THE GRAPE TREE
Well, one afternoon--it was about two weeks later--I was sitting on the
grass where the mud cove is, just below our cottage up there on our
Birch Island, and Jibby Jones was sitting beside me. We weren’t doing
anything but waiting, or nothing much else, but we had three or four
empty baskets and a rake and an axe beside us. We were waiting for Uncle
Beeswax, because he was going to take us to get wild grapes.
One day, just after we had met him at Greenland Creek Uncle Beeswax had
stopped at Birch Island to see if our folks wanted any honey or beeswax.
Generally, when he stopped at our island he went right past us boys and
up to the cottages, but since we had saved him from the Tough Customer
he liked us, I guess. That day Jibby Jones was rigging up a trot-line,
and after Uncle Beeswax had told us that the Tough Customer and the Rat
were still digging at the creek bank, and had said, a couple of times,
“My, what a nose! My, what a noble nose!” he put down his baskets and
looked at what Jibby was doing, and shook his head.
“Who taught you that way to tie hooks on a trot-line?” he asked.
“Nobody did,” Jibby said in his solemn way. “I evolved this way out of
my own head.”
“Well, it is no way at all,” said Uncle Beeswax. “Let me show you.”
So he showed Jibby how to fix hooks on a trot-line. You know what a
trot-line is. It is a long, stout fish-line--mighty stout, too--and
sometimes a quarter of a mile long, or more. You tie one end to a tree
on the bank and have the rest of the line coiled in your skiff, with the
hooks tied on about three or four feet apart, and while some one rows
your skiff out into the river you pay out the line. When you come to the
end of the line, you tie a big anchor rock on the end of it and chuck it
overboard. The hooks are not fastened directly onto the trot-line. Each
hook is on a short line of its own--maybe a foot and a half long, and
the ends of these lines are tied to the trot-line. That lets them float
free and gives a fish some play when it gets caught. Otherwise it might
break away easier. It was the way Jibby was tying these hook-lines to
the trot-line that Uncle Beeswax did not like.
“If you tie them that way, Jibby,” he said, “they’ll slide back and
forth along the line when a big fish gets on them. This is the right
way.”
So he showed Jibby, but Jibby did not bother to go over the job again.
He thought the line might do as it was, because it was a big job to
untie hundreds of hard knots and he wanted to get his trot-line in the
water and catch some fish.
After that old Uncle Beeswax used to stop at the island every day he
went by, and he knew more about the old river, and told us more, than
any man ever did, except, maybe, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar. What Uncle
Oscar did not know Uncle Beeswax did.
Anyway, Jibby Jones put out his trot-line that afternoon after Uncle
Beeswax went. He tied one end to a tree by the mud cove and Wampus and I
rowed the skiff while Jibby paid out the trot-line and he anchored the
far end out beyond the middle of the river with a rock big enough to
hold a house from floating away. After that we “ran” the trot-line twice
a day and we always got fish--sometimes three or four catfish and white
perch and sometimes a carp or two, but always some. When you “run” a
trot-line one fellow rows the skiff to keep the current from sweeping it
downstream too strong, and the other sits in the bow of the boat with
the trot-line dragging over it. He pulls the boat along by pulling on
the trot-line, and when he comes to a hook-line he takes off the
fish--if there is one--and baits the hook and lets it slide back down
into the water.
So that’s that. There was Jibby’s trot-line stretching out a quarter of
a mile or so from our island, dipping into the river just a few feet
beyond the tree it was tied to, like a submarine cable that did not go
quite to Buffalo Island. When we were out “running” the line, old Uncle
Beeswax would row toward us, if he happened to be rowing by, and he
would ask how many fish we were getting, and things like that.
So, on this day in August, Jibby and I were out “running” the trot-line
and Wampus was in the stern of our skiff, and here came old Uncle
Beeswax rowing out from the shore of Buffalo Island toward us. There was
quite a breeze blowing and his long gray whiskers blew out like a
pennant. He rowed up alongside, and he was almost bobbing up and down on
his seat, he was so excited.
“My, my!” he cried. “My, oh, my! I just ran across the grandest grape
tree I ever saw in my whole life, bar none whatever! More wild grapes
than I ever saw in one place in all my born days. A big tree and just
loaded down and weighted down and covered with grapes.”
Well, we knew why he had come to tell us. He had said that sometime when
he found a fine grape tree he would let us know and take us with him to
get wild grapes, and he had found one. It was loaded down with wild
grapes, Uncle Beeswax said. There were so many wild grapes the tree
looked blue instead of green. It was worth going miles to see--just to
see, mind you!--and all those grapes were ours just for the getting!
Bushels of them! No wonder Uncle Beeswax was excited.
He was so excited he sputtered when he tried to talk, and his old hands
trembled. It meant money for him because he sold wild grapes to women
who wanted to make jelly, but he was almost as pleased because he could
show Jibby and us a real grape tree, and lead us where we could get our
share of grapes from the most wonderful grape tree any man ever saw. It
was a poor year for grapes, but that is the way the wild grapes behave.
You’ll walk miles and see only a few skinny bunches that are all
bird-picked and not worth bothering with, and then you’ll run across one
tree just loaded down with vines and the vines loaded with full bunches
of lovely blue grapes.
Uncle Beeswax tried to tell us where the tree was, but we could not
understand. We thought we had walked all over Buffalo Island, and we had
never seen a tree like that. So he took a piece of paper from Jibby and
a pencil from Wampus and he tried to draw a map. By the map we
understood pretty well where the tree must be, and the reason we had
never seen it was because it was hidden. The map Uncle Beeswax made
showed why.
Right straight across the river from the tree Jibby had his trot-line
tied to was a sycamore tree on Buffalo Island. If you rowed across from
Jibby’s trot-line tree to the sycamore tree and climbed the bank, you
got into a tangle of briars and tall nettles and wild flax and poison
ivy thirty or forty feet wide, and that was a jungle nobody would want
to break through. Just back of that was a sort of gully that the river
had hollowed out, and that gully had been mushy mud all summer. It ran
up and down for an eighth of a mile, both ways.
Now, you know how all those islands are--all a mess of trees and vines
and tangles of one sort and another. Whenever we landed on Buffalo
Island, we would walk down along the shore until we were below the mushy
gully, or up until we were above it, and, when we were coming from the
other side and struck the gully, we did the same. That was all right,
but we had been fooled every time. There was not just one gully; there
were two of them. They joined together at their upper and lower ends.
What we had always done, and what any one would do, was to look across
the gully from the side toward the river and think we saw the woods on
the other side, but what we saw was a little island of woods. The same
way, looking across the gully from the island side of it, we thought we
saw the tangle that was along the bank of the river, but we really saw
the little island of woods. Those islands fool you a thousand times,
that way. So there was the little island between its mud gullies and
that was where the wonderful grape tree was. All that had happened was
that the hot, dry August days had dried the mud in the gullies, and
Uncle Beeswax had walked across on the dry cakes of mud and had found
the grape tree.
That was simple enough, but if Uncle Beeswax could do it the next man
looking for grapes could do it, too, and, with everybody looking for
grapes for jelly and for wine, that might happen any minute. No wonder
he was excited.
He made it all clear enough for us and he gave Jibby the map. We dropped
the trot-line back into the water in a hurry, I tell you! This was what
we were to do. Jibby and Wampus and I were to row back to our island and
tell Skippy Root and Tad Willing and get baskets and axes and a rake or
two. The rakes were to pull down the vines. The axes were to chop down
the tree. It’s a ruinous way to do, but it is the way every one does.
Uncle Beeswax was to row up to his shanty-boat and get his own baskets
and axe and rake and he was to stop at our mud cove for Jibby and me.
Wampus and Skippy and Tad were to go in one skiff, and Uncle Beeswax and
Jibby and I in the other. So Uncle Beeswax rowed off up the river and
Jibby and Wampus and I rowed home across the river.
We hunted up Skippy and Tad and told them what was up, and they got
busy. They got baskets and axes and rakes, and Jibby and I did the same,
and then Skippy and Wampus and Tad took my skiff and rowed away. They
were to go over to the shore by the big sycamore tree and wait for us.
We had to wait for Uncle Beeswax. That was why we were sitting there on
the grass by the mud cove like I told you in the beginning. So we
talked, because we had nothing else to do. Only, it was Jibby who
talked.