Island of the Lost by Joan Druett Read Free Book Online Page B

precious small boat and keep it safe from high tides and storms. They then decided to build their cabin on a hillock nearby, about forty feet above sea level, and conveniently close to the tent, the brook, the beach, and the wreck.
    It also had the advantage that they would not have to go far to replenish the larder during the busy weeks of constructing the hut, because the sea lions were so numerous in the surrounding bush—“they go roaring about the woods like wild cattle,” wrote Musgrave six days later. “Indeed, we expect they will come and storm the tent some night. We live chiefly on seal meat, as we have to be very frugal with our own little stock; we kill them at the door of the tent as we require them.”
    With more experience in preparing and eating seal meat, they had learned to pick and choose their game. The animal they had killed and eaten first must certainly have been a bull, because they had found the meat so rank and oily. “We cannotuse the old bulls,” wrote Musgrave. The females and the calves, they found, could be very good eating. “We got one young one which had never been in the water,” Musgrave went on; “this was delicious—exactly like lamb.”
    They had salted down two carcasses for future use, though it didn’t seem likely that they would be short of game for quite a while—“we have no occasion to go far after them, as they come close to the tent; indeed we were very much annoyed with them in the night.” On one occasion he had been forced to take up the gun and put a bullet through the tail of one invader. “We have not been troubled with them since,” Musgrave added grimly.
    This was also, though, a mocking reminder of the riches he could have made if only the
Grafton
had not been lost. “If we had been fortunate enough to have kept the vessel afloat, I have no doubt but in two months or less we should have loaded her,” he wrote, going on to despair yet again about the hardness of his fate: “After getting to where I might have made up for what has been lost, I lose the means of doing so. The vessel leaves her bones here, and God only knows whether we are all to leave our bones here also. And what is to become of my poor unprovided-for family? It drives me mad to think of it. I can write no more.”
    The best remedy for despondency was to keep busy, François Raynal recording that Musgrave, George, and Alick were busy felling trees, cutting them into eight-foot lengths, and piling them on the hillside ready for further use. “As for myself, being too feeble for any hard work, I mended the torn clothing of my companions,” he wrote. He also cooked and tended the fire, all the time waving away the insects, which continued toplague them horribly. However, “For every ill there is a good,” he quoted, going on to describe the abundant, charming birdlife that was attracted to the campsite by the flies. “Never having been alarmed by man, they hovered round about us, and perched themselves on the branches, within easy reach of our hands.”
    The first to pay a call was a species of little blue robin (probably the Auckland Island pipit,
Anthus novaeseelandiae
), which was so very partial to flies that the men used to catch the insects on the wing for the fun of hand-feeding them to these little birds, which were so tame they would perch on their arms and legs to pick the flies off their clothes.
    â€œWe had also for neighbours, in the wood, some small, green, red-headed parrots,” Raynal continued. All five men found these astonishing, as they associated parakeets with the tropics: “Ours, however, seemed very well pleased and fully satisfied with their lot.”
    Known by its Maori name
kakariki
—“green”—in its native New Zealand because of its spectacular coloring, this parrot, a member of the
Cyanoramphus
species, has an emerald body, blue feathers mixed