DELBERT’S BIG GAME
Delbert was getting tired of small game now. He began to plan for deer
and pork. He made himself a new bow, larger and stronger than he had
ever had before, with a new, strong string, and he made new arrows
tipped with the best points he could get, and then he and Esther went
deer-hunting.
Jennie always stayed with Marian, to help with Davie and because she
really did not like hunting. She could not bear to kill things nor to
see them killed. She carried her bow and arrows and shot at marks along
with the rest of them, and sometimes at game, but she never seemed to
enjoy it when she hit it.
As soon as it was light enough for them to see their way at all,
Delbert and Esther would creep out and try for a close approach to
the deer. Sometimes they did not come back till about noon, their
only breakfast having been some raw vegetables carried with them, a
few bananas usually, which they carried in their quivers with their
arrows,--sometimes not even that. Marian had no hopes of their ever
getting a deer, but she never discouraged them. She and Jennie could
manage Davie and tend the little burros, and the lessons could be
studied in the afternoons. Davie, poor boy, certainly had to take his
lessons with great regularity in those days; there was no way he could
escape from them. Marian had had to loosen his bandages a number of
times, but she did not yet dare take them off, though she had not kept
him strapped to the house very long.
Marian now began to study very earnestly on the spinning and weaving
problem. Rabbit-skin clothing was very unsatisfactory, as were the
crocheted fiber things, too, though for different reasons, but little
King David’s misfortune had simply wiped every other kind out of
existence. What with bandages and towels, there was not one single
thin, worn garment left, only a little pile of frayed rags. Marian took
her swim at night now. It was imperative that new clothes be acquired
in some way, and she thought and thought, and was just beginning to
see light on the subject when Esther came tearing in one morning,
breathless and disheveled, to announce that Delbert had killed his deer.
His sisters could scarcely credit the story, but Marian took the path
straightway, leaving Jennie to keep Davie company and give him his
frequently demanded drinks of water and dampen his bandages and see if
he had remembered from yesterday the little words written on the big
clamshell. Marian found Delbert dancing a veritable war dance round a
fair-sized buck. The thing had happened almost as far back as Little
Pig Cove, where Davie had fallen, and, in a way, the two occurrences
were somewhat similar.
Delbert and Esther had crept along that morning, as luck would have it,
in time to witness a very serious disagreement between two bucks. The
wind was in their favor; otherwise they might not have got quite so
close to where the two were struggling together.
Perhaps one of them had thought they should cross the pasture on the
level land, perhaps the other wanted the herd to hunt _panales_ among
the rocks. Delbert never knew what the quarrel was about. He had read
of such things, but this was his first chance to see anything of the
sort. His blood leaped, and his eyes sparkled. Esther, a little behind
him, practically inclined, fitted an arrow to her bow and shot. In her
excitement the shaft went wide of the mark; so much so that no one, not
even the deer, noticed it at all, a result which so sobered her that
she did not try again. Delbert was actually forgetting to shoot at all,
which Esther afterwards declared was worse than shooting and missing,
even as wildly as she had.
But the stronger of the two bucks was beginning to push the other
about, and in the scuffle they worked nearer and nearer to the edge of
the rocks, though it is hardly likely this was other than accidental.
Probably they were so taken up with their tussle that they did not
notice where they were going. But presently a rock loosened and
slipped, and then, before they could realize what was happening, a
great mass of rocks and earth and bushes fell thundering down the steep
to the level strip below.
Esther screamed and ran back; the group of deer which had been watching
the combat also fled, and did not stop till they had reached the
safety of the farther pasture. One of the fighting bucks was able to
spring back and save himself, and he fled with the rest, but the other
one went down with the avalanche.
[Illustration: HE COULD SEE THE BUCK STRUGGLING TO FREE HIMSELF]
Delbert, with a shout, ran forward and began clambering down where it
was not so steep and appeared to be perfectly safe. In a minute he
could see the buck struggling to free himself from the mass of débris.
Even then he did not think of the trusty bow and arrows he had taken
such pains with for this very occasion, but, pulling out his long
knife, he ran forward, and, by the time Esther had scrambled down
beside him, the deer had ceased to kick, and Delbert was tugging at the
rocks that still partly covered it. He sent her post-haste for Marian,
and when they got back to him, he had the deer pulled out on a clear
space and was already beginning to skin it.
Neither of them knew a thing about cutting up such an animal except
what they dimly remembered used to be done at “Grandpa’s” at
hog-butchering time, but they managed to get the skin off after a
fashion and they chopped and cut away at the rest, breaking the bones
with a stone or the hatchets when they could not find a joint.
The discarded parts they would leave there, for it was too far to carry
them to the watermelon-patch for fertilizer, and there were plenty of
the scavengers of the sea waiting for them to go so that they could
clean up after them. The good meat they tied up in the skin, and they
swung it on a pole and carried it home between them, Esther carrying
the hatchet and knives.
It was past noon when, blood-stained and weary, they arrived at the
wickiup. Jennie was getting anxious, and Davie was decidedly fretful.
Delbert was then sent out to the salt reef to bring back all the salt
there was there. They would need it besides what they already had
in the wickiup, for Marian was determined not to lose a bit of that
meat. She cleaned up the pail and hung it over the fire too, for the
kettle would not hold all the bones. Some of the ribs were put to
roast immediately, and then she set to work cutting up and salting and
hanging up to dry. They stretched a line out in the sun and hung the
pieces over that.
The skin would fill several long-felt wants, one of which was to
provide Marian with sandals. Her leather ones had worn entirely out,
and she had tried fiber ones without much success; she had even tried
wooden ones.
Before that meat was half gone,--and they ate with true Indian
appetites,--Delbert had determined to go after pork. There was a
certain place on the farther end of the island where the pigs were
pretty apt to be found, especially in the heat of the day. It was back
from the shore, but low. In fact, it was a lagoon of water in the
rainy season and contained water till near the rains again. In one or
two places the fresh water oozed out all the year round. It was here
that the young hunter proposed to make his attack.
The boy’s idea was certainly novel. Good as his new bow and arrows
were, he did not really suppose he could kill a hog with them except
by accident. Perhaps a shot through the eye would be fatal,--he was
not sure,--but if one was merely wounded there was danger of the rest
showing fight, and--well, Delbert proposed to take no chances.
So where the big rocks, solid as the Island itself, overhung the bushes
and little pools below, he would establish himself. Here he would
be where the game could not get at him without making a détour of a
quarter of a mile or so, and, after he had cut some brush and piled it
properly, they could not see him either.
So with his hair rope he made a trap or snare across a much-used pig
path, the rope running up over a crude but strong pulley and being tied
about a good-sized cactus in the rocks above. With the butcher knife
lashed to the end of a good stout pole and several such implements by
his side he sat and waited patiently.
When it became pretty warm, the pigs assembled by the lagoon to drink
and wallow in the mud. Before so very long the Muggywah appeared,
with Jennie and Esther on board. They moored her out a little way and
waded in. Quietly they drove the herd up toward the rocks and bushes,
for, though not what could be called wild, the pigs would not permit a
close approach. Presently one of them poked his nose through Delbert’s
waiting noose, and Delbert fairly held his breath till he stepped on,
and then he gave a mighty jerk and began hauling in his rope over the
pulley. He had caught the porker just back of one front leg, and the
astonishment of that pig and his companions when he was thus lifted
bodily into the air was enough, Delbert afterward said, to pay him for
all his trouble.
From behind his screen of rocks and bushes he pulled the squealing
animal up till he could reach him with a sort of shepherd’s crook he
had provided himself with; whereupon he fastened the rope and pulled
the pig in out of sight of its companions and dispatched it.
At the first squeal the girls had retreated most hastily to the
Muggywah and pushed off, paddling back till they were well out of sight
of the herd of pigs, when they moored the craft again, this time to a
rock on shore, and, ascending the hill, circled round back till they
found Delbert cutting up the game.
[Illustration: DELBERT PULLED THE SQUEALING ANIMAL UP]
They did by it as they had done by the deer,--skinned it and carried
the meat home tied up in the skin slung over a pole. They had a stick
with a fork at one end, so each of the girls could take a fork, and
Delbert managed the other end.
After that Delbert had no more taste for potting small game. He spent
his time thinking up tricks and traps for deer and pigs. The deer were
not such easy marks, but the pigs, being more stupid or less shy, could
often be successfully bagged by practically the same tactics as he had
used the first time.
Finally Marian suggested to him that it would be in the long run a
great saving of time and an all-round better plan if he would build a
good little pen somewhere and catch rather small pigs and put them into
it, where they could fatten them up on garden stuff, of which they had
plenty now,--the inferior bananas, for instance,--and then they could
kill them when they chose. Jennie thought of a good place for a pen,
close to the watermelon-patch, where there was a scrubby tree or two
and a great overhanging rock that the pigs could go under for shade
and shelter, and where they would not have to build a fence except on
two sides.
The plan was put into operation and worked very well. They built the
fence mostly of rocks piled up into a wall, and when it was finished,
Delbert stocked it with youngsters that he was sure were quite old
enough to leave their mothers. And the catching of them and the
conveying of them across to the pen gave him much glee in spite of the
hard labor involved.
The pork when killed was cured with salt and smoke. Marian did not
have very good success with the last method, yet she managed it after
a fashion. First she tried smoking the meat by hanging it over their
chimney, but that was too hot, for it cooked it as well as smoking it
and fried out all the grease too. But she did better when she built a
smokehouse where a tiny fire discharged its smoke through a tunnel in a
bank that terminated in a little cubby-hole affair of sticks and rocks
where the meat was laid. They called it a smokehouse. It was a sort of
doll smokehouse. The meat was always cut in rather small pieces and
well salted, for Marian had a horror of spoilt meat.
Soap was also attempted,--staggered at, Marian said. She knew little
about it, but had seen Bobbie’s mother making it, and she happened to
know that ashes contained lye. The bottom of the wickerwork around the
good demijohn had worn clear through. Marian carefully broke it away
at the neck as well and took it off entirely. Then, tipping it upside
down, she had a basket forsooth. She lined the sides with green banana
leaves and filled it full of ashes.
She rigged it up where she could slip under it the old broken demijohn
they had found in the cove and had used so much, which would hold
about a gallon. Then she poured a little water on the ashes, and when
that soaked in, a little more, and kept it up till she had it dripping
through into the old demijohn below. Thus she leached out her lye. And
if it did not seem very strong, she could boil it down in the porcelain
kettle, which was the only thing she had that she dared use for that
purpose, though she could boil things and even try out her grease in
Mr. Cunningham’s pail.
When the lye was stout enough to suit her, she put it into the
two-quart glass jar or the bottles, and finally she started in with
the soap-making. Well, she made it, but don’t imagine it was nice
white, sweet-smelling soap, such as you can buy, for it certainly was
not. She made, first and last, a good many batches. Some of it would
harden, and some would not.
What did harden she cut into cakes and put on a shelf to dry, where it
would proceed to do so, shrinking itself up into the most absurd shapes
of about half its former size. And what would not harden, she put into
broken bottles or great shells or hollowed-out pieces of wood, but it
was nearly all black in color and smelled--oh, like nothing in the
world but very strong-smelling soap, but it would make a lather, after
a fashion, and would take out dirt and grease.