Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Pap wakes Huck, who fell asleep in the night, and asks him what he’s doing with the gun. Huck lies and says that someone tried to break in and that Huck was lying in wait for the intruder, which Pap accepts. He tells Huck to go check the fishing line for breakfast. Huck does so, scanning as he does the rising river. Seeing a passing canoe, Huck jumps into it and paddles it ashore, thinking Pap will be pleased. But then another idea strikes Huck: he decides to hide the canoe and use it in his escape.

After Huck returns to shore, Pap berates him for taking so long with the fish. Huck lies that he fell in the river. Huck and Pap get five catfish off the fishing lines and head hone. As the two Finns lay about and Pap says that Huck should rouse him the next time an intruder comes prowling, Huck has an idea to prevent Pap and the Widow from pursuing him after he makes his escape.

Pap and Huck collect nine logs from the river to sell and then eat dinner. Pap is content to do so, even though any other man would keep scanning the river for things to sell from it. After dinner, Pap locks Huck up in the cabin again and boats to town to sell the nine logs. After Pap has gotten a ways, Huck retrieves his saw from its hiding place and finishes making his hole in the cabin, through which he then escapes. Huck takes provisions from the cabin, anything “worth a cent,” and stores them in his hidden canoe. He hides any trace of his escape by covering his tracks and sealing the hole he made in the cabin.

Huck takes Pap’s gun into the nearby woods, kills a hog, and takes the hog back to his camp. He smashes in the door of the cabin with an ax, takes the pig inside, and slits its throat so that its blood covers the dirt floor of the cabin. Huck wishes Tom could join him to “throw in the fancy touches.” Huck then bloodies the ax, sticks some of his own pulled-out hair onto the blade, and slings the tool into a corner of the cabin. He also takes a sack full of rocks and the pig carcass and dumps both in the river. Finally, Huck takes the bag of meal out of his canoe and back to the house, rips it open, and carries the sack about a hundred yards from the house, trailing meal as he does so. He also drops Pap’s whetstone at the spot where he stops trailing the grain. Then Huck ties the bag of meal so it stops sifting out and returns to his canoe.

As Huck waits for the moon to come out so that he can travel by its light, he eats, smokes, and thinks to himself that people looking for him after his escape, thinking him dead, will follow the trail left by the sack full of rocks to the river and afterwards dredge the river for his body, as well as the trail of meal in order to find the “robbers that killed [him].” He is sure, though, that nobody will think that he is alive, much less find him. He plans to paddle to a place called Jackson’s Island on the river, and to visit towns at night to stock up on supplies. Huck soon falls asleep, only to soon wake. It looks late to Huck, and “smelt late” too, though Huck acknowledges that he doesn’t know how to put the sensation in words.

Huck hears a sound. It is Pap paddling back to the cabin. Huck loses no time in slipping quietly down the river in his canoe, shaded by the bank. He paddles down the center of the river to avoid being hailed by people on the ferry landing before, at last, reaching Jackson’s Island, “like a steamboat without any lights.” Huck lands and conceals his canoe. In the darkness, he sees a raft go by the island and hears a man on the raft shout commands to someone onboard with him. Huck goes into the woods to get some sleep before breakfast.