I thought so, too, and so did Tad Willing. Wampus always won. But, when we saw the prize Wampus’s Uncle Oscar offered this year, we did wish we had a chance. It was a jointed fishing-rod, with a five-dollar reel, and it was a beauty.
So, a week or so before Uncle Oscar’s birthday, we were squatting on the shore of the river talking about things, and Jibby Jones came along and sat down beside us. We were talking about crawfish holes and where bees had their bee trees with the honey in them and all sorts of things, just as we happened to think of them. There was a yellow-jacket bee on a flower just in front of us, getting honey, and Skippy said he wished he knew where that bee’s bee tree was.
Jibby Jones leaned over until his big nose almost touched the bee.
“I can’t tell by this bee,” he said, “but by and by there will be a bee come along and I can tell you.”
Pretty soon the bee flew up and circled and went down and lit on a rock and walked around. Then it flew out over the river and back and zigzagged off. Then two or three other bees tried the flower for honey, and each time Jibby Jones put his nose close to it and said, “No; not this one.” After a while a bee lit on the flower that seemed to satisfy Jibby.
“Now I can tell you,” he said. “You watch this bee when it flies away.”
So we did. When it got enough honey, it flew into the air and made a beeline off for somewhere. Jibby pulled a pocket compass out of his pants pocket.
“A bit west of southwest-by-west,” he said. “Any time you want to find that bee tree you start from here and go just west of southwest-by-west and you’ll find it. That bee was going home.”
“How did you know that one was going home and the others were not?” Wampus asked. “Was that a pilot bee?”
“Maybe it was,” said Jibby.
“Well, how did you know it was a pilot bee, then?” asked Skippy.
“Maybe I could smell the difference,” Jibby said. “I’ve got a lot of nose; it ought to be good for something.”
So we all laughed, but we didn’t know whether Jibby was fooling or in earnest. That was the way he was. Sometimes he fooled just for the fun of it, and sometimes he was in earnest. We could never quite make out which he was, but we had found out one thing—if we waited long enough and didn’t keep joshing him too much, he always ended up by telling us what the truth was. So now Wampus sort of laughed.
“Aw, quit!” he said. “You can’t smell like that; you can’t smell the difference between one kind of bee and another kind. Nobody can; I never heard such nonsense. I bet even my Uncle Oscar can’t, and he knows just about everything.”
“Has he got a nose like mine?” Jibby asked.
Well, Wampus couldn’t say he had, because nobody we knew had a nose like Jibby. There were no other noses like it. It was the biggest and thinnest nose anybody ever saw.
“No,” Wampus said, “Uncle Oscar’s nose is just a common nose.”
“And does he exercise it regular?” Jibby asked.
“What do you mean by ‘exercise it regular’?” Wampus asked.
“Why, exercise it right along,” said Jibby. “Like you exercise your arms and legs if you want to make them good for what they are good for. Or like you would exercise your eyes if you wanted them to be good at seeing things. Or your ears if you wanted them to be ’cute at hearing things. You know you can do that, don’t you?”
“How?” asked Skippy.
“Well, the Indians did it,” said Jibby. “They began when they were young, and they exercised their ears and their eyes, and soon they could hear the grass grow and see a hair as far as you can see a fishpole. You can exercise your nose the same way, can’t you?”
“Well, it sounds sort of reasonable,” said Tad Willing.
“Of course, it sounds reasonable,” Jibby said, as pleasant as could be. “Can you do this?”
He put his thumb against the side of his nose and pushed it until most of his nose lay flat against his left cheek; then he put his thumb on the other side of his nose and pushed until his nose lay flat against his right cheek. We all tried it, but we couldn’t do it. Wampus was the worst at it, because his nose is a pug and sticks up.
“You don’t exercise your noses, that’s why,” Jibby said. “I don’t blame you. It is no business of mine what you do with your noses. But I exercise mine and keep it limber and flexible. I get up every morning and push my nose all around my face, to keep it keen and lively. It would be mighty dangerous for me if I ever let my nose get stiff and hard.”
“Why would it?” Skippy wanted to know.
“Because it’s my jib sail,” Jibby said, as solemn as an owl. “If I got out in a big wind sometime, say near the edge of a big precipice, and the wind caught my nose, it might blow me over and dash me to pieces on the rocks below. I’ve got to watch out for that, with a nose like mine. I’ve got to keep my nose limber, so that if a big wind comes up I can furl my jib, or jibe it to port or starboard, to steer me away from the precipice.”
We didn’t say anything. We just looked at one another.
“I might be out in Arizona, or somewhere else, where the wind blows hard for months at a time,” Jibby went on, just as solemn as before, “and a
