“I can’t look over, I get dizzy!” Tim said to Bill. “Look at the river. It surely looks a mile below.”

“Lie down,” Bill told him. “Then you can’t tumble off.”

The boys amused themselves by dropping stones over the cliff and counting the seconds till they struck amongst the trees below. Tim claimed he could throw a stone into the river.

“Ah! you can’t do it, Tim,” Bill objected. “The river is a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies.”

“I’ll pick a good sailer-rock,” Tim persisted, “and you’ll see.”

But although Tim did his best, his rock seemed to come sailing back to the sloping bluff.

“Guess you are right,” admitted Tim, a little crestfallen; “the rivet is pretty far away.”

Tatanka stood gazing in silence over the sublime panorama. The river appeared to come like a broad glassy channel out of the blue hazy distance in the north. Just below the point it was half a mile wide and Tatanka could easily distinguish the deep dark channel from the light brown sandbars near shore.

Like a wonderful picture the valley spread out below the hunters. Dark groves of elms stood out clearly from long stretches of cottonwood in light gray. The swelling and bursting buds of the bottom maples showed great dashes of a dark ruddy red, while vast stretches of gray and brown marshes were dotted with brighter patches of orange willow and of bright red killikinnick.

“My people once lived here,” said Tatanka, at last. “They loved this land. It is rich and beautiful, and at that time many red deer and elk and black bear lived in these woods. The big game is gone now. The white settlers have too many guns and too many dogs. They drive the deer away.

“It is good that Manitou gave wings to the ducks and the geese, so the white hunters can not kill them all.

“Our people will never come back to this land. Our trails will grow over with weeds, and the graves of our fathers will be forgotten. Our people must learn to plow the field and raise cattle and horses like white men!”

The old trapper also was carried back to his boyhood as he stood gazing over the river, the bayous, and islands, and to the hills two miles away on the Wisconsin side.

“I used to think,” he said to his friend, “that the Wabash and the Illinois were great rivers, but they are just little crawling creeks compared with the Mississippi, and they can show no great woods and grand hills and cliffs like the Mississippi. If these woods were mine, I would build my house on this point and every morning I would see the sun rise over the hills yonder. In the winter I would watch the snow-storms rush down the valley; and in the sultry summer nights I would watch the lightning play between the hills, over the river and among the tree-tops, and hear the thunder roll and echo from bluff to bluff.”

“Are you not afraid of thunder and lightning?” asked Tatanka. “My people are afraid of it and will not travel in a storm.”

“I used to be afraid, when I was a boy,” Barker continued, “but since that time I have lived so much alone in the forest and on the rivers that I no longer fear a thunderstorm; but I never make my camp near tall trees.”

White people who go down the Mississippi in boats do see some fine scenery, but the real grandeur of Mississippi River scenery is revealed only from good vantage-points on the crest of the bluffs. For those sufficiently strong and Venturesome to climb to those points, nature spreads out her grandest panoramas found in the inhabited part of the globe.

Many Americans have made long trips to see the beauties of the Rhine and the Danube; the far grander beauty of the Mississippi is to our own people still an unexplored country. There are awaiting those who would go and see a thousand Inspiration Points on the upper Mississippi and ten thousand miles of semi-tropical wilderness, cane-brake, forest, lakes, and bayous on the lower river and its southern tributaries. Most Americans know the Mississippi only as a crooked black line on the map.

When Barker and Tatanka had finished drinking in the landscape, as they called it, the trapper told the lads that they might run about as they pleased till four o’clock.

“At that time,” he added, “the hunting will begin.”

“What are we going—?” Bill started, but he checked himself just in time, to the great delight of Barker and Tatanka.

“Come on, Tim,” he sang out, “Let’s take a hike to the prairie. I’ll be sent home, if I hang around here all day.”

“Don’t chase any geese or cranes, boys,” Barker called after them. “If you see any on the fields, don’t disturb them.”

The boys discovered that from the place, where they started, the open prairie was only about half a mile away. As they carefully skirted along the edge of the timber, they saw several large flocks of geese and cranes feeding on open fields of young winter-wheat. On one field they could distinguish a boy who had evidently been told to drive the cranes off the wheat-field. He was a small boy and was having a sorry time of it. He had no gun, but tried to scare them away with a stick.

“I bet his mother wouldn’t let him take a gun,” remarked Tim.

“May be his people are too poor to buy a gun,” suggested Bill. “Settlers in a new country don’t have much money and they need all kinds of things for a new farm.”

The boy walked from one end of the field to the other. When he arrived at the east end, the cranes flew to the west end, but the boy could not make them leave the field.

The longer the boy tried to drive them away, the bolder they became.

“I’ll bet they know the boy hasn’t a gun,” Tim exclaimed.

Now a very big crane defied the boy altogether. He walked boldly toward the boy, spreading his wings and uttering a loud croak.

“Look, look,” exclaimed Tim, “he’s going to bite the boy. Let’s run and help him.”

“No, we mustn’t,” argued Bill. “Mr. Barker said we shouldn’t scare the cranes. If that kid runs away from a crane, he deserves to be bitten.”

“I would run,” Tim acknowledged, “if I had no gun.”

The boy was now actually running away with the crane after him, but falling over a furrow and seeing that he could not run away from the fighting crane, he picked up his stick and went hard at his pursuer. At this unexpected attack, the crane ran away, napped his wings and arose to join the flock at the other end of the field.

The boy started for home, looking back from time to time as if afraid that the big bird might be after him again.

“I wouldn’t herd cranes,” said Tim, “if they didn’t give me a gun.”

The boys returned to camp in good time and about four o’clock the hunting actually began, for the big Canada geese began to fly over the timber to their resting place on a long sandspit below Inspiration Point.

“One rule,” Mr. Barker called, “about this hunt. Don’t fire at any bird that is too far off. We don’t want to leave any wounded birds in the woods. Tim, you come with me. I’ll tell you when to fire.”

The hunters walked back half a dozen rods, so they would not drop any birds below the cliff, and placed themselves about fifty yards apart on a line parallel to the crest of the bluff.

Half a dozen geese soon came flying just above the tops of the old oaks.

“Aim at the last one,” Barker told Tim. “Take it from behind!”

Tim brought down a large fat goose.

“Good work!” exclaimed the trapper. “Your shot went right in between the feathers. If you had fired at the bird from in front, the shot might have glanced off the heavy coat of feathers. ‘Always aim at a single bird,’ is also a good rule in wing-shooting. If you just fire wildly at the whole flock, you are likely to miss them all.”

Barker at once took up Tim’s goose, saying, “That will just furnish us a good supper with some bacon and corn bread.”

After the goose had been picked and drawn, he put a slender green pole through it, which he laid on two forked sticks close to a hot fire. When one side was partly cooked, he turned the other side to the fire. In this way he prepared a savory meal of wild goose roasted on the spit.

When it grew too dark to shoot, the hunters came in with six geese. Bill had had the bad luck of merely winging a bird, so that he was compelled to follow his game for nearly an hour. A wild goose is so protectively colored that among dead leaves and brush it can make itself almost as invisible as a sparrow.

When Bill finally captured his bird, it was almost dark and he had forgotten to watch the direction to camp; he was lost.

He fired two shots in quick succession.

“There is Big Boy,” Tatanka laughed. “He is lost, Tim; shoot twice, so he can find home. He is hungry.”

Two shots fired close together means, “I’m lost,” to hunters and woodsmen.

Of course Bill was not far from camp and he came home in time for supper.

“Bill,” his younger brother teased him, “the next time you run after a goose, hang a cowbell on your neck, so we can tell where you go.”

Barker and the Indian had built a lean-to and a warm camp-fire with back-logs of green oaks. For the fire itself they had cut a big pile of green white-birch.

“Look here, boys,” Barker told them after supper, “we sleep between the log-fire and the lean-to. Any man that wakes up puts a few logs on the fire. In that way I think we’ll keep warm.”

They sat late around the camp-fire and when, at last, they were ready to roll in, Tatanka walked out to the point, below which river and valley spread out in a strange light.

“Look, my friend,” he called. “The whole sky is burning. It is growing daylight. The world is burning up.”

As they stepped away from the fire, they all saw the strange appearance of the sky. It was indeed growing daylight, although it was still before midnight.

Great streamers and bundles of whitish and reddish light were shooting up from all points on the horizon toward the zenith. Some streamers flickered, swayed and died out, but others took their places and for half an hour it was light enough to read. The river, the bottom forest, even the Wisconsin bluffs could be plainly seen. The men could even see their canoe amongst the willows below.

“The world is coming to an end,” Tatanka muttered, overcome by his superstitious fears.

“No, it isn’t,” Barker explained to him. “We are seeing a grand display of northern lights, the greatest I have ever seen, although I have seen them many, many times. This is something many city people never see, because they are always cooped up in houses.”

In an hour it was dark again, and the tired hunters rolled up in their blankets before the fire.

“Make a night-cap out of your handkerchiefs,” Barker advised the boys. “The night is going to be chilly and your heads and ears will get cold if they are not covered.”

Early in the morning they started for the field, where the boy had herded the cranes. The birds were there again, and it was not hard to get within range, although they were much more wary of the hunters than they had been of the small boy with his stick. When the great birds arose, all four fired and each man brought down his bird.

As Bill ran to pick up his game, the trapper called to him, “Look out, Bill; he isn’t dead!”

But Bill was too eager to take warning. The bird suddenly straightened out his long neck and shot his sharp beak right into Bill’s face.

The young hunter staggered and cried out with pain and surprise. The crane had cut a deep gash in Bill’s cheek and the blood ran freely down his face.

At first his three friends laughed at him, but when they saw how badly Bill was wounded, Tatanka quickly chewed a handful of choke-cherry twigs and put them on the wound to stop the bleeding.

Thus ended the crane-hunt near Inspiration Point.