“So long, suh. When yo’all hears me whistle—come to dinner.”
Bill found Osceola near the marsh half a mile away. Close by stood a giant cypress whose straight stemmed trunk must have measured at least twelve feet where the tall shaft sprang from the buttressed base of the tree, and rose perhaps a hundred and fifty feet in the air, topped by a wide-spreading head of great limbs and branchlets. At the Indian’s feet lay one of these limbs and a glance at its five foot butt showed Bill that the big branch was hollow.
“Hello!” greeted Osceola. “Find your spring?”
“You bet-cha,” returned his friend. “There’s a bucket of fresh water in camp now.”
“That’s fine. We’re in luck all way round the circle.” He pointed to the hollow limb. “There’s our dugout. Nature is a great help when you lack tools. She’s half built already.”
“How did you happen to find it?”
“Well, you see, I knew exactly what I was looking for, and headed toward the biggest cypress in sight. An immense tree like that one is very, very old. It’s been here for a thousand to two thousand years, I suppose.”
“Whew!” Bill stared up at the towering giant with an interest that was almost reverence.
“Yes, it was an old tree when Ponce de Leon was looking for his fountain of youth in these Glades,” continued the Seminole. “But for hundreds of years it has been dying, and these old cypresses die backward, or downward, during a period of one to four centuries. The heart decays and the last stage is generally a hollow cylinder. A hurricane from the Gulf brought down this limb, of course.”
“But surely you don’t expect to fashion a canoe out of that with a knife!”