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 maple2, 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 bruised3 the bark or torn away some twigs4. 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 syrup5?”
“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 bluffs6 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 creeks8 have become swollen9, their turbid10 floods rush into the river, whose icy covering although still two or three feet thick has lost the brittleness11 and strength of winter. The creeks and brooks13 and countless14 bubbling, gurgling rills creep under the ice. With a slow, but resistless power, the power of a hydraulic15 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 steer16, 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 brook12 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 marshes17, rise from a sandbar. With a spiraling noisy flight, they arose against the face of the high bluff7 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 kindling18 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 rations19 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 spurted20. “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 densely21 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 northward22 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 amethysts23, scattered25 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 wither26 their petals27, and before rank grasses and weeds can cut off the sunlight.
When the robins28 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 stony29 ridges31 and moraine hills, which the great glaciers32 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 scatter24 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 tasseled33 alders34 and red killikinnick. But it takes a sharp-eyed naturalist35 to find these strange underground flowers.
Many different trees the lads also discovered in these upland woods. There were the trees of the large fragrant36 buds, shellbark and pig-nut hickory, black-walnut, and butternut; and from the dead rustling37 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 entangled38 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 ridge30, 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 boughs39. A woodchuck that had been feeding on a patch of new grass sat up to look at the invaders40 of his solitude41 and then hurried into his hole. From a distance came the strange drumming of a grouse42, while a woodpecker sounded his peculiar43 rattle44 on a dead branch.
At the edge of the woods, they came to a bare spot, which ended abruptly45 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 blurted46 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.”
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1
obstinately
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| ad.固执地，顽固地 | |
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maple
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| n.槭树，枫树，槭木 | |
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bruised
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| [医]青肿的，瘀紫的 | |
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twigs
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| 细枝，嫩枝( twig的名词复数 ) | |
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syrup
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| n.糖浆，糖水 | |
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bluffs
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| 恐吓( bluff的名词复数 )； 悬崖； 峭壁 | |
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bluff
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| v.虚张声势，用假象骗人；n.虚张声势，欺骗 | |
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8
creeks
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| n.小湾( creek的名词复数 )；小港；小河；小溪 | |
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swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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turbid
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| adj.混浊的，泥水的，浓的 | |
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brittleness
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| n.脆性，脆度，脆弱性 | |
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brook
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| n.小河，溪；v.忍受，容让 | |
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brooks
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| n.小溪( brook的名词复数 ) | |
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countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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hydraulic
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| adj.水力的；水压的，液压的；水力学的 | |
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steer
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| vt.驾驶，为…操舵；引导；vi.驾驶 | |
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marshes
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| n.沼泽，湿地( marsh的名词复数 ) | |
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kindling
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| n. 点火, 可燃物 动词kindle的现在分词形式 | |
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rations
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| 定量( ration的名词复数 )； 配给量； 正常量； 合理的量 | |
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spurted
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| （液体，火焰等）喷出，（使）涌出( spurt的过去式和过去分词 )； （短暂地）加速前进，冲刺 | |
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densely
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| ad.密集地；浓厚地 | |
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northward
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| adv.向北；n.北方的地区 | |
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amethysts
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| n.紫蓝色宝石( amethyst的名词复数 )；紫晶；紫水晶；紫色 | |
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24
scatter
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| vt.撒，驱散，散开；散布/播；vi.分散，消散 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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wither
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| vt.使凋谢，使衰退，(用眼神气势等)使畏缩；vi.枯萎，衰退，消亡 | |
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27
petals
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| n.花瓣( petal的名词复数 ) | |
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robins
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| n.知更鸟，鸫( robin的名词复数 )；（签名者不分先后，以避免受责的）圆形签名抗议书（或请愿书） | |
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stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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ridges
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| n.脊( ridge的名词复数 )；山脊；脊状突起；大气层的)高压脊 | |
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32
glaciers
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| 冰河，冰川( glacier的名词复数 ) | |
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tasseled
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| v.抽穗， （玉米）长穗须( tassel的过去式和过去分词 )；使抽穗， （为了使作物茁壮生长）摘去穗状雄花；用流苏装饰 | |
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alders
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| n.桤木( alder的名词复数 ) | |
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35
naturalist
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| n.博物学家(尤指直接观察动植物者) | |
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fragrant
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| adj.芬香的，馥郁的，愉快的 | |
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rustling
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| n. 瑟瑟声，沙沙声 adj. 发沙沙声的 | |
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38
entangled
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| adj.卷入的；陷入的；被缠住的；缠在一起的v.使某人（某物/自己）缠绕，纠缠于（某物中），使某人（自己）陷入（困难或复杂的环境中）( entangle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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39
boughs
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| 大树枝( bough的名词复数 ) | |
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40
invaders
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| 入侵者，侵略者，侵入物( invader的名词复数 ) | |
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41
solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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42
grouse
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| n.松鸡；v.牢骚，诉苦 | |
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43
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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44
rattle
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| v.飞奔，碰响；激怒；n.碰撞声；拨浪鼓 | |
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45
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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46
blurted
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| v.突然说出，脱口而出( blurt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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