DUNBAR TALKS AND SLEEPS

It required nearly all the afternoon for Tom and Cal to bring the deer to camp and dress it. In the meantime Larry, Dick and Dunbar—who insisted upon helping and did his part very cleverly—worked upon the shelter and the bunks inside. As a result the hut was ready for use that night, though not quite finished in certain details.

By Larry’s orders no further work was to be done after supper, but supper was to be late, as there was the turkey to be roasted, and he wanted to roast it right. While he was preparing the bird for the fire, Dick was rigging up a vine contrivance to serve in lieu of a spit, and Tom and Cal employed the time in bringing a bushel or two of Tom’s wild sweet potatoes to camp.

The turkey was suspended by a long vine from the limb of a tree, so hung as to bring the fowl immediately in front of a fire built at that point especially for this roasting. Dick had bethought him to go to the dory and bring away a square of sheet copper, carried for boat-repairing purposes. This he scoured to brightness with sand, after which he fashioned it into a rude dripping pan, and placed it under the turkey to catch the juices for basting purposes. There was nothing remotely resembling a spoon in the camp or the boat, but Dick was handy with his jackknife, and it did not take him long to whittle out a long-handled wooden ladle with which to do the basting.

By another device of his the roasting fowl was kept turning as fast or as slowly as might seem desirable. This device consisted of two very slender vines attached to the supporting vine at a point several feet above the fire. One of the “twirlers,” as Dick called the slender vines, was wrapped several times around the supporting vine in one direction and the other in the opposite way.

Sitting on opposite sides of the fire, and each grasping a “twirler,” Dick and Larry kept the turkey turning first one way and then the other.

While they were engaged in this, an abundant supply of Tom’s sweet potatoes were roasting in the ashes.

“Now we are at Quasi,” said Cal, just before the turkey was declared “done to a turn”—“at Quasi, the object of all our hopes, the goal of our endeavors, and the guiding star of all our aspirations during a period of buffetings, trials and sore afflictions. We are securely at Quasi, and our residence—which prosaic people might call a hut, hovel or shanty, but which is to us a mansion—is practically finished. It is only meet and fit, and in accordance with Homeric custom, that we should celebrate the occasion and the toilsome achievements that have made it possible, by all possible lavishness of feasting. All of which means that I am going to make a pot of robust and red-hot coffee to drink with the turkey and ‘taters.’”

It was a hungry company that sat down on the ground to eat that supper, and if there was anything lacking in the bill of fare, such appetites as theirs did not permit the boys to find out the fact.

“It is an inflexible rule of good housewives,” drawled Cal, when the dinner was done, “that the ‘things’ as they call the dishes, pots, pans, and the like, shall be cleared away and cleansed. So here goes,” gathering up the palmete leaves that had served for plates and tossing them, together with the bones and fragments of the feast, upon the fire, where they quickly crackled into nothingness. “There aren’t any cooking utensils, and as for these exquisitely shaped agate iron cups, it is the function of each fellow to rinse the coffee out of his own. Oh, yes, there’s the coffee pot I forgot it, and by way of impressing the enormity of my fault upon a dull intelligence I’ll clean that myself. A hurried scouring with some sand and water, followed by a thorough rinsing, ought to do the business finely.”

“I say, Cal,” said Dick, “I wish you would remember that this is your off night.”

“I confess I don’t understand. Do you mean that I shall leave the coffee pot for some other member of the company to scour?”

“No. I mean this is your off night for word-slinging. The professor is going to tell us some things and we want to hear him. So, ‘dry up.’”

“I bow my head in contriteness and deep humiliation. You have the floor, Professor.”

“May I ask you young gentlemen not to call me ‘professor’?” Dunbar asked very earnestly.

“Why, of course, we will do as you like about that,” answered Larry; “we have been calling you ‘professor’ merely out of respect, and you told us you were or had been a professor in a college.”

“Yes, I know, and I thank you for your impulse of courtesy. I used the word descriptively when I told you I had been a ‘professor’ of Natural History. Used in that way it is inoffensive enough, but when employed as a title—well, you know every tight-rope walker and every trapeze performer calls himself ‘professor.’”

“Well, you must at least have a doctorate of some kind,” said Dick, “and so you are entitled to be addressed as ‘Dr. Dunbar.’”

“No, not at all. Of course a number of colleges have offered me baubles of that cheap sort—asking to make me ‘LL.D.,’ or ‘Ph. D.,’ or ‘L. H. D.,’ or some other sham sort of a doctor, but I have always refused upon principle. I hate shams, and as to these things, they seem to me to work a grievous injustice. No man ought to be called ‘Doctor’ unless he has earned the degree by a prescribed course of study and examinations. Honorary degrees are an affront to the men who have won real degrees by years of hard study. With two or three hundred colleges in this country, each scattering honorary degrees around and multiplying them every year, all degrees have lost something of their value and significance.”

“How shall we address you then?” asked Larry.

“Simply as ‘Mr. Dunbar.’ The President of the United States is entitled to no other address than ‘Mr. President.’ In a republic certainly ‘Mr.’ ought to be title enough for any man. Call me ‘Mr. Dunbar,’ please.”

“Well, now, Mr. Dunbar, won’t you go on and tell us what you promised?”

“What was it? I have quite forgotten.”

“Why, you said you had been led to suspect that your fish—the kind that takes wing and flies away into the bushes—had a sense of taste. Did you mean to imply that fishes generally have no such sense?”

“Yes, certainly. There are very few fishes that have capacity of taste. They have no need of it, as they bolt their food whole, and usually alive. There are curious exceptions, and—”

“But, Mr. Dunbar,” interrupted Tom, “is it only because they swallow their food whole that you think they have no sense of taste? Is there any more certain way of finding out?”

“Yes, of course. The sense of taste is located in certain nerves, called for that reason ‘gustatory nerves,’ or ‘taste goblets.’ Now, as the fishes generally have no gustatory nerves or taste goblets, we know positively that they do not and cannot taste their food. That is definite; but the other reason I gave is sufficient in itself to settle the matter. The gustatory nerves cannot taste any substance until it is partially dissolved and brought into contact with them in its dissolved state. You can test that for yourself by placing a dry lump of sugar in your mouth. Until the saliva begins to dissolve it you can no more recognize any taste in it than in a similar lump of marble.”

“But why do they eat so voraciously then? What pleasure do they find in it?” asked Dick.

“Chiefly the pleasure of distending the stomach, but there is also the natural craving of every living organism for sustenance, without which it must suffer and die. That craving for sustenance is ordinarily satisfied only by eating, but it may be satisfied in other ways. Sometimes a man cannot swallow because of an obstruction in the canal by which food reaches the stomach. In such cases the surgeons insert a tube through the walls of the body and introduce food directly into the stomach. That satisfies the desire for sustenance, though the patient has not tasted anything. When a fish takes a run and jump at a minnow and swallows it whole at a gulp, he is doing for himself much the same thing that the surgeon does for his patient.”

“But, Mr. Dunbar,” Tom asked, “why is it then that the same species of fish will take a particular kind of bait at one time of year and won’t touch it at other times? In the very early spring I’ve caught lots of perch on worms, while a little later they would take nothing but live bait, and still later, when they were feeding on insects on the surface, I’ve known them to nose even live bait out of their way, refusing to take anything but the insects. If they don’t taste their food, why do they behave in that way?”

“Frankly, I don’t know,” Dunbar answered. “I have formed many conjectures on the subject, but all of them are unsatisfactory. Perhaps somebody will solve the riddle some day, but at present I confess I can’t answer it.”

Dunbar stopped as if he meant to say no more, and Tom became apologetic.

“Won’t you please go on, Mr. Dunbar? I’m sorry I interrupted.”

“Oh, but you must interrupt. If you don’t interpose with questions, how am I to know whether I’ve made my meaning clear or not? And how am I to know what else you wish to hear? No, no, no. Don’t withhold any question that comes into your mind, or I shall feel that I’m making a bore of myself by talking too much.”

“You spoke,” said Dick, “of certain fishes that are exceptions to the rule.”

“Oh, yes; thank you. I meant to come back to that but forgot it. The chief exception I know of is the bullhead, a small species of catfish that abounds in northern waters, particularly in the Adirondack lakes. The bullhead has gustatory nerves all over him. He can taste with his tail, or his side, or his head, as well as with his mouth. Of course there’s a good reason for the difference.”

“I suppose so, but I can’t imagine what it is,” said Larry.

“Neither can I,” echoed Tom and Dick. Cal continued the silence he had not broken by a word since Dunbar had begun. Observing the fact, Dick was troubled lest his playful suppression of Cal at the beginning had wounded him. So, rising, he went over to Cal’s side, passed his arm around him in warm friendly fashion, and said under his breath:

“Did you take me seriously, Cal? Are you hurt or offended?”

“No, you sympathetically sublimated idiot, of course not. It is only that I want to hear all I can of Mr. Dunbar’s talk. You know I’ve always been interested in fish—even when they refuse to take bait. Hush. He’s about to begin again.”

“Oh, it is obvious enough when you think about it,” said Dunbar. “It is a fundamental law of nature that every living thing, animal or vegetable, shall tend to develop whatever organs or functions it has need of, for defense against enemies or for securing the food it needs. You see that everywhere, in the coloring of animals and in a thousand other ways. The upper side of a flounder is exactly the color of the sand on which he lies. That is to prevent the shark and other enemies from seeing him and eating him up. But his under side, which cannot be seen at all by his enemies, is white, because there is no need of color in it. I could give you a hundred illustrations, but there is no need. Your own daily observation will supply them.”

Again Dunbar paused, as if his mind had wandered far away and was occupying itself with other subjects. After waiting for a minute or two Cal ventured to jog his memory:

“As we are not familiar with the bullhead—we who live down South—we don’t quite see the application of what you’ve been saying, Mr. Dunbar. Would you mind explaining?”

“Oh, certainly not,” quickly answered the man of science, rousing himself as if from sleep. “I was saying—it’s very ridiculous, but I’ve quite forgotten what I was saying. Tell me.”

“You were telling us about the bullhead’s possession—”

“Oh, yes, I remember now. You see fishes generally hunt their prey by sight, in the clear upper water and in broad daylight. They quit feeding as soon as it becomes too dark to see the minnows or other things they want to eat. As they hunt only by sight, they have no need of the senses of smell and taste, and so those senses are not developed in them. With the bullhead the thing is exactly turned around. He never swims or feeds in the upper waters. He lives always on or very near the bottom of comparatively deep water, in thick growths of grass, where sight would be of little use to him for want of light. He feeds almost entirely at night, so that those who fish for him rarely begin their sport before the dusk falls. In such conditions Mr. Bullhead finds it exceedingly convenient to be able to taste anything he may happen to touch in his gropings. So with him the sense of taste is the food-finding sense, and in the long ages since his species came into being that sense has been developed out of all proportion to the others. He has very little feeling and his nervous system is so rudimentary that if you leave him in a pail without water and packed in with a hundred others of his species, he seems to find very little to distress him in the experience. You may keep him in the waterless pail for twenty-four hours or more, and yet if you put him back into the pond or lake he will swim away as unconcernedly as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But then all species of fish are among the very lowest forms of vertebrate creatures, so that they feel neither pain nor pleasure at all keenly.”

Suddenly Dunbar ceased speaking for a minute. Then he seemed to speak with some effort, saying:

“There are many other things I could tell you about fish, and if you’re interested, I’ll do so at another time. I’m very sleepy now. May I pass the night here?”

“Certainly. I’ll bring you some moss—”

“It isn’t at all necessary,” he answered, as he threw himself flat upon the earth and fell instantly into a slumber so profound that it lasted until Cal called him to breakfast next morning.