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.