Although the _Red Hawk_ and her cargo were a complete loss, all on board
reached land safely. With the wreckage of the boat, the men built a fire
to dry themselves and from a box of bread and bacon which the waves
threw ashore, they made a frugal supper. The four travelers for the
South had saved their guns and blankets and all spent the night near a
big fire as best they could.
The next day, Tatanka built a tepee, using blankets and canvas instead
of the deerskins and buffalo skins he had learned to use when he was a
boy. The company was indeed much in need of some kind of shelter because
little Tim was not at all himself. He tried bravely not to "lie down,"
as he said, but his head ached, his face was flushed and at times he had
a high fever.
"I fear the boy will be sick," said Tatanka. "I will fix him a tea."
Tim had the dislike of most small boys for medicine, but he drank down a
large cupful of hot tea made by steeping some green plants in hot water.
Then Tatanka covered him up with several blankets to produce sweating.
"It is good medicine," the Indian remarked. "It is the way our women
cure their children, and the missionaries also say it is good medicine."
After a few days, the four travelers moved to a permanent camp a little
way below the foot of Lake Pepin and about a mile below Reed's Landing.
At this place were several stores, and the landing owed its existence to
the fact that early in spring goods were delivered here and hauled by
wagon to the head of the lake, where they were loaded on other steamers
for shipment to St. Paul. For the ice sometimes remains in Lake Pepin
two weeks longer than in any other part of the upper river.
Barker and Black Buffalo had intended to take the next boat to St.
Louis, but Little Tim grew so sick that it was impossible to move him,
and the men decided that they would have to take care of the sick boy as
well as they could.
"He has the long fever," declared Tatanka, "and he will be sick a long
time. May be till the Mississippi freezes over."
Tim did have a long sickness. He had no pain, he had no appetite, and
his small body often burnt with a high fever.
If a doctor could have been consulted, he would have said that Tim had a
fairly mild case of typhoid fever, but there was no doctor within fifty
miles of Reed's Landing. Barker and Tatanka had both seen cases like
Tim's and felt that in time the little fellow would get well again.
"We shall stay here till the Great River freezes over," said Tatanka,
after a week had passed. "A sick boy cannot travel."
Tatanka built another tepee, which he and Bill occupied, while the
trapper slept in the first tepee with the sick boy. The two men bought a
boat of the trader and finished a canoe the trader had begun. They also
built of logs and rough boards a shack for winter use, doing the work
whenever they had plenty of time.
[Illustration: The two men bought a boat of the trader.]
"A tepee," Tatanka said, "is a good house in summer and fall, but in
winter it is too cold for white people, who are not used to it."
Both the trapper and Black Buffalo did all they could to make the sick
boy comfortable. They gathered wild cherries and gave him the juice to
drink; they made soup of prairie chicken, grouse, and wild duck.
"You must drink the good soup," said Barker, "for when the lake freezes
up you and Bill must go skating and you must be big and strong when we
get home to Vicksburg."
It was not difficult for the trapper and the Indian to secure enough
food, for both of them knew how to gather the wild foods of woods,
river, and marsh.
It was not getting to be the time when the great waves of bird life roll
southward, and as the Mississippi and its grand winding bottoms are one
of the great highways of the winged millions, there was an endless
procession of flocks coming and going.
When little Tim had a good day and the weather was mild, the trapper
carried the sick boy to a spot where he could see the shining river and
the wooded bluffs, gorgeous in autumn colors, for no river in the world
surpasses the upper Mississippi in the almost inconceivable profusion of
autumn flowers and in the gorgeous effects of mixed and blended green,
gold, orange, reds, and crimson, all painted on a canvas far too vast
for any human artist and almost too grand for human eye to drink in.
And above all this beauty on earth, spread the blue sky, with fleecy
white clouds floating eastward.
"Uncle Barker," the boy would ask, "what are the birds almost touching
the clouds?"
"I can hear their call," the old trapper answered, glad that Tim was
beginning to take an interest in things, "I think they are martins, the
kind that nested in the hollow trees at Fort Ridgely and in the big
house the soldiers had built for them."
Near the tepees stood an immense hollow elm. Around this tree a small
flock of swifts gyrated in wide, noisy circles every evening.
"What are they doing!" asked Bill. "Where are they going?"
Tatanka smiled. "The Indian boys know," he answered. "If your eyes are
sharp, you can tell."
Then Bill watched. Every time the swarm sailed, noisily chirping, over
the big tree, some of the birds suddenly turned their wings against the
air, and dropped into the dark hollow like so many stones. After half an
hour the last bird had dropped to its sleeping-perch and Bill thumped
the tree with his ax; he laid his ear to the tree and heard a great
humming as of a hundred swarms of bees, and a few of the birds came out
and fluttered about.
"Don't disturb them, Bill," the trapper urged. "They have been on the
wing all day and we should let them rest. Some people say they have no
feet, but they have, only they are very small and the swifts use them
merely for clinging to walls of hollow trees at night. It is a queer way
of sleeping, but the best they can do, for they never sleep in any other
way."
Nowadays not many swifts sleep in hollow trees, for most of these
natural homes of the bears, raccoons, and swifts are gone, but the
light-winged swifts have found other sleeping-places; they roost by
thousands in chimneys of court-houses, churches, and schools. And before
white men light their fires, when the days begin to grow cold, the
swifts have assembled in great flocks on the Gulf of Mexico, whence they
go to spend the winter in Central and South America.
Bill took great delight in bringing his sick brother a handful of the
most beautiful flowers of the bottom forest, the scarlet lobelia, or
cardinal flower. Tim was not alone in enjoying these dazzling red
flowers. A flock of humming-birds soon found them and came to them
several times every day. Within reach of the boys' hands, the little
bird gems hung motionless on invisible wings. 'At times they perched,
and preened their delicate plumage for ten minutes at a time. Tim
laughed for the first time, when two of the midgets of the air had a
fight. They squeaked like mice, as they threatened angrily to spear each
other with their long sharp bills.
"They are funny little things," Tim said, as he turned over and went to
sleep.
"The boy will get well," remarked Tatanka. "When a sick person laughs,
he gets well again."
One warm day rather late in September, the trapper proposed a new kind
of hunting to Bill. "Let us go on a bee hunt," he said; "Tatanka will
stay with Tim."
Bill had never heard of a bee hunt, and wanted to know what Mr. Barker
wanted to do with the bees.
"We don't want the bees," the trapper explained; "we want to get some
honey, and in order to do that we have to find the nest of a swarm of
wild honey-bees."
The trapper made a little box of bark and caught a bee, after it had
worked for quite a while on a clump of goldenrod.
In an open place, he let the bee go. "Now, watch," he said to Bill, "and
point your finger in the direction it flies and run after it as far as
you can follow it."
Bill did not know why he should run after the bee, but he followed
through grass and weeds until he tumbled over a hidden log.
Barker laughed when Bill picked himself out of the weeds.
"That's fine," he commented. "My eyes are getting a little dull on such
small creatures and I can't run as fast as I once could, so I took you
along to do the spying and the running. You see, we know now that this
bee goes east from here to reach its home."
The two hunters now walked a few hundred yards in the same direction and
then caught another bee. Again Bill saw the liberated insect make a
straight line eastward.
In this manner, they proceeded until they came close to the bluffs on
the Wisconsin side.
"We're on their line, all right," Barker expressed himself gleefully.
"If it doesn't end at some settler's bee-hive, we ought to find our
bee-tree pretty soon."
The next bee surprised Bill by going directly west; but the trapper
clapped his hands and called: "We've passed the tree, so we'll just work
back carefully and watch for a good-looking hollow tree. If we can't
find it, we shall have to run a cross-line, which is sure to find it."
But they found the wild bees, at the next trial, without running a
cross-line. "Here they are, here they are!" Bill called, as he stood
under a big white-oak.
Hundreds of black bees were entering and leaving a knot-hole about six
feet above the ground.
"It's a big swarm," Barker told the boy; "and they are in a good place
for us. Sometimes they go into a hollow limb thirty feet high, where you
can't get at them.
"To-morrow, we'll come back and get some honey. Now let's go home and
tell Tim and Tatanka about our luck."