Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

“Oughtn’t we to leave someone to keep guard?” asked Able-seaman Titty.

“You can stay if you want to,” said Captain John, “but when we are high up no the hill we shall be able to see right up the lake. If we see the Amazons coming we can get back here quicker than they could get here rowing.”

Titty, thinking of the savages she had come to see, hurriedly agreed that there was no need for a guard.

Then the whole party began scrambling up through the trees. They had not gone very far before they came to a road. They crossed that and then the forest became much steeper. Sometimes it was a wonder how the little trees themselves clung on among the rocks. There were all sorts of trees. Here and there was a tall pine, but most of the trees were oaks and beeches and hazels and mountain ash. There was no path and the brambles on the ground and the long strings of honeysuckle twisting from branch to branch made it hard work pushing through the undergrowth.

“We’d better keep together,” said Mate Susan, when Titty tried to take a line of her own.

“It’s a real forest,” said Roger.

“A jungle almost,” said Titty.

“We ought to have an axe to blaze the trees so that we can be sure of finding our way back,” said John, “but we can’t go far wrong if we keep going straight down on the way back. That will bring us to the lake, anyhow, and once we’re on the shore it’ll be easy.”

“What if we don’t find the charcoal-burners?” asked Titty.

“Listen,” said Captain John. They listened and could hear the steady plunk, plunk of an axe somewhere far above them. “We can’t very well miss them, so long as they are making a noise like that.”

They climbed on and on through the wood. Captain John went first, then Roger and Titty, then Mate Susan, to see that there were no stragglers. Rabbits showed their white scuts as they scampered away among the bushes. A squirrel chattered at them out of a pine tree. Roger chattered back at it.

“It’s almost as good as a monkey,” said Titty. “If only there were some parrots.”

Just then there was a loud raucous squawking close in front of them and a tremendous flapping among the leaves, and a pair of jays flashed through the tops of the trees, showing for a moment white and black and pinky-grey and the bright blue bands on their wings.

“There are the parrots,” said Roger. “Talking ones. Listen to them saying ‘Pretty Polly,’ only it’s in savage language, not ours.”

At last they came to a track in the wood. It seemed to lead upwards towards the noise of the wood-chopping.

“Now we must make a blaze,” said Captain John, “to show the place where we came into this track. Then we’ll know where to turn off on our way down.”

Titty pulled out her knife and cut a blaze on the side of a hazel. It was not a very big one.

“We might easily miss that,” said the captain. “We must have something easier to see.” He bent down two branches of the hazel and tied the ends of them to the tree, so that they made two big hoops at the side of the track.

“We’re sure to see those,” said Roger.

“We’ll have a patteran as well,” said Captain John.

“What’s that?” asked Titty.

“It’s what gipsies make to show each other which way they have gone. You take a long stick and a short one and put them in the road across each other, so that the long stick shows the way.”

He cut two sticks and put the long one in the middle of the track pointing towards the hazel with the two bent boughs. The short stick he laid on the other, so that they made a cross.

“That’s a patteran,” he said.

“But suppose somebody kicks them away?” said Roger.

“Nobody would do it on purpose,” said Susan.

“And if they did, there would still be John’s hoops and my blaze,” said Titty.

They got on much faster when they were walking along the track which wound up the side of the hill than they had when they were clambering through the bushes and trees. Presently the track came out into a clearing at a patch of flat ground. In the middle of the clearing was a big circle of black burnt earth.

“This is where the savages have had a corroboree,” said Titty. “They cooked their prisoners on the fire and danced round them.”

“Yelling like mad,” said Roger.

On the other side of the clearing they found the track again. The noise of the chopping was now close at hand. A keen smell of smouldering wood tickled their nostrils. Suddenly they came out of the trees again on the open hillside. There were still plenty of larger trees, but the smaller ones and the undergrowth had been cut away. There were long piles of branches cut all of a length and neatly stacked, ready for the fire. There was one pile that made a complete circle with a hole in the middle of it. Forty or fifty yards away there was a great mound of earth with little jets of blue wood smoke spirting from it. A man with a spade was patting the mound and putting a spadeful of earth wherever the smoke showed. Sometimes he climbed on the mound itself to smother a jet of smoke near the top of it. As soon as he closed one hole another jet of smoke would show itself somewhere else. The noise of chopping had stopped just before the explorers came into the open.

“Look, look,” cried Titty.

At the edge of the wood, not far from the smoking mound, there was a hut shaped like a round tent, but made not of canvas but of larch poles set up on end and all sloping together so that the longer poles crossed each other at the top. On the side of it nearest to the mound there was a doorway covered with a hanging flap made of an old sack. The sack was pulled aside from within and a little, bent old man, as wrinkled as a walnut and as brown, with long, bare arms covered with muscles, came out. He blinked at the explorers in the sunlight.

Roger took Titty’s hand.

“Hullo, you!” said the little old man, “come to have a look, have you? Glad to see you.”

“Good morning,” said Captain John.

“It is that,” said the little old man, “it’s a grand day.”

“Good morning,” said the rest of the Swallows.

“Same to you,” said the old man. He seemed a very friendly savage. Roger let go of Titty’s hand.

All the Swallows were staring at the hut.

“It’s a Red Indian wigwam,” said Titty.

“Like to look inside?” said the old man. “Folk generally what do,” he added, almost to himself.

“May we?” said Titty, partly to the old man and partly to Mate Susan.

“Aye,” said the old man, and as for Susan, she was as keen as Titty to see inside.

The old man took a corner of the flap of sacking and hooked it up on a nail on the outside of the wigwam.

“Come in,” he said. “You’ll get used to the dark in a minute.”

The doorway was so low that Captain John had to bend. It was so low that in spite of the sunlight outside it was very dark in the hut. The Swallows went in one by one and stood together inside the doorway. The old man had gone in first, but they could hardly see him. They heard him chuckle.

“You’ll see better than bats in a minute. Sit you down on yon bed.”

Gradually their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and they saw that on each side of the hut a stout log divided off a place where there were rugs and blankets. Between the two logs there was an open space, where it looked as if there had been a small fire. The only light came through the doorhole. Not a speck of light came from between the poles of which the wigwam was made. Every chink had been well stuffed with moss. Overhead there hung a lantern, like their own camp lantern, from a hook at the end of a bit of wire. But it was not lit. High above them was pitch darkness, where the poles met each other at the pointed top of the hut. The old man was squatting on the log that shut off one of the bed-places. The Swallows sat in a row along the other.