The Lure Of The Mississippi Part 15

"Can't tell, lads," Barker smiled. "You lads ask a lot of hard questions. I reckon they can tell whether it is storming or whether the sun is s.h.i.+ning."

After the meal, Tatanka smoked in silence, with a far-away look on his face.

"What is it our brother is thinking of?" Barker asked him in Sioux. "His face is sad and his eyes heavy."

"I was thinking of my people," Tatanka replied, after a few moments of silence. "Not long ago they lived on this great river. Now they are driven away from their river, Minnesota, where deer used to be plentiful, and where elk, ducks, and geese live still in great flocks, and the muskrats build many little houses.

"But my people will never come back. They must now live in the country of short gra.s.s and small trees on the River Missouri. A few more years they will hunt buffaloes, but the white people are fast killing all the buffaloes and making robes out of their skins.

"When the buffalo are gone, we shall starve or become beggars, or we must learn to live like white men.

"A spirit tells me I ought to return to my people."

"You cannot return now," Barker told him in Sioux. "We need you. If the bad white men find us, they may steal the boys and kill me, if you leave us. You must stay with us and go with us to the city, where the white people have the big war."

"I shall stay with you," Tatanka promised, after a pause, "but I'm homesick for my people."

A flock of chickadees had been attracted by the smoke and the fire. They hopped boldly on the ground and picked up the crumbs of bread, and one even took a bath in a little pool of snow-water collected under the bank by the combined beat of the fire and the sun.

"The little birds bring good luck," remarked Tatanka. "May be the big guns will not kill us, when we go south," he added pensively.

When the fishermen approached their net, they saw by the movement of the poles that they had made a good catch. The net was fairly alive with pickerel, pike, ba.s.s, and suckers, but they caught no gars or paddle-fish.

"Why don't we catch some of those queer fish?" Bill asked.

"Don't know," replied the trapper. "You never see those in winter. May be they go south to live in warmer water."

In the evening, the men dressed all the fish they had caught. They did not smoke them as they had done with the fish caught in warm weather, but they placed them on frames of sticks in a brush shed. This shed was their store-house. The brush protected the frozen fish from thawing in the sun, and in this way the men kept a good supply of fresh fish always on hand.

CHAPTER XIV-SIGNS OF SPRING

Winter held on obstinately until the middle of March.

At last, one fine morning, Tatanka announced, "I smell spring. The little nuthatches and the little woodp.e.c.k.e.rs are calling and I saw two crows flying north. That means spring is coming and the ice will soon float down stream in big white blocks."

The boys found another sign of spring. The flowing of the sap. Tatanka called it the bleeding of the trees. At the time when the frost is not yet out of the ground, when spring has not quite conquered winter, soft maple, box-elder, birch, and sugar-maple begin to bleed; that is, the sap begins to drip out of some fresh wound. A squirrel may have cut the bark, a bird picked a bud, snow or wind or the falling of dead branches may have bruised the bark or torn away some twigs. It is from these wounds that the sap begins to drip.

Sharp eyes can find these drippings in the forest, and it is easy to discover small dark patches of sap on city streets and walks.

"Mr. Barker," the boys asked, "can't we make some sugar and syrup?"

"Go ahead with it, laddies," the old trapper encouraged them. "A can of maple syrup and some real maple sugar would taste good to me."

The boys had grown up in a country where the sugar-maple, a northern tree, does not grow and had only the vaguest idea about sugar-making; so they asked Tatanka to show them how to make maple-sugar, a bit of woodcraft which white men have learned from the Indians.

Each boy took a tin pail and Tatanka took two big pails and an ax. Tim soon found a large box-elder and Bill sighted a big soft-maple, a river-bottom maple, from which the sap was dripping. But Tatanka laughed at them saying, "No good, no good; 'most all water. Good sugar trees grow on high land."

Tatanka knew the trees in winter as well as in summer, and when the three sugar-makers had reached the Minnesota bluffs he soon found two big sugar-maples. Into each tree he made an upward cut and put a chip into the cut. The sap began at once to run along the chips and dripped into the pails below. In an hour the small pails were filled and Tatanka replaced them with his large buckets.

"Now you build a fire and boil your sap," he told the boys. "Slow, over Indian fire; no white man's fire."

The boys were surprised to see how much of the sap boiled away before they had a thick sweet syrup. Tatanka from time to time poured some more sap into their pails so that each boy at last had a pailful of maple-syrup.

About noon the boys were hungry, but Tatanka would not hear of going to camp for lunch.

"When you make sugar, you make sugar all day. You drink sap, you eat syrup, and sugar. That is the way the Indians make sugar, plenty good sugar. We go home when it gets cold, then the sap stops flowing."

They did stay all day, and the lads helped Tatanka boil his sap down to a good thick syrup.

In the evening Mr. Barker's biscuits and Tatanka's maple syrup made the best supper the lads had ever eaten. After the meal, Tatanka made some real maple-sugar by boiling down the syrup in a big frying-pan, but little Tim fell asleep before the syrup began to sugar and Bill was disappointed because he could eat only a few small pieces, although Barker and Tatanka told him that he might eat the whole panful if he cared for it.

"It's the same as with the honey," Bill mourned. "I thought I could eat a piece as big as Mr. Barker's fist, and then I could only eat a spoonful."

A week later, about the first of April, the ice below Lake Pepin began to move.

There is something mysterious in the spring break-up of a big river. A warm, south wind begins to melt the snow. So rapidly it vanishes from open fields and from south-facing bluffs that you wonder where it went.

But in the woods the white covering lingers for weeks. After several days of warm weather, the unbroken ice on the river is covered with a few inches of water, but there are no signs of a break-up. Still the slush and water on the ice is the sign that the sleeping river is awaking.

Over night the creeks have become swollen, their turbid floods rush into the river, whose icy covering although still two or three feet thick has lost the brittleness and strength of winter. The creeks and brooks and countless bubbling, gurgling rills creep under the ice. With a slow, but resistless power, the power of a hydraulic press, they lift the frozen ma.s.s from its moorings on sh.o.r.e. The sleeping river yawns and stretches itself; the ice begins to move, slowly at first, then rapidly. The river is awake, alive once more. In a day or two, the great rafts and ma.s.ses of ice have pa.s.sed south, the river is open; it is spring.

"Friends, it is time to move," Barker observed next morning. "In a day or two our camp will be flooded."

Within a few hours everything was packed. Barker and Tatanka each handled a paddle, Bill took his seat in the stern to steer, while little Tim, wrapped in an Indian blanket, watched for hidden snags from his seat in the bow. Meetcha, who had come out of his log about two weeks before, was allowed to remain with his four-footed friends in the woods.

Tim had become convinced that they could not take him along any farther.

When evening came, they had left the long lake far behind them and now carried their large canoe up on high land at the mouth of a spring brook several miles below the quiet little river town of Minneiska, White Water.

There was no time to set up a tent. The travelers raked together a bed of dry leaves, spread their blankets over them, rolled themselves into other blankets, and used their tent-canvas as extra covering.

"Boys, make a night-cap out of your handkerchiefs," Barker advised the lads, "for the morning will be biting crisp."

While they were eating breakfast next morning, they saw a flock of cranes, real cranes, not the common blue herons of our marshes, rise from a sandbar. With a spiraling noisy flight, they arose against the face of the high bluff and disappeared over the timber, six hundred feet above the river.

"Where are they going?" asked Tim. "Why don't they fly north up the river!"

"They have gone to feed on the young winter-wheat of the settlers on the upland," the trapper informed them, his eyes kindling with the fire of the pioneer hunter. "If you are willing to climb the high bluffs we may be able to find them."

Tatanka, like a real Indian, was willing, and the boys, like all real boys, were eager to go.

"Each man take a blanket," ordered Barker, as he put a day's rations into his pack-sack, and in addition to his gun he also took an ax.

"What's that for!" asked Bill, with his usual curiosity.

"To chop their heads off," Tim spurted. "Bill, you ask lots of fool questions."