In the Land of the Long White Cloud

stood in boxes generously strewn with hay, and the saddles and bridles in the tack room were old but well maintained. A single stable lantern bathed the interior in weak light—enough to orient himself by and to see to the horses at night, but not bright enough to bother the animals.
    Lucas looked around for a place to sleep, but he seemed to be the only overnight guest. He was considering making camp without asking around. But then a high-pitched voice, more fearful than authoritative, sounded through the dark stables: “Who’s there? State your name and what you want, stranger!”
    Lucas raised his arms nervously. “Luke…uh…Denward. I have no bad intentions, I’m just looking for a place to sleep. And this girl, Miss Daphne, said…”
    “We let people sleep here who have put up their horses here,” the voice answered, coming closer. Its owner finally appeared. A blond boy, perhaps sixteen years old, stretched his neck over the wall of one of the stalls. “But you don’t have a horse.”
    Lucas nodded. “That’s right. But I could still pay a few cents. And I don’t need a whole stall either. A corner would do.”
    The boy nodded. “How’d you get here without a horse, sir?” he asked curiously, stepping around to reveal himself entirely. He was tall but gangly, and his face still looked childlike. Lucas gazed into the boy’s bright round eyes, whose color he could not make out in the dim light. The boy seemed open and friendly.
    “I came from the seal banks,” Lucas said, as though this were an explanation for how someone had crossed the mountains without a mount. But maybe the boy could figure out for himself that his guest must have arrived by ship. Lucas hoped that this did not make him think right away of the
Pretty Peg
’s deserter.
    “Were you hunting seals? I tried to do that once; you earn a lot of money for it. But I couldn’t do it…the way the things look at a guy…”
    Lucas’s heart warmed.
    “That’s exactly why I’m looking for another job,” he explained.
    The young boy nodded. “You can help the carpenters or the lumberjacks. There’s certainly enough work. I’ll take you along on Monday. I’m also working construction.”
    “I thought you were the stable boy here.” Lucas was surprised. “What’s your name? David?”
    The boy shrugged. “That’s what they call me. My name is actually Steinbjörn. Steinbjörn Sigleifson. But no one here can pronounce it. So that girl, Daphne, just started calling me David. After David Copperfield. I think he wrote a book or something.”
    Lucas smiled, once more astonished by Daphne. A barmaid who read Dickens?
    “And where do people name their children ‘Steinbjörn Sigleifson’?” Lucas inquired. David had been leading him to a shed, which he had made habitable. Straw bales served as tables and chairs, and hay had been piled into a sort of shelf. More hay lay in a corner, and David indicated to Lucas that he should use it for a bed.
    “In Iceland,” he replied, helping Lucas energetically. “That’s where I come from. My father was a whaler. But my mother, who was Irish, always wanted to leave. She would have liked nothing more than to return to her island, but then her family immigrated to New Zealand. So she wanted to come here because she couldn’t stand the weather in Iceland anymore; it’s always dark, always cold…she got sick and died on the boat on the way here. On a sunny day. That was important to her, I think.” David wiped his eyes furtively.
    “But your father was still around?” Lucas asked amiably, spreading out his sleeping bag.
    David nodded. “But not for long. When he heard that there was whaling here too, it lit a fire under him. We left Christchurch for the West Coast, and he signed on straightaway with the next whaler. He wanted to take me along as a half-deck boy, but they didn’t need one. So that was that.”
    “He just left you alone?” Lucas was horrified. “How old were you? Fifteen?”
    “Fourteen,” David said calmly. “Old enough to survive on my own, thought my father, though I couldn’t even speak English. But as you can see, he was right. I’m here; I’m alive—and I don’t think I would have made a good whaler. I always felt ill when my father came home smelling of blubber.”
    While the two of them got comfortable in their sleeping bags, the boy spoke freely of his experiences among the hard men of the West Coast. Apparently, he felt just as uncomfortable