The Keelig
We need anchors, one for the bow and one for the stern. It takes little time to make them, as you only need a forked stick, a stone, and a piece of plank, or, better still, a barrel stave. Figs. 35 to 39 show how this is made. Down East the fishermen use the "keelig" in preference to any other anchor.
Make fast your lines to the "keelig" thus: Take the end of the rope in your right hand and the standing part (which is the part leading from the boat) in your left hand and form the loop (A, [Fig. 31]).
Then with the left hand curve the cable from you, bringing the end through the loop, as in B, [Fig. 32]; then lead it around and down, as in C, [Fig. 33].
Draw it tight, as in D, [Fig. 34], and you have the good, old-fashioned knot, called by sailors the "bow-line."
To make it look neat and shipshape you may take a piece of string and bind the standing part to the shaft of your anchor or keelig—keelek—killick—killeck—kelleck—kellock—killock, etc., as you may choose to spell it.
A paddle to steer with and two pegs in the stern cross-piece to rest it in complete the craft; and now the big bass had better use due caution, because our lines will reach their haunts, and we are after them!
CHAPTER IV
CANOES
The Advantages of a Canoe—How to Make the Slab Canoe and the Dugout—How to Make a Siwash and a White Man's Dugout
There are many small freak crafts invented each year, but none of them has any probabilities of being popularly used as substitutes for the old models.
Folding canoes, as a rule, are cranky, but the writer has found them most convenient when it was necessary to transport them long distances overland. They are not, however, the safest of crafts; necessarily they lack the buoyant wooden frame and lining of the ordinary canvas canoe, which enables it to float even when filled with water.
The author owes his life to the floating properties of his canvas canoe. On one occasion when it upset in a driving easterly storm the wind was off shore, and any attempt upon the canoeist's part to swim toward shore would have caused him to have been suffocated by the tops of the waves which the wind cut off, driving the water with stinging force into his face so constantly that, in order to breathe at all, he had to face the other way. He was at length rescued by a steamer, losing nothing but the sails and his shoes. Nevertheless, the same storm which capsized his little craft upset several larger boats and tore the sails from others.
The advantages of a good canoe are many for the young navigators: they can launch their own craft, pick it up when occasion demands and carry it overland. It is safe in experienced hands in any weather which is fit for out-door amusement. When you are "paddling your own canoe" you are facing to the front and can see what is ahead of you, which is much safer and more pleasant than travelling backward, like a crawfish.
Fig. 40.
The advance-guard of modern civilization is the lumberman, and following close on his heels comes the all-devouring saw-mill. This fierce creature has an abnormal appetite for logs, and it keeps an army of men, boys, and horses busy in supplying it with food. While it supplies us with lumber for the carpenter, builder, and cabinet-maker, it at the same time, in the most shameful way, fills the trout streams and rivers with great masses of sawdust, which kills and drives away the fish. But near the saw-mill there is always to be found material for a