“I used to be afraid, when I was a boy,” Barker continued, “but since that time I have lived so much alone in the forest and on the rivers that I no longer fear a thunderstorm; but I never make my camp near tall trees.”
White people who go down the Mississippi in boats do see some fine scenery, but the real grandeur of Mississippi River scenery is revealed only from good vantage-points on the crest of the bluffs. For those sufficiently strong and Venturesome to climb to those points, nature spreads out her grandest panoramas found in the inhabited part of the globe.
Many Americans have made long trips to see the beauties of the Rhine and the Danube; the far grander beauty of the Mississippi is to our own people still an unexplored country. There are awaiting those who would go and see a thousand Inspiration Points on the upper Mississippi and ten thousand miles of semi-tropical wilderness, cane-brake, forest, lakes, and bayous on the lower river and its southern tributaries. Most Americans know the Mississippi only as a crooked black line on the map.
When Barker and Tatanka had finished drinking in the landscape, as they called it, the trapper told the lads that they might run about as they pleased till four o’clock.
“At that time,” he added, “the hunting will begin.”
“What are we going—?” Bill started, but he checked himself just in time, to the great delight of Barker and Tatanka.
“Come on, Tim,” he sang out, “Let’s take a hike to the prairie. I’ll be sent home, if I hang around here all day.”
“Don’t chase any geese or cranes, boys,” Barker called after them. “If you see any on the fields, don’t disturb them.”
The boys discovered that from the place, where they started, the open prairie was only about half a mile away. As they carefully skirted along the edge of the timber, they saw several large flocks of geese and cranes feeding on open fields of young winter-wheat. On one field they could distinguish a boy who had evidently been told to drive the cranes off the wheat-field. He was a small boy and was having a sorry time of it. He had no gun, but tried to scare them away with a stick.
“I bet his mother wouldn’t let him take a gun,” remarked Tim.