The Island of Yellow Sands: An Adventure and Mystery Story for Boys

by Ethel C. Brill

Then Ronald sought for game while the Indian and Jean began canoe making. Ronald met with no success. Not a trace of game of any kind could he find. Apparently there was not even a squirrel on the island, and no gulls frequented it. He tried fishing from shore and rocks, but did not get a bite. Once more the wanderers were obliged to lie down for the night supperless, while from somewhere across the water an owl hooted derisively.

“If that fellow comes over here where we can get him, he’ll be howling in a different tone,” growled Ronald. He was so hungry he would not have rejected an owl, in spite of its animal diet.

“The great horned one is far too wise to come close enough for us to catch or shoot him,” Jean replied.

All three had worked late by firelight that night. They were expert at canoe building, and, though they did not appear to hurry, but performed each step of the operation carefully and thoroughly, they wasted few motions. Without any ready made materials, however, and no tools except their axes, knives and a big, strong needle for sewing, the task was necessarily a slow one and could not be completed in one day. They had felled suitable trees, white cedar for the frame and birch for the covering, and had skilfully peeled the birch bark, stripping a trunk in a single piece and scraping the inner surface as a tanner scrapes leather. Their ball of wattap and chunk of gum were gone, so they had to dig small spruce roots and gather spruce gum, soak, peel and split the roots and twist the strands into cord, and boil the gum to prepare it for use. Ribs, gunwales, cross pieces and sheathing had to be hewed and whittled out of the tough, elastic, but light and easily cut cedar wood, and soaked to render them as pliable as possible.

An open space, with soil deep enough to hold stakes, had been selected, and the stakes cut and driven in to outline the shape of the canoe. Within them the frame was formed, large stones being placed on the ribs to keep them in shape until dry. Slender cross pieces or bars strengthened and held the ribs in place, and the ends were pointed and fitted into holes in the rim, then bound with wattap. The pieces of bark, which had been sewed together, were fitted neatly over this frame, and wattap was wrapped over and over the gunwale and passed through bark and ribs. Next to the bark, and held in place by the ribs, strips of cedar, shaved as thin as the blade of a knife, were placed to form sheathing. The last process was the gumming of the seams to make them water-tight. The gum, softened by heat, was applied, and the seams carefully gone over with a live coal held in a split stick, while, with the thumb of the other hand, the canoe maker pressed in the sticky substance.

The boat was done at last, and, though made without saw, hammer, chisel, plane, nails, boards or paint, was, when completed and put in the water, a strong, sound, light, graceful, well-balanced craft that satisfied even the Indian’s critical eye. It floated buoyantly, and was water proof in every seam.

During the boat building, a few small fish had been caught, but no one had had half enough to eat. As the three paddled away in their new canoe, they debated whether they had better land at once or skirt the shore looking for possible beaches. They were not yet fully convinced that they might not be near the yellow sands. Food, not sand, was the first necessity, however, and Nangotook and Jean expressed themselves in favor of landing immediately and looking for game. But Ronald pointed out that they had scarcely any ammunition left, and that to catch game with snares and traps would be slow work. They had better try for fish first, he said, and they could do that while going along shore. Jean at once agreed, and Nangotook, when he saw the others were both against him, grunted his assent. So, when close to a gently sloping rock beach, they turned and paddled northeast, with a fishing line attached to the stern paddle.

They had gone but a little way, when a pull at the line signaled a bite. The fish did not make as hard a fight as the lake trout they had caught before, while fishing in the same manner, and when Jean pulled it over the side, he was disappointed to find that it was a siskiwit or lake salmon. Siskiwit are not very good eating for they are very fat and this was a small one weighing not over three pounds. Hungry as they were, they decided to try their luck again, in the hope of getting a better and larger fish, but after paddling for fifteen or twenty minutes and catching another larger siskiwit, they could wait no longer.

They put in to the rock beach very carefully, stepping out into the water before the bow grounded, to avoid scraping the new canoe. There on the rock Ronald and Etienne made a fire of moss, bark and birch wood, while Jean cleaned the fish. The boiled siskiwit was very fat and oily, but the three were so nearly starved that it seemed a feast to them. As they had not been accustomed to use salt with their food they did not miss that luxury. While the lads were preparing the meal, Etienne had discovered a well defined hare runway. The boys had to admit that a supply of food was a prime necessity, and they agreed to camp where they were until next day and make every attempt to secure game.

After Etienne had gone to set his snares, Ronald and Jean crossed the sloping rock beach, which was rough and scored. A little back from the water’s edge it was covered more or less thickly, first with lichens, and then with moss, bearberry plants and creeping evergreens. Looking for signs of game, they pushed their way through spruce and birch woods, stopping several times to set snares where hares had made a runway or squirrels had left a little pile of cone scales, with the seeds neatly extracted, at the foot of a spruce. The two had been going through the woods for perhaps half a mile, when they came out suddenly on the shore of a body of water.