Chapter 9.
A Growing Family.
We headed back to Cape Disappointment, which we named after.
We could not find any of our shipmates there.
For this trip, I decided to take the whole family.
We stopped and gathered more of the waxberries and found a nice spot to rest in a clearing between the sugarcane and bamboo.
Why not live here? asked Jack.
It's lovely, I said, but imagine a tiger coming out of the woods and trapping us here.
We all looked into the woods and shared the worry.
Still, we had to do our work.
As it grew dark, our donkey ran off and the dogs chased it.
But when the dogs came back, the donkey was not with them.
We made a big fire and I told the boys to sleep beside their weapons as we lay down nervously in the clearing.
The next morning I left the bigger boys to protect their mother and told Jack he could come with me to try to find our poor donkey.
He was proud to be asked.
After trudging for hours following the donkey's hoof prints, we saw that they joined with many others.
Cutting our way through the forest, we came upon an amazing sight.
Our donkey had joined a herd that stood by the river, a herd of giant buffalo.
Before we could stop them, our dogs ran out into the herd and attacked a calf.
The herd began to bellow and, with a rush, attacked us all at once, their horns flashing.
We ran back toward the forest, but the leader of the herd, a giant, was already on top of us before we could reach it.
At the last minute, I pulled my pistol and shot him dead.
This stopped the herd and they turned tail to run.
Still, our dogs were trying to take down the calf.
Jack acted quickly, calling off the dogs and swinging his lasso as the calf fell.
All at once, he had the calf by the feet and I tied the other end of the rope to a tree.
We now had ourselves a live buffalo calf to try and tame.
The children named the calf Storm.
We took what we could from the fallen buffalo, made a leash for our calf out of Jack's lasso and walked home.
As we headed out, the dogs ran ahead.
Suddenly, a pack of jackals appeared, drawn by the dead buffalo.
They all fell into a fight with our dogs.
The dogs won this fight and chased away the pack.
We did, however, manage to rescue one small jackal to take back with us.
Getting back to our camp, we found our family excited at our new pets.
Jack jumped about telling the story of what had happened, bragging a little.
I let him tell his stories.
He had done well.
The family had been busy too while we were gone.
They had collected some wood that had washed up from the wrecked ship and had gone hunting.
Fritz had found a young eagle by Cape Disappointment.
We decided to try and raise it as a hunting bird.
As we headed back to the camp, the boys went for another walk and began calling to me suddenly.
I ran into the woods thinking they were in danger, only to find them with our sow lying on her side, surrounded by piglets.
Our family continued to grow.
