When the robins have come back and the crocuses are out, the boys and girls of the Prairie States and Provinces know that spring has come.
The prairie crocuses do not take time, like most other flowers to grow leaves first. The brown woolly buds push out of the soil as soon as the snow is gone. After a few warm days they cover the bare patches of dry river bluffs and all the stony ridges and moraine hills, which the great glaciers left behind many thousand years ago. They make early flower-gardens along the right-of-way of the railroads, although the section men burn the grass and the prairie flowers every fall. Fires cannot harm the sleeping roots and buds of the crocuses in the ground.
When the prairie grasses begin to grow in May and June, the crocuses find time to produce large whorls of pretty cut-up leaves, and the winds of summer scatter their long seeds.
They are not really the first flowers of the Northern States; that honor belongs to the dark purple spathe-like sheaths of the skunk-cabbage, which grow in the black muck near brooks and spring-holes, under the tasseled alders and red killikinnick. But it takes a sharp-eyed naturalist to find these strange underground flowers.
Many different trees the lads also discovered in these upland woods. There were the trees of the large fragrant buds, shellbark and pig-nut hickory, black-walnut, and butternut; and from the dead rustling leaves the lads picked many a well-seasoned nut, which the squirrels, gray and red, had lost or forgotten. There were several kinds of oaks, bur-oaks, black oaks and white oaks; and from the dark oaks the trunks of canoe-birches stood out in pure white. In the river bottom the lads had often cut for their evening camp-fires the slender trunks of the river birch with its tousled curls of light brown bark, but of this curious birch they did not find a tree in the upland woods.
After the four men had followed the little stream for half a mile, they struck off to their right up a steep slope; where they often became entangled in vines of wild grape and bitter-sweet. Tim was soon out of breath and had to rest.
“Mr. Barker,” asked Bill, “did you say the bluffs were six hundred feet high! They must surely be a mile high.”
“Keep still,” Tim urged him; “you’ll have to go back to the boat.”
After much hard climbing, they came to a wide ridge, which sloped gently upward toward the river and they followed it in that direction. The ridge was covered with great spreading white oaks two or three hundred years old. Bold gray squirrels were chasing one another along the big horizontal boughs. A woodchuck that had been feeding on a patch of new grass sat up to look at the invaders of his solitude and then hurried into his hole. From a distance came the strange drumming of a grouse, while a woodpecker sounded his peculiar rattle on a dead branch.
At the edge of the woods, they came to a bare spot, which ended abruptly on the top of a hundred-foot cliff.