be sure to live in summer, Hiram heard men’s voices, whispering low and quiet to one another. A great joy filled his soul. He could see at once by their dress and big fur caps what they were. They were trappers! One piece of romance still survived in Geauga County, among the cranberry swamps and rush beds where the flooded creek flowed sluggishly into the bosom of Ontario; and on that one piece of romance he had luckily lighted by pure accident. Trappers! Yes, not a doubt of it! He struck out on his skates swiftly but noiselessly toward them, and joined the three men without a word as they stood taking counsel together below their breath on the ice-bound marshland.
‘Hello, sonny!’ one of the men said in a low undertone. ‘Say whar did you drop from? What air you comin’ spyin’ out a few peaceable surveyors for, eh? Tell me.’
‘I didn’t think you was surveyors,’ Hiram answered, a little disappointed. ‘I thought you was trappers.’ And at the same time he glanced suspiciously at the peculiar little gins that the surveyors held in their great gauntleted hands, for all the world like Oneida traps for musk-rats.
The man noticed the glance and laughed to himself a smothered laugh – the laugh of a person accustomed always to keep very quiet. ‘The young un has spotted us, an’ no mistake, boys,’ he said, laughing, to the others. ‘He’s a bit too ‘cute to be took in with the surveyor gammon. What do you call this ‘ere, sonny?’
‘I calc’late that’s somewhar near a mink trap,’ Hiram answered, breathless with delight.
‘Wal, it is a mink trap,’ the trapper said slowly, looking deep into the boy’s truthful eyes. ‘Now, who sent you down here to track us out and peach upon us; eh, Bob?’
‘Nobody sent me,’ Hiram replied, with his blue eyes looking deep back into the trapper’s keen restless grey pair. ‘I kem out all o’ my own accord, ‘cos father gave me a lickin’ this mornin’, an’ I’ve kem out jest to get away for a bit alone somewhar.’
‘Who’s your father?’ asked the man still suspiciously.
‘Deacon Winthrop, down to Muddy Creek Deepo.’
‘Deacon Winthrop! Oh, I know him, ruther. A tall, skinny, dried-up kind of fellow, ain’t he, who looks as if most of his milk was turned sour, an’ the Hopkinsite Confession was a settin’ orful heavy on his digestion?’
Hiram nodded several times successively, in acknowledgment of the general accuracy of this brief description. ‘That’s him, you bet,’ he answered with unfilial promptitude. ‘I guess you’ve seed him somwhar, for that’s him as like as a portrait. Look here, say, I’ll draw him for you.’ And the boy, taking his pencil from his pocket, drew as quickly as he was able on a scrap of birch-bark a humorous caricature of his respected parent, as he appeared in the very act of offering an unctuous exhortation to the Hopkinsite assembly at Muddy Creek meeting-house. It was very wrong and wicked, of course – a clear breach of the Fifth Commandment – but the deacon hadn’t done much on his own account to merit honour or love at the hands of Hiram Winthrop.
The man took the rough sketch and laughed at it inwardly, with a suppressed chuckle. There was no denying, he saw, that it was the perfect moral of that thar freezed-up old customer down to the Deepo. He handed it with a smile to his two companions. They both recognised the likeness and the little additions which gave it point, and one of them, a Canadian as Hiram conjectured (for he spoke with a dreadful English accent – so stuck-up), said in the same soft undertone: ‘Do you know where any mink live anywhere hereabouts?’
‘A little higher up stream,’ Hiram answered, overjoyed, ‘I know every spot whar ther’s any mink stirrin’ for five miles round, anyhow.’
The Canadian turned to the others.
‘Boys,’ he said, ‘you can trust the youngster. He won’t peach on us. He’s game, you may be sure. Now, youngster, we’re trappers, as you guessed correctly. But you see, farmers don’t love trappers, because they go trespassing, and overrunning the fields: and so we don’t want you to say a word about us to this father of yours. Do you understand?’
Hiram nodded.
‘You promise not to tell him or anybody?’
‘Yes, I promise.’
‘Well, then, if you like, you can come with us. We’re going to set our traps now. You don’t seem a bad sort of little chap, and you can see the fun out if you’ve a mind to.’
Hiram’s heart bounded with excitement. What a magnificent prospect! He promised to show the trappers every spot he knew about the place where any fur-bearing animal, from ermine to musk-rat, was likely to be found. In ten minutes, all four were started off upon their skates once more, striking up the river in the direction of the deacon’s, and setting traps by Hiram’s advice as they went along, at every likely run or corner.
‘You drew that picture real well,’ the Canadian said, as they skated side by side: ‘I could see it was the old man at a glance.’
Hiram’s face shone with pleasure at this sincere compliment to his artistic merit. ‘I could hev done it a long sight better,’ he said simply, ‘ef my hands hadn’t been numbed a bit with the cold, so’s I could hardly hold the pencil.’
It was a grand day, that day with the trappers – the gipsies of half-settled America; the grandest day Hiram had ever spent in his whole lifetime. How many musk-rats’ burrows he pointed out to his new acquaintance along the bank of the creek; how many spots where the mink, that strange water-haunting weasel, lurks unseen among the frozen sedges! Here and there, too, he showed them the points where he had noticed the faint track of the ermine on the lightly fallen snow, and where they might place their traps across the path worn by the ‘coons on their way to and from the Indian corn patch. It was cruel work, to be sure, setting those murderous snapping iron jaws, and perhaps if Hiram had thought more about the beasts themselves (whom after all he loved in his heart) he wouldn’t have been so ready to aid their natural enemies in thus catching and exterminating them: but what boy is free from the aboriginal love of hunting something? Certainly not Hiram Winthrop, at least, to whom this one glimpse of a delightful wandering life among the woods and marshes – a life that wasn’t all made up of bare fields and fall wheat and snake fences and cross-ploughing – seemed like a stray snatch of that impossible paradise he had read about in ‘Peter Simple’ and the ‘Buccaneers of the Caribbean Sea.’
‘Say, Bob,’ the Canadian muttered to him as they were half-way through their work (in Northern New York every boy unknown is ex officio addressed as Bob), ‘we shall be back in these diggings in the spring again, looking after the summer furs, you see. Now, don’t you go and tell any other trappers about these places we’ve set, because trappers gener’ly (present company always excepted) is a pretty dishonest lot, and they’ll poach on other trappers’ grounds and even steal their furs and traps as soon as look at ‘em. You stand by us and we’ll stand by you, and take care you don’t suffer by it.’
‘When’ll you come?’ Hiram asked in the thrilling delight of anticipation.
‘When the first spring days are on,’ the Canadian answered. ‘I’ll tell you the best sign: it’s no use going by days o’ the month – we don’t remember ‘em mostly; – but it’ll be about the time when the skunk cabbage begins to flower.’
Hiram made a note of the date mentally, and treasured it up in safety on the lasting tablets of his memory.
At about one o’clock the trappers sat down upon the frozen bank and ate their dinner. It would have been cold work to men less actively engaged; but skating and trapping warms your blood
