CHAPTER 49
The Hyena
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke,
though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that
the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and
nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds,
and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never
mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets
and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of
sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to
him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by
the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I
am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme
tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just
before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but
a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to
breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I
now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale
its object.
“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck,
and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;
“Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without
much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to
understand that such things did often happen.
“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-
jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I think I
have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr.
Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going
plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of
a whaleman’s discretion?”
“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape
Horn.”
“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close
by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me
whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to
break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s jaws?”
“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I should
like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha!
the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!”
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of
the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the
water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common
occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively critical
instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him
who steered the boat— oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in
his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic
stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat
was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in
the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was
famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged
to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in
what a devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all
things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough
draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, “come along, you shall be my lawyer,
executor, and legatee.”
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their
last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of
that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done
the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present
occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart.
Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that
Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many
months or weeks as the case may be. I survived myself; my death and burial
were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly,
like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug
family vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil
fetch the hindmost.
