Having Laid In Such A Supply Of Wood,
And The Days Being Now Long, And Invariably Pleasant, We Had A
Good Deal Of Time To Ourselves.
All the duck I received from home,
I soon made up into trowsers and frocks, and displayed, every Sunday,
a complete suit of my own make, from head to foot, having formed
the remnants of the duck into a cap.
Reading, mending, sleeping,
with occasional excursions into the bush, with the dogs, in search
of coati, hares, and rabbits, or to encounter a rattlesnake, and now
and then a visit to the Presidio, filled up our spare time after
hide-curing was over for the day. Another amusement, which we
sometimes indulged in, was "burning the water" for craw-fish.
For this purpose, we procured a pair of grains, with a long staff
like a harpoon, and making torches with tarred rope twisted round a
long pine stick, took the only boat on the beach, a small skiff,
and with a torch-bearer in the bow, a steersman in the stern, and one
man on each side with the grains, went off, on dark nights, to burn
the water. This is fine sport. Keeping within a few rods of the
shore, where the water is not more than three or four feet deep,
with a clear sandy bottom, the torches light everything up so that one
could almost have seen a pin among the grains of sand. The craw-fish
are an easy prey, and we used soon to get a load of them.
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