Sea of Slaughter Read Free Page A

elastic feathers, both of which had become valuable trading commodities throughout much of Europe. So avidly was it hunted on the European coasts thereafter that, by the mid-1500s, only a scattering of its eastern Atlantic breeding colonies had escaped destruction. By a century later only one remained, on the bleak and forbidding island of St. Kilda in the Outer Hebrides. In 1697, St. Kilda was visited by a certain Mr. Martin who left us this succinct account.
    â€œThe gairfowl is the stateliest as well as the largest sort [of seabird], of a black colour, red about the eyes, a large spot under each eye; a long broad bill; it stands stately, its whole body erected, its wings short, flies not at all; lays its egg upon the bare rock which if taken away she lays no more for that year... it appears the first of May and goes away the middle of June.”
    Sometime before 1800 it went away from St. Kilda for the last time... never to return.
    Look now at a time before Europe began to cast its engulfing shadow over the New World.
    A little cluster of men gather in darkness beside two bark canoes drawn up on a stony beach in what will one day be known as Newfoundland. They peer earnestly into the pre-dawn sky. Slowly the light strengthens, revealing a few tendrils of high cloud in the western dome. There is no threat of wind. The men smile their satisfaction at one another and at the tall, tawny one who leads them on this June day.
    As they wade into the landwash, carefully holding their fragile craft clear of the kelp-slimed rocks, the sun explodes over the hills behind them. On the sea horizon, a string of looming shadows begins to take on the contours of a low-lying archipelago. Aimless catspaws riffle the water as the canoes drive out from land toward the distant islands, leaving the scattered tents of the People to dwindle into insignificance against a sombre wall of forest.
    In the full glare of morning, the islands become haloed with a glittering haze of flashing wings as their inhabitants depart the land to begin the day’s fishing. Phalanx after phalanx of arrow-swift murres and puffins fill the air with their rush and rustle. Above them, massed echelons of snowy gannets row steadily on black-tipped wings. Terns, kittiwakes, and larger gulls fly arabesques betwixt and between until the sky seems everywhere alive with flight.
    The sea through which the canoes ease swiftly is living, too. Endless flotillas of the big black-and-white divers, that fly in water instead of air, stream outward from the low-lying islands. The first flock comes porpoising past the canoes. The men cease paddling and their leader touches a bone amulet hanging around his neck, upon which is carved an image of the spear-billed bird.
    The morning is half-spent before the paddlers close with the island of their choice, and now the multitudes that have remained ashore to incubate their eggs or brood their young begin to take alarm. Soon they are rising in such numbers that the sky is obscured as by a blizzard. So vast is this airborne armada that the sun’s light is dimmed and the surface of the sea hisses from the rain of droppings falling into it.
    As the canoes approach the island, winged masses descend on them like the funnel of a tornado. The rush of air through stiffened pinions and the harsh clangour of bird cries make it hard for the men to hear each other’s shouts as they leap overside and carry the canoes to safety on the sloping rocks of the foreshore.
    They move with hunched shoulders, as if cringing under the weight of furious life above them... and ahead. Not twenty feet from the landing place, rank after serried rank of spearbills stand, so closely packed that they seem almost shoulder to shoulder. Here stands an army of occupation hundreds of thousands strong. It covers almost the entire surface of the mile-long island. Each individual bird is incubating a single enormous egg in a shallow depression in the stinking mass of