The hunter gave a yell. “Come on, boys,” he shouted; “get your honey. We could fill a wash-tub full. The biggest lot of wild honey I ever saw.”
The bees had almost stopped swarming about the hunter and had settled in black masses on the broken combs and were gorging themselves on the dripping honey.
Bill and Tatanka would not come near the tree.
“I am not afraid to fight the Chippewas,” remarked Tatanka, “but I do not like the little black bees.”
Barker filled a birch-bark bucket with honey and then put the slab again in place on the tree.
“I left them enough for the winter,” he told his friends. “It would not be right to rob the little creatures of all, because it is so late in the season now that they could not gather another supply for the winter.”
Little Tim enjoyed very much the story Bill told him of the bee hunt, and he laughed heartily when his brother told how Meetcha had fought the angry bees. However, although Tim was now well on the road to recovery, it was quite evident that he could not go on the long journey to Vicksburg before winter, and Barker and Tatanka made their preparations to winter in the river bottom below Lake Pepin.
The trapper had bought a gill-net about fifty feet long and on the first warm day after the bee hunt, he proposed a fishing trip to Beef Slough, one of the sluggish side-channels of the Mississippi.
One who has never seen the Great River is apt to imagine that, like smaller rivers, it has only one channel, but below the mouth of the St. Croix, it generally flows in one main channel and one or more side-channels. The steamboats naturally take the main channel, but hunters, canoeists, and fishermen often find their best sport on the side-channels, or sloughs, as they are often called..
Bill was in a flutter of excitement when he and Barker arrived at Beef Slough, for he had never fished with a gill-net. The trapper first cut two stout poles, to each of which he tied one end of the net. He next set the net across the slough so that it reached almost from side to side.