Page 250 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

snares. The goats, with whose hides he hoped to cover the
coracle, were sufficiently numerous and tame to encour-
age him to use every exertion. He carefully examined the
tracks of the animals, and found that they converged to
one point—the track to the nearest water. With much la-
bour he cut down bushes, so as to mask the approach to the
waterhole on all sides save where these tracks immediate-
ly conjoined. Close to the water, and at unequal distances
along the various tracks, he scattered the salt he had ob-
tained by his rude distillation of sea-water. Between this
scattered salt and the points where he judged the animals
would be likely to approach, he set his traps, made after the
following manner. He took several pliant branches of young
trees, and having stripped them of leaves and twigs, dug
with his knife and the end of the rude paddle he had made
for the voyage across the inlet, a succession of holes, about
a foot deep. At the thicker end of these saplings he fastened,
by a piece of fishing line, a small cross-bar, which swung
loosely, like the stick handle which a schoolboy fastens to
the string of his pegtop. Forcing the ends of the saplings
thus prepared into the holes, he filled in and stamped down
the earth all around them. The saplings, thus anchored as
it were by the cross-pieces of stick, not only stood firm, but
resisted all his efforts to withdraw them. To the thin ends
of these saplings he bound tightly, into notches cut in the
wood, and secured by a multiplicity of twisting, the catgut
springes he had brought from the camping ground. The
saplings were then bent double, and the gutted ends se-
cured in the ground by the same means as that employed