Crusoe crosses the island with gun, hatchet, dog, and raisins. From the western height he makes out land fifteen or twenty leagues off, perhaps a Spanish coast where a ship might pass, perhaps the cannibal shore between that coast and Brazil. He knocks a young parrot down with a stick and carries it home. Years will pass before it says his name. The far beach is thick with turtles, against three on his own shore in a year and a half, and with birds he will not spend powder on. Goats see him too soon on the flat. He will not move. Twelve miles east he sets a pole and turns back on a new path.
Haze traps him. Wooded hills close out the sun for three or four days, and he has to find the sea, find the pole, and come the long way home. The dog seizes a kid. Crusoe saves it, collars it with rope-yarn, and leaves it in the bower. He has been gone more than a month. The hammock feels like a settlement, and he resolves not to travel far from it again. When he returns, the kid is nearly starved. Fed, it follows him like a dog and will not leave.
On 30 September, in the autumn rains, he keeps the second anniversary of the landing. He starts to thank God that this life may be happier than his old one, then stops, unwilling to bless a condition he still wants to escape. One sad morning the Bible opens on the promise never to leave him or forsake him, and the fits of weeping that used to halt his work begin to ease. He reads three times a day. A board for one shelf takes forty-two days.
In November the barley and rice stand up, and goats and hares shear the blade to the ground. A hedge and the dog at the gate save the crop. Birds then cover the ears. He shoots three and hangs them in chains, and the rest leave that ground. Late in December he cuts the ears with a cutlass, rubs the grain by hand, and guesses near two bushels of rice and two and a half of barley. He will not eat it. Mill, sieve, yeast, salt, and oven are still missing, and he sets the next six months to inventing them.
Coming Up in Chapter 8
Shut in by rain after sowing seed enough for an acre, Crusoe spends two months on clay that collapses, cracks, or falls apart in his hands. Then a broken shard left in the cooking fire comes out red and hard as stone, and he sits up all night to burn whole pots the same way.
