The Dark Canoe by Scott O’Dell Page A

look of a canoe?”
    â€œYes, sometimes.”
    â€œSometimes? When would that be? When thou has smelt a rum cork, mayhap.”
    â€œIn certain lights,” I said, “it looks like a canoe and in other lights like a chest.”
    â€œHast seen it by light of day?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhat doth it resemble then, chest or canoe?”
    â€œNeither one, exactly. In the daylight it looks like a coffin.”
    â€œWhat dost thou say? A coffin?”
    â€œLike Grandfather Caleb was buried in, the one with the big brass handles.”
    â€œBrass handles? A coffin? Thou must be joking, Nathan.”
    â€œIt doesn’t have brass handles,” I said, “at least none I’ve seen. Also it looks like a canoe. I think it’s a chest.”
    â€œChest, canoe, coffin. Thou hast a choice there. Cradle to grave, aye, a wondrous choice.”
    â€œIt has a lid, with long, square nails in it. More than a hundred.”
    â€œThen canst not be a canoe. Hast thou seen a lidded canoe, ever? No, nor I in all my worldly wanderings. ’Tis a monstrous thought, a lidded canoe, though the Esquimox hath one decked o’er save for a small hole wherein they sit.”
    Caleb paused, looking aloft where the tall spars swung to the tide and the waning moon wheeled westward. He ran a finger through his beard.
    â€œYet I do recall something from the book,” he said. “Aye, it comes clearly now. ’Tis there on the hundredth page, more or less. Hast thou met a canoe in the book? Hast read this far?”
    â€œYes, beyond a chapter called ‘The Doubloon.’”
    â€œDoubloon! Aye, ’tis a thing I remember.” I likewise remembered it, for as I had read the scene where Captain Ahab nails the gold doubloon upon the mast there flashed before my eyes the time when Caleb had nailed the golden coins the Indians had given us. In my mind, the two scenes had become one—the three coins and the two strange men.
    â€œBut our thoughts fly afield,” he said. “Back to the canoe. There’s a fanciful part thou will soon overtake. Queequeg, the painted savage, thou hast met already, since he comes early. Thou wilt recall that this Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, ‘an island far away to the West and South,’ and that he was the son of a king on his father’s side and of unconquerable warriors on his mother’s. Dost follow?”
    â€œI remember Queequeg well.”
    â€œAnd thou wilt remember likewise that far along in the book, in chapter one hundred and ten, Queequeg is taken by a chill, which brought him to the very threshold. Whereupon they placed him in a hammock to die. But swinging there, while the rolling sea rocked him, he made a most curious request. Dost recall poor Queequeg’ s last request?”
    â€œHe asked them to build a coffin and put him in it, which they…”
    â€œNo, thou scamp things badly,” my brother broke in. “It follows a fuller course. ‘He called one of the crew to him and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle, and upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him, for it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes.’”
    â€œI remember.”
    â€œAye, ’tis memorable. But tell me, hath the wood of this canoe-chest-coffin a darkish cast? Dost it remind thee somewhat of old, heathenish lumber hewn from aboriginal groves?”
    â€œWhether it has a heathenish cast, I don’t know. But it is a dark wood, almost black and very hard.”
    â€œBlack it is and hard? Aye, it wouldst so appear, after countless suns have