Still anxious to know their owner, the following morning I repaired again to the spot, and hung my own rudely formed weapons on the same tree from which I had taken the others. My motives were, first, to ascertain whether any person would yet come to remove them, and also to inform those who might come for that purpose, that another human being was in the neighbourhood.
The bow and arrows hung there a month, when I gave up all hopes of seeing any person in the woods; still the event caused me much uneasiness, and ever afterwards occasioned me to tread the paths around with extreme caution.
Flint and steel
Being now furnished with well-made arms, I soon brought down my birds, and might have fared sumptuously, could I have procured a fire. All my waking hours were, therefore, spent in bewailing this want, when one morning, as I was digging with my stick to come at a land tortoise that had crept into a hole, I raked out a piece of flint, and the tinder-box occurring to my mind, I struck it on the back of my knife, and instantly produced sparks, which actually made me leap for joy. My delight, however, was but of short duration. How were the sparks to be collected? I had no tinder—no matches. I then thought of my shirt, which I had long cast off; but then I had no matches, and must have fire before I could make tinder.
My joy was soon turned into despondency. I threw down the flint, and in the bitterness of my disappointment, apostrophised it, as the cock in the fable did, when scratching on a dunghill he found a jewel instead of a grain of corn. "Are all my days to be spent," I ejaculated, "in hopes that delight me only to make me more miserable?" Suddenly it occurred to my memory, that when at school, our small pieces of artillery were fired with lighted decayed wood, what the boys called touch-wood. Repossessing myself of the flint, I flew to my old sleeping-place, and in my impatience, struck a light on my former bed—the soft wood in the interior—it ignited, and smouldered. I was in an ecstacy of delight, and clapped my hands with exultation. Still I had no flame. I then collected some dried leaves, and holding them loosely over the spot that was alight, I blew with my mouth; a severely burnt hand soon informed me that I had succeeded.
My first fire was indeed a bonfire: heaping more leaves and dried sticks on to it, the tree was entirely consumed, and a number of others so damaged as very soon to become touch-wood.
The thunder-storm
A terrible thunder-storm succeeded this exploit. So wholly absorbed had I been with the fire, that when it expended itself, I found myself in total darkness, the moon having been suddenly obscured. All the inhabitants of the wood were restless and uneasy in their beds. I could hear the stag startle, and again lay himself down. Flashes of lightning showed the birds, lifting their heads at intervals, then returning them hastily again under their wings. The storm had for some time been gathering on the tops of the forest, and had now spread its black mantle over the moon, while I, like a school-boy on the fifth of November, had been exulting over a blaze.
On the storm advanced, in the majesty of darkness, moving on the wings of the blast, which my imagination pictured as uprooting the trees around me. The thunder rolled over the crown of the forest in the rear of the lightning. Rifted clouds continued to pass over my head. An owl left its dirge unfinished, and fitted its ruffled feathers into a cleft of a blasted tree over my head. The wild animals that prowl by night, with famished stomachs, sought shelter in their dens.
I alone stood bared to the fury of the storm, incapable of reaching my hut in the darkness of that awful night. The thunder rolled as with ten thousand voices, and the lightning at intervals set the whole forest in a blaze of light. One of the flashes brought down a mora tree near to where I stood, crushing the limbs of other trees as it fell. The crash was terrific. Examining it the next morning by daylight, there was a wild fig-tree growing out of its top, and on the fig grew a wild species of vine. The fig-tree was as large as a common apple-tree, yet owed its growth to an undigested seed, dropped by birds that resort to the mora to feed on its ripe fruit. Such seeds the sap of the mora raises into full bearing, when they, in their turn, are called on to support and give out their sap to different species of seeds, also dropped by birds. In this case the usurpation of the fig on the mora, and the vine on the fig, brought all to an early end. A dead sloth was lying near to the prostrate timber, probably brought down, by the force of its fall, from the branch of another tree.