The Bear Dance and Wolf Pack — Robinson Crusoe

Friday asked leave to shake the bear's hand and give them a laugh. Crusoe said the beast would eat him. Friday threw off his boots, hit the bear with a stone, and led the chase to an oak. He climbed, leaving his gun at the foot, and the bear climbed after him. Out on a thinning branch he jumped and shook, crying that he would teach the bear to dance. The bear clung and would not come far enough to fall.

Friday slid down, took his gun, and waited until the bear came backward down the trunk. He shot it dead through the ear, and laughed when he saw the others pleased. Bears at home, he said, were killed with a long arrow. They left the skin. Night was close, the guide was hurt, and wolves were howling. In the plain a dozen were at a dead horse. Then about a hundred came on in a line. Firing by turns, the travellers broke the charge with a shout and sent it into the wood.

Farther on they found two men and a horse already eaten, a fired gun beside one body, and a pack Crusoe put at three hundred. Behind felled timber, horses in the centre, they fired until a train of powder along the log had to be lit. The flash turned the rush. Swords finished the lame wolves, and about sixty were killed in all. They reached a town already in arms. The guide could not go on, so a new one led them to Toulouse, where people said the horses had drawn the wolves and it was a wonder any of the party lived. Crusoe would rather meet a weekly storm at sea than cross those mountains again.

He landed at Dover on 14 January, his bills paid. The widow took his money. He sold the plantation in the Brazils for thirty-two thousand eight hundred pieces of eight, the old captain's income still charged on the estate. For almost seven years she kept him at home. He married, had three children, and his wife died. In 1694 he sailed with his nephew for the East Indies and spent twenty days on the island. The Spaniards held it. He left a carpenter and a smith, and from the Brazils sent cattle and seven women. He never sent the Englishmen the women he had promised from England. Three hundred Caribbees later ruined the plantations. A storm broke their canoes after two fights, and the settlers recovered the place. The rest of his story, he says, belongs to a second part.