زمستان

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Winter

There were dark clouds in the sky, and the sea was stormy. I looked out to sea and thought, ‘The Sea has finally broken up our ship. There will be more wood on the beach. And this rough sea will come up to our boat on the beach.’

‘Boys,’ I said, ‘we must pull our boat high up on the beach. We don’t want the sea to carry it away. And we must turn it over, so it doesn’t fill with water.’

We went down to the beach and pulled the boat up high on the sand and turned it over.

Then Ernest pointed and said, ‘What’s that thing there? That square thing?’

I looked and saw a big box. It was nearly covered with sand. We uncovered it and opened it, and it was full of a sailor’s clothes. The clothes were very wet and salty from the sea water.

‘We can wash them in the river and dry them,’ I said.

‘They’ll be too big for us,’ said Jack. ‘They’re too big for Fritz, or Ernest.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they’ll be too big for you. But you’ll be glad when your other clothes have got wet in the rain.’

Then I thought, ‘Now winter’s coming, what do we need? Dry firewood for my wife to cook with under the Tree House.’ We didn’t, of course, cook in the Tree House, because of the wooden floor. So we found a lot of firewood and put it at the foot of the tree, under the Tree House.

Then I thought, ‘In the stormy weather we won’t be able to go far from our house to get food. We must be sure that we have a lot of food in or near the house. Then we can use that when the weather’s very bad. We’ve got barrels of salt meat and buffalo meat. I hope it will keep well. We can’t get any more salt.’

The sea was now coming up over the rocks. And there was no sunshine to dry the salt.

My thoughts continued, ‘We’ve got eggs, of course, from our chickens. Perhaps we can catch fish with the fishing line from the ship. But that’s not easy when the sea is very stormy. We’ve got sweet potatoes and a lot of coconuts. The goats will give us a little milk, and there’s plenty of dry grass for our animals.’

‘Now,’ I said to my family,’ we’ve got a good house and plenty of food, so we’re ready for the winter.’

That’s what I thought. But I was very wrong!

The next few months were probably the unhappiest months that I have ever known in all my life. We had four enemies - the rain, the wind, the cold and the shorter days. The days were not much shorter, but we had to spend a lot of time inside the house because of the bad weather.

The rain came down like a river from the sky. It rained nearly all day and all night. There were only a few days when it stopped. Most of the land was under water. The river was too big to cross, and our bridge was broken. Luckily our garden was on higher ground, and our plants were beginning to come through.

The wind was very strong. When we made our Tree House, I didn’t think about the wind. If a house is built on the ground, with good walls and a low roof, the wind will pass over it. The house is safe. But when a house is built up in a tree, the wind goes up into it.

The roof of our house was made of sailcloth. When it rained, there were deep pools of water on the roof. The water ran over the sides, on to the floor. Then the strong wind pushed the sailcloth up, and a river of rain came down into the room!

The days were not as hot as before, and the nights were the same - sometimes even cold. We sat all day in wet clothes and we couldn’t dry them. In the evenings, we didn’t know how to keep warm. We put stones on the floor of our tree room and lit a fire on them, but soon the room was full of smoke and we were afraid of a fire. We couldn’t get the smoke out of the room. We couldn’t make a hole in the roof because of the rain.

When the sun went down, darkness came suddenly. But even in the daytime, the room was quite dark. We had no light. We burned small pieces of wood, giving a little light. But that wasn’t enough. So at night we sat round in our wet clothes, very cold, in the darkness. There was nothing to do except sleep.

We couldn’t continue like this.

I said, ‘We must go down and live at the foot of the tree. We’ll put a sailcloth over this floor. Then there will be two roofs - the roof in the tree and the roof on this floor. Then we’ll be dry down there.’

We built two walls at the foot of the tree. The animals’ huts made the third wall, and the tree was the fourth wall. We made a hole in the floor of the upstairs room for the smoke from our fire. Now the rain couldn’t come straight down on to the fire.

We were more comfortable in this lower room, but the smell of the animals came in from the huts, and that was terrible.

After a time, we began to have problems with our food. The buffalo meat went bad because there wasn’t enough salt in the barrels. Oh, why didn’t I think about that before? We needed a lot of salt to keep our food fresh through the bad months of the year.

We killed some of the older chickens and ate them. Then, when the weather was better, the boys were able to go out fishing or shooting with their bows and arrows. They brought in a little fish and meat. We had sweet potatoes, but cooking was very difficult. When the weather was good, my wife made enough sweet-potato bread for a few days. But it wasn’t very good.

We didn’t have enough food for the animals. We killed four of the young dogs, leaving only Turk and Flora and two of their babies. We had to find food for the goats, the sheep and the buffaloes. We couldn’t give them enough food in their huts, so we moved them out into the forest. We put coconut shells around their necks, so we could hear them. Then we put a little food in their huts each night, so they wanted to come back home.