Patrick O'Brian - The Nutmeg of Consolation

The trail he was following at present, however, was more promising than any he had seen for some while. It was recent, so recent that when it reached the edge of a spiny rattan-patch he saw the outer rim of the deep hoof-print fall in: what is more, this animal was almost certainly a babirussa of nine or ten score, the first he had seen since Thursday week. He was glad of it, because the ship's company included several Jews and many Mahometans, united only in their hatred of swine's flesh; but a willing mind could accept the babirussa, with his extraordinary horn-like upper pair of tusks and his long legs, as the kind of deer that might be expected on so remote an island.

'I shall go round and wait for him,' said Stephen, and he fetched a long cast round the rattan-brake, walking slowly in the heat. The animal had almost certainly gone to sleep. The boars of this country, like all the other boars he had ever known, were deeply conservative, devoted to the beaten track; and by now he knew most of their paths. At the other end of this one he climbed a tree that commanded the way out of the brake, and in its broad mossy crutch he sat at his ease, embowered in orchids, of a species, a habit and colour he had never seen before. The low sun appeared through a gap in the clouds, sinking towards Sumatra? Biliton? The west in any case. And sloping under the canopy it lit the orchid, the whole spray of fifty or sixty orchid flowers, with singular brilliance, vermilion in the wet, shining green; he was still contemplating it and its attendant insects when the boar began moving again in the rattan-brake. The sound came nearer; the boar emerged, standing motionless, its square snout twitching from side to side; with a detached, clinical look on his face Stephen dropped it dead and climbed down from the tree.

He had an apron in his knapsack and he put it on to gralloch his pig, because although he had no objection to a little blood on his clothes, Killick had; and Killick's high nasal complaining righteous voice, going on and on, was so disagreeable that the inconvenience of an apron on so heavy a day was nothing to it. He also had a light tackle that allowed him to heave the beast about single-handed. This was the one piece of something like seamanship that he had studied with profit: Bonden, the captain's coxswain, had spent hours showing him how to make one end fast and how to reeve the fall through the channels; and as long as he held the top block uppermost he often succeeded at the first try. He succeeded now, and stepping back he surveyed the boar with real satisfaction: nearer eleven score than ten. And there were few dishes Jack Aubrey preferred to soused pig's face, while for his own part he was fond of a pair of cold crubeens. He hung his apron on a branch to guide those who would carry the babirussa down and wiped his hands on his jacket - on his jacket, as he realized a moment too late, gazing at the stain on the fine white linen.

'I shall try to get it off at the swallows' pool,' he said, but with no conviction. At one period in his childhood he had been under the rule of a Dominican tertiary called Sor Luisa, one of the older, more respectable branch of the Torquemadas of Valladolid (his cousin and godfather was very particular about these things), a woman for whom cleanliness was godliness; and his attempts at 'getting it off' had never deceived her for a moment. Now she had been replaced by a lean ageless weatherbeaten pigtailed seaman with one gold earring and a shrewish penetrating voice. It was not even that Killick was his servant, with a servant's rights; he was Jack Aubrey's steward, Stephen's man being a gentle, witless young Malay by the name of Ahmed; but Preserved Killick had known both the Captain and the Doctor so long and had acquired such a moral ascendancy in certain fields that Ahmed was no protection at all.

As Stephen had feared, the swallows' pool did nothing to remove the stain, but with a cowardice unworthy of his age and education he concealed the blood and peritoneal fluid with a superimposed film of dirt from the water's edge, adding some algae for good measure. He called the pool the swallows' because it was near the birds' most spectacular cliff, not because they used the soft grey mud for building: far from it, indeed. The wholly sheltered nests were pearly white and translucent, with never a hint of moss or vegetable fibre, far less of mud: these were the nests deepest in the caves or rather clefts in the seaward precipice, and Stephen could see the best only from one place, where his particular cave soared up from a broad, deep stretch of shingle two hundred feet below to a narrow fissure at the top. He had an indifferent head for heights and the upper yards of even a frigate filled him with paralysing dread, scarcely to be overcome by the strongest effort of will, but here he could lie flat, with his arms and legs spread out, his body firmly pressed against the warm level rock and only his face hanging over the void, gazing at the birds below - the cloud of little grey birds that flew in at the widest part of the cave, whirled about at an extraordinary speed and then shot off from the general vortex, each to its own nest. He leant farther into the cavity, his hands spread to shade his eyes, and almost at once his wig fell off, turning and turning until it vanished among the bird-filled shadows far below. 'Hell and death,' he said, for although it was only an old scratch-wig worn almost bare, Killick had recently curled and whitened its sides (there was nothing to be done to the top): and in any case he felt naked without it. The vexation lasted little longer than the slow turning fall, however; his wild attempt at catching the wig had brought him into a much better position: certainly it meant that the sun shone right on to the back of his unprotected head, but it allowed him to lie there in the utmost comfort, his face far deeper into the cleft. His body was perfectly relaxed, and as his eyes grew even more used to the dimness of the cavern he could make out the nests themselves, stretching away and away in rows, half-cups touching one another, row upon row, covering the rock-wall from sixty feet above high-water mark almost all the way up, the finest and whitest being not the top rows, which had a certain amount of wind-drifted dirt upon them, but those about twenty down, in a narrow chimney. These were the nests that were sold for their weight in silver among the Chinese; and as he had expected, the nestlings, the scrupulously clean nestlings, two to each brood, would be ready to fly any day now. Yet as he lay there, glass after glass, oblivious of the roasting sun and watching the whirl of parent-birds bringing food and carrying away faecal sacs, a frown came over his face. He concentrated all his attention upon one particularly well-lit nest, and slowly his suspicions were confirmed: again and again the incoming bird perched on its rim with all four toes pointing forward.

After another half hour he rose to his feet, shouldered his rifle, and looking back at the birds with real displeasure he walked off.

'They are not swallows at all,' he said, feeling not only indignant but deadly sick. He stepped aside into a bush: and then into a series of bushes, for the vomiting was succeeded by an imperative looseness.

Stephen Maturin was not really an ill-natured man, but his was scarcely a jovial, sunny temperament, and sometimes disturbances of this kind rendered him morose or even worse. By the time he reached the camp he was perfectly ready to savage Killick. Killick knew him very well, however, and after one glance at his filthy jacket, his indecently bare head and the dangerous look in his pale eye silently fetched him a broad-brimmed sennit hat and said, 'Captain is just woke up, sir.'

'My indignation against those birds was quite excessive,' said Stephen inwardly. 'It was no doubt caused by a sudden flow of bile, my posture exerting pressure on the ductus choledocus communis.'