Ghost Canoe

1

Footprints on the Shore

Nathan, it’s time.

He didn’t hear. Nathan MacAllister was so deeply asleep, he was like a stone plunging to the bottom of the sea.

Nathan, it’s time.

This time he heard the voice, far away, and then felt the hand on his shoulder. He fought himself back to the surface and awoke. Blinking, he took in his father’s face, saw the rain dripping through the tangles of his silver beard. Nathan heard the wind shrieking outside and the rain in sheets lashing the windows, and then he heard his mother coughing in her sleep in the next room. Her cough was getting worse again.

Your watch, Nathan, came his father’s voice, deep as a foghorn, but gentle. It’s a ghastly night—be careful.

Nathan struggled to his feet and started pulling on his clothes. He thought of the odds stacked against them, and he drew strength from his father’s faith in him. We haven’t let the Tatoosh Light fail yet, and we won’t, he vowed.

Once he’d wrapped himself in sea-coat, oil slicker, and rubber boots, Nathan pulled his sou’wester over his head and put on his gloves. He took the lantern from his father’s hand with the full measure of pride that came from doing the work of an assistant lighthouse keeper at the age of fourteen.

They didn’t have any choice. He and his father had to split the night, because they still had the work of four men to do during the day.

I’ve lit a fire for the fog trumpet, just in case we need it, his father advised in parting.

Nathan lowered his head and stepped outside into the teeth of the gale. The rain was mixed heavily with salt spray. In a crouch, with one hand clutching the lantern and the other grasping the rail, he fought his way toward the lighthouse. Just before he reached it, against the background of the booming surf he thought he heard the cow downwind, calling as if from a great distance. There was a distinct note of terror in her voice. Then Nathan heard a faint, repetitive sound he identified as the door of her little barn banging.

The cow must be loose in the dark and the storm. Cow, he thought, you better be lying down—there’s cliffs whichever way you turn. I can’t chase you on a night like this, and neither can my father.

More than once during this winter, he’d been forced by storms to get down on his hands and knees and crawl. Here it was April, and still, wind like this. Would it never end? One of the assistant keepers who’d abandoned them said he’d once been blown clear across Tatoosh Island’s treeless, seventeen-acre top before managing to grip onto shrubbery at the edge of the cliff. And that was in the daytime, Nathan thought.

No, I have to tend the light, even if it might mean losing the cow and one of Mother’s few comforts, that cup of warm milk three times a day. There might be ships out there depending on this light.

In the foghorn building, he checked the water level in the boiler, then shoveled more coal into the furnace below. No pressure yet on the gauge—no steam. He would check back in half an hour.

Nathan entered the assistants’ quarters, which enveloped the base of the lighthouse, and, with his lantern held high, began to climb the spiral stairs. The iron stairway was vibrating uncannily, the way it always did when the wind howled. His hand on the stone wall felt the same vibration. The hair climbed on the back of his neck. He recalled hearing that the roof itself, up above the lantern room, had blown off during a storm several years before.

Near the top of the stairs, he entered the watch room, a small compartment beneath the light. The entire tower was shuddering, and Nathan believed he could feel it swaying. At a time like this back in January, the former assistants had deserted their post here in the watch room, certain that the entire lighthouse was about to collapse into a heap of stone blocks.

When he reached the very top of the stairs, Nathan pulled back the heavy iron door and entered the brilliant lantern room itself. He was amazed, as ever, to be standing so close to the dazzling lens while it was in operation. This was a first-order Fresnel lens, fully twelve feet high, and so wide that when he went inside it during the daytime to clean it, he couldn’t touch both sides of the glass, even with his arms spread wide. This miraculous revolving chandelier with its 1,176 prisms was powerful enough to send its sweeping ray twenty miles through the gloom.

Soot was building up on the lens, but no more than usual. Tomorrow they’d get inside and clean every bit of it off. The lamp’s five concentric wicks, he could see, were trim and burning cleanly. He checked to see that the clockworks that propelled the light were wound, and he gave the oil machinery another grind to make sure the oil would keep flowing to the wicks. That lighthouse tender ship had better get here soon. Nathan worried, or else there’d be a disaster. The lamp burned ten gallons of oil a night, and they were down to the last fifty gallons.

Everything was in order except for the windows outside the lantern room. They were taking too much salt spray. Even though Tatoosh stood one hundred and fifty feet above the sea, at times like this the waves would batter the ocean-facing side of the island, where the lighthouse was perched, with such fury that the wind swept the spray over the rim of the island, even as high as the top of the tower itself.

Nathan knew it was his job to go outside and clean those windows. The salt spray was griming the glass, and when that happened, the light was so dim it would be hard for anyone at sea to make it out.

It was up to him. His father was asleep, and at this moment he was the operator of the Tatoosh Light at the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, one of the most treacherous places for ships in all the world, as proven by the wrecks of countless ships on both the American and the Canadian sides.

Nathan wedged the door open—the door latch was broken and he was afraid of it. He went out onto the catwalk and into the howling wind. With one hand he clutched the inside handrail while, with the other, he worked the polishing rag as fast as he could. The wind kept tearing at him and forcing the freezing rain down inside his slicker.

Working as fast as he could, he was halfway around the lantern room when he heard the door slam shut behind him. Almost at the same time, with terrific force, a seabird attracted by the light slammed against the quarter-inch glass only a few feet from his head, and fell dead at his feet. Nathan was startled and unnerved, as he’d been every time this had happened before. It wasn’t something he would ever get used to.

He worried about the door, but kept working his way around the lantern. Get the job done, he told himself. He was freezing cold and anxious to get inside as fast as he could. When he got back to the door, he found it had jammed shut, just as he had feared.

Now matter how hard he pulled on the door, Nathan couldn’t budge it. Shivering and shaking, he tried to think. Searching for a way down, he considered the lightning-rod cable suspended from the roof above and falling into the darkness below. It would be more than three hours until his father would find him out here. During that time, something might happen to the light, and he wouldn’t be able to tend the fog-trumpet boiler, either. Stranded on the catwalk, he might even freeze to death.

Nathan cursed the rusty iron door, and then he cursed the assistant lighthouse keepers. They’d been so sure that the lighthouse tender would steam in soon, bringing their replacements. Little did they know or care that the ship still hadn’t come!

He knew what he had to do. Pulling his gloves down tight on his fingers, he reached for the cable, knowing he had to take the risk. Only thirty feet down to the roof of the house, he told himself.

Nathan forced himself to lean back away from the tower and try to plant his feet wide against it as he began to lower himself down into the dark. He’d lowered himself down cliff walls this way, and knew he had to keep leaning back, using his feet to work his way down. But the tower was slick and the wind blew him immediately out of position. Then it began to buffet him from side to side, like a pendulum. He felt the cable slipping in his grasp, and his heart jumped wildly in his chest. The salt spray stung his eyes and blinded him.

Don’t give up, don’t let go!

Suddenly his feet lost their grip on the tower altogether. All his weight was suspended from his hands, and his hands couldn’t hold. He was sliding, out of control, down the cable. For a moment he struggled, unsuccessfully, to plant his feet against the tower. Then he managed to wrap his legs around the cable and made a final effort with his hands and feet together to slow himself down.

It worked. He crumpled—rather, crashed—on the peak of the house.

Nathan sprawled on the rooftop, breathing hard. He’d landed on his elbow, and hoped it wasn’t broken. He could move it. He wasn’t hurt, he’d just scared himself badly.

At last he felt strong enough to work his way along the peak of the house. He reached the ladder that provided access to the roof and the chimneys, and started down. On the ground finally, he collapsed to his knees in relief, then fell back against the building and waited for his heart to slow down.

The wind and the rain were beginning to ebb. Tendrils of fog were creeping off the sea over the rim of the island. No time to dwell on what had just happened—fog could thicken fast.

Nathan climbed the lighthouse stairs, retrieved the lantern, then hurried to the foghorn building. He found the steam level high and ready for service. After stoking the boiler furnace once more, he went to the red engine alongside the huge trumpet-shaped horn that spouted through the wall. Nathan started the engine, opened the drains and exhaust, adjusted the throttle, then slowly opened the valve. The heavy flywheel revolved, and the building shuddered with the deep resounding blast of the horn.

Before his watch was over, fog was pouring up and over the cliffs and beginning to shroud the island. He could take a deeper breath now: all was well with the light and the horn.

In the muffled light of dawn, his father arrived. Nathan showed him his gloves, torn to tatters at the palms, and told him all that had happened. His father listened carefully, and then Zachary MacAllister said, You may be just fourteen, but no grown man could’ve done better.

Together they set out to look for the cow before the fog worsened. Near the north end of the island, they walked to a known danger spot, a strange hole in the ground that always spouted vapor, where countless times Nathan had lain on his belly and watched the sea below thundering through a cave that passed under the island. The hole was just large enough for the cow to have fallen through, but there were no tracks around it this morning.

Nathan and his father scanned the violent surf surging through the offshore rocks as they walked the rim all the way around to the southeast side. The fog was closing the half-mile gap between Tatoosh and Cape Flattery, the storm-wracked northwestern tip of the United States. It was then his father pointed, almost straight down, to the body of the cow on an outcrop of rock at the foot of the cliffs.

Nathan glanced back to his father, who only said, I suppose all things are difficult before they are easy. Let’s go inside and tell your mother.

Fog enclosed the island until it was hidden from view. Nathan and his father spent most of the day cleaning the lens, and they kept the foghorn going. Midafternoon, Nathan’s mother called them in for an early supper.

Every so often there was a slight break in the fog and the misty shape of Cape Flattery appeared through the south-facing window. Every twenty-seven seconds came the three-second resounding blast of the foghorn. Nathan had never felt so weary in his life.

As his mother was gazing toward the mainland through one of the brief openings in the fog, her face suddenly registered the utmost astonishment. She pointed toward Cape Flattery. Nathan and his father were shocked by the sight of a three-masted square-rigger under full sail emerging from the mist where a ship never, ever should have been. Like an apparition, the lumber schooner was sailing through the narrow gap between Tatoosh and the mainland.

They’ve missed the Strait! Nathan’s mother cried. Nathan and his father went running outside, as fast as they could, toward the edge of the cliff.

They could see the men on the ship, even read the name, the L. S. Burnaby, on the side. The sailors were so close Nathan could make out the men’s faces, shocked beyond amazement to discover their situation. Paralyzed by the sight of Tatoosh’s looming cliffs, the crew stood unmoving on the deck like actors in a tragic drama, staring up at Nathan and his father. A dense bank of fog was engulfing the ship from behind. Only the helmsman was in motion as, realizing their situation, he spun the ship’s wheel away from Tatoosh.

Nathan knew instantly what the result of the correction would be. The helmsman was now steering the Burnaby directly toward the barely submerged reef known as Jones Rock, invisible in the fog ahead of them.

Jones Rock! Nathan exclaimed under his breath. His father had realized the same thing and already was