A large stone served for an anvil, a pair of deer horns did duty for tongs, and with these and the fire, the iron hook was made into a hammer; and then two of the nails were shaped into spear-heads, which were tied to sticks from the driftwood with strips of deerskin. With these weapons they began by killing a bear, whose flesh they ate, whose skin they kept, and whose tendons they made into thread and a string for the bow formed out of the root of the fir tree. More nails were forged into arrow-heads, tied with sinew on to light sticks cut with the knife, the shafts being feathered from the feathers of seafowl. With these weapons they shot, before they had finished, two hundred and fifty reindeer, and they kept the skins, as they did also those of a large number of blue and white foxes, as we shall see in the sequel. In their own protection they killed nine bears, the only one they deliberately attacked being the first. To be sure of keeping their fire alight they modelled a lamp out of clay, which they filled with deer-fat, with twisted linen for a wick; but the clay was too porous, the fat ran through it; so they made another lamp of the same stuff, dried it in the air, heated it red hot, and cooled it in a sort of thin starch made of flour and water, strengthening the pottery by pasting linen rags over it. The result was so successful that they made a second lamp as a reserve. Some wreckage gave them a little cordage and a quantity of oakum, which came in for lamp-wicks. The lamp, like the sacred fire, was never allowed to go out. To make themselves clothes, they soaked skins in fresh water till the hair could be pulled off easily, and rubbed them well, and then rubbed deer fat into them until they were pliant and supple. Some of the skins they prepared as furs. Out of nails they, after many failures, made awls and needles, getting the eyes by piercing the heads with the point of the knife, and smoothing and pointing them by rounding and whetting them on a stone. For six years they lived in this desert place. Then one of them, Weregin, died of scurvy, and their gloomy forebodings as to which was to be taken next were broken in upon by their sighting a ship, to which they signalled with a flag made of deerskin. The signal was seen and they were rescued; and they took back to Archangel two thousand pounds weight of reindeer fat, their bales of skins and furs, their bow and arrows and spears, and in short everything they possessed. And they arrived there on the 28th of September, 1749, comfortably off from the value of the goods they brought with them—the heroes of one of the very best of true desert island stories.