Chapter XIII: Thorn Learns to Swim

After a little the boys jumped up and ran into the water to play with the other children.

A big green wave came rolling in, and the children quickly took hold of hands. They jumped up as the wave broke over them. It knocked some of them down and stood Clam on his head. Somebody caught his feet, and the others all laughed. He came up angry and choking, when another wave caught him and rolled him over again. After that the boys came crowding around Thorn, waving their arms.

"You must learn to swim," they cried. "It is easy. Make your arms go this way and your feet this way"; and they showed him how.

Thorn tried it and went straight to the bottom. The boys shouted.

"Here is a log," they said. "Put your arms over that. It will keep you up till you learn."

Thorn kept on trying, and in a few days he could swim a little.

"You do very well," said Foam.

The next day, when the tide was out, the boys waded in and picked up periwinkles and oysters and clams, and threw them up on the beach.

When Periwinkle began to open his oysters, he took a brown bowl to put them in. Once, in breaking a shell, his stone knife struck the bowl and broke it.

"Too bad," he said. "Mother liked that bowl. She made it herself, of clay, and dried it by the fire."

"Of clay!" Thorn said, looking at pieces wonderingly. "I never saw a bowl like that."

Periwinkle threw the oyster shells and pieces of broken bowl up on the shell heap. "We throw all such things in a heap," he said. "Then they are out of the way and will not cut our feet."

After working for days and days, the men got the tree for the dug-out hacked down. Then they hacked off a log and dragged it down to the shore. Here they began to make the dug-out.

They built a fire all along the top of the log. It burned down slowly. The men watched the fire and kept putting on more sticks. If it burned too near the edge, they put on water or clay or wet moss to stop it.

"You see, they burn out only the middle of the log and leave good strong thick sides to the boat," said Periwinkle.

After the fire had burned down into the log a way, the men raked off the hot coals. The wood beneath was burned to charcoal. The men scraped it off with stone scrapers. Then they put on more fire and again burned the log.

"The fire will burn down faster, now that the charcoal is scraped off," said Periwinkle.

The men worked for a long time, burning and scraping away, burning and scraping, until they had dug a little hollow all along the middle of the log.

Then one man said, "We have worked enough."

And the men dropped their scrapers and went off.

The next day Thorn walked along the beach and picked up pretty shells.

"These are for the folks at home," he said to Periwinkle. "They will put them on the strings around their necks."

"Here is my bow," he went on, handing it to Periwinkle. "You may keep it. I can make another. I am going back to my grandfather's now."

Periwinkle and Clam and some of the men went part way with Thorn. They walked for a long time through fir forests and then came to the forests of oak and beech and ash and chestnut. Here Thorn left his friends, and waved his arm to them as he ran on to his grandfather's. The shell people went back to their home by the sea.