THE FISHING PRIZE
That night, before we went to bed, the five of us sat on the riprap
rocks in front of the cottages, and Jibby told all he knew about the
land pirate and his treasure again, and we got up the Land Pirate’s
Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company. We sat there and swatted
mosquitoes and talked like good friends and Dutch uncles, and swore a
cross-my-heart and hope-to-die oath to be faithful and true to the
constitution and by-laws of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and
Exploration Company. There wasn’t any constitution or any by-laws, but
that did not matter--we swore to be true to them, anyhow, and maybe,
sometime when we had time, we might get up some, if we thought we needed
them.
But, when we had talked it all over and had come right down to facts,
the only thing about the treasure that Jibby seemed to be real sure of
was that the old negro Mose had been awful dead earnest. That old negro
had been mortal sure there was treasure somewhere. He would have bet a
million dollars on it. And that was what made Jibby think there must be
some treasure hidden somewhere. There was no doubt that there had been a
land pirate named John A. Murrell.
Talking it over together that way, we asked Jibby a million or two
questions, and it came out that the old negro Mose had said that
“Riverbank” was the key to where the treasure was hidden. There was no
“Riverbank” on the map side of the map, but on the back of it the one
word “Riverbank” was written, old Mose had said, and old Mose said his
father had said that was the key. “You go whar Riverbank is, up the
river whar black folks is free,” was what his father had said. Of
course, that was away back when there were slaves, and Mose was a slave
then, and so was his father.
The other thing Jibby had to go on was the pine tree--the signal pine
that every friend of John A. Murrell and his pirates set out in the
corner of the lot or yard or farm. The thing to do, Jibby said, was to
find a lone pine tree, because that would be a sign and a signal and a
symbol and a sort of trademark, showing that place had something to do
with John A. Murrell. We tried to think of lone pines, but, just
offhand, we couldn’t think of any that night. All we knew were planted
in rows.
So there did not seem to be much to do but elect Wampus the Captain of
the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company, and go to
bed. We thought we would go up and down the river when we had time, and
explore back into the country here and there, and look for lone pines,
and, if we found one in the corner of a lot or farm, we would look for a
likely treasure-hiding place.
Early the next morning, Parcell, who runs the boathouse down at town,
came up with my sister May and a load of groceries and meat for
everybody, and he brought my dog along. My dog is one of the bulliest
dogs you ever saw, but along about April that year all the hair came off
his back, and mother said he was an awful sight, so we let a man take
him, to grow his hair back on. The man was a horse doctor and good at
making hairless dogs hairy again, and he had fixed Rover up fine. And
now he had sent him back.
I was tickled to see Rover again, and he was tickled to see me, and I
guess my mother was almost as glad, because some pretty tough customers
live in houseboats on the river, sometimes. Most of the houseboaters are
all right, and are kind and nice, but some mean ones come floating down
the river, and you can never tell what they’ll do. So a dog comes in
handy, especially a good-sized dog like Rover.
The only thing I was sorry about was that Rover had come this particular
day, because the next day I would have to tie him up and leave him at
home, because it was the day of the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize. You can’t
have a dog along when you are fishing from a skiff for a prize. And
Uncle Oscar’s Fishing Prize was one of the most important things of the
whole summer, always.
The way of the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize was this: Every year, as long
as we had been going up to the island, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar had
given a prize to the fellow who made the best fishing record on a
certain day, and that day was Uncle Oscar’s birthday. That was why we
fished for the prize on that day, and not on another day.
This Uncle Oscar just lived and breathed on the river, as you might say,
and loved it, and he thought nobody fished enough or boated enough or
swam enough or loved the big old river enough. That was the way he was.
He almost wept when he told about the old days when the river was full
of fish and the big old packets and logging steamers were as thick as
mosquitoes, and great long log rafts used to float down with huts built
on them, and camp-fires, and men pushing the long sweeps to steer them.
That was why, every year, he offered the fishing prize, but we boys got
so we didn’t take much interest in it.
“He just gives it so Wampus can win it,” Skippy Root said to me this
year. “He knows Wampus is the best fisher, and he knows Wampus is sure
to win it.”
“Well,” I said, “ain’t you going to try for it? Fishing is luck, and
sometime Wampus’s luck is going to go back on him.”
“Sure, I’m going to try,” Skippy said. “I’m going to try, but not
because I’ve got a chance to win. I’m going to try because Uncle Oscar
Smale is a bully fellow and he’d feel bad if we didn’t let on we were
trying to win the prize he gives. But Wampus will win it, like he always
does.”
I thought so, too, and so did Tad Willing. Wampus always won. But, when
we saw the prize Wampus’s Uncle Oscar offered this year, we did wish we
had a chance. It was a jointed fishing-rod, with a five-dollar reel, and
it was a beauty.
So, a week or so before Uncle Oscar’s birthday, we were squatting on the
shore of the river talking about things, and Jibby Jones came along and
sat down beside us. We were talking about crawfish holes and where bees
had their bee trees with the honey in them and all sorts of things, just
as we happened to think of them. There was a yellow-jacket bee on a
flower just in front of us, getting honey, and Skippy said he wished he
knew where that bee’s bee tree was.
Jibby Jones leaned over until his big nose almost touched the bee.
“I can’t tell by this bee,” he said, “but by and by there will be a bee
come along and I can tell you.”
Pretty soon the bee flew up and circled and went down and lit on a rock
and walked around. Then it flew out over the river and back and
zigzagged off. Then two or three other bees tried the flower for honey,
and each time Jibby Jones put his nose close to it and said, “No; not
this one.” After a while a bee lit on the flower that seemed to satisfy
Jibby.
“Now I can tell you,” he said. “You watch this bee when it flies away.”
So we did. When it got enough honey, it flew into the air and made a
bee-line off for somewhere. Jibby pulled a pocket compass out of his
pants pocket.
“A bit west of south-west-by-west,” he said. “Any time you want to find
that bee tree you start from here and go just west of south-west-by-west
and you’ll find it. That bee was going home.”
“How did you know that one was going home and the others were not?”
Wampus asked. “Was that a pilot bee?”
“Maybe it was,” said Jibby.
“Well, how did you know it was a pilot bee, then?” asked Skippy.
“Maybe I could smell the difference,” Jibby said. “I’ve got a lot of
nose; it ought to be good for something.”
So we all laughed, but we didn’t know whether Jibby was fooling or in
earnest. That was the way he was. Sometimes he fooled just for the fun
of it, and sometimes he was in earnest. We could never quite make out
which he was, but we had found out one thing--if we waited long enough
and didn’t keep joshing him too much, he always ended up by telling us
what the truth was. So now Wampus sort of laughed.
“Aw, quit!” he said. “You can’t smell like that; you can’t smell the
difference between one kind of bee and another kind. Nobody can; I never
heard such nonsense. I bet even my Uncle Oscar can’t, and he knows just
about everything.”
“Has he got a nose like mine?” Jibby asked.
Well, Wampus couldn’t say he had, because nobody we knew had a nose like
Jibby. There were no other noses like it. It was the biggest and
thinnest nose anybody ever saw.
“No,” Wampus said, “Uncle Oscar’s nose is just a common nose.”
“And does he exercise it regular?” Jibby asked.
“What do you mean by ‘exercise it regular’?” Wampus asked.
“Why, exercise it right along,” said Jibby. “Like you exercise your arms
and legs if you want to make them good for what they are good for. Or
like you would exercise your eyes if you wanted them to be good at
seeing things. Or your ears if you wanted them to be ’cute at hearing
things. You know you can do that, don’t you?”
“How?” asked Skippy.
“Well, the Indians did it,” said Jibby. “They began when they were
young, and they exercised their ears and their eyes, and soon they could
hear the grass grow and see a hair as far as you can see a fishpole. You
can exercise your nose the same way, can’t you?”
“Well, it sounds sort of reasonable,” said Tad Willing.
“Of course, it sounds reasonable,” Jibby said, as pleasant as could be.
“Can you do this?”
He put his thumb against the side of his nose and pushed it until most
of his nose lay flat against his left cheek; then he put his thumb on
the other side of his nose and pushed until his nose lay flat against
his right cheek. We all tried it, but we couldn’t do it. Wampus was the
worst at it, because his nose is a pug and sticks up.
“You don’t exercise your noses, that’s why,” Jibby said. “I don’t blame
you. It is no business of mine what you do with your noses. But I
exercise mine and keep it limber and flexible. I get up every morning
and push my nose all around my face, to keep it keen and lively. It
would be mighty dangerous for me if I ever let my nose get stiff and
hard.”
“Why would it?” Skippy wanted to know.
“Because it’s my jib sail,” Jibby said, as solemn as an owl. “If I got
out in a big wind sometime, say near the edge of a big precipice, and
the wind caught my nose, it might blow me over and dash me to pieces on
the rocks below. I’ve got to watch out for that, with a nose like mine.
I’ve got to keep my nose limber, so that if a big wind comes up I can
furl my jib, or jibe it to port or starboard, to steer me away from the
precipice.”
We didn’t say anything. We just looked at one another.
“I might be out in Arizona, or somewhere else, where the wind blows hard
for months at a time,” Jibby went on, just as solemn as before, “and a
nose like mine would be a nuisance. The wind would catch it on one side
and whirl me around one way, and then it would catch it on the other
side and whirl me around the other way, and I’d never be able to get
anywhere if I didn’t keep my nose soft and flexible, so I could lay it
back against my face and fasten it there with a strip of adhesive
plaster.”
“Oh, boy!” Skippy said then, because that was almost too much.
“But,” Jibby went on, “you fellows don’t need to exercise your noses
that way because they don’t amount to much as jibs, anyway.”
“I’ll say mine don’t,” said Wampus, touching his pug.
“No,” said Jibby seriously. “I’ve often felt sorry for you, Wampus;
having a stub like that. But it’s a good nose for smelling with, if you
train it right. It ought to be a quick smeller--a lot quicker than
mine--because it is so short. Smells ought to get in quicker. The only
trouble is that you don’t any of you know how to smell.”
“You don’t have to know how to smell things,” said Tad. “You just smell
them, and that’s all there is to it; you can’t help smelling them.”
“Did you ever read James Latimer’s book called ‘Odors and How to Improve
the Sense of Smell’?” Jibby asked.
“No,” we all said.
“Neither did I,” said Jibby. “I never even heard of it, because there
isn’t any such book, but there might be. Maybe I’ll write one myself,
sometime. The trouble with you fellows is that you don’t think about
your noses. I do think about mine; I think a lot about it. I can’t help
thinking about it, there’s such a lot of it.”
That was true, anyway.
“You fellows just go around smelling what happens to come to you to be
smelled,” Jibby went on. “You can tell a violet from a fish by the smell
of it, maybe, but you don’t exercise your smelling apparatus. Can you
tell the difference between a channel catfish and a mud catfish when
they are down under the water ten feet or so?”
“No, and nobody can. Nobody can even smell a fish when it is under
water,” said Wampus. “Can you?”
“No matter!” said Jibby, sort of tossing his head. “What I say is that,
if people trained their noses and exercised their smelling powers
properly, they might smell smells that they don’t even imagine they can
smell now. That stands to reason. There are dozens of kinds of violets,
but the most that most people can tell when they smell a violet is that
it is a violet. A botanist, that has trained his nose to smell violets
and knows there are dozens of different kinds of violets, gets so, after
a while, he can tell most of them from the others just by the smell. And
it is that way with everything.”
“Well, what good does it do?” asked Skippy.
“Everything you know does some good,” said Jibby. “That’s what knowing
things is for, to do us good. It is just the ‘little bit more’ that
makes anything the ‘most’ instead of leaving it the ‘least.’”
“I guess that’s so,” I said. “It’s partly because Wampus knows a little
bit more about fishing than we do that he wins the Uncle Oscar Fishing
Prize every year.”
“You mean he can smell the fish when they are under water?” Jibby asked.
“Pshaw, no!” said Skippy. “That’s nonsense.”
“Is it?” Jibby asked, grinning a little.
“Well, if it isn’t,” said Skippy, “why don’t you go in for the Uncle
Oscar Prize this year?”
“Oh, I oughtn’t to do that,” Jibby said. “It wouldn’t be fair. What if I
could smell the fish when they are under water? I’d know where all the
fish were and you fellows that belong on the island here wouldn’t have a
chance. No, I’d better not compete for that prize; I’d win it sure.”