We decided to follow the tracks, which we did, but didn’t find anything interesting. There might be a broken twig trail, though, like the one we’d followed before, and which you know about, maybe, but we couldn’t find a thing, so we gave up and went back to Dragonfly and Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim.
“Where you guys been?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and I said, “Oh, looking for buried treasure.”
Little Snow-in-the-face got a queer far-away expression on his face, squinted his eyes and said, “Sometimes we see lights out here at night.”
And then it was Dragonfly’s turn to get a queer far-away expression on his face, which made it seem like he wished he was as far away as his thoughts were, he, as you know, believing in ghosts.
Well, we decided to try fishing some more like the rest of the guys in the other boat were, but who still hadn’t caught anything. We rowed out to another place and baited our hooks and tried again.
Another hour passed during which we pulled anchor and tried a half dozen different locations and still not a one of us caught a single fish and we were terribly discouraged.
“You can have one if you want one,” Little Jim said.
“How?” I said, and he said, “One of those balloons I bought for you yesterday is a rubber fish. You can blow it up—maybe it’s a walleye.”
Well, I still had those two rubber balloons in my shirt pocket, so because I was terribly bored and didn’t know what else to do, I pulled out the one that looked like it would be shaped like a fish when it was blown up, and, like the old wolf that ate up the little pigs, I huffed and I puffed and I blew the balloon up into a nice great big long fish that looked like a walleyed pike. For awhile I had something to keep my mind off being bored, on account of if there is anything that is harder to do than anything else, it is to sit on the seat of a boat on a hot day when the fish won’t bite.
“If we get one, we’ll get twenty,” Poetry said. “Walleyes go in schools, you know.”