slopes, but moving sideways as they came. The crew of the Sea Bear lost sight of them, saw them again, nearer the head of the cove. They disappeared once more.
“They’re going to the loch,” said Dick.
“Of course they aren’t,” said Dorothea, “or they wouldn’t have come by the Pict-house. They’d have gone straight down on the other side of the Hump.”
Peggy was at the masthead now.
“Lights in the Pterodactyl’s cucumber frame,” she reported, and a moment later, they saw her signalling quietly with one hand.
She had caught sight of the tall Gael and the boy. Presently the others saw them.
“They must have crossed the stream,” said John.
“They’re going to talk to the egg-collector,” said Dick.
“Allies already,” said Dorothea.
From the Sea Bear, the watchers saw the boy and the dogmudgeon climbing among the rocks and heather of Low Ridge.
“What are they wating for?” said Titty.
The two figures were on the top of the ridge, looking down towards the anchored motor boat. They stood there a minute or two, and then turned back the way they had come.
“Funny to come all that way and not hail him in the end,” said Nancy.
“They can’t be allies,” said Dorothea.
“Don’t talk too loud,” said Nancy. “You know how sound carries over water.”
The sun had gone down, leaving a golden glow above the distant hills. It was already hard to see the man and the boy against the slopes of the hill below the Pict-house, but more than once somebody saw something moving, and just for a second, as they passed the Pict-house, the two figures showed black against the sky.
“They’re going back to the castle,” said Dorothea.
“Very rum,” said Captain Flint. “But it’s the other boat they came to see. They aren’t interested in us.”
“They’ve seen us already,” said Titty.
“I wish you’d let me go ashore,” said Roger. “If it was that boy….”
“He’s bigger than you,” said John.
“I don’t care,” said Roger. “I want to know why he did it.”
“Perhaps he didn’t,” said Susan.
“Well, who did?” said Roger.
“You ready to start?” said Captain Flint to Dick.
“Give them time to get home first,” said Nancy.
Half an hour passed. The light in the sky had faded. The shore looked dark in the dusk.
“Now,” said Nancy. “Now’s your chance. Off with you. Gaels in bed, Dactyls ditto. We’ll keep watch all the time and give you a blare on the foghorn if they come ashore. They can’t until they put their dinghy over. Look here. If John’s going with Dick, I’ll go with them and watch the Dactyl from those rocks. I’ll borrow Susan’s whistle. No I won’t. If the Dactyl launches her dinghy, I’ll do an owl-call, and then the Sea Bear can loose a blare on the foghorn, so that Dick and John’ll know it isn’t safe.”
“It’s all right, Dick,” said Dorothea, “you can’t do any harm by putting up your hide tonight, even if it isn’t safe to use it tomorrow. No one will ever notice it if we have to leave it behind.”
“It’ll be dark if we don’t go now,” said Dick, his mind made up.
John, without a word, had already brought the dinghy to the ladder, and gone down into it. Dick followed. The rolled up net was lowered in and John made ready to row, with a leg on each side of the bundle. Nancy went down with the painter.
“You ought to be in the stern,” said John, “but never mind now.”
“Good luck,” said Dorothea.
The dinghy slipped quietly
away towards the mouth of the stream.
CHAPTER XVIII
NIGHT VISIT TO THE ISLAND
THE GLOW IN the sky was fading as Nancy stepped ashore beside the stream, held the stem of the dinghy for a moment and then sent it afloat again, so that John and Dick could land on the other side without risking a tumble in wading across with the net.
“A very gentle owl-call when you come back,” she whispered. “I’ll be listening.”
John backwatered and then brought the dinghy in again. He and Dick landed without a sound. Carefully they pulled the dinghy up and laid out the little anchor. John swung the bundle of netting over his shoulder, holding it by the end of the rope that tied it. In the dusk, on the other side of the stream, Nancy gave them a silent wave of the hand. They lost sight of her at once as she left the stream and began to climb up among the rocks to a point from which she could look down on the enemy.
It was still light enough for them to follow without much difficulty the track they had found in the morning, leading up through heather and rocks past the waterfall and so to the foot of the loch where the folding boat lay waiting for them hidden in the reeds. It was dark enough for Dick to fall headlong over a low clump of heather, lose his spectacles and have a hard time in finding them again. He was much encouraged.
“Got them?” asked John.
“Yes,” said Dick. “I say, I do really think it’s too dark for anybody to see us from far away.”
“Of course they can’t,” said John. “And there probably isn’t anybody to look.”
Dick, whenever he could safely lift his eyes from the narrow deer-track they were following, glanced up at the high ridge of the Northern Rockies that hid Dorothea’s “castle” and the cottages of the Gaels. It might have been cut in cardboard and pasted on the sky. He could see the notch in it, where he knew the road went over to the inhabited country on the other side.
“He’d have to have eyes that could see in the dark,” he said.
“There’s nothing for anybody to see,” said John.
Dick remembered that an even worse danger lay behind Low Ridge on the other side of the valley, but he knew that Nancy was there and that if anyone came ashore from the Pterodactyl, Nancy would signal to the Sea Bear and the Sea Bear’s foghorn, blaring into the night, would warn him that it was not safe to row out to the island. It was all right. All he had to worry about was to set up the hide without frightening the birds, and to get back to the Sea Bear as quickly as he could.
They came to the shore of the loch, skirted round the reed-bed where the folding boat was hidden and found that the shelving bank above them shut out the Northern Rockies altogether, and gave them a skyline only a few yards from their heads.
“I thought so,” said John. “Nothing to worry about. It’s only when we go out to the island that those Gaels have a chance of seeing us. You stay here with the net while I get the folder out of the reeds.”
Dick crouched on his heels by the bundle of netting, looking out over the steely rippled waters of the loch at the dim further shore. He fingered the netting. Whatever happened he must not get into a mess in unfolding it, when the time came to drape it over the rocks and make his hide. What if the rocks were too far apart? What if they were too close together to leave room for him to lurk between them?
He heard a rustle of reeds and saw the dark shape of the folding boat moving out. John rowed her along a few yards off the shore.
“John,” said Dick quietly.
“All right. I see you.”
John brought the boat in stern first. Dick swung the netting aboard, grabbed both gunwales and scrambled in.
“It’s almost as if it wanted to upset you,” he said.
“Lucky there’s a bit of wind,” said John.
“Why?”
“In smooth water our ripples would run right across the lake. Anybody might notice them, even if he didn’t see us. She fairly wallowed just then.”
“And it isn’t only people,” said Dick. “The ripples would tell the birds there was somebody about.”
“Won’t the birds be asleep by now?”
“Listen,” said Dick.
“Ducks,” said John.
“They’re up at the top end,” said Dick. “They started talking just after we got here. But it’s only talk, not fright.”
They were moving, with quick short strokes, a few yards out from the shadowy shore. Suddenly, Dick’s heart all but stopped beating. There was a quick, hurried splashing in the water of a little bay, the click of stones and then the fading sound of galloping hoofs on soft peat.
“Only deer,” said John. “Gosh! Just for a moment I thought it was somebody fishing in the dark.”
“They must have come down to drink,” said Dick, and wished his teeth would not chatter. It was cool on the water but not cold enough for that.
“We’re all right so far,” said John.
A curlew whistled high overhead and Dick tried and failed to see him swinging across the valley against the dark sky. The ducks were silent for a minute and then began talking to each other again. Staring out across the water, Dick watched the low, dark line of the island.
“Don’t turn out yet,” he said. “We ought to go a bit past it and then go out, so as to come to it from the other end without the birds seeing us.”
“Wonder what it’ll be like landing.”
“I saw some reeds at the other end.”
“May be squishy,” said John. “Better than rocks, anyway, with the folder. We’d look fools if we tore a hole in the canvas.”
Dick had not thought of that. Nothing could be worse than to tear a hole in the bottom of the boat so that they would have to stay on the island until next morning’s sunlight showed them to all the world. But, if John had the danger in mind, it was all right. He thought of something else.
“We’ll have to go in very gently,” he said “however soft it is … because of the birds.”
What would those Divers do? Coots, he knew from watching them on the Norfolk Broads, might leave their nests if people came near but very soon would go back. Grebes, too, never went far away. But these big, ocean-going birds, wild and shy … who knew what they would do? What if they deserted altogether? Almost he wished he had not come. But with the Sea Bear coming back on purpose, and the netting made, and the whole crew counting on him, he could not give up now. And a new fact in natural history has simply got to be proved. Even the birds would understand that if it could be explained to them. He wished it was possible to explain to them and to tell them that he meant to disturb them as little as possible.
Away to the left the dark line of the island broke the wide sheet of steely ripples. The boat had already passed it. Nothing had happened to show that they had been noticed by the Divers. A new danger lay ahead. He did not want to go near enough to the head of the lake to change the quiet easy chattering of those ducks into the hurried flutter and splash of rising birds that would set everything within hearing on the alert.
“Now,” he whispered.
John held his right and took a gentle stroke with his left. The folding boat swung round till it was heading straight out into the loch. John steadied it, and rowing as quietly as he could, pulled for the end of the island.
“We’re in full view,” he said, as the boat moved out from under the shelter of the bank, and he saw again the long line of the Rockies, black against the sky. “But there’s nobody to see.”
“We mustn’t talk,” Dick whispered.
It was not human beings that mattered now. What worried Dick was the Divers. Were they both at the nest with the eggs? Or was one on the nest and the other, perhaps, keeping guard at the very end of the island where they were going to land? With every moment he was expecting to hear an angry, frightened cry of warning.
There was none, only, high overhead, a long swaying whistle, like a call out of another world.
“Curlew again,” whispered Dick.
John rowed on. Beyond him,
moving against the sky, Dick saw waving reeds.
“Very near,” he whispered.
John glanced over his shoulder, stopped rowing, stooped and took off his shoes and stockings. Dick fumbled with his own.
“Keep yours on,” whispered John. “You’ll want them ashore.”
Dick waited, listening. Were both birds asleep? It seemed almost too good to be true.
John was rowing again, just paddling. Reed-tops showed on either hand. There was a thin noise of reeds against the boat. He was feeling for the bottom with an oar. He was stepping over the side. Dick, with a hand on each gunwale knew that she was aground. The boat lurched. She was pulled suddenly forward.
“Firm enough,” whispered John. “Come on. Step out over the bows. I’ll bring the netting for you.”
“Keep it just as it is,” whispered Dick, “or I won’t be able to spread it first time.”
He was ashore. John, standing in the water among the reeds, bent over the boat, lifted the bundle of netting, waded out with only a single splash, that might have been made by a frog or a water rat, and put the netting into Dick’s waiting arms. There was still not a hint that they were not alone on the island and that those two great birds were less than thirty yards away.
“Shall I come too?”
“No,” whispered Dick. “Better only one.”
“Right.”
Dick turned … Had he, after all, left it too late to see what he was doing? No. It was nothing like so dark as it would have been in the south at this time of night. He could see the tufts of rank grass at his feet, and white stones, and, towards the middle of the island, big rocks, like sleeping cows, or walruses. Dick was impatient with himself at the thought. What mattered was not what they looked like but exactly how they were placed. If there was no room for him to hide within photographing distance of the nest, he might just as well have never come at all.
He moved slowly forward, putting his feet down carefully, much bothered by his big bundle of netting. Those pale rocks ahead of him seemed to stretch clean across. He looked for a way through them and found it. He rested the bundle of netting on one of them and waited, listening. Were the Divers asleep or not? On an island like this, in the middle of a lonely bit of water, far from houses, there was nothing for them to fear, and he knew that he and John had, so far, made no noise.