I WAS certainly glad our little Indian friend, Snow-in-the-face, was well enough to be our guide on our fishing trip for walleyed pike. As you maybe know, he’d been very sick but almost right away after our gang had called to see him, which we did the very next day after we had come up north, he had started to get better, and now, today, he was coming to our camp to visit us and to guide us to the best fishing waters for walleyed pike, so we could all catch our “limit,” which is eight walleyes apiece. Multiplying eight fish by seven boys, which any teacher will tell you you can’t do, we’d have fifty-six fish to pack in ice and ship back to Sugar Creek for our parents to see and to help us eat. Boy oh boy, it was going to be fun!

About three o’clock that afternoon, after the gang had all had our rest hour, little Snow-in-the-face and his big Indian brother, Eagle Eye, came putt-putting in a canoe, straight to our shore.

There was a lot of excitement around camp for a while, while all of us finished getting our equipment ready. Our two big fishing boats were equipped with life-preserver pillows, which everybody oughtn’t to go on a fishing trip without.

It had been a terribly hot day and the sun up in the sky, as our boats plowed their wet way out across the waves toward an island, poured its yellowish heat down on us something fierce. It also reflected back up into our faces from the water and made me glad I had on a pair of dark glasses to protect my eyes from the extra bright light.

Snow-in-the-face was in the boat I was in, along with Little Jim, Poetry and Dragonfly, and we were following the other boat which had Eagle Eye and Big Jim and Circus and Little Tom Till. Barry had stayed home to write letters and to look after camp.

In a little while our boats neared the pretty pine and spruce-covered island, circled around it to the other side where we anchored in a little cove, not more than thirty yards from each other, in some quiet water.

That swell little reddish-brown-faced Indian boy with his bright black eyes and straight black hair didn’t even use a pole, but had a big heavy line which he dropped down over the side of our boat. I was sitting beside him in the middle seat, with Poetry sitting in the stern close to the outboard motor. Dragonfly was in the prow, and Little Jim in front of me in a seat by himself, with his life vest on, which meant he was even safer than the rest of us, on account of if we had our boat upset or fell out, he would be ready to float to shore without having to hold onto a pillow.

In only a few jiffies we all had our hooks baited with live chubs and were waiting for somebody—either in our boat or in the other one—to catch the first fish. The very second one of us would get a walleye, we’d know we’d found a school of them, and in a little while we’d all get bites and catch fish at the same time, on account of walleyes stick together like a gang of boys. “Eagle Eye found this place last year,” Snow-in-the-face said. “Fish bite here when they don’t any place else on the lake.”

But say, after we all had sat there and waited and waited and pulled our lines in and out of the water for an hour and not a one of us had caught a single fish, or even had a nibble, it looked as if having a good guide wasn’t any good.

Snow-in-the-face had a pucker on his brown forehead and looked worried.

“Ho hum,” I thought, and shifted myself to another uncomfortable position on the hot boat seat I was on—any position being uncomfortable when the fish don’t bite, and the deer flies are swarming around your legs and hands and biting fiercely just like you wish the fish would.

Pretty soon, I looked over at the pretty pine-covered island and wished I could go over there and sit down in the shade for awhile. I was also remembering that that was the very island I’d wanted to explore when I’d first gotten the idea of playing Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, and which had got us tangled up in the mystery of the buried treasure, most of which we’d finally found. The rest of it Old John Till probably had somewhere, wherever he was, which nobody knew.

“I’m terribly hot,” I said to the rest of us in our boat. “Let’s go over to that island and lie down in the shade awhile.” The rest of us thought it was a good idea, and so we pulled in our lazy lines and also pulled anchor and rowed over, and in a little while, Poetry and I were strolling along following the shore around to the side where we could look across and see our camp away out across the lake. It was one of the prettiest islands I’d ever seen, and had great big Norway pines and spruce and Tamarack and also ferns and all kinds of wild flowers such as red-flowered wild columbine and white goldthread and, in a boggy place, some pitcher plants, which had queer-looking green leaves that looked like one of the green pitchers Mom has on our sideboard at home—also the leaves looked like the lips of a French horn that one of the men at Sugar Creek plays in the band on Saturday night....

We’d left Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim and Dragonfly back at the shore in the boat, ’cause Snow-in-the-face had acted like he didn’t want to come with us, and Dragonfly had been so lazy and also afraid of smelling wild flowers and having to sneeze a lot—that being one of the reasons he’d come on this vacation with us, so he could get away from Sugar Creek flowers and timothy hay and ragweed and everything else which would make him sneeze.

“You know what?” Poetry said to me all of a sudden, and when I said, “No, what?” he said, “This would be a good island for John Till to hide on. Maybe when he got out of the icehouse, he came over here.”

“But how could he get here? We had his boat.”

“He might swim,” Poetry said, but it wasn’t a good idea because it was pretty far from any other shore over here, so I said, “Of course, he could rent a boat from almost any resort up here,”—which he could.

We were standing right that minute close to a sandy beach and the waves were washing up in a very lazy friendly way, when all of a sudden, Poetry said, “Hey, look, somebody’s been here. Somebody’s had a boat beached here on the sand,” which he had, but it was gone now.

“Boy oh boy!” I said, all of a sudden getting excited, “and here’re shoe tracks, going back into the island somewhere.”

We decided to follow the tracks, which we did, but didn’t find anything interesting. There might be a broken twig trail, though, like the one we’d followed before, and which you know about, maybe, but we couldn’t find a thing, so we gave up and went back to Dragonfly and Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim.

“Where you guys been?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and I said, “Oh, looking for buried treasure.”

Little Snow-in-the-face got a queer far-away expression on his face, squinted his eyes and said, “Sometimes we see lights out here at night.”

And then it was Dragonfly’s turn to get a queer far-away expression on his face, which made it seem like he wished he was as far away as his thoughts were, he, as you know, believing in ghosts.

Well, we decided to try fishing some more like the rest of the guys in the other boat were, but who still hadn’t caught anything. We rowed out to another place and baited our hooks and tried again.

Another hour passed during which we pulled anchor and tried a half dozen different locations and still not a one of us caught a single fish and we were terribly discouraged.

“You can have one if you want one,” Little Jim said.

“How?” I said, and he said, “One of those balloons I bought for you yesterday is a rubber fish. You can blow it up—maybe it’s a walleye.”

Well, I still had those two rubber balloons in my shirt pocket, so because I was terribly bored and didn’t know what else to do, I pulled out the one that looked like it would be shaped like a fish when it was blown up, and, like the old wolf that ate up the little pigs, I huffed and I puffed and I blew the balloon up into a nice great big long fish that looked like a walleyed pike. For awhile I had something to keep my mind off being bored, on account of if there is anything that is harder to do than anything else, it is to sit on the seat of a boat on a hot day when the fish won’t bite.

“If we get one, we’ll get twenty,” Poetry said. “Walleyes go in schools, you know.”

“Yeah,” Little Jim piped up and said, “but fish maybe don’t have school in August,” which reminded me that right after August came September, and generally in the first week of September, the Sugar Creek School started and—

I let out a fierce long sigh when I thought of that, not because I didn’t need an education but I hated to have to sit down to get one, which is what you have to do in school most of the time—and the boat seat was getting harder and harder every minute.

The yellowish rubber fish I’d just blown up looked cute though, and was as fat as a butterball. For a jiffy I let it float on the water clear out to the end of the fishing line I had it tied on. “Here, Poetry,” I said to the fish, “get out there and float. You’re so fat you can’t sink,” which made the real Poetry in the boat with us pretend to be peeved, and he said to me, “Oh, you go jump in the lake!”

And then—all of an excited sudden—Poetry got a big strike. He waited until he was sure it was time to set the hook, which he did at exactly the right time and in a jiffy he landed a very excited walleye; only it wasn’t much bigger than a big yellow perch—hardly big enough to keep.

“O.K., Bill—hand me the stringer,” he ordered me, panting with happiness. Talk about a proud grin on a boy’s face—Poetry really had one.

“What stringer?” I said, and looked all around on the bottom of the boat for one. And—would you believe it?—not a one of us had brought along a fish stringer! The other boat was too far away for them to throw one into our boat, so Poetry just sat there with his fish in his fat hand, wondering what to do with it.

“It’s too little to keep,” Little Jim said. “Let him go back to his mama.”

“I wish I knew where his mama is hiding,” Dragonfly said, “I’d like to catch her.”

“Let him go and he’ll find his mama,” Snow-in-the-face said, and had the cutest grin on his smallish face, and that tickled me all over ’cause I could see he was as mischievous as any white-faced boy.

“It’s probably a little lost child-fish,” Little Jim said. “We aren’t going to catch any more anyway. Let’s let him go home to his parents.”

Well, as you know, I had the end of my fish balloon tied air-tight shut, with a piece of old fishing line I’d had in my pocket, and it was still in the water on the opposite side of the boat. It was really cute, that little yellowish rubber fish bobbing along out there on the surface of the water.

And then Poetry yelled across to the other boat, saying, “HEY, YOU GUYS, OVER THERE! WE GOT A FISH BUT DON’T HAVE ANY STRINGER TO PUT HIM ON. WHAT’LL WE DO WITH HIM?”

Circus, being mischievous and having lots of bright ideas anyway, yelled back to us, “IF YOU’LL PUT HIM BACK IN THE WATER AND TELL HIM TO SWIM OVER HERE, WE’LL PUT HIM ON OUR STRINGER!”

And that was what gave Poetry another idea which wasn’t so dumb and which turned our discouraged fishing trip into a real one that was wonderful. Poetry yelled back to Circus, “SWELL IDEA, WE’LL SEND HIM OVER, RIGHT AWAY!” Then he got a command in his voice and said to me, “Here, Bill, give me that line,” and reached out and took it before I could make up my mind not to let him have it.

“What on earth crazy thing you going to do?” Dragonfly asked, when Poetry held the fish between his knees a minute while with his two fat hands he made a double slip-knot around the walleye’s tail; and then almost before anybody could have stopped him if he had wanted to, Poetry released that frisky little walleye into the water sort of like my mother does when she carefully holds an old setting hen and eases her into a coop where there is a nestful of eggs for her to sit on. Poetry said to the fish, as he let go, “Here, Wally, my friend, you go swimming straight for the other boat away over there!” Boy, that fish certainly had lots of pep. Being out of the water for that smallish jiffy hadn’t hurt him a bit, although if you are going to let a fish go free after catching him, you are supposed to be very careful to handle him with wet hands, and release him under the water rather than throw him back, and he’ll be more likely to live.

Say, that frisky little walleye made a fierce fast dive straight down into the water, and in a few fast seconds, the yellowish rubber balloon was bobbing up and down like it was a boy’s bobber on a fishing line.... And—would you believe it?—it started to move right in the direction of that other boat—kinda slow though, but actually toward it.

Poetry sighed proudly, leaned back, stuck his thumbs in his arm pits and said, “See there, fish understand my language,” which made Dragonfly say, “That’s ’cause you talk like a fish,” which, for Dragonfly, was almost a bright remark.

I could see, though, that the balloon fish was changing its course. It began working its way a little toward the left and out toward deeper water and farther from shore. We all watched it, having fun, and Poetry kept yelling to it to “Turn to the right!” and to “Hurry up!” but pretty soon when it was maybe fifty yards from us it stopped going in one direction and began to move slowly around in a small circle.

“I’ll bet he’s caught on a snag,” Little Snow-in-the-face said in his cute Indian voice, and it seemed like he might be right, because, even though the balloon bobbed around a little, it didn’t move any farther away, but just seemed to stay more or less in the same place. Well, we fished on, all of us hoping for another fish, but not a one of us caught one, so pretty soon we got discouraged again and pulled up anchor. Then Poetry said, “Whyn’t we go get him and go home, and everybody go swimming?” which sounded like a good idea. It’d be a lot more fun to do that than to sit on a hard boat seat watching a rubber balloon bobbing on the surface of a lake that didn’t have any hungry fish in it.

“Let’s troll over,” Snow-in-the-face said. “Sometimes when you can’t catch fish any other way, they’ll bite when you do that.”

Dragonfly said it was a good idea too, ’cause there might be a “lost, strayed or stolen” fish all by itself between here and that balloon, so we all left our lines in the water while Snow-in-the-face and Little Jim took the oars and rowed us kinda splashily out toward that nice yellowish balloon which I was going to get and take home to Charlotte Ann.

In a little while we were almost there, and I was getting ready to reach out my hand and get the balloon when quick as a flash I saw Little Jim’s line go taut, and his pole bend down clear to the water, while he dropped his oar and quick grabbed his pole and yelled excitedly, “Hey, I’ve got a fish!” Just as Dragonfly’s line did the same thing, and then WHAM!—my own line went tight and the next thing we knew most of us in our boat found ourselves in the middle of one of the most exciting fishing experiences of our whole lives. We yelled and pulled, and our lines went singing out as our reels unwound; and almost at the same time, Dragonfly and Little Jim and Poetry and I all landed a walleye apiece, and laid them, flopping and splashing water in every direction, in the bottom of the boat.

“WE’VE STRUCK A SCHOOL!” Poetry cried. “MY FISH TOOK US RIGHT TO THEM! HE KNEW EXACTLY WHERE THEY WERE!”