“For myself, I could not see clearly how this difficulty was to be got over—as the woods beyond D and E were thick and tangled. The thing was no puzzle to Cudjo, however. He knew a way of finding B, and the bee-tree as well, and he went about it at once.
“Placing one of the boys at the station A, so that he could see him over the grass, he shouldered his axe, and moved off along the line A D. He entered the woods at D, and kept on until he had found a tree from which both A and D were visible, and which lay exactly in the same line. This tree he ‘blazed.’ He then moved a little farther, and blazed another, and another—all on the continuation of the line A D—until we could hear him chopping away at a good distance in the woods. Presently he returned to the point E; and, calling to one of us to stand for a moment at C, he commenced ‘blazing’ backwards, on the continuation of C E. We now joined him—as our presence at the logs was no longer necessary to his operations.
“At a distance of about two hundred yards from the edge of the glade, the blazed lines were seen to approach each other. There were several very large trees at this point. Cudjo’s ‘instinct’ told him, that in one of these the bees had their nest. He flung down his axe at length, and rolled his eyes upwards. We all took part in the search, and gazed up, trying to discover the little insects that, no doubt, were winging their way among the high branches.
“In a few moments, however, a loud and joyful exclamation from Cudjo proclaimed that the hunt was over—the bee-tree was found!
“True enough, there was the nest, or the entrance that led to it, away high up on a giant sycamore. We could see the discoloration on the bark caused by the feet of the bees, and even the little creatures themselves crowding out and in. It was a large tree, with a cavity at the bottom big enough to have admitted a full-sized man, and, no doubt, hollow up to the place where the bees had constructed their nest.
“As we had spent many hours in finding it, and the day was now well advanced, we concluded to leave farther operations for the morrow, when we should fell it, and procure the delicious honey. With this determination, and well satisfied with our day’s amusement, we returned to our house.”