CHAPTER X
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.
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.
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.