CHAPTER 16 – BREAD
Chapter 16
At the end of December I had my first corn. It wasn’t a lot. I didn’t want to eat the corn, so I decided to leave it all for seeds. My goal was to put the seeds in the ground again and have more corn later.
Meanwhile I began preparing the tools I would need in a year’s time. I realized I needed pots to keep the corn. I looked for clay around the island. I found some and after two months of experiments I succeeded in making two large pots. To protect them better I put them in baskets and placed dry grass between the baskets and the pots.
I continued making small pots and plates. I also made long but not very high pots. I put sea water in these pots. When the water was gone, I had salt.
One day, quite by accident, I found a broken piece of one of my pots in the fire. The heat made it as hard as stone and it was very red too.
This gave me a good idea. I took one pot and made a fire around it. The pot was very hard after a few hours. I was happy with the result.
I also felt a need for some other tools. For example, I needed a tool to make flour from seeds. I took a big piece of hard wood for that. I made a hole in the wood. Then I took another piece of hard wood and I broke the seeds in this hole with the wood.
The flour stayed on the bottom of the hole.
I thought, “I will need something to bake bread.” I had an idea. I mixed the flour with water. Then I took two stones. I put them near the fire. When they were very hot, I put the bread between them. This was how I made my first bread on the island. It was during my third year on the island. The bread wasn’t perfect but I liked it a lot. It was my first bread after a long time.
I was thinking whether I could make a canoe out of some large tree. I found one big tree. I cut it and I started to make a hole in it.
One day, when I was working on the canoe, I realized I didn’t know how to move it from the forest to the beach. I was stupid. It took me many days to make the canoe and the thought of how I was going to put it in water never came to my mind.
I tried everything to move the canoe. I even considered digging a channel from the beach to where the canoe stayed, but it was all useless. There was a hill in between and it would have taken me a long time to dig the channel through the hill. Eventually I gave up on the canoe. Many days of work were lost. I couldn’t believe that I made such a mistake. I had to plan my work better next time.
WORDS FROM CHAPTER 16
