“No,” said Wampus, “because the water was as high then as it had been; it was higher than it had been.”
“Did your uncle see the rabbit climb the tree?” Jibby Jones asked.
“No, it was there when he saw it,” said Wampus. “It was high up in the tree; twice as high as he could reach from his boat. He said it was the first tree-climbing rabbit he had seen, but that he understood just what had happened. The river had come up and surrounded the rabbit and the tree, and as the river got higher there was no place for the rabbit to go but up the tree. It just had to climb, so it climbed. So rabbits do climb trees. Because my uncle doesn’t tell lies, and I can lick any two that say he does.”
That seemed reasonable to me. I thought Wampus had proved it pretty well, and so did Tad and Skippy. When an uncle sees a rabbit up a tree and that uncle don’t lie and his nephew can lick any two that say he does lie, it seems a pretty sure thing that rabbits do climb trees. We admitted it. Tad and Skippy and I admitted it, but Jibby Jones was not that sort of admitter.
“It may be so,” he said, “because a lot of things that do not seem so are so. I never thought crabs could climb trees until father took me to Tahiti. I saw crabs climb trees and throw down coconuts there.”
“Oh, come off!” Wampus laughed. We all laughed.
“But I did,” said Jibby. “They climb trees and pick the coconuts, and throw them down, to break them open. And if the coconuts don’t break open, they carry them up the trees again and drop them again, until they do break.”
We thought he was trying to fool us, but he was as sober as a judge. Of course, we didn’t believe him; not until I asked my father and he said it was true. Then I had to.
“There is also,” said Jibby, “a fish that climbs trees. I have never seen one, but my father has. I think it was in Liberia. Perhaps not. And some fish fly.”
“Of course! We’ve all heard of flying fish,” said Wampus. “What do you think we are? Ignorant?”
“But here,” said Jibby Jones, “fish do not fly, and fish do not climb trees, and crabs do not climb trees. And I am not so sure rabbits climb trees.”
“You don’t mean to say my Uncle Oscar says what is not so, do you?” Wampus demanded, as mad as he could get.
“No, Jibby,” I said, “you must not say that, because Wampus’s Uncle Oscar isn’t that kind. He doesn’t tell lies.”
“I wasn’t saying he did,” said Jibby. “I don’t know him, but I believe he tells all the truth there is. I only say he saw the rabbit in the tree, but he did not see it climb the tree. The rabbit might have got into the tree some other way.”
“How, I’d like to know?” Wampus demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Jibby. “I wasn’t there. I only mean to say things sometimes seem to be so when they are not so. If there was such a tree as one that grows up in a night, and if that was a tree of that kind, the rabbit might have stepped on it without thinking it was that sort of tree. Then the tree might have shot up in a hurry, with the rabbit in its top. Then anybody, seeing the rabbit in the top of the tree, would naturally think it had climbed the tree.”
“There are no such trees,” said Wampus. “Trees don’t grow in a night.”
“And if there were such trees,” Skippy said, “it would not prove anything. If the rabbit stepped on a limb one inch from the ground that limb would still be one inch from the ground when the tree was a hundred feet high. Tree limbs don’t slide up the tree like that. If you hang a horseshoe on a limb five feet high today, and nobody touches it, it will be on the same limb and only five feet high a hundred years from now.”
Of course, this was true and we all agreed with Skippy, and got to talking about trees and why so many have limbs only high up. It is because the tender little first limbs die and break off. They get too much shade or animals eat them or something. Then we got to talking of what animals eat, and about caribou and elk, and about one thing and another, and we forgot all about rabbits.
About half an hour later, Orpheus Cadwallader came along in his rubber coat and rubber boots. He is the man that is watchman on the island and he is plump and pleasant and can tell some great stories of the river. We tried to coax him to come under with us and talk, but he said he had a trotline he wanted to run and couldn’t stop. He said the rain was about over; that it would be sunny in an hour. And it was. Somebody suggested that we go fishing, and we went.
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
