“Don’t disturb them, Bill,” the trapper urged. “They have been on the wing all day and we should let them rest. Some people say they have no feet, but they have, only they are very small and the swifts use them merely for clinging to walls of hollow trees at night. It is a queer way of sleeping, but the best they can do, for they never sleep in any other way.”
Nowadays not many swifts sleep in hollow trees, for most of these natural homes of the bears, raccoons, and swifts are gone, but the light-winged swifts have found other sleeping-places; they roost by thousands in chimneys of court-houses, churches, and schools. And before white men light their fires, when the days begin to grow cold, the swifts have assembled in great flocks on the Gulf of Mexico, whence they go to spend the winter in Central and South America.
Bill took great delight in bringing his sick brother a handful of the most beautiful flowers of the bottom forest, the scarlet lobelia, or cardinal flower. Tim was not alone in enjoying these dazzling red flowers. A flock of humming-birds soon found them and came to them several times every day. Within reach of the boys’ hands, the little bird gems hung motionless on invisible wings. ‘At times they perched, and preened their delicate plumage for ten minutes at a time. Tim laughed for the first time, when two of the midgets of the air had a fight. They squeaked like mice, as they threatened angrily to spear each other with their long sharp bills.
“They are funny little things,” Tim said, as he turned over and went to sleep.
“The boy will get well,” remarked Tatanka. “When a sick person laughs, he gets well again.”
One warm day rather late in September, the trapper proposed a new kind of hunting to Bill. “Let us go on a bee hunt,” he said; “Tatanka will stay with Tim.”
Bill had never heard of a bee hunt, and wanted to know what Mr. Barker wanted to do with the bees.
“We don’t want the bees,” the trapper explained; “we want to get some honey, and in order to do that we have to find the nest of a swarm of wild honey-bees.”
The trapper made a little box of bark and caught a bee, after it had worked for quite a while on a clump of goldenrod.
In an open place, he let the bee go. “Now, watch,” he said to Bill, “and point your finger in the direction it flies and run after it as far as you can follow it.”