Crusoe dines with Poll as the only voice, the old dog at his right, and a tame cat to either side. The cats from the ship are dead and buried by him. The two beside him he has kept tame. The rest ran wild, raided the house, and left only after he shot a great many. He wants the far boat and fears the water. Five or six days along the shore, in goatskin cap, jacket, and breeches, he goes to watch the current again. It is smooth at first. On the ebb it runs well off the land, and he sees that tide and wind decide how close it comes. He could bring the boat round by waiting. He cannot bear to try. He will build a second canoe, one for each side.
He has two homes by now. Rooms open inside the cave, one of them full of pots and baskets of corn, and the stake wall has grown into trees that hide the house. At the country bower he keeps a hedge, a ladder, a tent of sail, and a couch of skins. The goat pens are staked so tight he has to pull wood out when it grows. He sleeps there on the way to the boat and, if he sails, stays a stone's throw from the beach.
One noon, on that path, he finds a single naked footprint, toes and heel, and no other mark. He searches, sees nobody, and goes home hardly feeling the ground, every stump a man. He does not sleep. A devil would not leave one print for the next sea to wipe away, so he settles on people from the mainland who have already gone. If they saw the boat they may come back. He, who once wanted any human face, now dreads a foot in the sand. After three days shut in, the goats unmilked, he hopes the print is his own. It is not. He was never on that sand when he laid the boat up, and his foot is much smaller than the mark. He returns shaking with cold.
That night he thinks of pulling down fences, corn, and bower so the island will look empty. He sleeps at last and wakes calmer. Fifteen years, and no one has stayed. He can hide. On the double row of trees planted twelve years before, he raises a second wall, packs it with timber and old cables, banks the inner side with earth until it is about ten feet thick, and sets seven muskets to fire in two minutes. Beyond it he plants near twenty thousand stakes. Two years make a grove. Five or six make a wood with no path through it. Two ladders, drawn up behind him, are the only way in. He waits there, still not knowing whose foot printed the sand.
Coming Up in Chapter 11
Farther west than he has ever walked, Crusoe comes down to the south-west point and stops at a shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of human bodies, and at a circle dug in the earth where a fire has burned.
