Carl laughed. The cat bristled its tail, growled, and slunk back inch by inch till it was close to the thickets, and then vanished with a leap.
“You could tame a lynx just as quickly,” said Carl. “These cats are wild clear through now.”
“But I believe we could coax them into the house when snow comes, if we were to stay here all winter,” returned Alice. “One of those creatures would be as good as a watch-dog.”
Carl presently set to work again at the bee-fixtures stored in the barn, while Alice resumed her gardening. He found more supplies and a greater quantity of them than he had anticipated. There were no less than two hundred supers for comb-honey, all fitted with section-holders and separators, but with no sections. There were one hundred and five deep supers, the same size as the hives, for producing extracted honey, all full of empty combs for extracting, though many of these had been badly damaged by mice and the bee-moth. In one corner was a great pile of perforated zinc queen-excluders, designed to prevent the queen from reaching the extracting combs and laying eggs in them. Carl rejoiced at this particularly, for these excluders are expensive, and he had been wondering if they would have to buy them. There was also one good smoker and one broken one. There was a four-frame extractor, rusty, but apparently in working condition. There were honey tanks, which only needed cleaning, and there were several hundred brood frames in the flat, which had never been put together. There were also two dozen ten-pound honey-pails, most of which had never been used, and were now too rusted to put honey in; but they would be extremely useful for many household purposes. Alice had been lamenting her scanty stock of tinware, and Carl was gathering these together to carry them up to the house, when he came upon two that were unexpectedly heavy. Opening them, he found them both full of honey that the former owner had somehow overlooked. It was candied as hard as butter, but was white and delicious in flavor, not in the least injured by the winter cold. Carl carried it up to Alice in triumph. It was a great find.
“If the honey we get this summer is as white and good as this, there’ll be no trouble about getting a good price,” he remarked, digging into the pail with a spoon.
Alice finally took it forcibly from him, and sent him back to the barn. He sorted out the different articles, and stored them in neat piles, making a written inventory of the lot. The things that were to be repaired he put aside. Should the season turn out well, they would need more supplies, and certainly they must have about a hundred new hives for the increase they intended to make, as well as for additional supers. But this outfit would give them a good start, and he felt that they had got a bargain after all.
Down at the bottom of the pile he came upon a big fish-net, now rather old, moldy, and torn. Still, he thought it might be mended and made fit for use, and he hung it in the sun. It was not a sportsman’s tool, of course. He had no idea of using it that summer, but if they should want to catch a large quantity of fish for winter salting, it would be just the thing.
Alice, meanwhile, was planting more lettuce, corn, and potatoes on the sunny side of the house. All day they both worked hard, and their fear of the wendigo gradually disappeared. They slept in their own bunks that night, and in the morning they found that the apiary had not been molested.
The willow bloom was almost over now, but the bees were still getting a little honey from the maples. That day Carl and Alice looked over some of the colonies again, and were delighted to find that both the hives that had been raided were getting back into condition again. The queens had survived, and with the strong force of bees that they possessed, these two colonies would quickly recover from their disaster.
A few other colonies were found almost destitute of stores, naturally the best ones, as they had an enormous amount of brood to feed with only a limited supply of honey. Others had honey to spare, and they equalized matters a little, taking frames of honey from the rich ones and giving them to the needy.