"But I don't quite see," said Wilbur, "how they make these galleries running in all sorts of ways."
"I ain't no expert on this here," said Rifle-Eye. "But as far as I know, in the spring a beetle finds an old decayed tree. She begins at once to bore a sort of passageway, half in the bark an' half in the wood, an' lays eggs all along the sides. When the eggs come out, each grub digs a tunnel out from the big gallery, an' in about three weeks the grub has made a long tunnel, livin' on the bark an' wood for its food, an' has grown to be a beetle. Then it bores its way out an' flies away to another tree to repeat the same interestin' performance."
"And if there are a lot of them," said Wilbur, "I suppose it stops the sap from going up."
"Exactly," said the hunter. "But they generally begin on sickly trees."
"Wilbur," he called a moment later, "come here."
The boy hurried over to the old hunter, who was standing by a dead tree—a small one, lying on the ground.
"Try that one," he said.
The boy struck it with the ax and it showed up alive with beetles and grubs and honeycombed with galleries.
"Gee," said the boy, "that's a bad one."
"That's very like the way I found the other," said the old hunter; "one very bad one lyin' on the ground an' just a few around it bad, while just a short distance away there was no signs."