The prospect as to Uncle Jim was certainly encouraging, and it was now too late to go further. It seemed necessary to stop on Smith's Island for the night, even if we were restricted to quartering in the corn-crib which the Smith boy kindly put at our disposal in case of Uncle Jim's refusal,—with the additional inducement that he would lend us the collie for company and to "keep off rats," which he intimated were phenomenally numerous on this swamp-girt hill.
The entire troop of urchins accompanied us down to the bank to make fast for the night, and helped us up with our baggage to the corn-crib, where we disturbed a large family of hens which were using the airy structure as a summer dormitory. Then, with the two oldest boys as pilots, we set off along the ridge to find the domicile of Uncle Jim, who had established a reputation for hospitality by having once entertained a way-worn tramp.
The moon had now swung clear of the trees on the edge of the river basin, and gleamed through a great cleft in the blue-black clouds, investing the landscape with a luminous glow. Along the eastern horizon a dark forest-girt ridge hemmed in the reedy widespread, through which the gleaming Fox twisted and doubled upon itself like a silvery serpent in agony. The Indians, who have an eye to the picturesque in Nature, tell us that once a monster snake lay down for the night in the swamp between the portage and the lake of the Winnebagoes. The dew accumulated upon it as it lay, and when the morning came it wriggled and shook the water from its back, and disappeared down the river which it had thus created in its nocturnal bed. I had never fully appreciated the aptness of the legend until last night, when I had that bird's-eye view of the valley of the Fox from the summit of Smith's Island. To our left, the timothy-field sloped gracefully down to the sedgy couch of the serpent; to our right, there were pastures and oak openings, with glimpses of the moonlit bayou below, across which a dark line led to a forest,—the narrow roadway leading from Smith's to the outer world. At the edge of a small wood-lot our guides stopped, telling us to keep on along the path, over two stiles and through a barn-yard gate, till we saw a light; the light would be Uncle Jim's.
A cloud was by this time overcasting the moon, and a distant rumble told us that the night would be stormy. Groping our way through the copse, we passed the barriers, and, according to promise, the blinding light of a kerosene lamp standing on the ledge of an open window burst upon us. Then a door opened, and the form of a tall, stalwart man stood upon the threshold, a striking silhouette. It was Uncle Jim peering into the darkness, for he had heard footsteps in the yard. We were greeted cordially on the porch, and shown into a cosey sitting-room, where Uncle Jim had been reading his weekly paper, and Uncle Jim's wife, smiling sweetly amid her curl-papers, was engaged on a bit of crochet. Charmingly hospitable people they are. They have been married but a year or two, are without children, and have a pleasant cottage furnished simply but in excellent taste. Such delightful little homes are rare in the country, and the Doctor couldn't help telling Uncle Jim so, whereat the latter was very properly pleased. Uncle Jim is a fine-looking, manly fellow, six feet two in his stockings, he told us; and his pretty, blooming wife, though young, has the fine manners of the olden school. We were earnestly invited to stop for the night before we had fairly stated our case, and in five minutes were talking on politics, general news, and agriculture, as though we had always lived on Smith's Island and had just dropped in for an evening's chat. I am sure you would have enjoyed it, W——, it was such a contrast to our night at the Erie tavern,—only a week ago, though it seems a month. One sees and feels so much, canoeing, that the days are like weeks of ordinary travel. Two hundred miles by river are more full of the essence of life than two thousand by rail.
We had an excellent bed and an appetizing breakfast. The flood-gates of heaven had been opened during the night, and Smith's Island shaken to its peaty foundations by great thunder-peals. Uncle Jim was happy, for the pasturage would be improved, and the corn crop would have a "show." Uncle Jim's wife said there would now be milk enough to make butter for market; and the hens would do better, for somehow they never would lay regularly during the drought we had been experiencing. And so we talked on while the "clearing showers" lasted. I told Uncle Jim that I was surprised to see him raising anything at all in what was apparently sand. He acknowledged that the soil was light, and inclined to blow away on the slightest aerial provocation, but he nevertheless managed to get twenty bushels of wheat to the acre, and the lowlands gave him an abundance of hay and pasturage. He was decidedly in favor of mixed crops, himself, and was gradually getting into the stock line, as he wanted a crop that could "walk itself into market." The Doctor inquired about the health of the neighborhood, which he found to be excellent. He is much of a gallant, you know; and Uncle Jim's wife was pleasantly flustered when, in his most winning tones, the disciple of Æsculapius declared that the climate that could produce such splendid complexions as hers—and Uncle Jim's—must indeed be rated as available for a sanitarium.
By a quarter to eight o'clock this morning the storm had ceased, and the eastern sky brightened. Our kind friends bade us a cheery farewell, we retraced our steps to the corn-crib, the Smith boys helped us down with our load, and just as our watches touched eight we shoved off into the stream, and were once more afloat upon the serpentine trail.
These great wild-rice widespreads—sloughs, the natives call them—are doubtless the beds of ancient lakes. In coursing through them, the bayous, the cul-de-sacs, are so frequent, and the stream switches off upon such unexpected tangents, that it is sometimes perplexing to ascertain which body of sluggish water is the main channel. Marquette found this out when he ascended the Fox in 1673. He says, in his relation of the voyage, "The way is so cut up by marshes and little lakes that it is easy to go astray, especially as the river is so covered with wild oats [wild rice] that you can hardly discover the channel; hence, we had good need of our two guides."
Little bog-islands, heavily grown with aspens and willows, occasionally dot the seas of rice. They often fairly hum with the varied notes of the red-winged blackbird, the rusty grackle, and our American robin, while whistling plovers are seen upon the mud-spits, snapping up the choicest of the snails. And such bullfrogs! I have not heard their like since, when a boy, living on the verge of a New England pond, I imagined their hollow rumble of a roundelay to bear the burden of "Paddy, go 'round! Go 'round and 'round!" This in accordance with a local tradition which says that Paddy, coming home one night o'erfull of the "craithur," came to the edge of the pond, which stopped his progress. The friendly frogs, who themselves enjoy a soaking, advised him to go around the obstruction; and as the wild refrain kept on, Paddy did indeed "go 'round, and 'round" till morning and his better-half found him, a foot-sore and a soberer man. They tell us that on the Fox River the frogs say, "Judge Arndt! Arndt! Judge Arndt!" Old Judge Arndt was one of the celebrities in the early day at Green Bay; he was a fur-trader, and accustomed, with his gang of voyageurs, to navigate the Fox and Wisconsin with heavily laden canoes and Mackinaw boats. A Frenchman, he had a gastronomic affection for frogs' legs, and many a branch of the house of Rana was cast into mourning in the neighborhood of his nightly camps. The story goes, therefore, that unto this time whenever a boat is seen upon the river, sentinel frogs give out the signal cry of "Judge Arndt!" by way of deadly warning to their kind. Certain it is that the valley of the upper Fox, by day or by night, is resonant with the bellow of the amphibious bull. It is not always "Judge Arndt!" but occasionally, as if miles and miles away, one hears a sudden twanging note, like that of the finger-snapped bass string of a violin; whereas the customary refrain may be likened to the deep reverberations of the bass-viol. Add the countless chatter and whistle of the birds, the ear-piercing hum of the cicada, and the muffled chimes from scores of sheep and cow bells on the hillside pastures, and we have an orchestral accompaniment upon our voyage that could be fully appreciated only in a Chinese theatre.
In the pockets and the sloughs, we find thousands of yellow and white water-lilies, and sometimes progress is impeded by masses of creeping root-stalks which have been torn from their muddy bed by the upheaval of the ice, and now float about in great rafts, firmly anchored by the few whose extremities are still imbedded in the ooze.
Fishing-boats were also occasionally met with this morning, occupied by Packwaukee people; for in the widespreads just above this village, the pickerel thrives mightily off the swarms of perch who love these reedy seas; and the weighty sturgeon often swallows a hook and gives his captor many a frenzied tug before he consents to enter the "live-box" which floats behind each craft.