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Why, with one hand. Back in Pennsylvania I climbed shell-bark hickory-trees with the lowest limb fifty feet from the ground. .. But there weren't any bears up them." "You must keep out of his way if he comes down on you. He's a sassy little chap. Now take this rope an' go up an' climb round him." "Climb round him?" I queried, as I gazed dubiously upward.
"No," said he; "I will walk with you and leave my gun in safe quarters. You had better not travel so fast, or I am afraid you will never reach the hickory-trees." Fleda smiled, and said there was no danger, but she slackened her pace, and they proceeded at a more reasonable rate till they reached the house. Mr. Carleton would not go in, placing his gun in an outer shelter.
By whatever slight tokens she might read this, in whatsoever fine characters of the eye, or speech, or manner, she knew it; and knew it just as well before they reached the hickory-trees as she did afterwards. When one of the trees was well stripped, the young gentleman mounted into another, while Fleda set herself to hull and gather up the nuts under the one first beaten.
It was all found near the spot, and for many days the sound of two axes was heard through the great stillness of the Indian summer; for at this time nature, as well as Jim, was in a dream. Nuts were falling from the hickory-trees, and squirrels were leaping along the ground, picking up the stores on which they were to subsist during the long winter that lay before them.
Fleda said yes, with a relieved face, and Mr. Carleton, still smiling, emptied his basket of the few nuts he had put in, and they walked on. In a hollow, rather a deep hollow, behind the crest of the hill, as Fleda had said, they came at last to a noble group of large hickory-trees, with one or two chestnuts standing in attendance on the outskirts.
The island contains, perhaps, twenty-five acres, and is thickly covered with hickory-trees; and there is an annual strife between the village boys and the squirrels, to see which can gather the greater quantity of nuts. Directly opposite the village, near the middle of the river, is another island, called Strawberry Island, from the great quantity of that fruit which it produces.
I watched him depart along the white dusty road, looking like a long snake in the glare of the summer sun, until it and he who travelled thereon disappeared among the messmate- and hickory-trees forming the horizon. I stood gazing at the hills in the distance on which the blue dreaming mists of evening were gathering, until tears stole down my cheeks. I was not given to weeping. What brought them?
Not unfrequently the Mexican hunter is "treed" by javalies, and compelled to remain on his perch for hours, and sometimes for days, before his besiegers retire, and leave him to descend with safety. The place where our adventurers now encamped was in a large grove of white oaks and shell-bark hickory-trees.
The songbirds had gone away to winter homes in the South, and the stillness of the forest was broken only by the dropping of nuts from the hickory-trees. "The first day of November!" she thought, as she stood leaning on the bars, with old Jock lying at her feet. "I wonder how soon he will come," and she smiled tenderly.
There were flocks of wild ducks on the Reservoirs and on Old River, and flocks of kildees on the Commons; and there were squirrels in the woods, where there was abundant mast for the pigs that ran wild in them, and battened on the nuts under the hickory-trees.
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