“Sure. When they’re lousy it’s a sign they’ve all been herdin’ together by the thousand, and when they take the bait that way they’re hungry. Never mind how the bait sets. They’ll bite on the bare hook.”
“Say, this is great!” Harvey cried, as the fish came in gasping and splashing—nearly all poke-hooked, as Dan had said. “Why can’t we always fish from the boat instead of from the dories?”
“Allus can, till we begin to dress daown. Efter thet, the heads and offals ’u’d scare the fish to Fundy. Boatfishin’ ain’t reckoned progressive, though, unless ye know as much as dad knows. Guess we’ll run aout aour trawl tonight. Harder on the back, this, than frum the dory, ain’t it?”
It was rather backbreaking work, for in a dory the weight of a cod is waterborne till the last minute, and you are, so to speak, abreast of him; but the few feet of a schooner’s freeboard make so much extra dead-hauling, and stooping over the bulwarks cramps the stomach. But it was wild and furious sport so long as it lasted; and a big pile lay aboard when the fish ceased biting.
“Where’s Penn and Uncle Salters?” Harvey asked, slapping the slime off his oilskins, and reeling up the line in careful imitation of the others.
“Git ’s coffee and see.”
Under the yellow glare of the lamp on the pawl-post, the foc’sle table down and opened, utterly unconscious of fish or weather, sat the two men, a checkerboard between them, Uncle Salters snarling at Penn’s every move.
“What’s the matter naow?” said the former, as Harvey, one hand in the leather loop at the head of the ladder, hung shouting to the cook.
“Big fish and lousy—heaps and heaps,” Harvey replied, quoting Long Jack. “How’s the game?”