The Pop’s Rhinoceros Read Free

discourage them, but they had gone ahead anyway.
    “Higher, Bernardo! Higher!”
    They had built a derrick, but it had not worked well, so now three poles lashed together in a tripod with a longer one balanced in the fork served the same purpose. From one end of the pole a barrel was suspended over the pond. From the other hung Bernardo, who clambered up and down its length as muffled commands issued from within the tun. They had caulked its staves and cut a tiny window in the side into which fitted the glass filched in Nürnberg, then cased the whole in leather with lacings for the window and the top.
    “Now down, Bernardo! Down!”
    He heard a
whump
as the barrel hit the water, felt it sink, then settle with six inches of barrel showing above the surface of the pond, the waterline cutting his viewing hole in two. The barrel had been borrowed from Ewald’s store—inevitably, it stank of fish. It gave him splinters, too. He saw the pole from which he was suspended running back overhead and Bernardo clinging to it like an over-grown sloth. He tried a wave, and the barrel rocked alarmingly. The ballast-rock would cure that. Bernardo waved back, a great extravagant wave, which was actually Bernardo losing his grip, falling, and releasing the pole, which reared up at one end and fell heavily at the other. He braced himself—
dunt
—a direct hit on the barrel, which tipped slowly onto its side, then overturned, and he found himself upside-down in utter darkness and panicked.
    Afterward, prising the fox-trap off Bernardo’s foot while they dripped and shivered before the fire, contemplating the necessary repairs to their vessel, lying leaking by the pond, he was forced to concede that punching out the glass had been the course of action most likely to turn mishap into disaster.
    “That was coming here in the first place,” muttered Bernardo. He yelped as the trap came free.
    It had been so sudden, so swift a descent in the lightless water, and the dark so close; choking him in an instant, the water and his own terror somehow dissolved in one another and the world turned upside-down. He could not stand it for a second, had to get out. He had punched out the glass and the water had rushed in. He was nailed inside the tub. He had begun to fight and scream, but only barked his knuckles, and the water had a dreadful thickness to it, like molasses. He had punched out the glass in a panic, and Bernardo had strode in there to rescue him.
    “Shut up, Bernardo,” he told him now. He had been lucky. Not so much the rescue—Bernardo did not know fear, and fox-traps would not teach him—no, in a crisis Bernardo’s presence could be counted on. Nor in the manner of the rescue, which was straightforward, a simple lifting of the barrel and its contents from pond to shore. But in the man himself, there fortune had favored him. By himself he could barely shift their contraption when empty and on dry land. His partnerstood almost seven feet tall and was built like an oak; he had lifted the vessel over his head, filled with water and himself, then waded back to shore with a fox-trap on his foot. Bernardo was not clever, but he was big.
    Later, hungry and cold as they lay in damp clothes, breathing smoke from the temperamental fire, the two men tried to rest. For a while the hut was silent but for their tossings and turnings. Neither slept. Tomorrow they would restore the glass and experiment with the ballast-stone. They would work with a strained enthusiasm to ready themselves and cheer their spirits, and in his own case to banish the fear that had got a grip on him with their late mishap. He was thinking that the pond was nothing to the sea, whose waves had advanced on the near inlet throughout the past weeks’ effort, seeming sometimes to beckon him on and sometimes to warn him off. The day after tomorrow Ewald had agreed to lend them the boat. He shifted irritably on the damp earth and heard Bernardo do the same. At length, the other