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 woodpeckers 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
mass from its moorings on shore. 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 masses
of ice have passed 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."
The men laughed aloud. "One string to this crane hunt," the old trapper
told them. "The fellow that asks one of those 'tarnal botheration
questions hikes back to the river and watches the boat till the rest of
us come back.
"Keep your eyes and ears open, but your mouths shut tight. That's the
rule for a crane-hunt. Now walk slow. Those hills are higher than they
look."
For a little while they traveled up the ravine of one of those small
streams which run in large numbers into the west banks of the
Mississippi. On the upper river, from St. Paul into Iowa, the hills and
bluffs on the west bank are densely wooded, while those of the east bank
are covered with a scrubby growth and show many patches covered only
with grasses and other prairie plants, which are fitted to endure
intense sunlight, great heat and long spells of drought. Some patches of
prairie, however, are also found amongst the bluffs on the west bank.
It was on one of those bare patches of hillside that the lads, with
great joy, picked their first spring flowers, the wild crocus, or pasque
flower, of the Prairie States.
From Illinois to Montana, and northward far into Canada, the wild
crocuses spring out of the sear grass or the burnt prairie, while ice
and snow still linger in shaded spots. Like millions of living
amethysts, scattered broadcast over a continent, but far more beautiful
than dead stones, they smile at the sky and the sun before the drought
and hot winds of summer can wither their petals, and before rank grasses
and weeds can cut off the sunlight.
When the robins have come back and the crocuses are out, the boys and
girls of the Prairie States and Provinces know that spring has come.
The prairie crocuses do not take time, like most other flowers to grow
leaves first. The brown woolly buds push out of the soil as soon as the
snow is gone. After a few warm days they cover the bare patches of dry
river bluffs and all the stony ridges and moraine hills, which the great
glaciers left behind many thousand years ago. They make early
flower-gardens along the right-of-way of the railroads, although the
section men burn the grass and the prairie flowers every fall. Fires
cannot harm the sleeping roots and buds of the crocuses in the ground.
When the prairie grasses begin to grow in May and June, the crocuses
find time to produce large whorls of pretty cut-up leaves, and the winds
of summer scatter their long seeds.
They are not really the first flowers of the Northern States; that honor
belongs to the dark purple spathe-like sheaths of the skunk-cabbage,
which grow in the black muck near brooks and spring-holes, under the
tasseled alders and red killikinnick. But it takes a sharp-eyed
naturalist to find these strange underground flowers.
Many different trees the lads also discovered in these upland woods.
There were the trees of the large fragrant buds, shellbark and pig-nut
hickory, black-walnut, and butternut; and from the dead rustling leaves
the lads picked many a well-seasoned nut, which the squirrels, gray and
red, had lost or forgotten. There were several kinds of oaks, bur-oaks,
black oaks and white oaks; and from the dark oaks the trunks of
canoe-birches stood out in pure white. In the river bottom the lads had
often cut for their evening camp-fires the slender trunks of the river
birch with its tousled curls of light brown bark, but of this curious
birch they did not find a tree in the upland woods.
After the four men had followed the little stream for half a mile, they
struck off to their right up a steep slope; where they often became
entangled in vines of wild grape and bitter-sweet. Tim was soon out of
breath and had to rest.
"Mr. Barker," asked Bill, "did you say the bluffs were six hundred feet
high! They must surely be a mile high."
"Keep still," Tim urged him; "you'll have to go back to the boat."
After much hard climbing, they came to a wide ridge, which sloped gently
upward toward the river and they followed it in that direction. The
ridge was covered with great spreading white oaks two or three hundred
years old. Bold gray squirrels were chasing one another along the big
horizontal boughs. A woodchuck that had been feeding on a patch of new
grass sat up to look at the invaders of his solitude and then hurried
into his hole. From a distance came the strange drumming of a grouse,
while a woodpecker sounded his peculiar rattle on a dead branch.
At the edge of the woods, they came to a bare spot, which ended abruptly
on the top of a hundred-foot cliff.
"Don't go too near the rim," Barker warned the boys, as they ran ahead.
"If you go over, you'll get smashed on the rocks below.
"Here we're going to camp for the night," the trapper said, as he and
Tatanka placed their packs on the ground.
"When are we going to hunt cranes?" Bill almost blurted out, but he
checked himself just in time.
"It wouldn't be any fun to sit alone all night at the boat," he
whispered to Tim, "with the rest of you camping on the grandest spot I
have ever seen. I think Mr. Barker has some fun up his sleeve, but I
can't figure out what it is."