The boys had grown up in a country where the sugar-maple, a northern tree, does not grow and had only the vaguest idea about sugar-making; so they asked Tatanka to show them how to make maple-sugar, a bit of woodcraft which white men have learned from the Indians.
Each boy took a tin pail and Tatanka took two big pails and an ax. Tim soon found a large box-elder and Bill sighted a big soft-maple, a river-bottom maple, from which the sap was dripping. But Tatanka laughed at them saying, “No good, no good; ’most all water. Good sugar trees grow on high land.”
Tatanka knew the trees in winter as well as in summer, and when the three sugar-makers had reached the Minnesota bluffs he soon found two big sugar-maples. Into each tree he made an upward cut and put a chip into the cut. The sap began at once to run along the chips and dripped into the pails below. In an hour the small pails were filled and Tatanka replaced them with his large buckets.
“Now you build a fire and boil your sap,” he told the boys. “Slow, over Indian fire; no white man’s fire.”
The boys were surprised to see how much of the sap boiled away before they had a thick sweet syrup. Tatanka from time to time poured some more sap into their pails so that each boy at last had a pailful of maple-syrup.
About noon the boys were hungry, but Tatanka would not hear of going to camp for lunch.
“When you make sugar, you make sugar all day. You drink sap, you eat syrup, and sugar. That is the way the Indians make sugar, plenty good sugar. We go home when it gets cold, then the sap stops flowing.”
They did stay all day, and the lads helped Tatanka boil his sap down to a good thick syrup.
In the evening Mr. Barker’s biscuits and Tatanka’s maple syrup made the best supper the lads had ever eaten. After the meal, Tatanka made some real maple-sugar by boiling down the syrup in a big frying-pan, but little Tim fell asleep before the syrup began to sugar and Bill was disappointed because he could eat only a few small pieces, although Barker and Tatanka told him that he might eat the whole panful if he cared for it.
“It’s the same as with the honey,” Bill mourned. “I thought I could eat a piece as big as Mr. Barker’s fist, and then I could only eat a spoonful.”