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When the day came to tap the bush, the caldrons, the hogsheads, and the two hundred or more pans with the bundles of spiles were put upon the sled and drawn by the oxen up to the boiling-place in the sap bush.
When there came a bright morning, wind northwest and warm enough to begin to thaw by eight o'clock, the sugar-making utensils pans, kettles, spiles, hogsheads were loaded upon the sled and taken to the woods, and by ten o'clock the trees began to feel the cruel ax and gouge once more.
The Lord shows he's down on this savin' and hoardin' up of things, for he makes 'em get musty right away; and if anything spiles on my hands I'm mad enough to bite myself in two." "But if you treat all stragglers as you do me, you do not give away odds and ends and what's left over. This coffee is fine old Java, and a more delicate ham I never tasted." "Now you hit me twice.
Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
In order to lower the water in the river while they were driving the spiles, Tom had the men put the gates in place in the dam built further up the stream by the timber-pirates. This, in the low condition of the river, would keep the water back for several days and give Tom's men a better opportunity to build his dam.
Jimmy was carrying the water-melon now, by means of a shawl-strap. Oh, and I forgot threee dozen mince turnovers, brought by Ed Mason. The Captain snorted a little over the fresh bread and some of the other things. "If you'd ever had to live for months at a time on salt-hoss an' hard tack, the same's I've done, you wouldn't bring soft bread on a boat. It spiles in no time."
The first figure, as the two Overlanders started for him at a run, had dashed out over the broken and bent spiles of the dam, hopping from one spile to another with remarkable agility, with Willy Horse in close pursuit. The hopping man, reaching the end of the spiles at the middle of the dam, halted, hesitated, and the Indian was upon him. "It's Peg Tatem!" cried Hippy.
This was the amber toll from the rock-maple, discovered long ago by the Indian, whose primitive methods have been so greatly improved upon by the white man. But there are still very remote places in Canada, where the old-fashioned slash in the tree, into which a wedge is driven, has not been superseded by spiles and buckets.
I had other puppy loves but they all died a natural death. But let me get back to the farm work. The gathering of the things in the sugar bush, when the flow of sap had stopped, usually fell to Eden and me. We would carry the pans and spiles together in big piles, where the oxen and sled could reach them.
Then the buds break for very joy, and timid green things push up through the leaf-mold; and from the swamps the little frogs begin to pipe, at first in solo, but soon in exultant chorus, till the whole moist night is vocal, and then every one knows that the sugar time is over, and troughs and spiles are gathered up, and with sap-barrels and kettles, are stored in the back shed for another year.
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