IV
Do Fish Climb Trees?
In the summer, when we are up there on Birch Island, we fish in quite a few places and in quite a few ways, but we don’t do much fishing on our own island; it is about as poor a place as there is in the whole Mississippi River. Once in a while, though, we do go across the island to where the slough is, and try it. If the river is high enough, and not too muddy, we catch a few fish there, and sometimes we try it because it is so near—only a few hundred feet from the back doors of our cottages. So, this day, we got our cans of worms and our fishpoles and went back through the woods and weeds and nettles to see how the fishing was there.
All our cottages set on the bank of the “chute” or what is now the main channel of the river, but Orph Cadwallader’s cottage sets back a couple of hundred feet or so, because he is the caretaker, and we went to the part of the slough back of Orpheus Cadwallader’s cottage because we thought the fishing would be best there, but when we got there it looked pretty bad. Along the edges of the slough the weeds had grown tall and thick and beyond them was nothing but mud—just soft, slushy mud, slanting down to the water of the slough like the edge of a dinner plate.
We tried to throw our lines far enough out to get to water deep enough to have fish in it, but it couldn’t be done—the lines would not reach. We tried putting some driftwood on top of the slush mud, to walk out on, but that was no good either. When we put a foot on a stick of driftwood, it went right down in the mud, as if there was no bottom.
“Aw, come on!” Wampus said. “This is no good. If there are any big carp in there they can stay there, for all I care. We can’t get out to where they are, and they can’t come in to us. Let’s go home.”
We all thought the same. But Jibby Jones stood still.
“Wait a minute!” he said. “When I was in the North Woods with father, I saw them catching fish through the ice with saplings.”
“Ice!” Wampus shouted. “Ice! I’d like to see some ice! There’s not much ice around here that I can see.”
“And a sapling wouldn’t reach as far as our fishpoles do,” said Tad.
“You don’t understand,” said Jibby. “What I mean to say is that they bent the saplings down and tied their lines on the tips of them. Then they set the saplings with a sort of trigger, so that when the fish bit at the bait the sapling sprung up and pulled the fish out.”
“Come on; let’s get home!” said Wampus. “The mosquitoes are eating me alive.”
But Jibby aimed his nose toward a tall, thin elm sapling near the edge of the weeds and followed his nose.
“This tree will do,” he said, and he took hold of it as high as he could reach and threw his weight on it. But his weight was not enough to bend it down.
“Come on, you fellows, and help,” he said; “perhaps we will catch a good fish.”
We laughed, but we all took hold of the tree. We began to bend it toward the slough.
“No, please!” Jibby said. “Not that way. Bend it in the other direction. Bend it along the shore. We have to bait it first.”
So we shifted to another side of the elm and bent it down. We held it down, with the top touching the ground. Jibby looked at it doubtfully.
“It is too bad it isn’t nearer the slough,” he said; and then he said: “I’ve got it!”
He got the longest of our fishpoles and tied it to the top of the tree.
“That will give just that much more length,” he said, and then he baited the hook with the nicest lot of worms you ever saw and set the bobber at what he thought was about the right height and told us to ease up on the tree.
We eased up until the end of the tree was about twenty feet from the ground, and then Jibby told us to swing it around, out over the slough, and we did it. We lowered away until the bait was in the water and the bobber floated. They were out in the deeper water, where fish ought to be if there were any. We tried to hold the tree steady, but it wabbled a good deal, and Jibby got a sound piece of driftwood and propped it under the tree.
“Now,” he said, “you can all sit on the tree and hold it down. I’m sorry we haven’t an automatic trigger to hold it, but we haven’t had time to make one. Perhaps this will do as well. You sit on the tree and I will watch the bobber, and when we get a bite I’ll say ‘Jump!’ then everybody jump lively, and we’ll have our fish.”
So we sat there and nothing happened.
And we sat there longer and nothing happened.
“There are no two ways about it,” Wampus said, “this is the craziest idea I ever heard of. Nobody but Jibby Jones would ever think of anything like this. Four boys and a complete tree, and a fishpole, and Jibby Jones, all trying to catch one fish. We won’t catch a fish. But if we do catch a fish, you know what kind it will be—it will be a mudcat as big as your little finger or a perch as big as your thumb.”
“Or a minnow, maybe,” said Skippy.
“Surely! A minnow,” I said. “Using a whole elm tree to catch a minnow!”
“We could sit here a hundred years,” said Wampus, “and we wouldn’t catch anything.”
Jibby did not hear us. He was keeping his eagle eye on the bobber.
“I think we had a nibble just then,” he said now. “You fellows want to be ready to jump when I say ‘jump.’ ”
“We’ll be ready,” Wampus said. “Don’t worry, Jibby; we’ll be ready, in about one hundred years. If anybody can catch a fish this way, I’ll—”
“Jump! Jump! Oh, jump!” Jibby Jones shouted just then, waving his hands and jumping himself for all he was worth.
I don’t know whether we all jumped at once or not. All I know is that I got off the tree and it whacked me in the back of the head as it went on up and all four of us were on our backs in the weeds just in time to see the biggest carp I ever saw go sailing up into the air like a shot out of a cannon. I’ll bet the carp was the most surprised fish in the Mississippi Valley right then. There wasn’t any playing with him, as an angler does; one moment he was wondering where that nice bunch of worm bait came from and the next moment he was yanked out of the slough at about sixty miles an hour as that tree snapped up like a whip. There was enough strength in that tree to pull an ox out of the water, almost, and it spent it all on that one carp and all in one second, too.
“Whoop!” was all Wampus had time to say, and then the tree and the pole at the top of it did what any tree and pole would have done in the same circumstances. They snapped that carp off the hook like a giant throwing a mud ball from the end of a switch. We saw the carp sail up and up, twice as high as the tree itself and come down and down, inland from the slough.
I scrambled to my feet and Tad and Wampus and Skippy scrambled to their feet, and we made a rapid break for the direction the carp had taken.
“Stop! Listen! Hear where it falls!” Jibby Jones shouted, but we were too excited for that. We rushed into the woods and began beating through the weeds and nettles and looking up into the trees, and Jibby had to join us. We hunted for an hour, I guess, and then we gave it up. It was time to go home, anyway.
We went back to the slough to get our poles and things, and we got them and started home. The first house we came to was Wampus’s, because that is nearest to Orpheus Cadwallader’s cottage, which we had been almost back of, and when we got there Mr. and Mrs. Smale and Sue Smale were on the little front porch and Orpheus Cadwallader was standing at the foot of the porch steps with one foot on the bottom step and the biggest carp I ever saw was in his hands. It was a beauty.
“Y‑e‑s, M‑i‑s‑t‑e‑r S‑m‑a‑l‑e,” he was drawling in that slow, lazy way of his, “I always did think a carp was more of a land animal than most fish, and now I know it. This proves it. I’ve often seen carp wiggle across sand bars on their bellies, and I’ve often said I was sure they came up to my garden at night and ate the young vegetable tops, but now I know more than that. They climb trees, and I know they climb trees because this carp was in the maple alongside of my house, sitting in a crotch of a branch, eating maple leaves. There are some in its mouth now.”
Sure enough, he showed us that there were leaves in the carp’s mouth.
“But that doesn’t quite prove it climbs trees, does it?” asked Mr. Smale. “It might have got in the tree in some other way.”
“How could a carp get in a tree except by climbing it?” Orpheus Cadwallader drawled. “Of course, you needn’t believe me, if you don’t want to, but I’ll believe carps climb trees as long as I live.”
We knew, of course, that that carp had not climbed a tree. We knew exactly how it had got into that tree—our fishing tree had slung the carp so high in the air that it had alighted in the top of the maple tree. I nudged Wampus and grinned.
It was then Jibby Jones turned to us and spoke.
“Rabbits,” he said, and then repeated it: “Rabbits, and carp, may climb trees, but you cannot be sure rabbits and carp do climb trees just because you happen to find rabbits and carp in trees.”
Orpheus Cadwallader turned and looked at Jibby.
“Rabbits, hey?” he said. “I don’t know about rabbits. I never saw a rabbit climb a tree, and I never saw a rabbit in a tree, so I say nothing about rabbits. But I do know about carp. I know carp can climb trees, because I saw this carp in the tree, and it was still alive and kicking. I saw that with my own eyes. And if the carp did not climb that tree, how did it get up that tree?”
“Maybe it leaped from the water to the tree,” said Jibby.
“Foolishness! Nonsense!” Orpheus Cadwallader said. “I know better than that. A carp can’t leap that far.”
But we knew better, because that was just what that carp had done. It had made one jump from the slough to the tree. But had we helped it a little.
So Orph went waddling home with his tree-climbing carp, pretty mad because nobody would believe it had climbed the tree, but Jibby stood looking after him. When Orph had gone out of sight, Jibby turned to Skippy.
“Skippy,” he drawled, with a twinkle in his eyes that sometimes came there, “you don’t want to hunt for pirate’s treasure, do you? A little while ago you said we might as well look for fish in the tops of trees as for pirate’s treasure around here. I don’t say there is pirate’s treasure everywhere around here, but there does seem to be a fish in the top of a tree now and then.”
Skippy grinned.
“All right!” he said. “Tell us about the land pirate again, Jibby. Anybody that can throw a carp into a treetop has a right to believe in a land pirate’s treasure being a thousand miles from where he got it.”