Contains a Recovery, a Discovery, and a Disappointment.
"And now," said the Captain, "what was the young man doing, when we
knocked off the other day, after the storm?"
William, whose memory was always as good as his words were ready, said
he was "just going to sleep."
"True, that's the thing; and I went to sleep and slept soundly, I can
tell you. And this you may well enough believe when you bear in mind how
much I had passed through since the last sleep I had on board the
ship,--for since then had come the shipwreck, the saving of the Dean and
carrying him ashore, the walk around the island, besides all the anxiety
and worriment of mind in consequence of my own unhappy situation and the
Dean's uncertain fate.
"More than twenty-four hours had elapsed since the shipwreck, and if I
tell you that I slept full twelve hours, without once waking up, you
must not be at all surprised.
"When I opened my eyes again, we were in the shadow of the cliffs once
more; that is, the sun had gone around to the north again. The Dean was
already wide awake. When I asked him how he was, he said he felt much
better, only his head still pained him greatly, and he was very thirsty
and hungry.
"I got up immediately, and assisted the Dean to rise. He was a little
dizzy at first, but after sitting down for a few minutes on a rock he
recovered himself. Then I brought him some water in an egg-shell to
drink. And then I gave him a raw egg, which he swallowed as if it had
been the daintiest morsel in the world. 'It's lucky, isn't it,' said he,
'that there are so many eggs about?' After a moment I observed that he
was laughing, which very much surprised me, as that would have been
about the last thing that ever would have entered into my head to do.
'Do you know,' he asked, 'what a very ridiculous figure we are cutting?
Look, we are all covered over with feathers. I have heard of people
being tarred and feathered, but never heard of anything like this. Let's
pick each other.'
"Sure enough we were literally covered over with the down in which we
had been sleeping, and when I saw what a jest the poor Dean, with his
sore head, made of the plight we were in, I forgot all my own troubles
and joined in the laugh with him.
"We now fell to work picking each other, as the Dean had suggested, and
were soon as clean of feathers as any other well-plucked geese.
"By this time the Dean's clothes had become entirely dry; so each
dressed himself in the clothes that belonged to him, and then we started
over to the nearest brook, where we bathed our hands and faces, drying
them on an old bandanna handkerchief which I was lucky enough to have in
my pocket. I had to support the Dean a little as we went along, for he
was very weak; but in spite of this his spirits were excellent, and when
he saw, for the first time, the ducks fly up, he said, 'What a great
pair of silly dunces they must take us for,--coming into such a place as
this.'
"After we had refreshed ourselves at the brook, and eaten some more
eggs, we very naturally began to talk. I related to the Dean, more
particularly than I had done before, the events of the shipwreck and our
escape, and what I had discovered on the island, and then made some
allusion to the prospect ahead of us. To my great surprise, the Dean was
not apparently in the least cast down about it. In truth, he took it
much more resignedly, and had a more hopeful eye to the future, than I
had. 'If,' said he, 'it is God's will that we shall live, he will
furnish us the means; if not, we can but die. I wouldn't mind it half so
much, if my poor mother only knew what was become of me.' This
reflection seemed to sadden him for a moment, and I thought I saw a tear
in his eye; but he brightened up instantly as a great flock of ducks
went whizzing overhead. 'Well,' exclaimed he, 'there seems to be no lack
of something to eat here anyway, and we ought to manage to catch it
somehow, and live until a ship comes along and takes us off.'
"The Dean took such a hopeful view of the future that we were soon
chatting in a very lively way about everything that concerned our
escape, and here I must have dwelt largely upon the satisfaction which I
took in rescuing the Dean, for the little fellow said: 'Well, I suppose
I ought to thank you very much for saving me; but the truth is, all the
agony of death being over with me when you pulled me out, the chief
benefit falls on you, as you seem so much rejoiced about it; but I'll be
grateful as I can, and show it by not troubling you any more. See, I'm
almost well. I feel better and better every minute,--only I'm sore here
on the head where I got the crack.'
"To tell the truth, in thinking of other things, I had neglected, or
rather quite forgotten, the Dean's wounded head; so now, my attention
being called to it, I examined it very carefully, and found that it was
nothing more than a bad bruise, with a cut near the centre of it about
half an inch long. Having washed it carefully, I bound my bandanna
handkerchief about it, and we once more came back to consider what we
should do.
"Of course, the first thing we thought of and talked about was how we
should go about starting a fire; next in importance to this was that we
should have a place to shelter us. So far as concerned our food and
drink, our immediate necessities were provided for, as we had the little
rivulet close at hand, and any quantity of eggs to be had for the
gathering, and we set about collecting a great number of them at once;
for in a few days we thought it very likely that most of them would have
little ducks in them, as, indeed, many of them had already. Another
thing we settled upon was, that we would never both go to sleep at the
same time, nor quit our present side of the island together; but one of
us would be always on the lookout for a ship, as we both thought that,
since our ship had come that way, others would be very likely to, though
neither of us had the remotest idea in the world as to where we were,
any more than that we were on an island somewhere in the northern sea.
"But the fire which we wanted so much to warm ourselves and cook our
food,--what should we do for that? Here was the great question; and
fire, fire, fire, was the one leading idea running through both our
heads;--we thought of fire when we were gathering eggs, we talked of
fire when, later in the day, we sat upon the rocks, resting ourselves,
and we dreamed of fire when we fell asleep again,--not this time,
however, under the eider-down where we had slept before, but on the
green grass of the hillside, in the warm sunshine, under my overcoat,
for we had turned night into day, and were determined to sleep when the
sun was shining on us at the south, and do what work we had to do when
we were in the shade.
"Every method that either of us had ever heard of for making a fire was
remembered and talked over; but there was nothing that appeared to suit
our case. I found a hard flint, and by striking it on the back of my
knife-blade I saw that there was no difficulty in getting any number of
sparks, but we had nothing that would catch the sparks when struck; so
that we did not seem to be any better off than we were before; and, as I
have stated already, we fell asleep again, each in his turn,--'watch and
watch,' as the Dean playfully called it, and as they have it on
shipboard,--without having arrived at any other result than that of
being much discouraged.
"When we had been again refreshed with sleep, we determined to make a
still further exploration of the island; so, after once more eating our
fill of raw eggs, we set out. The Dean, being still weak and his head
still paining him very much from the hurt, remained at the lookout. He
could, however, walk up and down for a few hundred yards without losing
sight of the only part of the sea that was free enough of ice to allow a
ship to approach the island. After a while he came to where I had
discovered the dead seal and narwhal lying on the beach, when upon my
first journey round the island. I had told him about them, as indeed I
had of everything I had seen, and he was curious to try if he could not
catch a fox; but his fortune in that particular was not better than
mine.
"For myself, I had a very profitable journey, as I found a place among
the rocks which might, with some labor in fixing it up, give us shelter.
I was searching for a cave, but nothing of the sort could I come across;
but at the head of a little valley, very near to where I left the Dean,
I discovered a place that would, in some measure at least, answer the
same purpose. Its situation gave it the still further advantage, that we
commanded a perfect view of the sea from the front of it.
"I have said that it was not exactly a cave. It was rather a natural
tent, as it were, of solid rocks. At the foot of a very steep slope
there were several large masses of rough rocks heaped together,
evidently having one day slid down from the cliffs above, and afterwards
smaller rocks, being broken off, had piled up behind them. Two of these
large rocks had come together in such a manner as to leave an open space
between them. I should say this space was ten or twelve feet across at
the bottom, and, rising up about ten feet high, joined at the top like
the roof of a house. The rocks were pressed against them behind, so as
completely to close the outlet in that direction. I climbed into this
place, and was convinced that if we had strength to close up the front
entrance with a wall, we should have a complete protection from the
weather. But then, when I reflected how, if we did seek shelter there,
we should keep ourselves warm, I had great misgivings; for then came up
the question of all questions, 'What should we do for a fire?'
"Although this place was not a cave, yet I spoke to the Dean about it as
such, and by that name we came to know it; so I will now use the term,
inappropriate though it is. I also told the Dean about some other birds
that I had discovered in great numbers. They were very small, and seemed
to have their nests among the rocks all along the opposite side of the
island, where they were swarming on the hillside, and flying overhead in
even greater flocks than the ducks. I knew they were called 'little
auks,' from descriptions the sailors had given me of them.
[Illustration: The Dean makes provision for a change of diet.]
"'But look here what I've got,' exclaimed the Dean, with an air of
triumph, as soon as I came up with him. 'See this big duck!'
"The fellow had actually caught a duck, and in a most ingenious manner.
Seeing the ducks fly off their nests, the happy idea struck him that, if
he could only contrive a trap, or 'dead-fall,' he might catch them when
they came back. So he selected a nest favorable to his purpose, and
then piled up some stones about it, making a solid wall on one side of
it; then he put a thin narrow stone on the other side, and on this he
supported still another stone that was very heavy. Then he took from his
pocket a piece of twine which he was fortunate enough to have, and tied
one end of it to the thin narrow stone, and, holding on to the other
end, hid himself behind some rocks near by. When the duck came back to
her nest, he jerked the thin narrow stone away by a strong pull on the
twine string, and down came the heavy stone upon the duck's back. 'You
should have heard the old thing quacking,' said he, evidently forgetting
everything else but the sport of catching the bird: 'but I soon gave her
neck a twist, and here we are ready for a dinner, when we only find a
way to cook it. Have you discovered any way to make a fire yet?'
"I had to confess that on the subject of fire I was yet as ignorant as
ever.
"'Do you know,' continued he, 'that I have got an idea?'
"'What is it?' said I.
"'Why,' replied he, 'you told me something about people making fire with
a lens made of glass. Now, as I was down on the beach and looked at the
ice there, I thought, why not make a lens out of ice,--it is as clear as
glass?'
"'How ridiculous!' said I; 'but suppose you could, what will you set on
fire with it?'
"'In the first place,' he answered, 'the pockets of my coat are made of
some sort of cotton stuff, and if we could only set fire to that,
couldn't we blow a blaze into the fire plant, as you call it? See, I've
gathered a great heap of it.' And sure enough he had, for there was a
pile of it nearly as high as his head, looking like a great heap of dry
and green leaves.
"The idea did not seem to me to be worth much, but still, as it was the
only one that had been suggested by either of us, it was at least worthy
of trial; so we went down to the beach, and, finding a lump of ice about
twice as big as my two fists, we began chipping it with my knife into
the shape we wanted it, and then we ground it off with a stone, and then
rubbed it over with our warm hands until we had worn it down perfectly
smooth, and into the shape of a lens. This done, we held it up to the
sun, relieving each other as our hands grew cold; but without any
success whatever. We tried for a long time, and with much patience,
until the ice became so much melted, that we could do nothing more with
it, when we threw it away, and the experiment was abandoned as hopeless.
"Our disappointment at this failure was as great as the Dean's hopes had
been high. The Dean felt it most, for he was, at the very outset,
perfectly confident of success. Neither of us, however, wished to own
how much we felt the failure, so we spoke very little more together, but
made, almost in silence, another meal off the raw eggs, and, being now
quite worn out and weary with the labors and anxieties of the day, we
passed the next twelve hours in watching and sleeping alternately in the
bright sunshine, lying as before on the green grass, covered with the
overcoat. We did not even dare hope for better fortune on the morrow. We
had, however, made up our minds to struggle in the best manner we could
against the difficulties which surrounded us, and mutually to sustain
each other in the hard battle before us. Whether we should live or die
was known but to God alone, and to his gracious protection we once more
commended ourselves; the Dean repeating a prayer which he had learned
from a pious and careful mother, who had brought him up in the fear of
Heaven, and taught him, at a very early age, to have faith in God's
endless watchfulness.
"And now, my children," concluded the Captain, "I have some work to do
in my garden, to-day, so we must cut our story short this time. When you
come to-morrow, I will tell you what next we did towards raising a fire,
besides many other things for our safety and comfort."
* * * * *
So the party scattered from the "cabin,"--the Captain to his work, and
the children to play for a while with the Captain's dogs, Port and
Starboard, out among the trees; and to talk with Main Brace, whom they
found to be the most singular boy they had ever seen; after which they
went to the Captain to say "Good evening" to him, and then ran briskly
home,--William eager to write down what he had heard, while it was yet
fresh upon his memory, and all of them to relate to their parents, over
and over again, what this wonderful old man had been telling them, and
what a dear old soul he was.