“What in the world are you up to, Paul?” his mother asked, calling from the room below, in alarm.
“Killing the dog a second time, mother,” Paul replied, laughing and jumping into bed again.
Carleton.
TRAPPED IN A TREE.
A BACKWOODS ADVENTURE.
AMONG the many queer characters I have encountered, in the shadow of the forest or the sunshine of the prairie, I can remember none queerer than Zebulon Stump, or old Zeb, as he was familiarly known. “Kaintuck by birth and raisin',” as he described himself, he was a hunter of the Daniel Boone sort. The chase was his sole calling; and he would have indignantly scouted the suggestion that he ever followed it for mere amusement. Though not of ungenial disposition, he held all amateur hunters in lordly contempt; and his conversation with such was always of a condescending character, although he was not, after all, averse to their company. Being myself privileged with his acquaintance, many of my hunting excursions were made in company with Old Zeb. He was in truth my guide and instructor, as well as companion, and initiated me into many mysteries of American woodcraft.
One of the most inexplicable of these mysteries was Old Zeb's own existence; and I had known him for a considerable time before I could unravel it. He stood six feet high in his boots of alligator-skin, into the ample tops of which were crowded the legs of his coarse “copperas” trousers; while his other garments were a deer-skin shirt, and a blanket coat that had once been green, but, like the leaves of the autumnal forest, had become sere and yellow. A slouched felt hat shaded his cheeks from the sun upon the rare occasions when Old Zeb strayed beyond the shadow of the “timber.” Where and how he lived were the two points that most required explanation. In the tract of virgin forest where I usually met him, there was neither house nor hut. So said the people of Grand Gulf, the small town upon the Mississippi where I was staying. Yet Old Zeb had told me that in this forest was his “hum.” It was only after our acquaintance had ripened into strong fellowship, that I had the pleasure of spending an hour under his humble roof. It consisted of the hollow trunk of a gigantic sycamore-tree, still standing and growing! Here Old Zeb found shelter for himself, his squaw,—as he termed Mrs. Stump,—his household goods, and the tough old nag that carried him in his wanderings. His establishment was no longer a puzzle,—though there was still the mystery of how he maintained it. A skilled hunter might easily procure food for himself and family; but even the hunter disdains a diet exclusively game. There were the coffee, the “pone” of corn-bread, the corn itself necessary for the “critter,” the gown that wrapped the somewhat angular outlines of Mrs. Stump, and many other things that could not be procured by a rifle. Even the rifle itself required food not to be found in the forest.
Presuming on our intimacy, I asked, “How do you manage to live? You don't appear to make anything, nor do I see any signs of cultivation. How then do you support yourselves?”