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
