Half Child - Half Savage

He had seen some astonishing things during these five years--from a fight between a whale and two thrashers conducted outside the reef, lasting an hour, and dyeing the breaking waves with blood, to the poisoning of the fish in the lagoon by fresh water, due to an extraordinarily heavy rainy season.

He knew the woods of the back of the island by heart, and the forms of life that inhabited them, butterflies and moths and birds, lizards, and insects of strange shape; extraordinary orchids--some filthy-looking, the very image of corruption, some beautiful, and all strange. He found melons and guavas, and breadfruit, the red apple of Tahiti, and the great Brazilian plum, taro in plenty, and a dozen other good things--but there were no bananas. This made him unhappy at times, for he was human.

Though Emmeline had asked Koko for Dick's whereabouts, it was only a remark made by way of making conversation, for she could hear him in the little cane-brake which lay close by amidst the trees.

In a few minutes he appeared, dragging after him two canes which he had just cut, and wiping the perspiration off his brow with his naked arm.

He had an old pair of trousers on--part of the truck salved long ago from the Shenandoah--nothing else, and he was well worth looking at and considering, both from a physical and psychological point of view.

Auburn-haired and tall, looking more like seventeen than sixteen, with a restless and daring expression, half a child, half a man, half a civilised being, half a savage, he had both progressed and retrograded during the five years of savage life. He sat down beside Emmeline, flung the canes beside him, tried the edge of the old butcher's knife with which he had cut them, then, taking one of the canes across his knee, he began whittling at it.