Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

“I’ve never eaten one,” said Roger.

“There’s no hen can lay an egg to touch them,” said the old man, “not for meat and virtue. And with dad being over to Bigland there’ll be one for you and one for me and then we shan’t be clemmed for hunger in our sleep.”

He stirred the dry sticks till they blazed up under the kettle which he had filled with fresh water from the beck after Titty and the woodmen had gone. He went into the wigwam and came out with two huge greenish-white eggs and a big spoon with which he lowered them into the kettle. Roger knew that Susan said you ought not to boil eggs in the kettle if you could help it, and he was just going to ask a question about that, but stopped himself, remembering that different tribes have different customs and that he really knew very little about this one.

Then the old man brought out a lot of blankets from the wigwam and shook them and took them back again. Then he came out with a loaf of bread and he opened his pocket knife and cut two big hunks off the loaf. Then he slapped his knee and said he was forgetting the salt and went in again and came out with an old tobacco tin full of salt. Then he took the eggs out of the kettle and put in some tea and put the kettle back on the fire with the tea in it, a thing that Susan never did.

“There’s enough milk left for both of us,” he said, lifting the green bottle, “with dad away.”

The big eggs were almost too hot to touch, but the old charcoal-burner rolled a foxglove leaf and held his egg in that while he began peeling off the shell after battering it a little with the big spoon. He showed Roger how to do the same. By the time half the shell had been peeled off the egg was not so hot and the other half was managed without the leaf, and there were the two eggs, ready to be eaten, bluish, quivering things, like egg-shaped corn-flower moulds. The old man took a bite off the top of his egg, and there was the dark orange yolk trying to pour itself out. Roger did the same to his egg, and both the old man and Roger licked at the orange yolk of their eggs as it ran down over the edge of the white. Then the old man took a huge bite of his bread, and Roger did the same.

“Rare things are duck eggs,” said the old man, dropping a pinch of salt into his.

“Jolly good,” said Roger, “and plenty in them.”

Soon after that the old charcoal-burner began to make things ready for the night.

“You’ll be wanting a pillow,” he said to Roger. “Dad’s taken his coat with him.”

“I’ll put my clothes inside my knapsack,” said Roger.

“You’ll be cold without them,” said the old man.

“I slept in them last night,” said Roger.

“Better sleep in them again,” said the old man, “but I’ll put some dry bracken in that bag of yours to make a pillow.”

“Now then,” he said, a few minutes later, and he helped Roger up on one foot, and almost carried him into the hut. The door was too low for that, and Roger had to crawl through it in spite of his bad foot, which did not hurt him as much as he expected. Inside the hut a farm lantern was hanging, for it was growing dusk outside and very little light came through the doorway, even when the sacking was pulled out of the way. The hut was divided in three by two big logs that lay on the floor, cutting off the bed space on each side, and leaving a narrow passage in the middle where there was a small stone fireplace with no fire in it.

“Too hot for that these nights,” said the old man.

The bed on the left of the doorway was waiting for Roger. A blanket lay on the thickly piled bracken, and at one end of it the old man had put Roger’s knapsack.

“Lie you down there,” said the old man, “and I’ll fold blanket over you and you’ll be warm enough.”

Roger hesitated.

“Have you still got an adder in a box?” he asked.

“Never fear for that,” the old man laughed. “Adder’s my side of the hut and he won’t get out.”

“May I see him?”

“I’ll take him out in the morning,” said the old man. “It’s getting too dark for that now.”

Roger lay down on the blanket with his head on his stuffed knapsack. The old man folded the blanket over him and then folded the other side over the first.

“Snug enough like that,” he said. “Now don’t you be waking when you hear me stirring in the morning. Good night to you.”

“You aren’t going away?” said Roger.

“Nay,” said the old man, “I’ll be close outside.”

There was a bitter smell in the hut, of bracken, and burnt wood and newly cut timber, and smoke from the wood-fire outside, and oil from the smoky farm lantern overhead. The lantern had been joggled a little by the old man in tucking up Roger for the night, and for a long time it went on swinging on the end of the long bit of wire on which it hung, so that splashes of light and shadow moved round the edges of the darkness on the sloping walls of the hut. Part of the way up the walls Roger could see and count the poles of which the hut was built, but above the lantern they melted together into blackness.

Outside there was a noise of chopping, not with an axe but with a knife. And the old man grunted as he worked away by the fire in the deepening dark. The old man? It might be something quite different grunting out there. Roger lifted himself on his elbow and listened. “Chop, chop. Grunt, grunt.” Was it the old man or had something else taken his place?

“What are you doing?” he asked at last.

The grunting stopped.

“Aren’t you asleep?” came back the voice of the old charcoal-burner.

“Not quite,” said Roger.

“I’m just fettling up a crutch,” said the old man. “You’ll be wanting to be getting about in the morning, and that foot of yours’ll be all the better for being off the ground for a day or two. Now, get you to sleep.”

“A crutch for me?”

“Aye.”

And in the shadows dancing along the edges of the darkness overhead, Roger saw Long John Silver with his crutch and his parrot, hopping about the Bristol tavern, stumping the decks of the Hispaniola, and being bothered by the point of the crutch sinking in the loose sand of Treasure Island. Titty had the parrot, and now he was going to have the crutch. This was going to be worth a hurt foot and worth it a hundred times over. How soon would he be able to go across the lake to Holly Howe and stump up the field to the farm, as an old sailor back from the sea, to show his crutch to mother and nurse and the ship’s baby? What would Titty say that Peter Duck thought about it?

Later on in the night he woke to find that all was dark. There was the noise of the old man breathing on the bracken bed at the other side of the hut. There was the noise of wind stirring the tree-tops. The sacking did not cover the whole doorway, or, maybe, a corner of it had blown aside, for looking that way, past his own feet, Roger could see a patch of dark blue sky with stars in it. He thought of the others sleeping in the camp in Swallowdale. Little they knew that a one-legged sailor . . . that Long John Silver . . . that . . . that . . . But before his thought was finished even for himself, he was again as fast asleep as the old charcoal-burner at his side.

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The two captains laid to their oars, and it seemed no time before the war canoe crossed Octopus Lagoon and shot into the lower river, past the wood, and below the Beckfoot garden, where yesterday John had seen the great-aunt pointing with her stick at the daisies on the lawn. “Pull right,” called Mate Peggy. “Right. Easy. Ship your oars.” Nancy and John brought their oars in as the canoe (which was really the Beckfoot rowing boat) slid on into the dark boathouse, where the Amazon lay moored beside Beckfoot motor launch. There seemed to be a good deal of cargo in the Amazon already, what with the tent and the tent-poles, and two sleeping-bags, and some fishing-rods and a lot of mixed food.