Chapter 10.
A Tree with Stairs.
My wife asked if I could invent a way to reach our treehouse without having to climb the ladder.
It was a good challenge, and the boys and I got to work on it.
We thought we might carve steps inside the trunk if it was hollow, which we hoped it was.
The boys looked in a hole in the tree trunk and found it hollow but full of bees that came swarming out to attack them.
We smoked the bees out by stopping up the hole with a hollowed piece of bamboo.
I lifted up some hot coals from the fire and blew smoke from them through the bamboo until the bees were sleepy.
We then quickly cut another hole in the trunk and the bees flew out to get away from the smoke and were gone.
We took what we could of their honey and wax, then carved the space where they had come out wider and wider, until it was the size of a full door.
Later we attached a door from the ship to the hole in our tree with hinges we had taken from the ship.
It was perfect.
We spent several days hollowing out more of the tree to make our stairs and built wooden steps leading around the inside of the trunk.
Soon we had a staircase, complete with a railing for holding.
During our weeks of this work, our animals all had babies of their own.
We trained our buffalo to till our fields.
We tamed our jackal so that we could raise it with our puppies.
I even trained our eagle and got nips to ride the buffalo.
One morning while we were working, we heard a very loud roaring.
We had no idea what it could be.
A lion?
A gorilla?
A tiger?
We were all worried and climbed up to our house where we loaded the guns.
Fritz and I decided it was best to go into the woods to find out what it was, or we all would always be afraid.
We snuck through the bush. fearing some monster beyond our understanding.
As we grew nearer, the sound grew more intense.
We cringed, cocked our guns and pulled back the branches to find ourselves staring at a sight that had us laughing wildly.
The sound was from our donkey, which had come home with a new friend, a wild donkey.
We led them back to our camp by offering tidbits of food.
It took us days to tame the wild one.
I had to jump on its back and ride it to tire it out and calm it down.
At long last, it became calm and friendly.
One night we took Nips to the woods to fill our sacks with acorns.
The little monkey ran up a tree and discovered the eggs of a grouse.
We covered them and took them back to our house where my wife kept them warm, wrapped in blankets, by the fire.
In a few days they hatched.
My wife had been working with our birds and had raised more than 40 chickens.
The grouse chicks added more birds to our growing flock.
Ernest had been busy cutting long, thick grass for Franz to play swords with back at camp.
Franz had the time of his life dancing about and battling imaginary enemies.
After examining his sword more closely, I noticed that it was a plant called flax.
My wife was overjoyed.
If you can make me a spindle, I can spin this flax into yarn.
We will all have new clothes.
With that, we took our donkeys and buffalo and brought back all the flax we could.
We worked extra hard before winter came to make stables on the grounds, stack away hay and build a dairy kitchen and dining hall under our one roof in our giant tree home.
There was not much more time to get ready.
We spent the next days storing potatoes coconuts acorns, sugar cane and whatever other food we found as quickly as we could harvest them.
Each day, the sky grew darker and thunder rattled in the distance.
Soon, cool showers turned to icy cold and never-ending winter rains.
The weather was fierce.
Each day we had to take shelter in the trunk of our crowded treehouse.
The smell of the animals was not pleasing, and the smoke from the fire made us cough.
My wife brushed some of the rubber we had found onto our hooded shirts to make them waterproof.
Soon she had made us full waterproof suits to wear.
The days were long and hard.
We tried to pass the time as best we could.
I wrote all that had happened in my journal and my wife sewed.
Ernest made sketches of birds and Fritz and Jack taught little Franz to read.
The weeks rolled by.
We were prisoners of the winter.
It was a gloomy time for all.
