The geese came first, and for a while they were most of what stood between us and starving.
“Standish wants every man who can hold a musket steady,” Giles Hopkins told me one gray morning, already dragging on his coat.
“Flocks of them down on the marsh, thicker than I have ever seen fowl anywhere.
Take enough and it is meat to salt for weeks.”
I was not given a musket.
Powder and shot were too dear to trust to a servant boy Standish had never fought beside.
But I went along to carry and to clean whatever the hunters brought down, and they brought down a great deal.
The marshes off the harbor held ducks and geese in numbers that made careful Englishmen’s eyes go round, and for one good week the hunting parties came back with more fresh meat than the colony had seen in a month.
I spent two whole days up to my elbows in feathers and blood, plucking alongside Mary Brewster and the other women, my hands raw from the cold water.
“You have a strong stomach for this,” Mary said, watching me work, “for a boy who spends half his day turning clever thoughts over in his head.”
“A man cannot eat clever thoughts, ma’am,” I said, and she laughed, a real laugh, the first I had heard out of her in weeks.
Fish were harder.
The nets we had carried from England were made for waters that behaved like English waters, and these did not.
They tangled and tore and came up empty more evenings than not, and more than one cold night ended with Standish or Hopkins cursing quietly over a catch not worth the hauling.
I watched them fail at it for a week before I saw why, and once I saw it, it seemed so plain that I was almost ashamed to say it aloud.
We were fighting the water.
Every net we threw was a man trying to drag fish out against a tide that meant to carry them the other way.
But the tide was not the enemy.
The tide was the strongest arm on that whole coast, and it came in and went out twice a day for nothing, and no one was making it work for us.
I took it to Stephen Hopkins rather than Standish, because Hopkins had already failed at things in front of strangers and lived through it, and a man who has done that takes a new notion more easily than a proud one does.
“We are going at the fish the wrong way, sir,” I said.
“The nets fight the tide, and the tide will always win.
But we could make it work for us instead.
The rising tide carries the fish in over the low water.
The falling tide leaves them behind the fence in the pool, and a man gathers them at his leisure once the water has drawn down.
We would not be catching the fish at all.
We would be letting the sea hand them to us, twice a day, for the price of some stakes and an afternoon.”
Hopkins looked at me a long moment.
“And how does a servant boy come to think of a thing like that?”
“I watched the nets fail, sir, and I watched the tide come and go, and I asked myself which of the two I would rather have working for me.” I gave him an easy smile.
“I would sooner use a strong thing than fight it.
That is the whole of it.
It may not work at all.
But it cannot do worse than the nets have done.”
That last was what moved him, I think, more than the cleverness of it.
Hopkins was not a man who could be talked into things, but he was a man who could not bear to keep doing what plainly did not work.
“It cannot do worse,” he agreed.
“We will try it.”
We put a small weir across the mouth of the stream, and it did a great deal better than the nets ever had.
By the time the story went round the fire that night, it had become Hopkins’s notion as much as mine, and that suited me well enough.
A good idea travels further and faster on the shoulders of a man everyone already trusts than it ever will on a servant boy’s word.
I had no use for the credit.
I had use for the fish, and for a colony that thought of me as one of its useful hands, and I came away with both.
The mussels and clams asked no cleverness at all, only a low tide and cold hands and a willingness to wade into water that made a man’s feet ache for an hour afterward. Visit novelping(.)com for the full chapter.
I went out most mornings with the younger boys and some of the women and filled baskets with whatever the mudflats gave up, which was a startling amount.
There was something steadying in it, after all the contriving.
You did not have to be clever to gather clams.
You had only to be cold, and patient, and willing, and the flats fed us one more day.
By the end of that first hard month ashore, we had not beaten hunger so much as learned to hold it out at arm’s length.
Geese when the flocks came through.
Shellfish at the low tide.
A fish weir that promised more than the nets ever had.
And under all of it, the seed corn from Corn Hill waiting in its baskets, worth more than all the rest of it together, if only we lived long enough and stayed strong enough to put it in the ground come spring.
I found Brewster by the fire one night, mending a net that had, in truth, been given up as more useful for its rope than its purpose.
“We will not starve, I think,” he said, half to himself, testing a knot.
“Whatever else this winter takes from us.”
“No, sir,” I said.
“I do not think we will.”
And we did not.
It was never hunger that meant to do the worst of it.
I had watched too many of us go thin and grey and start to cough, on the ship and in that first month ashore, to believe otherwise, and any man with open eyes could have seen the same.
But I did not take Brewster’s small, plain comfort from him over the fish and the geese.
Let the old man have his knot and his fire and his one good certainty.
The other thing was coming whether we named it by the hearth or not, and it would find us soon enough on its own.
Outside, the tide was turning again, patient and paying us no mind, uncovering the flats that would feed us one more morning.