Smugglers' Island and the devil fires of San Moros

by Clarissa A. Kneeland

Marian sat Turk-fashion on the seaweed deck and steered with the broken oar, which had been spliced to make it better to handle, and Davie was in front of her, dry and warm. When he went to sleep, it was the easiest thing in the world to tie him safely, for some of the stakes of the basketwork had been left high for that especial purpose, and then he did not have to be watched.

Jennie took the spear first, and when, after a while, she grew tired and gave the spear to Esther, who had been teasing for it, she too crept back and crawled in with Davie under the shawls and lay on her back, watching the bright stars above and the mango bushes, weird and grotesque with the flare of the pitalla fire and the backward swirl of the smoke. When the game became an old story to Esther, she yielded the spear to Delbert, and, after replenishing the fire from the fuel in the barrel, she too curled down on the deck at Jennie’s feet.

Delbert and Marian then took turns at steering and spearing, and only turned the Muggywah back toward the pier when the fuel was all gone.

Along with their feathers the children took up other modes of Indian decoration of their persons. They did not quite come to war paint, but they wore long strings of beads, principally of the guaymuchel seeds. These are flat black seeds that grow embedded in a thick sweetish pith enclosed in a pod which grows on a big tree. The pithy part is highly prized by the Indians for eating, and the Island Hawks gathered them for that, and saved the seeds, which, when soft, are easily strung.

Then there were the tiny many-colored clamshells that they found so plentiful on the beaches of the bird islands. They bored holes in these with Marian’s big fat darning-needle and strung them into valuable wampum belts. There were other seeds and beans that they strung, but these were the staples.

One Christmas, Marian gave Jennie a string of bone beads. She had found a number of the bones of some big bird, long, smooth, and hollow, and she whittled them into little sections and strung them on a string of her own hair. That same year her gift to Esther was a headdress of pink feathers taken from a dead bird that Delbert had found washed up on the beach one morning. To Delbert she gave a gay feather-trimmed quiver for his arrows and two new arrow-points of bone, and to Davie a number of little toys whittled out of driftwood. The children had remembered their kindergarten lore that year, and each one made Marian a little basket. They were rather loose and ill-shapen, but they were the forerunners of better ones.

With the Muggywah their food problem was still further simplified. They had lived so long on the Island now that they knew the tides, when they would be high and when low, and always took these into consideration along with the wind. With their gay striped blanket for a sail and a paddle of some sort in the hands of each, with their trips planned to have the tide in their favor as much as possible, they could accomplish much more business than formerly. They could take a dishpanful of boiled-down sea-water out to the salt reef, put it into the rock-hollows there, where the sun finished the evaporation for them, and maybe gather up a dish of dry and quite passably clean salt to take back with them; go on to some other place and gather a lot of clams for dinner, or perhaps oysters; go back again to Smugglers’, put up the salt and attend to the clams, and strike off across the bay toward some distant estero, which would lead back into good pitalla country, or perhaps to a panal which they had seen some days before and been too busy to gather in; and by night they would have accomplished several times as much as when they had crept over the water on the old log with only driftwood and poles for paddles, or else had had to stay on land because the water was a little rough. With the new firm mast which was in no danger of falling down, they could utilize a wind that had been much too strong for them to tamper with before, and with the children able to swim like little fishes, they could brave a possible capsize or tumble overboard. Of course Marian was not going to risk the great waves outside in the Gulf, and when the wind blew the water into breakers on the Island, white and thunderous, she kept her tribe busy in the pasture or the garden.

Some time during each day they took their bath and swim. If the water was too rough on the seaward side, they took it in the harbor, where it was quieter, but there were not so very many days when it was too rough. Marian would keep her eye on Davie if they were out very far, but she had little anxiety about the others. Sometimes they took the Muggywah out into deep water and anchored her with a stone, and had their swim from there.

They had had no storm yet equal to the one on the night of their arrival on the Island, but during the fall after the Muggywah was finished they had one which came nearer to it than any in the three years. It lasted two days and two nights and certainly gave them a miserable time. They turned the little burros out with their mothers to save feeding and milking, and they collected vegetables and bananas in the Cave, which they ate raw, not being able to have a fire to cook by. Indeed, their precious embers were all put out, so that they had to start anew with the fire-sticks when the storm was over.

They snuggled up in the Cave, not going out except when it seemed absolutely necessary, and Marian sang over all the songs she knew and which she had sung to them on rainy days a hundred times before,—or at least it seemed so to her,—and told over all the stories they called for and racked her brains for new ones.