Juhani did so and almost cut his finger. The edges were as sharp as knives.
"I don't understand yet," he said, putting his hand up to his mouth, "how that can catch a fox."
"Wait," returned his friend, and running to the barn he soon returned with bait which he placed at the top.
"The old fellow will jump at that," he explained, "and catch his paw between the prongs. You bet it'll hold him fast, too. There are a lot of them around," he continued as they made their way to the house, "and we're a good deal put out by them. Grandfather says, however, that it is nothing to the time when father first moved here. Then there were wolves and bears. I'd like to meet a bear. Do you remember the lines:
'Otso apple of the forest
With thy honey paws so curving'?
Grandfather says that they used to use charms to help them when they went hunting. Do you know what he likes to talk about better than bear hunting? It's seal shooting; perhaps because he did it only once. It wasn't here, of course, but on the frozen sea. He says he lay flat on a sled in front of which he had fastened a white sail so that the seal would take it for a part of the ice around. He pushed the sled with his feet, and, when near enough, shot."
"That was when he was a fisherman," conjectured Juhani.
His friend laughed. "Please don't use the past tense in regard to him. Why, he's still a fisherman. Only last year he had a fishing adventure that would make some people's hair rise. You look as if you didn't believe. Come, I'll get him to tell you about it."
They found the old man sitting in a sunny workroom mending a basket. He was quite ready to talk. "I don't belong here," he said, "but to the east end of the gulf. You say that you want to hear what happened last spring. Well, a whole camp of us went out together to fish through the ice. That's done every year. We took tents and firewood and food and expected to stay a long time. It was all right for a while and we got a lot of fish. But the spring thaw came earlier than we expected; we had fellows watching, but they were careless, and the first thing we knew the ice had cracked and I and one other were carried out to sea on a great ice floe. Our companions saw us when we were about twelve yards away, but they couldn't do anything for they hadn't any boats. We couldn't do anything but let the wind and wave carry us wherever they wished. I had a bottle of rum in my pocket and a big hunk of hard bread. My companion had nothing but a plug of tobacco. These three things we divided and lived on for two days. At last we drifted to firm ice, from which, stiff as we were, we managed to make our way to the mainland."
"You don't expect to go this year, do you?" asked Juhani.