Two minutes later, the cabin door swung open. Innes looked slowly round the wreckage of the room. His soft brown gaze traveled from the ravaged desk to me, sitting damp and disheveled, but respectably clothed, upon the berth, and rested at last on Jamie, who sat collapsed on a stool, still clad in his wet shirt, chest heaving and the deep red color fading slowly from his face.
Innes’s nostrils flared delicately, but he said nothing. He walked into the cabin, nodding at me, and bent to reach under Fergus’s berth, whence he pulled out a bottle of brandywine.
“For the Chinee,” he said to me. “So as he mightn’t take a chill.” He turned toward the door and paused, squinting thoughtfully at Jamie.
“Ye might should have Mr. Murphy make ye some broth on that same account, Mac Dubh. They do say as ’tis dangerous to get chilled after hard work, aye? Ye dinna want to take the ague.” There was a faint twinkle in the mournful brown depths.
Jamie brushed back the salty tangle of his hair, a slow smile spreading across his face.
“Aye, well, and if it should come to that, Innes, at least I shall die a happy man.”
We found out the next day what Mr. Willoughby wanted the pelican for. I found him on the afterdeck, the bird perched on a sail-chest beside him, its wings bound tight to its body by means of strips of cloth. It glared at me with round yellow eyes, and clacked its bill in warning.
Mr. Willoughby was pulling in a line, on the end of which was a small, wriggling purple squid. Detaching this, he held it up in front of the pelican and said something in Chinese. The bird regarded him with deep suspicion, but didn’t move. Quickly, he seized the upper bill in his hand, pulled it up, and tossed the squid into the bird’s pouch. The pelican, looking surprised, gulped convulsively and swallowed it.
“Ping An,” he said, indicating the pelican. “Peaceful one.” The bird erected a small crest of white feathers, for all the world as though it were pricking up its ears at its name, and I laughed.
“Really? What are you going to do with him?”
“I teach him hunt for me,” the little Chinese said matter-of-factly. “You watch.”
I did. After several more squid and a couple of small fish had been caught and fed to the pelican, Mr. Willoughby removed another strip of soft cloth from the recesses of his costume, and wrapped this snugly round the bird’s neck.
“Not want choke,” he explained. “Not swallow fish.” He then tied a length of light line tightly to this collar, motioned to me to stand back, and with a swift jerk, released the bindings that held the bird’s wings.
Surprised at the sudden freedom, the pelican waddled back and forth on the locker, flapped its huge bony wings once or twice, and then shot into the sky in an explosion of feathers.
A pelican on the ground is a comical thing, all awkward angles, splayed feet, and gawky bill. A soaring pelican, circling over water, is a thing of wonder, graceful and primitive, startling as a pterodactyl among the sleeker forms of gulls and petrels.
Ping An, the peaceful one, soared to the limit of his line, struggled to go higher, then, as though resigned, began to circle. Mr. Willoughby, eyes squinted nearly shut against the sun, spun slowly round and round on the deck below, playing the pelican like a kite. All the hands in the rigging and on deck nearby stopped what they were doing to watch in fascination.
Sudden as a bolt from a crossbow, the pelican folded its wings and dived, cleaving the water with scarcely a splash. As it popped to the surface, looking mildly surprised, Mr. Willoughby began to tow it in. Aboard once more, the pelican was persuaded with some difficulty to give up its catch, but at last suffered its captor to reach cautiously into the leathery subgular pouch and extract a fine, fat sea bream.
Mr. Willoughby smiled pleasantly at a gawking Picard, took out a small knife, and slit the still-living fish down the back. Pinioning the bird in one wiry arm, he loosened the collar with his other hand, and offered it a flapping piece of bream, which Ping An eagerly snatched from his fingers and gulped.
“His,” Mr. Willoughby explained, wiping blood and scales carelessly on the leg of his trousers. “Mine,” nodding toward the half-fish still sitting on the locker, now motionless.
Within a week, the pelican was entirely tame, able to fly free, collared, but without the tethering line, returning to his master to regurgitate a pouchful of shining fish at his feet. When not fishing, Ping An either took up a position on the crosstrees, much to the displeasure of the crewmen responsible for swabbing the deck beneath, or followed Mr. Willoughby around the deck, waddling absurdly from side to side, eight-foot wings half-spread for balance.
