Tatanka had lit his pipe and looked about him in silence.
“There,” Barker encouraged him. “Doesn’t that look like a Minnesota lake? Ducks and turtles and fish and acres of water-lilies. Just like the marshes on your wonderful Minnesota, only the lotus doesn’t grow there.”
“Yes it does,” Tatanka claimed. “My mother and I gathered the big seeds on a lake below the mouth of the Minnesota and in a few other places where wankapin grows in our country.”
“Well, at last you are convinced that we are not on a bewitched lake. But now it is high time we look for a camping-place.
“Bill, steer straight for shore. We’ll make a good soft bed in that cane-brake.”
There are two kinds of cane growing in the South, the small and the large. The small cane, in which the travelers were camping now, grows about a dozen feet high and forms vast thickets on waste lands as far north as Kentucky. These cane-brakes were the home of deer and bear and other wild animals, but large areas have now been made into cotton-fields.
The big cane grows only on wet lands near the rivers from the White River southward. It reaches a height of thirty feet. At the age of about thirty or forty years, the big cane flowers and produces an abundance of rich nourishing grains for stock and game. After flowering, the old canes die and new plants spring up from the seed. The young shoots are known as mutton cane, because deer and bear and stock grow fat on them.
“This cane,” said Tatanka, after they had eaten their supper, “is like the pipe-stem reeds of the Sioux Country. The Indian boys called them spear-grass, and we threw the reeds at each other when we played war.”
The campers remained a week on Reelfoot Lake, and they still found much evidence of the great earthquake half a century before.
The great cracks in the earth, formed at that time, could still be seen in many places. Some of the fissures were filled with sand, which had come up from below; in others, young trees had grown up, while many of the old trees, still alive, were leaning over the partly filled fissures.