Island of the Lost by Joan Druett Page A

volunteered to teach the others Portuguese and Norwegian in return for lessons in reading and writing. Raynal himself offered to tutor French and mathematics. Thus, he recorded, “from that evening we were alternately the masters and pupils of one another. These new relations still further united us; by alternately raising and lowering us one above the other, they really kept us on a level, and created a perfect equality amongst us.”
    As time passed, they devised games as well as lessons. Musgrave made a solitaire board by perforating a bit of wood and whittling pegs for the holes, while Raynal painted a larger piece of wood with alternating squares of lime and soot to make a chessboard, and carved chessmen out of two thin laths, one white, and the other red. Dominoes were marked and whittled next. Then Raynal made the mistake of cutting fifty-two playing cards out of pages from an old logbook, thickening them with paste made with some of the medicinal flour, and painting in the pips. He thought it would be safe, because the men had nothing to bet with, but Musgrave turned out to be not just a bad card player, but a sore loser as well; so, after exchanging“some unpleasant words” with the captain, the Frenchman threw the cards into the fire.
    Raynal reckoned that he destroyed them “tranquilly, without saying a word,” but, as Musgrave did not mention the incident, it’s hard to tell if it wasn’t Raynal himself who had flounced into a rage. Altogether, it was a waste of precious flour. After he had made the cards, Raynal had shared the little bit of paste that was left in the bottom of the pot with Musgrave, and, as he wrote ruefully, “truly, I had never eaten anything in my life which seemed so delicious.” For the next few days the memory of the flavor haunted him—“I was punished for my greediness.”
    Besides parlor games and night school, they had pets to enliven their leisure hours. One day in early March, Harry noticed a pretty bird hopping in and out of a hole in the trunk of a tree. This was one of the small parrots they had already noted and marveled about, the sight of a parrot being so unexpected on a subantarctic island. When this parakeet flew away, Harry cautiously investigated the nest, which proved to hold three fledglings. He set to work at once, according to Raynal, “to construct a little cage for their reception, weaving a number of twigs together in the most skilful fashion.” Having captured the little birds, he carried them back to the house, to the amazement of the others, Musgrave confessing that he found it “very strange to find parrots here at all, and it is more surprising that they should have young ones at this season of the year.” March in the subantarctic south marks the start of autumn, a dangerous time for eggs to hatch.
    â€œWe fed them on the seeds of the sacchary plant, which at first we pounded carefully, and afterwards mixed with a littleseal’s flesh roasted, and minced into very small pieces,” Raynal wrote. One soon died, but the other two thrived, the male of the pair amusing them greatly by learning to talk. As the two
kakariki
grew larger, they destroyed the bars of their cage, but by that time they were tame enough to be allowed to live freely in the hut.
    They were also thoroughly spoiled. A fresh branch of sacchary, complete with seeds, was provided for them every day; they slept at the foot of Harry’s bed, right up against the warm chimney; and they made a fuss if their dish of water, placed at the foot of the roosting branch, was not perfectly clean. “On emerging from their bath, they dried themselves before the fire, and turned themselves first on one side, then on the other, with the gravest air in the world,” wrote Raynal. Having washed themselves, they were allowed to join the men at the table, “and, in excellent English, Boss—for so we named the male