As is usually the case in Minnesota, the fine outdoor skating came to a
close toward the end of November through storms and snow-falls.
If the lads had not lived in company with such men as the trapper and
Tatanka, time would have hung heavily on their hands. On many days the
weather was very cold and the snow had become so deep in the woods that
traveling was very difficult.
After they had been shut up in the cabin for three days by a bad storm,
Tatanka one morning began to carve something out of a piece of soft
basswood.
"What are you making?" Tim asked.
"Watch and see," said Tatanka, as he continued slowly to cut away small
white shavings.
Soon the boys saw that Tatanka was making a wooden fish about six inches
long. When the figure was ready, the Indian cut small pieces of tin out
of a tobacco-can and these he tacked to his wooden minnow to serve as
fins.
"There, my little brothers," he uttered with a smile, "you have a good
minnow. He will fool the pickerel and the bass when they are hungry. I
put a little piece of lead on him and you pull him up and down in the
water, and pickerel and bass think he is a real fish. They come to eat
him. May be you catch them."
After Tatanka had made two more wooden minnows he and the lads went to a
deep quiet place in a slough to fish.
At first they cut a small hole in the ice. Then, by the aid of a few
poles and some blankets, Tatanka built a small dark tent over the hole.
"Now, then," he said, "we go in and fish. May be we catch them, may be
not. If the fish don't come, we go home. May be they come to-morrow."
The tent was entirely dark, but the boys were surprised to find that
after their eyes had adjusted themselves to the darkness in the tent the
water did not appear dark, but was pervaded by a soft light, enabling
them to see clearly even insects and small fish which swam past, and
they could plainly see their decoy minnow to a depth of four feet.
Tatanka took the string of the decoy in his left hand. In his right hand
he held a spear, and the three fishermen seated themselves on a log.
"You sit still," Tatanka told them. "Don't jump. Fish have no ears, but
they can feel every little noise in the water."
It seemed a long time to the boys before anything happened. Then Tatanka
bent over quickly, thrust his spear into the hole and brought up a large
flapping pickerel.
"May be we caught him," he spoke with a laugh. "Now, Bill, you catch
him. This is the way Indians catch plenty fish in winter when they
cannot find deer."
Again Bill waited a long time. At last he saw some big fish. With a
beating heart he dropped his spear and would have lost it, if it had not
been tied by a string to his arm, but he caught no fish.
Tatanka laughed. "You get much excited," he said, "like white man. Keep
cool like Indian. May be you catch him next time."
The next time Bill showed that he could keep cool, and he brought up a
fine large bass. The fish were getting more numerous and Bill added
another and another to his catch. Sometimes several fish or even a small
school of them came together. Very soon Bill could tell when a school
was coming, because their bodies shut out a part of the light before
they reached the hole and made the water look dark, as if a cloud were
passing over.
After Bill had fished a while, Tim also learned to fish like an Indian
and brought up several fine fish.
"Now we go home," Tatanka suggested, after a while. "I think Tim is
hungry."
That night each man ate for supper a big bass, which Barker had fried in
bacon fat and corn meal.
After this day, the boys often went fishing by themselves and supplied
the camp with all the fresh fish the four men cared to eat. They found
that all the fish, bass and pike, pickerel and suckers, tasted
remarkably good, for all fish are good if they have been caught in cold,
clear water.
One warm morning, the genial old trapper took down the gill-net.
"You lads come with me," he said. "I can catch more fish in a day than
you and Tatanka can catch in a week. Yesterday you fished all day and
caught one little sunfish."
"No, Mr. Barker, it was a big one," Tim piped out.
"It was only a poor sunfish," Barker replied. "We'll starve if I don't
help you catch fish. Take both axes and our shovel."
When they arrived at the spot Barker had selected, he stepped off a line
and told the boys to shovel the snow from half a dozen spots, while he
and Tatanka began to cut holes through the ice. The first hole he cut
about eight feet long and then he cut smaller holes about ten feet
apart, but all in a straight line.
When the holes were cut, he asked the boys to shovel the slush out of
them as much as possible, while he went and cut a long straight pole.
"I know, I know how he is going to do it," Tim exclaimed. "But we'll
have to make all the holes longer, so they will run together."
"You wait," said Bill. "I won't cut any more holes."
When the long pole was ready, Barker tied one end of the net to it and
pushed pole and net into the first long hole and under the ice toward
the second hole.
To the other end of the net a rope was attached.
"There," he told Bill, "you take hold of this rope and see that the net
does not get tangled."
When Bill had taken charge of his end of the net, the trapper pushed the
pole under the ice to the next hole and in the same manner he pushed and
pulled it along to the last opening. Here he pulled the pole out and
drove the end of it into the soft bottom.
"Now, Bill," he suggested, "you had better tie your rope to a log, so
they can't run away with your end of the net. You know there are some
big fish in the Mississippi."
As the men had nothing to do for a while, they sat down under a warm
sunny bank, where Barker built a fire, under the dry stump of a stranded
cottonwood.
"White man's fire," Tatanka muttered good-naturedly, as he backed away
from the growing heat.
"Yes, white man's fire is what we want to-day," the trapper replied.
"The Great River furnishes us plenty of big wood, but the little dry
sticks are buried under the snow."
Then to the delight of the boys the trapper drew a small tin pail out of
his pack-sack, together with some cornbread and a big piece of bacon for
each one.
"There, lads," he said, "you warm the cornbread and fry the bacon while
I make tea."
It took some time before enough snow was melted for tea, for even on a
big fire snow and ice melt very slowly.
"I forgot to dip water out of one of our net-holes," the trapper
remarked, "but we have plenty of time to melt snow and ice."
The boys cut some green maple twigs, and on these as an improvised grate
they heated the bread and fried the bacon.
"I'm glad you brought something to eat, Mr. Barker," Tim remarked
thankfully. "I was getting very hungry. You called us so early this
morning."
"I did," replied Barker, "because the fish run most during the warm part
of the day."
"Do they know when the air is warm!" asked Bill. "How can they know down
in the water?"
"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 shining."
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 grass 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, bass, 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.