The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told

by Stephen Brennan

  Joe had counted on seeing some of the sharp-shooters, the forerunners of the hunt, coming along the edge of the woods. He would go to meet them, and, continuing along the edge of the woods, reach the main line of the hunt and pass on behind it until he found his father and brother, and Gus with his gun.

  Joe waited as much as fifteen minutes of the fence without seeing or hearing anything but the ordinary sights and sounds of the field and woodside. The time seemed to him much longer than fifteen minutes.

  Could they have gone past already? Had he come too late? His heart sank again at the thought.

  He could settle that question by going into the woods and looking for tracks. There is no grass in Western woods, but underneath the tall saplings of second-growth woods like this there is, in the late days of June, a luxuriant growth of broad, light-green mandrake leaves. If the hunt had passed, the mandrakes would be trampled down, and many tracks would be plainly visible in the black earth.

  Joe jumped down from the fence, his jacket still on his arm. He ran in among the very tall young poplars, hickories and black oaks. He noticed that they all leaned slightly to the eastward, and reflected that the almost ceaseless west winds bend them thus. The west wind was blowing now, and the hunt was coming from that direction.

  Underneath the trees the green carpet of mandrake leaves was everywhere undisturbed. There were no tracks—no signs that any one had been here for many days.

  Joe went a little father into the woods, to make sure. He stood for a moment on an old, fallen log, and then walked some eight or ten rods farther to a big old basswood-tree, which had a rift on the easterly side of it opening into a hollow and dark interior. The tree was a spared relic of the old forest, standing amidst the second growth.

  He leaned against the sound side of the tree, facing toward the direction from which he knew the hunt would come. He intended to go back to the edge of the woods, but he paused to listen a moment for any sounds approaching, though he knew well that the hunters had taken no dogs, and that the hunt was to be conducted stealthily.

  But what was that? He certainly heard a thump, and a brushing, rustling sound not far away, as if somebody or something had jumped over a log into the bed of mandrakes.

  He peered past the saplings toward another old log farther into the woods; and there, crouching among the mandrake leaves, he saw a sight which seemed to stop the flow of his blood, but not by any means the beating of his heart.

  It was the wolf himself—the same big grey creature that Joe and Henry Amory had seen racing across the schoolhouse pasture! The animal was now crouched on his haunches, his jaws open, his tongue thrust out, and his fierce, bulging eyes looking straight at the boy, who stood there with his back braced against the trunk of the tree, his jacket on his arm, and not even a stick or stone near him.

  Joe was not so sick with fright but that he could see that the wolf had a crazed look. Evidently the creature had been running swiftly; he was panting heavily. He did not sit still now, but lunged forward a few inches every other moment, as if he were preparing for a spring, but had not yet quite made up his mind to it.

  Meanwhile queer thoughts were passing through Joe’s head. He afterward confessed that he did not meditate any plan of escape or resistance, but that his mind was rehearsing the scene and the dialogue when his mother had told him that he might go to the hunt.

  He heard the wringer creaking, and the water dripping into the tub. “Go and get your gun and start,” his mother was saying. “But Gus has got my gun!” “So—he—has; so—he—has!” and then he seemed to hear nothing but those three words, repeated with awful slowness, “So—he—has!”

  All at once Joe really heard a voice far away in the woods. The wolf started up, jerked his head half-backward an instant, and then leaped swiftly straight at Joe.

  The animal was really attacking him, and in an instant it would have been all over; but just then an inspiration did come to Joe, for he whirled around the trunk of the tree, dropping his jacket as he did so, and squeezed quickly into the hollow through the rift in the opposite side of the trunk.

  The wolf seized and shook the falling jacket and leaped at the rift. It was very narrow at the bottom and widened upward. By leaping up, the wolf got his head through the rift, but as he bounded forward his shoulders struck the sides. Then as his weight settled down, the animal’s neck became squeezed tightly into the narrower part of the rift.

  The wolf struggled and tried to draw backward for another spring; but his head was now struck fast in the hole. And as his struggles with his feet tended to pull his body down-ward, all his pulling only served to draw his head more tightly into the narrowing rift.

  Joe, crouching with his back against the side of the tree, felt against his face the hot breath of the gasping, struggling wolf. He expected every instant that the animal would get in; and yet he dimly realized that in some way it was stuck in the aperture.

  And now another phrase of his mother’s uttered that morning, was running though Joe’s brain; “Fourteen years old, and small of his age—small of his age!” For the first time in his life he was glad that he was undersized.

  While he kept saying these idle words over to himself, the wolf was twisting his head from side to side, pulling it back as far as he could, thrusting it forward vainly, yelping and whining in a half-choked way, and all the time scratching the edges of the hole with all four paws.

  Joe found that the hollow of the tree seemed to lead upward and nowhere else; but it was too wide to give him a chance to climb by putting his feet and hands against the opposite sides. He crouched in the back part of the cavity, expecting that every moment the decayed wood of the tree would give way before the wolf ’s tearing paws, and that then the frightful jaws would reach him.

  He felt himself growing very faint. No words of any kind were echoing through his brain now. This was rather strange, because words of some sort were always seeming to ring in Joe’s ears—it had always been so.

  Suddenly, in the midst of the snarling and scratching and snapping of the animal almost in his very face, Joe heard a sound that seemed to his sinking senses exactly like the report of a leaden pop-gun that he owned when he was a small boy.

  Then he heard another like it, and another. Who could be shooting with a pop-gun in these woods, he dimly wondered.

  The wolf yelped louder than ever, and leaped upward until his head actually cleared the narrow space in which it had been stuck. Then the animal fell back out of Joe’s sight.

  There came a quick thump against the tree itself just back of the boy’s head, accompanied by a sort of spattering sound, as if pieces of bark were being split off.

  More pop-guns, rather louder, were heard outside, and there were more spattering thumps against the tree. Joe understood it all now, and had a new terror. What had sounded to him, shut up within a tree, like pop-guns, had been rifles! The hunt had come up, and the men were shooting at the wolf, and mostly hitting the tree.

  He did not know how thin a shell the trunk might be. At any rate, they would probably shoot until a ball had pierced the wood and hit him.

  He sank down and curled up in a heap at the bottom of the hollow, his head close to the entrance. He wanted to scream, but could not. Outside, as he went down, he saw the writhing body of the wolf, and his own torn jacket.

  The firing ceased, and he heard a man’s footsteps approaching. Once more he tried to call out, but could not.

  Then he heard what was plainly another rifle-shot close at hand.

  “That ends him!” cried a voice which Joe knew very well.

  “Father!” Joe gasped feebly from inside the tree. “Father!”

  “Hello! Hi! What’s this? Joe! Why, how in time did you get here? I was almost a-going to shoot you for another wolf! What in the world—”

  He thrust his arm into the hole and attempted to pull the boy out. It was impossible. The aperture was apparently the small for him to pass through.

  He heard a grea
t many shouts, and a dozen—fifteen—twenty men and boys, and then a greater crowd still, gathered about, some standing over the great wolf, now quite dead, some pressing to see what was in the tree.

  “Stand back!” Joe’s father called out, “My boy Joe is in this tree, and we’ve got to get him out somehow!”

  There was a shout of laughter from the crowd. It was found necessary to send to Weeks’s for an axe, with which the hole was enlarged, before Joe was got out.

  “How on earth did you ever get in there?” half a dozen asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Joe faintly, “but I guess I had to get in !”

  He was right. Under the desperate necessity of escape from the maddened wolf, Joe had squeezed his body into a smaller compass than he could possibly occupy in his limp condition afterwards.

  Joe had the chief honours of the day, for no one could tell whose bullet had really brought down the wolf; and if the animal had not stopped to attack the boy it would undoubtedly have escaped. By a blunder on the part of the men in advance, the space at the edge of the woods at Weeks’s had been left unguarded, and the wolf had evidently been making for it.

  SHIPWRECK

  CAPTAIN JAMES RILEY

  We set sail from the bay of Gibraltar on the 23rd of August, 1815, intending to go by way of the Cape de Verd Islands, to complete the landing of the vessel with salt. We passed Capt Spartel on the morning of the 24th, giving it a berth of from ten to twelve leagues, and steered off to the W. S. W. I intended to make the Canary Islands, and pass between Teneriffe and Palma, having a fair wind; but it being very thick and foggy weather, though we got two observations at noon, neither could be much depended upon. On account of the fog, we saw no land, and found, by good meridian altitudes on the twenty-eighth, that we were in the latitude of 27. 30. N. having differed our latitude by the force of current, one hundred and twenty miles; thus passing the Canaries without seeing any of them. I concluded we must have passed through the intended passage without discovering the land on either side, particularly, as it was in the night, which was very dark, and black as pitch; nor could I believe otherwise from having had a fair wind all the way, and having steered one course ever since we took our departure from Cape Spartel. Soon after we got an observation on the 28th, it became as thick as ever, and the darkness seemed (if possible) to increase. Towards evening I got up my reckoning, and examined it all over, to be sure that I had committed no error, and caused the mates to do the same with theirs. Having thus ascertained that I was correct in calculation, I altered our course to S.W. which ought to have carried us nearly on the course I wished to steer, that is, for the easternmost of the Cape de Verds; but finding the weather becoming more foggy towards night, it being so thick that we could scarcely see the end of the jib-boom, I rounded the vessel to, and sounded with one hundred and twenty fathoms of line, but found no bottom, and continued on our course, still reflecting on what should be the cause of our not seeing land, (as I never had passed near the Canaries before without seeing them, even in thick weather or in the night.) I came to a determination to haul off to the N.W. by the wind at 10 p.m., as I should then be by the long only thirty miles north of Cape Bajador. I concluded on this at nine, and thought my fears had never before so much prevailed over my judgment and my reckoning. I ordered the light sails to be handed, and the steering sail booms to be rigged in snug, which was done as fast as it could be by one watch, under the immediate direction of Mr. Savage.

  We had just got the men stationed at the braces for hauling off, as the man at helm cried “ten o’clock.” Out try-sail boom was on the starboard side, but ready for jibing; the helm was put to port, dreaming of no danger near. I had been on deck all the evening myself; the vessel was running at the rate of nine or ten knots, with a very strong breeze, and high sea, when the main boom was jibed over, and I at that instant heard a roaring; the yards were braced up—all hands were called. I imagined at first it was a squall, and was near ordering the sails to be lowered down; but I then discovered breakers foaming at a most dreadful rate under our lee. Hope for a moment flattered me that we could fetch off still, as there were no breakers in view ahead: the anchors were made ready; but these hopes vanished in an instant, as the vessel was carried by a current and a sea directly towards the breakers, and she struck! We let go the best bower anchor; all sails were taken in as fast as possible: surge after surge came thundering on, and drove her in spite of anchors, partly with her head on shore. She struck with such violence as to start every man from the deck. Knowing there was no possibility of saving her, and that she must very soon bilge and fill with water, I ordered all the provisions we could get at to be brought on deck, in hopes of saving some, and as much water to be drawn from the large casks as possible. We started several quarter casks of wine, and filled them with water. Every man worked as if his life depended upon his present exertions; all were obedient to every order I gave, and seemed perfectly calm;—The vessel was stout and high, as she was only in ballast trim;—The sea combed over her stern and swept her decks; but we managed to get the small boat in on deck, to sling her and keep her from staving. We cut away the bulwark on the larboard side so as to prevent the boast from staving when we should get them out; cleared away the long boat and hung her in tackles, the vessel continuing to strike very heavy, and filling fast. We however, had secured five or six barrels of water, and as many of wine,—three barrels of bread, and three or four salted provisions. I had as yet been so busily employed, that no pains had been taken to ascertain what distance we were from the land, nor had any of us yet seen it; and in the meantime all the clothing, chests, trunks, &c. were got up, and the books, charts, and sea instruments, were stowed in them, in the hope of their being useful to us in future.

  The vessel being now nearly full of water, the surf making a fair breach over her, and fearing she would go to pieces, I prepared a rope, and put it in the small boat, having got a glimpse of the short, at no great distance, and taking Porter with me, we were lowered down on the larboard or lee side of the vessel, where she broke the violence of the sea, and made it comparatively smooth; we shoved off, but on clearing away from the bow of the vessel, the boat was overwhelmed with a surf, and we were plunged into the foaming surges: we were driven along by the current, aided by what seamen call the undertow, (or recoil of the sea) to the distance of three hundred yards to the westward, covered nearly all the time by the billows, which, following each other in quick succession, scarcely gave us time to catch a breath before we were again literally swallowed by them, till at length we were thrown, together with our boat, upon a sandy beach. After taking breath a little, and ridding our stomachs of the salt water that had forced its way into them, my first care was to turn the water out of the boat, and haul her up out of the reach of the surf. We found the rope that was made fast to her still remaining; this we carried up along the beach, directly to leeward of the wreck, where we fastened it to sticks about the thickness of handspikes, that had drifted on the shoe from the vessel, and which we drove into the sand by the help of other pieces of wood. Before leaving the vessel, I had directed that all the chests, trunks, and everything that would float, should be hove overboard: this all hands were busied in doing. The vessel lay about one hundred fathoms from the beach, at high tide. In order to save the crew, a hawser was made fast to the rope we had on shore, one end of which we hauled to us, and made it fast to a number of sticks we had driven into the sand for the purpose. It was then tautened on board the wreck, and made fast. This being done, the long-boat (in order to save the provisions already in her) was lowered down, and two hands steadied her by ropes fastened to the rings in her stem and stern posts over the hawser, so as to slide, keeping her bow to the surf. In this manner they reached the beach, carried on the top of a heavy wave. The boat was stove by the violence of the shock against the beach; but by great exertions we saved the three barrels of bread in her before they were much damaged; and two barrels of salted provisions were also saved. We were
now, four of us, on shore, and busied in picking up the clothing and other things which drifted from the vessel, and carrying them up out of the surf. It was by this time daylight, and high water; the vessel careened deep off shore, and I made signs to have the mast cut away, in the hope of easing her, that she might not go to pieces. They were accordingly cut away, and fell on her starboard side, making a better lee for a boat alongside the wreck, as they projected considerably beyond her bows. The masts and rigging being gone, the sea breaking very high over the wreck, and nothing left to hold on by, the mates and six men still on board, though secured, as well as they could be, on the bowsprit and in the larboard fore-channels, were yet in imminent danger of being washed off by every surge. The long-boat was stove, and it being impossible for the small one to live, my great object was now to save the lives of the crew by means of the hawser. I therefore made signs to them to come, one by one, on the hawser, which had been stretched taut for that purpose. John Hogan ventured first, and having pulled off his jacket, took to the hawser, and made for the shore. When he had got clear of the immediate lee of the wreck, every surf buried him, combing many feet above his head; but he still held fast to the rope with a death-like grasp, and as soon as the surf was passed, proceeded on towards the shore, until another surf, more powerful than the former, unclenched his hands, and threw him within our reach; when we laid hold of him and dragged him to the beach; we then rolled him on the sand, until he discharged the salt water from his stomach, and revived. I kept n the water up to my chin, steadying myself by the hawser, while the surf passed over me, to catch the others as they approached, and thus, with the assistance of those already on shore, was enabled to save all the rest from a watery grave.

  THE OPEN BOAT

  STEPHEN CRANE