But that, too, came to an end, and finally we marched off to the camp, which we had removed a half-mile upstream, dragging after us a piece of the hide about thirty feet long and half as wide.  It was not as heavy as we had thought, which made it all the better for our purpose.

The remainder of our task, though tedious, was not unpleasant.

We first made the larger bones, which were to serve as the beams of our raft, exactly the same length by filing off the ends of the longer ones with rough bits of granite.  I have said it was tedious.  Then we filed off each of the smaller bones projecting from the neural arch until they were of equal length.

They extended on either side about ten inches, which, allowing four inches for the width of the larger bone and one inch for the covering, would make our raft slightly over a foot in depth.

To make the cylindrical column rigid, we bound each of the vertebrae to the one in direct juxtaposition on either side firmly with strips of hide, several hundred feet of which we had prepared.

This gave us four beams held straight and true, without any play in either direction, with only a slight flexibility resulting from the cartilages within the center cord.

With these four beams we formed a square, placing them on their edges, end to end.  At each corner of the square we lashed the ends together firmly with strips of hide.  It was both firm and flexible after we had lashed the corners over and over with the strips, that there might be no play under the strain of the current.

Over this framework we stretched the large piece of hide so that the ends met on top, near the middle.  The bottom was thus absolutely watertight.  We folded the corners in and caught them up with strips over the top.  Then, with longer strips, we fastened up the sides, passing the strips back and forth across the top, from side to side, having first similarly secured the two ends.  As a final precaution, we passed broader strips around both top and bottom, lashing them together in the center of the top.  And there was our raft, twelve feet square, over a foot deep, water-tight as a town drunkard, and weighing not more than a hundred pounds.  It has taken me two minutes to tell it; it took us two weeks to do it.

But we discovered immediately that the four beams on the sides and ends were not enough, for Desiree’s weight alone caused the skin to sag clear through in the center, though we had stretched it as tightly as possible.  We were forced to unlash all the strips running from side to side and insert supports, made of smaller bones, across the middle each way.  These we reinforced on their ends with the thickest hide we could find, that they might not puncture the bottom.  After that it was fairly firm; though its sea-worthiness was not improved, it was much easier to navigate than it would have been before.

For oars we took the lower ends of the backbones of the two smaller fish and covered them with hide.  They were about five feet long and quite heavy; but we intended to use them more for the purpose of steering than for propulsion.  The current of the stream would attend to that for us.