“Grab him in the gills!” the trapper shouted, as much excited as his boy friend.
The black giant was just splashing into open water when Bill threw himself forward and caught him firmly in the gills.
“Catch him, Mr. Barker, catch him!” Bill spluttered as he blew the water out of his nose and mouth. “I can’t lift him.”
By their united effort, they dragged the monster on shore.
“We’ve caught a whale, a real whale,” Bill shouted, and danced around like a wild Indian. “What is it, Mr. Barker! Is it a whale?”
“It is a paddle-fish, but sure a big one, I reckon,” the trapper told him as he dragged the ungainly monster into the grass. “He must weigh a hundred pounds, and he measures six feet, if he measures an inch.”
Sorting the fish and loading them into the boat took some time, and when the work was done, the two fishermen could not help laughing at each other. Their clothes were dripping wet and covered with mud and fish-scales all over, but they had a boat-load of fish.
“That’s all a part of fishing,” Barker remarked, with his quiet smile. “It is a saying among us trappers that dry fishermen and wet hunters have had poor luck. I guess our luck was worth getting soaked for.”
Before they started for camp all small fish or fish not wanted were put back in the water. Bill had already learned the maxim of the old trapper: “Never waste any of God’s wild bread and meat. What you do not need to-day, you may want badly to-morrow.”
“I have seen the days,” the old man had often told the boys, “when I was mighty glad to dip a mess of minnows out of a spring-hole in winter, and I have many times thanked the Good Lord that porcupines can’t run as fast as deer.