“Why don’t we catch some of those queer fish?” Bill asked.
“Don’t know,” replied the trapper. “You never see those in winter. May be they go south to live in warmer water.”
In the evening, the men dressed all the fish they had caught. They did not smoke them as they had done with the fish caught in warm weather, but they placed them on frames of sticks in a brush shed. This shed was their store-house. The brush protected the frozen fish from thawing in the sun, and in this way the men kept a good supply of fresh fish always on hand.
CHAPTER XIV—SIGNS OF SPRING
Winter held on obstinately until the middle of March.
At last, one fine morning, Tatanka announced, “I smell spring. The little nuthatches and the little woodpeckers are calling and I saw two crows flying north. That means spring is coming and the ice will soon float down stream in big white blocks.”
The boys found another sign of spring. The flowing of the sap. Tatanka called it the bleeding of the trees. At the time when the frost is not yet out of the ground, when spring has not quite conquered winter, soft maple, box-elder, birch, and sugar-maple begin to bleed; that is, the sap begins to drip out of some fresh wound. A squirrel may have cut the bark, a bird picked a bud, snow or wind or the falling of dead branches may have bruised the bark or torn away some twigs. It is from these wounds that the sap begins to drip.
Sharp eyes can find these drippings in the forest, and it is easy to discover small dark patches of sap on city streets and walks.
“Mr. Barker,” the boys asked, “can’t we make some sugar and syrup?”
“Go ahead with it, laddies,” the old trapper encouraged them. “A can of maple syrup and some real maple sugar would taste good to me.”