that was tough enough, it was not at all elastic, so that I gave that
up at once. Next I bethought me of the fibres in the husks and leaves
of the cocoa-nut, and wondered whether these could be woven into a
cord; and if any are surprised that I should so much as mention this,
having seen cocoa-nuts, perhaps, only as they appear in our shops, I
will explain that the nut itself is enclosed in a tough fibrous husk of
about two inches in thickness, while the leaf is covered for two or
three feet of its length with a fibrous matting, very fine and strong,
which acts as a kind of brace to the stalk and keeps it steadily fixed
to the trunk. I had taken note of this fibrous substance, and, indeed,
thought I remembered that the native people made thread of it; but when
I came to the actual experiment, I found that the thread so made was as
tough as you please, and it served us excellent well afterward in many
ways, as will presently be seen, but it was quite lacking in that
spring without which a bow-string is impossible.
[Illustration: Spearhead]
I do not mean to say that I made all these discoveries while Billy was
cooking the supper, but only that I began to make my trials then. It
was, indeed, several days before we lighted on something that was
suited to our purpose, and that by a kind of accident. We had gone up
the mountain, as was our daily custom, to make our survey, and coming
down again we left our usual path, for no reason that I can remember,
and came upon a patch of plants of a kind that we had not observed
before. We had become by this time so knowing in the vegetation of our
island, though quite ignorant of the names of the plants, that we
stopped to examine this new kind, and plucked some of it, which we
peeled as we went our way. It seemed to me that the bark of it had a
certain stretch in its fibres, and when we got back to our hut we
pulled the fibres out and twisted some of them together in the manner
of a cord, and fastened the ends of the string thus made to the ends of
a short pliable twig, and to our great joy, when I pulled the string
and released it suddenly, it shot back with a twang as like that of a
true cord as can be imagined. In my delight I cried out that I would
be Robin Hood and Billy should be Little John, which he took at first
to be an affront on his shortness of stature, he being eight inches or
more less than I was at that time; he grew afterwards till there was no
more than four inches betwixt us. But on my telling him what stories I
could remember of Robin Hood and his bold men in Lincoln green--Friar
Tuck and Maid Marion and the rest of the company--Billy, who had never
heard of any of these before, was greatly delighted, though he doubted
whether they were quite so good marksmen as the stories said, and
professed that of them all he would have preferred to be Friar Tuck,
who had a nice taste in venison, just as Billy himself had in pork.
However, he agreed to be Little John, reminding me very pertinently
that we had not yet made our bows and arrows.
I had already made up my mind as to the wood we should use for making
the bows. It was that same red wood of which I have spoken once or
twice, and which, being flexible as well as hard, seemed to me the
fittest for our purpose of all the woods in the island. Accordingly we
chose two strong saplings of this tree growing to my own height, or a
little more, and having uprooted them, we cut off the branches and
twigs, peeled the bark off, and then pared them for three or four
inches in the centre, so as we might grip them easily. This done, we
shaved the ends as well as we could with our axes until they tapered,
and about two inches from each end we burned a notch in which we
purposed fitting the strings. Thus with an easy day's work we had two
fine bows, not very cunningly shaped, but strong and serviceable--at
least, we hoped so.
[Illustration: Billy's Bow and Arrow]
Billy took upon himself to make some arrows while I made the strings.
For this purpose he chose some straight light shoots, about as thick as
your finger, peeled off the bark as we did with the saplings, and
trimmed them with his axe and other sharp stones, rubbing them also
with sand, until they were wonderfully smooth. Billy was more patient
in this work than I had ever seen him, and as each shoot was prepared
he held it up to his eye and looked along it as if to see whether it
were a trifle out of the straight, and if he thought so, he would rub
and polish again until he was satisfied. He had near a dozen of these
shoots prepared by the time I had finished the strings for our two
bows, and he then began to point the heads; but it appeared that he was
quite ignorant of the use of feathers, so while he was pointing the
shafts I roamed about the woods in search of feathers, and found a good
number on the ground, and these we stuck on the tail end of the shafts
as I had seen them in pictures, for as for the actual things, I had
never had them in my hand. This made me wish, and so did many other
matters, that I had given more heed to the construction of things, for
barring pottery and rabbit-hutches I was a perfect simpleton in using
my hands. Of course, when the first arrow was finished, I tried it
with the bow, and found that it did not fly near so well as I hoped;
nor did the second and third that we made, which was a great trouble to
us. The flight of these arrows was neither far nor steady, and for a
long time we could not make out in the least why we had failed. It was
Billy that discovered the reason, though I believe it was more by guess
than by deduction.
[Illustration: Billy's Scraper for rounding Arrow Shafts]
"Why, master," he said, "I do believe 'tis all along o' those silly
feathers you've been and gone and stuck in, so that the tail's heavier
than the head."
I saw that there might be something in Billy's notion, so we first of
all tried the experiment of making one of the arrows taper towards the
tail; and when we found that it certainly flew from the bow much better
than the others, I thought of improving still further by fitting stone
heads to the shafts. We split up some pieces of flint, and using a
flat corner of the lava tract as a kind of anvil, Billy chipped away at
some of the smaller pieces with a heavy lump of the rock containing
iron until we had a little heap of flakes shaped something like a leaf.
Some of these we lashed to shallow grooves in our shafts by means of
pieces of the string I had made; others we drove into clefts in the top
of the shafts; and when we came to try these new-tipped arrows on the
bow, we found that they flew very much better than any that we had made
before.
By the time we had furnished ourselves with the bows and a dozen arrows
our week's holiday was past, and we ought by rights to have gone back
to our work on the house. But arrows were not made merely to be looked
at, nor to be shot off only for fun, as Billy said, and he was bent on
employing our new weapons in the useful work of providing food. We had
had nothing but bread-fruit, cocoanuts, and eggs, and pork twice, ever
since we had been on the island, which I reckoned to be now a matter of
three or four months or so, and I own I agreed with Billy that we
should be none the worse of a more frequent change of diet. Of late we
had seen very little of the wild pigs, being so much busied with our
building work and pottery, and other things; but the dogs were frequent
spectators of our proceedings, though not so constantly as at first,
finding no profit in them, I suppose. However, we now set off with our
bows and arrows, fiercely bent on slaughter.
We tramped for a good long time across the island before we discovered
a herd of pigs in a little open space beyond a wood. They were
grunting, as pigs do, and poking their snouts into the ground as if in
search of food, though I doubted whether they would find anything fit
to eat, even for them, which are not particular, as everybody knows.
We crept up very stealthily to the edge of the open space, so that they
did not perceive us, and then, selecting the two nearest animals, we
let fly our shafts both at the same moment. The arrows flew very
swiftly from the bows, but clean over the pigs, so that we did not hit
one of them, and the twang of the bow-strings being very audible, the
pigs instantly took fright, and scampered away, all but one old boar,
as he seemed, who stood with his snout lifted, grunting very loud, as
if angry with being disturbed.
"I'll have a shot for old father bacon," says Billy, fitting an arrow
to the string, and taking aim as well as he could, he shot it; but
having seen that his first shot went too high, he aimed the second too
low, and it stuck in the ground a yard or so in front of the solitary
boar. And then Billy flew into a mighty rage, I assure you, for the
boar marched up to the arrow, sticking out of the earth, and sniffed at
it with very loud grunts for a moment, and then snapped it up and broke
it in two. "There's half-a-day's work spoiled," cried Billy, who was
already angry enough at having missed his mark twice, and he rushed
out, calling the boar by many very unseemly names. The beast was taken
by surprise, and instantly turned tail and scampered after the rest of
the herd, with Billy at his heels, and me not far behind, for
remembering the scrape that Billy had fallen into once before, I did
not like to let him go out of my sight. And so we pursued those pigs
for above half-an-hour, I should think, and never came within fifty
yards of them, nor getting any chance to take a shot at them, because
they were never still. We gave it up when we were thoroughly weary,
and were going back to our hut, much disappointed of our expected meat,
when Billy remembered that we had left two arrows where we had first
encountered the pigs.
"We must go back for 'em," says he, shaking his fist in the direction
whither the pigs had fled. "They are easier shot than made, and easier
broke than shot, drat it; but I'll make 'em porkers pay for leading us
this dance, see if I don't."
I agreed that our arrows, made with such toil, were much too precious
to be wasted, and we went back to the place where we had shot them, not
finding it by any means easy to light on the spot again.
"We shall have to practise, Billy," I said on the way; "we can't expect
to be good marksmen all at once."
"I s'pose we can't," says Billy ruefully; "we do have to have three or
four goes at a thing afore we does it proper. But I did want some
pork."
Coming at length to the open space, we searched for a good time before
we found the two arrows; but as I was stooping I made a discovery that
quite banished my disappointment and more than made amends for our long
tramp. The pigs, as I said, had been grubbing the ground vainly, as I
had thought; but I now saw that it was not so, for there before me lay
a long round root as big as a man's head, and of a dark brown colour,
which I immediately recognized as a yam. I called Billy to come and
see it, and remembering that we had ate some that time we sojourned on
the island, and found them very like potatoes when boiled and mashed,
but sweeter, we were exceedingly pleased, and Billy at once said that
we must certainly make some pork sausages to go with our mashed
potatoes.
"Provided the pigs have left us any to mash," said I, for I now saw
that they had grubbed the ground pretty thoroughly, and though we
searched it for some time, we did not find above six yams, which we
carried back to our hut, and boiled one of them for dinner. Unless we
should find another plantation of them on the island, which I scarcely
hoped for, it seemed that our supply would be soon exhausted; but it
then came into my mind that we might plant some of those that we had,
and so grow them for ourselves. We knew nothing about the season for
planting, nor the right kind of soil for them, but supposed they would
be something like potatoes in their nature as well as in their taste,
and so determined to eat no more of them for the present, but to keep
them until such time as seemed fitting for planting.
This question made us think of times and seasons, which, living from
day to day as we did without concern for the morrow, we had not yet
troubled ourselves about. It was summer when we first came to the
island, and we were now, as I guessed, about the end of autumn, though
there was little in the weather to show it, nor very much, so far as we
could tell, in the varying length of day and night. But the near
approach of winter came upon my mind with a kind of shock. We knew not
what the winter was like in these latitudes, nor whether we should be
afflicted with severe cold; but we could tell from the ripeness of the
fruits of the island that they would not hang much longer upon the
trees; indeed, some had already fallen; and I began to wonder what we
should do for food in the winter. We had discovered that the
bread-fruit, when plucked, remained good for three or four days, if the
rind was not pierced; but we had never kept any for a longer time, and
I was not a little dismayed as I thought of the straits we should be
put to if we could not preserve the food in some way.
Billy reminded me that the native people with whom we had dwelt for a
fortnight had given us a bread-fruit pudding, which was delicious. I
asked him whether he had seen it made, and he said that he had not, but
it looked uncommon like batter pudding when it was baked, and indeed I
remembered it was just such a rich brown colour as well-cooked batter.
I had many a time seen my aunt Susan make batter, and though we had
neither milk nor flour, we had eggs, and it seemed to me at least worth
the trial to attempt a batter of bread-fruit. Accordingly we took two
large bread-fruits, very ripe, and having cut away the rind and
rejected the core, we put the white pulpy part into one of my earthen
vessels, and pounded and worked it with a thick stick until it looked
very like a thick batter. Billy meanwhile had beat up an egg, and when
we added this to the other, and mixed it, Billy cried out it reminded
him of pancake day, when his stepmother always made two thick pancakes
for herself and his father, and he had a thin one if there was any left
over. Since all the earthen vessels I had made were round-bottomed,
and we had nothing at all resembling a frying-pan, we were thinking of
boiling the mixture, and hoped it would not burn, being so thick, when
Billy asked why we shouldn't bake it. I pointed out that we had no
baking tins, and without something to hold it the batter would indeed
become as flat as a pancake; but Billy was equal to this difficulty.
"I've seen my mother--she ain't my real mother, 'course--put a piece of
greasy paper round a dough-cake before she popped it in the oven, and
it came out all right, only a bit burnt sometimes, and then, my eye,
didn't she make a row!" When I said that we had no paper, he at once
replied, "But we've got leaves, and I don't see why a leaf of a leaf,
as you may call it, shouldn't be as good as a leaf of paper, or better,
the name being such." This appeared to me to be quite a good notion,
so we got some leaves and wrapped some of our batter in them, making
little oblong parcels about four inches long and two broad, and these
we put into our oven, which I have before mentioned, and when we took
them out and removed the leaves, we found our cakes to be of a fine
brown colour, and they smelled exceeding good and tasted better: in
fact, we had made the bread-fruit pudding we had so much liked before,
only ours was richer by the addition of the egg.
We were very well pleased with this, but I own I was still better
pleased two or three days after, for I then came upon a portion of the
batter which we had left uncooked in the pot and forgotten, and found
that it was perfectly sweet and good, being not in the least offensive
either in taste or smell. It then came into my head all of a sudden
that if the bread-fruit pulp would keep good for days even when exposed
to the air, it might keep good for weeks and months if kept from the
air, and thus all our anxiety about our winter food would be removed.
When I suggested this to Billy he shook his head, saying, "We used to
keep potatoes in a cellar, but then they had their jackets on, and I've
never heard tell of fruits keeping. You can't keep an apple, 'cause
I've tried, only I ate it afore it was quite rotten." But I was
determined to make the experiment, though having no cellar or other
confined space I was at first at a loss how to form a large enough
receptacle for our store. After considering of it for some time I had
a notion of digging a hole in the ground and lining it with pottery
ware, but to this Billy said that we might use leaves and so save a lot
of time. So we dug a hole, not very deep, and lined it well with large
thick leaves, and into it we poured a great quantity of the bread-fruit
pulp that we had mashed--not mixing it with eggs, of course--and then
we covered it over with leaves, and put heavy stones on the top, and
waited for a week to see what came of it.
[Sidenote: Archery]
While we were waiting the result of our experiment at storage we
practised very diligently with our bows and arrows, and I observed that
Billy was pitting himself against me, though he did not say so, at
least not then, but he told me afterwards that he meant to try whether
Little John could not beat Robin Hood. At first we chose broad trees
for our targets, but we found after a time, when we began to be able to
hit them, that our arrows were very much blunted against the bark,
which made us think of devising a target, for the arrows took so long
to shape that it was important to us they should not be injured. This
making of a target gave us no trouble, for we had only to stretch
leaves across a light framework made of twigs; and to mark the centre
of it, for what I believe is called the bull's-eye, we smeared a circle
with the sticky substance which, as I have said, came out of the bark
of the bread-fruit tree when we beat it to make our flag, and then
sprinkled the sticky circle with sand, which stood out, light in
colour, against the dark green of the leaves.
We set up this target at varying distances, which we made greater as we
grew more proficient, and we found that our arrows took no hurt from
striking against it, passing through the leaves, indeed, so that we had
to make another target by and by; but not very soon, because it was
some time before either of us hit the target at all, and as for a
bull's-eye, we thought we should never do it. Indeed, when we had
practised for about a week, Billy declared that he was sure there never
was a Robin Hood (he had made the same declaration before about
Robinson Crusoe), and he thought the tales about these two heroes must
have been invented by the same liar, because the one was Robin and the
other Robinson. When I said that was impossible, because Robin Hood
lived five or six hundred years before Crusoe was heard of, Billy said
'twas no matter; the stories of both were all pure fudge, and he
wouldn't believe until he saw it that any one could ever hit the
bull's-eye at a greater distance than ten yards. It chanced that our
target was thirty yards away at that moment, and fitting an arrow to
the bow, I let it fly without any nice calculation, and Billy was
fairly dumfoundered, and so was I, when we saw the arrow sticking in
the circle of sand, a little to the right of the exact centre. For a
moment Billy looked foolish; then he flushed, and turning truculently
to me he said, "I lay you a dollar you don't do it again, not in ten
shots." This put me on my mettle, and it did not occur to either of us
that we had no dollars nor any such thing; but I fired my shots one
after another with the most careful aim I could, and missed the target
altogether six times, and the other times only grazed the outer rim.
Whereupon Billy began to caper, and said I owed him a dollar, and a
pretty fine Robin Hood I was, with more of that boyish sort of talk,
which made me angry, and I flung down my bow, intending, I own, to
punch Billy's head. When he saw this, he flung down his bow also, and
squared himself, and put up his fists in such a remarkable way, calling
to me to come on, that I could not keep from laughing, and then he
laughed too, and so we were friends again at once. This was the first
time things got so near to a fight with us, and though we had little
disagreements that are not worth mentioning, we never fought but once
all the time we were on the island, and of that I must tell in its
place, if I think of it.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
OF PIGS AND POULTRY, AND OF THE DEPREDATIONS OF THE WILD DOGS, UPON
WHOM WE MAKE WAR
It was after about a week of this practice in archery that we removed
the covering from the hole where we had stored the bread-fruit, and
looked to see how it was. To our great delight it was perfectly good,
though it had changed its colour, being now somewhat yellowish, and
also its smell, which was now something like that of yeast. This made
me think that the paste was fermenting, as indeed it was; but it seemed
to be none the worse, and we cooked a little and ate it with relish,
finding it rather acid, like cheese. Being satisfied on this point, we
immediately set to work to dig a larger hole, which we filled in like
manner with a great quantity of bread-fruits, mashing them to a paste
first in our earthen vessels. And having our anxiety thus relieved on
the score of provision for the winter, we ought to have gone back to
our work on the big hut, but we were so bent on improving our
marksmanship, Billy being determined to go pig-hunting, that we spent
nearly all our time in practising with our bows and arrows. By this
means we made ourselves pretty fair marksmen at the stationary target,
but when Billy talked about going out to shoot pigs, I said that he
would find it a very different matter to hit a moving thing. However,
he would not listen to me, but left me making some new arrows while he
went off by himself. He came back after a long time, empty-handed and
very crestfallen, having lost two arrows and broken a third, without
hitting a single pig.
"I tell you what, master," says he, "you carry the target while I take
a shot at it: that will be as good as a running pig, and learn me to
shoot 'em."
"And suppose you hit me?" I said.
"Well, I might, that's true," he said, "you being bigger than a pig.
Don't I wish I knew how that there Little John aimed when he was
shooting at a deer!"
[Illustration: Clay Saucepans, and Tongs of Wood]
This made me think whether we could not devise a moving target, and
though I could not hit upon any means for several days, I did at last,
and we tried it, and it answered my expectations very well, and
moreover furnished us with a kind of sport, which was very grateful to
us in our loneliness. What we did was this: we made a target somewhat
larger than our first, in the same manner, but shaped like a man, that
is, the top was smaller than the rest, but we did not attempt to make
limbs. We made it very light, for this reason: that we strung it to a
thin rope made of the fibres of the plant I have mentioned before, this
rope being tied to two trees, about twenty yards apart, and at the
height of a man from the ground. We hung the target (or the Guy
Fawkes, as Billy called it) to the rope by a large loop, and to this we
tied another rope, but thinner, so that the guy could be drawn easily
along the rope from tree to tree. Then we took turns, the one shooting
at the guy with his arrows while the other drew it along as quickly as
he could, and we tried which of us could plant the most arrows in the
figure while it moved over this space of twenty yards, the loser having
to prepare the food for next day's meals. We found it very good sport
and very good practice too, and there was not much to choose between
us, though I think I became a trifle more expert than Billy, he
excelling me in muscular strength, but I having, or acquiring, a
certain knack with which strength has nothing to do.
You may be sure that as soon as we had attained to any skill in hitting
our running man Billy was mad to go out once more and shoot pigs, and
we were talking about doing so, as we ate our breakfast one morning,
when we heard a great uproar in the wood just below the mountain,
running out towards the natural archway. It seemed as if all the dogs
in the island were barking and yelping at once. Wondering what the
cause might be, we snatched up our bows and arrows, having also our
axes as usual, and hasting across the lava bed towards the noise, we
came upon a great sow with a litter of tiny pigs, and twenty or more
dogs around them. This amazed us, for we had never seen the dogs
attack the pigs before, and I guessed that they would not have done so
now, only the sow was limping as if one of her legs was broken, and I
thought she might have fallen from a height, the ground hereabouts
being very rough and jagged. However, she was making a good fight of
it against the dogs, and we stopped to watch the struggle, forgetting
our own errand.