I called, “Hey, mister, will you give us a couple of fish? We’re perched up here waiting for some perch.”
He laughed and said sure, but that we should open the bridge. Now the way to open that bridge was to walk around pushing a big iron handle like a crowbar only longer. It was kind of like a windlass. I guess one man could do it all right but it took three of us to get the bridge started. It wasn’t a very big bridge but I’m not saying anything about that because we’re not so big either except our appetites and maybe one reason we couldn’t push so well was because we were hungry.
Garry said, “I guess when the creek is nearly empty boats can go under this bridge all right.”
I said, “Don’t talk about being empty; I’m so full of emptiness it’s flowing over. Get your hands on this thing and push. If anything should go wrong now we’ll have to eat the Animal Cracker.”
So then we all started pushing the long iron handle—it was a lever, that’s what it was. All the while the boat was standing about twenty feet away from the bridge and one man was keeping her bow upstream with a big oar while the other man was kind of fumbling in one of the baskets picking out a nice big fish. Pretty soon he held one up all wet and dripping and, oh boy, it looked good. I guess it was nearly a foot long. He shouted, “How will that one do?”
“Mm-m-mm!” I said. “Lead me to it.”
“I know where there’s an old piece of tin in the woods,” Pee-wee said, all the while pushing the big lever for all he was worth; “a scout is observant.”
“I could eat a sheet of galvanized iron,” I told him. “A little salt and pepper and I could eat a piece of railroad track.”
“I mean to cook the fish on,” the kid said; “you’re crazy. Don’t you know how to fry a fish? I’m going to be the one to cook it because I’ve got the matches.”
“Hang on to them,” I said; “things are beginning to look better. Keep pushing; think of fried fish and keep pushing.”