Pi sleeps through the morning, then wakes with renewed strength and a clearer sense of danger: Richard Parker is alive in the lifeboat, and staying aboard could mean being silently killed. Pi briefly considers abandoning the boat, but realizes that swimming away would guarantee death from distance, thirst, exposure, and sharks. Fighting despair, Pi hears an inner resolve to live and decides he must organize survival immediately.

As Richard Parker growls, Pi improvises a safer position by building a small raft from four floating oars, a lifebuoy, and life jackets. Working in terror near Richard Parker and the screaming hyena, Pi threads the oars through life-jacket armholes, lashes the joints with buoyant rope, and ties the lifebuoy to reinforce the frame. Pi then runs a long rope through a hole in the lifeboat’s stem so the raft can be tethered and not drift away.

Before Pi can finish escaping, Richard Parker emerges and kills the hyena almost silently, crushing its neck with paw and jaws. Richard Parker then turns and fixes Pi with an intense stare, closing the distance as if to jump onto the tarpaulin. A rat suddenly appears and scrambles onto Pi; Pi throws the rat toward Richard Parker, and Richard Parker eats it, then retreats under the tarpaulin and begins devouring the hyena.

Using Richard Parker’s distraction, Pi retrieves additional life jackets and the last oar, notices a patch of vomit that suggests Richard Parker is seasick, and improves the raft with extra flotation, a seat, and a footrest. Pi pushes the raft into the water and is shaken to see sharks lingering beneath it, though they do not attack. Once the tether goes taut, the raft swings out to about forty feet, making Pi feel both exposed above sharks and desperate for the relative solidity of the lifeboat.

Pi edges closer, then chooses a compromise distance of about thirty feet from the lifeboat, looping extra rope around the footrest to manage slack. As evening falls, cold rain begins; Pi pulls to the bow and quickly grabs a rain catcher, a blanket, and the survival manual from the locker. When Pi accidentally slams the locker lid and startles Richard Parker while Richard Parker is feeding, Richard Parker snarls, and Pi falls back to the raft and lets out all the rope, expecting an attack that does not come. Pi spends the night soaked and cold on the pitching raft in darkness, reassured only by the rope’s tug that the raft remains attached to the lifeboat.