A Whale For The Killing Read Online Free Page B

their web through the increasingly congested maze of houses. Two miles of incredibly rough trails were hewn from the living rock and, in 1962, the first two cars were unloaded from the coastal boat. They met a happy fate a few days later when they collided head-on and both were reduced to junk.
    During the five years Claire and I lived in Burgeo, Progress made further stunning strides. By 1967 there were thirty-nine cars and trucks rattling themselves to pieces on the stony goat tracks which led nowhere, and never would. The first snowmobile had gone snarling out into the barrens, where it fell into a crevice; but the following year saw five more on order. The non-returnable pop and beer bottle arrived. On sunny summer days the rocks which made up most of the physical surroundings gleamed and glittered in fairy colours from the layers of glass shards which littered them. In 1961 there had been no welfare officer and no unemployment. But by 1967 Burgeo had these modern advantages as well as a new fish meal reduction plant to spread its oily, nauseous fumes like a miasma over the entire community.
    It had also acquired a town council. It had a mayor—the owner of the fish plant. He was a man after Smallwood’s own heart, and one whose motto might well have been “What’s good for me is good for Burgeo.” Since the town council was chosen for the most part from among his employees, or his sycophants, he encountered little opposition.
    There was also a fine new school built to mainland standards and staffed with “modern” teachers who were skilled at denigrating the old ways, rejecting the past and arousing in their students the lust for the golden dreams of the industrial millennium.
    The people of the Sou’west Coast, and of Burgeo in particular, were “hauled into the twentieth century” so speedily that few of them had any understanding of what was happening to them. The age-old patterns of their lives collapsed in rapid succession. The inner certainties which had sustained them in past generations were evaporating like water spilled on a red-hot stove. But not all Burgeo people failed to grasp the significance of what was happening to them. Some of them understood.
    There was Uncle Bert, for example. He lived with his “Woman,” as he always referred to his wife, in a tiny but im-peccably neat little house a stone’s throw from us at Messers. In the evenings Uncle Bert would sit at his oilcloth-covered kitchen table listening disdainfully to a squalling transistor radio as it yammered out the daily tale of hate and horror, of suffering and disaster, which it offered as the news of the world.
    When the tale was told, Uncle Bert would switch off the radio, pour himself half a glass of straight alcohol (smuggled in from the offshore French island of St. Pierre), top it up with boiling water, add a spoonful of sugar, and toss the mixture down in a couple of gulps. Then, bald head shining with sweat from the effect of the “alky,” big, twisted hands gesticulating in the light of the oil lamp, he would bellow out his derision.
    “By the Lard livin’ Jasus, dem mainland fellers is gone altogether foolish! Foolish as a cut cat, me son! And de great joke onto it... dey don’t know it! Dey got to tinker wit’ every goddamn t’ing dere is... and everyt’ing dey tinkers wit’ goes wrong! And dat, me darlin’ man, dat’s what dey calls pro -gress!
    “Dey says dey’s makin’ a heaven on dis eart’ for we. But de troot onto it is, dey’s headin’ dereselves and all of we for hell, in a hoopin hurry-all. Smart? Oh yiss, dey do believe dey’s de smartest t’ings God put on dis old eart’... dem politicians and dem scientists, and all dem fine, big-moneyed fellows. But I’m tellin’ ye, byes, de codfish and de caribou, dey’s ten t’ousan’ times smarter in de head. Dey got de sense to lave well enough be. Dey’ll niver blow up de world; no, nor pizzen us all to deat’... Bejasus, byes, I t’ink de