The Lure Of The Mississippi Part 16

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 gra.s.ses 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.ses 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 gra.s.s and the prairie flowers every fall. Fires cannot harm the sleeping roots and buds of the crocuses in the ground.

When the prairie gra.s.ses 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 ta.s.seled 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, sh.e.l.lbark and pig-nut hickory, black-walnut, and b.u.t.ternut; 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 gra.s.s 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 woodp.e.c.k.e.r 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."

CHAPTER XV-AT INSPIRATION POINT

"I can't look over, I get dizzy!" Tim said to Bill. "Look at the river.

It surely looks a mile below."

"Lie down," Bill told him. "Then you can't tumble off."

The boys amused themselves by dropping stones over the cliff and counting the seconds till they struck amongst the trees below. Tim claimed he could throw a stone into the river.

"Ah! you can't do it, Tim," Bill objected. "The river is a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies."

"I'll pick a good sailer-rock," Tim persisted, "and you'll see."

But although Tim did his best, his rock seemed to come sailing back to the sloping bluff.

"Guess you are right," admitted Tim, a little crestfallen; "the rivet is pretty far away."

Tatanka stood gazing in silence over the sublime panorama. The river appeared to come like a broad gla.s.sy channel out of the blue hazy distance in the north. Just below the point it was half a mile wide and Tatanka could easily distinguish the deep dark channel from the light brown sandbars near sh.o.r.e.

Like a wonderful picture the valley spread out below the hunters. Dark groves of elms stood out clearly from long stretches of cottonwood in light gray. The swelling and bursting buds of the bottom maples showed great dashes of a dark ruddy red, while vast stretches of gray and brown marshes were dotted with brighter patches of orange willow and of bright red killikinnick.

"My people once lived here," said Tatanka, at last. "They loved this land. It is rich and beautiful, and at that time many red deer and elk and black bear lived in these woods. The big game is gone now. The white settlers have too many guns and too many dogs. They drive the deer away.

"It is good that Manitou gave wings to the ducks and the geese, so the white hunters can not kill them all.

"Our people will never come back to this land. Our trails will grow over with weeds, and the graves of our fathers will be forgotten. Our people must learn to plow the field and raise cattle and horses like white men!"

The old trapper also was carried back to his boyhood as he stood gazing over the river, the bayous, and islands, and to the hills two miles away on the Wisconsin side.

"I used to think," he said to his friend, "that the Wabash and the Illinois were great rivers, but they are just little crawling creeks compared with the Mississippi, and they can show no great woods and grand hills and cliffs like the Mississippi. If these woods were mine, I would build my house on this point and every morning I would see the sun rise over the hills yonder. In the winter I would watch the snow-storms rush down the valley; and in the sultry summer nights I would watch the lightning play between the hills, over the river and among the tree-tops, and hear the thunder roll and echo from bluff to bluff."

"Are you not afraid of thunder and lightning?" asked Tatanka. "My people are afraid of it and will not travel in a storm."

"I used to be afraid, when I was a boy," Barker continued, "but since that time I have lived so much alone in the forest and on the rivers that I no longer fear a thunderstorm; but I never make my camp near tall trees."

White people who go down the Mississippi in boats do see some fine scenery, but the real grandeur of Mississippi River scenery is revealed only from good vantage-points on the crest of the bluffs. For those sufficiently strong and Venturesome to climb to those points, nature spreads out her grandest panoramas found in the inhabited part of the globe.

Many Americans have made long trips to see the beauties of the Rhine and the Danube; the far grander beauty of the Mississippi is to our own people still an unexplored country. There are awaiting those who would go and see a thousand Inspiration Points on the upper Mississippi and ten thousand miles of semi-tropical wilderness, cane-brake, forest, lakes, and bayous on the lower river and its southern tributaries. Most Americans know the Mississippi only as a crooked black line on the map.

When Barker and Tatanka had finished drinking in the landscape, as they called it, the trapper told the lads that they might run about as they pleased till four o'clock.

"At that time," he added, "the hunting will begin."

"What are we going-?" Bill started, but he checked himself just in time, to the great delight of Barker and Tatanka.

"Come on, Tim," he sang out, "Let's take a hike to the prairie. I'll be sent home, if I hang around here all day."

"Don't chase any geese or cranes, boys," Barker called after them. "If you see any on the fields, don't disturb them."

The boys discovered that from the place, where they started, the open prairie was only about half a mile away. As they carefully skirted along the edge of the timber, they saw several large flocks of geese and cranes feeding on open fields of young winter-wheat. On one field they could distinguish a boy who had evidently been told to drive the cranes off the wheat-field. He was a small boy and was having a sorry time of it. He had no gun, but tried to scare them away with a stick.

"I bet his mother wouldn't let him take a gun," remarked Tim.

"May be his people are too poor to buy a gun," suggested Bill. "Settlers in a new country don't have much money and they need all kinds of things for a new farm."

The boy walked from one end of the field to the other. When he arrived at the east end, the cranes flew to the west end, but the boy could not make them leave the field.