Wilderness Honey

by Frank Lillie Pollock

Fortunately it did not overturn, but a gust of savage bees surged into his face. He brushed at them, and tried to get on his feet. Something that hurt extremely was hanging to his right foot. He made a blind leap to get away from that vortex of stinging insects, but was pulled up short by the ankle and fell again, with a rattle of metal. And now he saw the great, rusty steel trap gripping his foot. He had walked squarely into Carl’s bear trap. He had forgotten that it had been set in this yard.

For the moment he was too bewildered to realize more than this bare fact. He crawled away as far as the chain would let him, lay flat on his face and tried to protect himself from the tormenting insects. It seemed to him that all the bees in the yard had turned upon him. They were in his hair, they got under his collar and up his sleeves. Probably there were in reality only a few hundred attacking him, but it seemed to him that he got a fresh sting every second, till his whole body was in agony.

He drew his foot under him to examine the trap, and see if it could not be taken off. Age and rust had taken a good deal of the strength out of the springs, and, luckily, Bob was wearing heavy shoepacks that day with his trousers tucked inside them, so that the combined thicknesses of stout leather, cloth, and socks had deadened the force of the springing jaws. But it hurt extremely; his foot was numb, and he could not see how to extricate himself.

He tried to press down the springs with his hands, but he was not strong enough. It needed a lever to set that trap. Reckless of stings, Bob stood up and tried to stamp down the spring with his free foot, but in his constrained posture he was barely able to stir it. It would certainly take a lever to open the jaws. If he could only escape into the security of the woods, away from these maddening bees, he felt sure that he could contrive to get himself free, but the chain would let him go no farther. The chain was riveted to the trap in a heavy swivel, and the other end was attached to a stout maple sapling. The tree was too large to break off, but Bob had a stout pocket-knife and thought he might hack through it if he had time enough.

But he was beginning to feel sick and dizzy with the stinging. A professional bee-keeper thinks little of being stung, and Bob was pretty well hardened to it by this time, but not to such wholesale doses. His body was beginning to feel numb all over, and his tongue seemed swelling in his mouth. A horde of bees, he thought, roared and crawled over him, but his brain seemed stupefied, and he could hardly think connectedly of anything.

The idea dawned upon him that he was really going to be stung to death, and the horror of it whipped his brain to a last effort. He cast about for some expedient. If he only had a smoker! But why could he not make a smoke without one?

Instantly he struck a match and dropped it into a heap of dead leaves that lay beside him. They flamed up, and at the first puff of smoke the bees about his head drifted away. He piled on more leaves, using the dampest he could find, and created a suffocating cloud of smoke. He choked in it himself, but there were no bees about him now, except a few entangled in his clothing.

He crawled toward the maple sapling, raking the burning smudge along with him. Under cover of the smoke he began to whittle into the hard trunk with his knife. Between the thick smoke and a bee-sting that had nearly closed his eye, he worked rather blindly, and had hacked nearly half through the trunk before he discovered that no such work was necessary. The chain was merely wound around the tree a few times and hooked back into its own links. He might have known that it would be so fastened, and if he had been a little more clear-headed, he could have released himself a moment after being caught.

However, he cast the chain loose immediately and began to hobble toward the woods, trap and all. Once under cover, he pried open the trap without much difficulty, using a stout pole. There was a deep purple furrow on each side of his ankle, and his foot was blue and numb. He rubbed it a long time and bathed it in the lake before feeling came back to it.

He felt decidedly weak and shaky and had to take off all his clothes in order to get rid of the bees that were still crawling and stinging in their recesses. Being stripped, he ducked himself in the cool lake three or four times and felt better. Naturally, he selected a spot for his bath that was at a safe distance from the apiary, where the war was still raging.