Mr. Crusoe had been so busy hunting for caves and valleys that he had
not had time to hunt for goats; but after he had given up his idea of
building another house, he said we would shoot two or three goats, and
catch some more, so that we could have a flock of tame goats, and have
milk and butter and cheese.
We each took two guns with us, but we left the swords and saws and
hatchets at home. I wanted to go straight to the place where we saw the
goats, but Mr. Crusoe said they were so wild that we could never get
near enough to them to shoot them unless we could get on the top of a
hill when the goats were in a valley. We found a good place half-way up
a hill, where we could hide behind some bushes, and in a little while we
saw a flock of about thirty goats, and shot two of them.
We carried the goats home, though they were pretty heavy, and then Mr.
Crusoe skinned them, and put the skins out to dry in the sun, while I
roasted a splendid big piece of goat for dinner. But we couldn’t eat it,
because it was a piece of a goat old enough to have known Mr. Crusoe’s
grandfather, and Mr. Crusoe said that we would go out again and shoot a
kid. This time we shot a kid and another old goat, and when we had
skinned them both we buried all three of the old goats, and had a good
dinner of roast kid.
The next day Mr. Crusoe made me go with him into the valley where we
killed the goats, and dig what he called a pitfall. This was a hole six
feet deep and about three feet wide, and he meant it for a trap to catch
goats. When it was finished he covered the top of it with big weeds like
mullein-stalks, so that when the goats came to walk on it they would
fall in.
It was a very nice trap, I suppose, but it never caught anything but Mr.
Crusoe. We used to go to it to look for goats every night and morning
for about a week, but no goat was ever stupid enough to walk into it.
The last time, however, that we went to it Mr. Crusoe went too near the
edge, and it caved in with him. He never could have got out of the trap
alone, but as I was there I pulled him out without much trouble.
I said to him that if he would leave it to me I would catch as many
goats as he wanted, and he said I could do what I liked, but that he
didn’t want anything more to do with pitfalls.
I took half a dozen old tomato-cans that we had emptied, and dropped
them in a sort of careless way where I knew the goats would find them,
and then hid behind a tree. Pretty soon the goats came along on their
way to the creek to get a drink, and as soon as they saw the tomato-cans
they went at them as if they were starving, and I had no trouble in
walking right up to them, and making a line fast around the necks of an
old goat and her three kids. You see I knew, from living in my
grandmother’s shanty, that there is nothing that goats are so fond of as
they are of tomato-cans, and so I felt sure that by using tomato-cans as
ground-bait I could catch goats as easy as anything.
It struck me as a very curious thing that when I started for home,
leading the three kids and the goat, all the rest of the flock came
after me, and didn’t seem to be in the least bit afraid. They followed
me all the way to the house, and when Mr. Crusoe came out they crowded
around him, and you would have thought he was their dearest friend
instead of being a complete stranger.
Mr. Crusoe, of course, had an explanation ready. He said that we must
have been very stupid not to remember that his grandfather tamed all the
goats on the island, and that instead of being wild goats these were
some of those that belonged to his grandfather. He said that what proved
this was that the goats were so friendly with him, and that they
evidently mistook him for his grandfather. He was as pleased as he could
be about it, and fed the goats with all the rubbish that was lying
around the house. When I found out that the goats were tame, I let those
loose that I had caught, and the flock went and lay down in the shade of
the house, as if they meant to live with us for the next twenty-eight
years.
When they were hungry or thirsty they would wander away, but they always
came back again; and all the rest of the time that we were on the island
those goats fairly lived with us, and you couldn’t get up in the night
without falling over them.
I could not think what Mr. Crusoe wanted to do with the goat-skins; but
when they were dry he went to work to make clothes out of them. He made
himself a pair of breeches that came down to his knees, a jacket without
any sleeves, and a tremendous big cap that ran up to a point about two
feet above the top of his head, and had a big flap on the back of it
which hung down over the back of his neck. It was the ugliest and
stiffest and heaviest suit of clothes that was ever made, and when Mr.
Crusoe had it tried on, and found that the breeches were too small and
the coat too big, he said he would give it to me.
However, he didn’t give it to me until about a week later, and by that
time he had a new suit made for himself. The morning after he had
finished it he woke me up to build the fire, and for about a minute he
frightened me nearly out of my mind; for he had on all his goat-skin
clothes, and looked worse than any heathen that ever was born. I
couldn’t just at first think who he was, and I really thought that the
cannibals he was always talking about had boarded us and were going to
eat us.
Mr. Crusoe handed me what he called my suit of goat-skin clothes, and
told me to put them on. I tried to argue with him, but it wasn’t of any
use, especially as he had taken my regular clothes and locked them up or
hid them somewhere. He told me that we had been on the island nearly
three years, and our clothes were all worn out, so we must either wear
goat-skin clothes or no clothes at all; that his grandfather wore
goat-skin clothes of the same pattern as those he wanted me to wear;
and, finally, that he’d give me just ten minutes to get into the
goat-skins, and that if I didn’t choose to do it he would see that there
would be a nice coffin for me to wear.
It didn’t take me over five minutes to put on the goat-skin clothes
after I saw that Mr. Crusoe was in dead earnest. I could have made a
pair of breeches out of stove-pipe that would have been easy and
comfortable by the side of those that Mr. Crusoe gave me; and as for the
cap, it was heavier than a flour-barrel, and nothing like as soft. What
made me so disgusted was that both Mr. Crusoe and I had lots of decent
Christian clothes that would have lasted us for three or four years, but
he was that aggravating that he wouldn’t wear them, and wouldn’t let me
wear them.
We couldn’t eat much breakfast that morning, and I suppose it was
because we looked so frightful that we took each other’s appetites away.
And then we had to eat standing up, for the goat-skin was so stiff that
we couldn’t sit down until we had pounded our breeches two or three
hours with the back of an axe. The goats themselves did not know us till
we spoke to them, and when they first saw us they started on a run for
the woods.
[Illustration:
“HE LOOKED WORSE THAN ANY HEATHEN THAT EVER WAS BORN.”
]
Mr. Crusoe must have found his clothes as hard to wear as mine were, but
he bore it, and never gave the least sign that he was uncomfortable. I
didn’t dare to say anything before him, but I used to go off by myself
and take my clothes off every little while and be comfortable; that is,
I was comfortable after the sun got through blistering me, which it did
at first.
If our clothes had really been worn out we could have made good clothes
out of sail-cloth; and so could that wretched old idiot Mr. Crusoe’s
grandfather, if he had only had the least bit of sense; for, according
to Mr. Crusoe, he saved a great deal of canvas from his wreck. But of
course he did the most stupid and preposterous thing he could do, for
that was what he always did. Give him a choice of two courses to steer,
one right and one wrong, and he’d never fail to take the wrong one.
You may say that, being all alone, and his own master, old Mr. Crusoe
had a right to do what he pleased about building houses and making
clothes. I don’t say he hadn’t, provided he was never going to have a
grandson; but you see he did have a grandson, and I was cast away with
that grandson, and then the consequences of old Mr. Crusoe’s foolishness
all came on me. I think that if a man is cast away all alone it is his
duty to set an example to other people that may be cast away after him,
instead of doing the wrong thing every chance he gets.
Mr. Crusoe wasn’t satisfied with what he had done in making clothes. He
said that we must have goat-skin umbrellas, and carry them over our
heads to keep the sun off. I took the liberty of telling him that since
he was a landsman it was all right for him to carry an umbrella, but
that it would be a disgrace to a sailor to carry one, so he agreed to
let me live without an umbrella. He killed four goats, and used their
skins to cover the frame of an umbrella that he made partly out of wire
and partly out of wood. When it was done it would keep the rain off and
the sun off, and I believe it would have kept off a shower of
grape-shot, but it was so heavy that Mr. Crusoe could only carry it by
holding it with both hands, and then it tired him so that he couldn’t
walk half a mile with it.
“What puzzles me,” he said to me after he had tried his umbrella, “is to
understand how my grandfather could have carried that umbrella of his
and a gun on each shoulder at the same time. He must have been the
strongest, as well as the best and wisest, man that ever lived. Don’t
you think so, Mike?”
“Certainly,” said I. “He must have been stronger than Samson, for Samson
never carried two guns at the same time that he was carrying off the
gates of Delilah.”
This pleased Mr. Crusoe, for he didn’t understand that by saying what I
did I meant to say that his grandfather didn’t tell the truth about his
great feat with two guns and a goat-skin umbrella. For you can’t make me
believe that any man could carry a gun on each shoulder, and at the same
time carry an umbrella in both hands, weighing about as much as a spare
top-gallant mast, and spreading as much surface to the wind as a
main-royal.
After a few days Mr. Crusoe gave up trying to carry his umbrella, and
pitched it like a tent in our front yard, and the whole flock of goats
used to come and lie under it in the middle of the day, and sleep under
it at night. It blew over once or twice, but after that I made guys fast
to it and led them to trees, and it was so nice and pleasant under the
umbrella that I proposed to Mr. Crusoe that we should live under it
altogether instead of living in our house, but he wouldn’t do it.
The goat-skin cap troubled him almost as much as the umbrella. I lost
mine two or three days after it was given to me, though you can hardly
imagine how much planning and smart seamanship it took to lose that cap
in the water in just such a way that I couldn’t fish it out again. After
that I went bareheaded, which was a great deal more comfortable than
wearing a heavy cap, and I could see that Mr. Crusoe envied me.
He wouldn’t lose his cap, but he got into a habit of taking it off and
carrying it under his arm whenever we were in the shade. Then he said
that he was afraid he might drop it and lose it some day, so he fastened
a lanyard to it, which he put around his neck, and which let the cap
hang at his side under his left arm. Next he began to pick up pebbles
and bits of wood whenever we were walking together, and as his cap was
swinging handy at his side, he would drop his pebbles and things into
it. So before very long he gave up using his cap for anything but a bag,
and never thought of putting it on his head. I suppose he sometimes
wished that he dared to wear his old comfortable Christian hat that he
brought ashore from the wreck, but he was so much more comfortable with
his goat-skin cap swinging at his side than he was when he used to try
to wear it on his head that he was probably pretty well satisfied.
I thought of losing my goat-skin clothes, but I knew it would be of no
use, and that Mr. Crusoe would be sure to build new ones for me, so I
bore them as well as I could, and tried to enjoy seeing Mr. Crusoe
suffer in his.
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