Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  XIV.

  FORAGING.

  THE foraging began with the first relenting days of winter, whichusually came in February. Then the boys began to go to the woods to getsugar-water, as they called the maple sap, and they gave whole Saturdaysto it as long as the sap would run. It took at least five or six boys togo for sugar-water, and they always had to get a boy whose father had anauger to come along, so as to have something to bore the trees with. Ontheir way to the woods they had to stop at an elder thicket to getelder-wood to make spiles of, and at a straw pile to cut straws to suckthe sap through, if the spiles would not work. They always brought lotsof tin buckets to take the sap home in, and the big boys made the littlefellows carry these, for they had to keep their own hands free towhittle the elder sticks into the form of spouts, and to push the pithout and make them hollow. They talked loudly and all at once, and theyran a good deal of the way, from the excitement. If it was a goodsugar-day, there were patches of snow still in the fence corners andshady places, which they searched for rabbit-tracks; but the air was sowarm that they wanted to take their shoes off, and begin going barefootat once. Overhead, the sky was a sort of pale, milky blue, with the sunburning softly through it, and casting faint shadows. When they gotinto the woods, it was cooler, and there were more patches of snow, withbird-tracks and squirrel-tracks in them. They could hear the blue-jayssnarling at one another, and the yellowhammer chuckling; on some deadtree a redheaded woodpecker hammered noisily, and if the boys had onlyhad a gun with them they could have killed lots of things. Now and thenthey passed near some woodchoppers, whose axes made a pleasant sound,without frightening any of the wild things, they had got so used tothem; sometimes the boys heard the long hollow crash of a tree they werefelling. But all the time they kept looking out for a good sugar-tree,and when they saw a maple stained black from the branches down with thesap running from the little holes that the sap-suckers had made, theyburst into a shout, and dashed forward, and the fellow with the augerbegan to bore away, while the other fellows stood round and told himhow, and wanted to make him let them do it. Up and down the tree therewas a soft murmur from the bees that had found it out before the boys,and every now and then they wove through the air the straight lines oftheir coming and going, and made the fellows wish they could find abee-tree. But for the present these were intent upon the sugar-tree, andkept hurrying up the boy with the auger. When he had bored in deepenough, they tried to fit a spile to the hole, but it was nearly alwayscrooked and too big, or else it pointed downward and the water would notrun up through the spile. Then some of them got out their straws, andbegan to suck the sap up from the hole through them, and to quarrel andpush, till they agreed to take turn-about, and others got the auger andbunted for another blackened tree. They never could get their spiles towork, and the water gathered so slowly in the holes they bored, and someof the fellows took such long turns, that it was very little fun. Theytried to get some good out of the small holes the sap-suckers had made,but there were only a few drops in them, mixed with bark and moss. If ithad not been for the woodchoppers, foraging for sugar-water would alwayshave been a failure; but one of them was pretty sure to come up with hisaxe in his hand, and show the boys how to get the water. He would chooseone of the roots near the foot of the tree, and chop a clean, squarehole in it; the sap flew at each stroke of his axe, and it rose so fastin the well he made that the thirstiest boy could not keep it down, andthree or four boys, with their heads jammed tight together and theirstraws plunged into its depths, lay stretched upon their stomachs anddrank their fill at once. When every one was satisfied, or as nearlysatisfied as a boy can ever be, they began to think how they could carrysome of the sugar-water home. But by this time it would be pretty latein the afternoon; and they would have to put it off till some other day,when they intended to bring something to dip the water out with; thebuckets they had brought were all too big. Then, if they could getenough, they meant to boil it down and make sugar-wax. I never knew ofany boys who did so.

  The next thing after going for sugar-water was gathering may-apples, asthey called the fruit of the mandrake in that country. They grew totheir full size, nearly as large as a pullet's egg, some time in June,and they were gathered green, and carried home to be ripened in thecornmeal-barrel. The boys usually forgot about them before they wereripe; when now and then one was remembered, it was a thin, watery, sourthing at the best. But the boys gathered them every spring, in thepleasant open woods where they grew, just beyond the densest shade ofthe trees, among the tall, straggling grasses; and they had that joyoussense of the bounty of nature in hoarding them up which is one of thesweetest and dearest experiences of childhood. Through this the boycomes close to the heart of the mother of us all, and rejoices in thewealth she never grudges to those who are willing to be merely richenough.

  There were not many wild berries in the country near the Boy's Town, orwhat seemed near; but sometimes my boy's father took him a great way offto a region, long lost from the map, where there were blackberries. Theswimming lasted so late into September, however, that the boys began togo for nuts almost as soon as they left off going into the water. Theybegan with the little acorns that they called chinquepins, and that weresuch a pretty black, streaked upward from the cup with yellow, that theygathered them half for the unconscious pleasure of their beauty. Theywere rather bitter, and they puckered your mouth; but still you atethem. They were easy to knock off the low oaks where they grew, and theywere so plentiful that you could get a peck of them in no time. Therewas no need of anybody's climbing a tree to shake them; but one day theboys got to telling what they would do if a bear came, and one of themclimbed a chinquepin-tree to show how he would get out on such a smalllimb that the bear would be afraid to follow him; and he went so far outon the limb that it broke under him. Perhaps he was heavier than hewould have been if he had not been carrying the load of guilt whichmust burden a boy who is playing hookey. At any rate, he fell to theground, and lay there helpless while the other boys gathered round him,and shared all the alarm he felt for his life. His despair of now hidingthe fact that he had been playing hookey was his own affair, but theyreasoned with him that the offence would be overlooked in the anxietywhich his disaster must arouse. He was prepared to make the most ofthis, and his groans grew louder as he drew near home in the arms of theboys who took turns, two and two, in carrying him the whole long wayfrom Dayton Lane, with a terrified procession of alternates behind them.These all ran as soon as they came in sight of his house and left thelast pair to deliver him to his mother. They never knew whether sheforgave him fully, or merely waited till he got well. You never couldtell how a boy's mother was going to act in any given case; mothers wereso very apt to act differently.

  Red haws came a little before chinquepins. The trees grew mostly by theFirst Lock, and the boys gathered the haws when they came out fromswimming in the canal. They did not take bags to gather haws, as theydid chinquepins; the fruit was not thought worthy of that honor; butthey filled their pockets with them and ate them on the way home. Theywere rather nice, with a pleasant taste between a small apple and a roseseed-pod; only you had to throw most of them away because they werewormy. Once when the fellows were gathering haws out there they began tohave fun with a flock of turkeys, especially the gobblers, and one boygot an old gobbler to following him while he walked slowly backward, andteased him. The other boys would not have told him for anything whenthey saw him backing against a low stump. When he reached it, his headwent down and his heels flew into the air, and then the gobbler hoppedupon him and began to have some of the fun himself. The boys alwaysthought that if they had not rushed up all together and scared thegobbler off, he would have torn the boy to pieces, but very likely hewould not. He probably intended just to have fun with him.

  The woods were pretty full of the kind of hickory-trees called pignuts,and the boys gathered the nuts, and even ate their small, bitterkernels; and around the Poor-House woods there were some shag-barks, butthe boys did not go for t
hem because of the bull and the crazy people.Their great and constant reliance in foraging was the abundance of blackwalnuts which grew everywhere, along the roads and on the river-banks,as well as in the woods and the pastures. Long before it was time to gowalnutting, the boys began knocking off the nuts and trying whether theywere ripe enough; and just as soon as the kernels began to fill out, thefellows began making walnut wagons. I do not know why it was thoughtnecessary to have a wagon to gather walnuts, but I know that it was, andthat a boy had to make a new wagon every year. No boy's walnut wagoncould last till the next year; it did very well if it lasted till thenext day. He had to make it nearly all with his pocket-knife. He coulduse a saw to block the wheels out of a pine board, and he could use ahatchet to rough off the corners of the blocks, but he had to use hisknife to give them any sort of roundness, and they were not very roundthen; they were apt to be oval in shape, and they always wabbled. Hewhittled the axles out with his knife, and he made the hubs with it. Hecould get a tongue ready-made if he used a broom-handle or a hoop-pole,but that had in either case to be whittled so it could be fastened tothe wagon; he even bored the linchpin holes with his knife if he couldnot get a gimlet; and if he could not get an auger, he bored the holesthrough the wheels with a red-hot poker, and then whittled them largeenough with his knife. He had to use pine for nearly everything, becauseany other wood was too hard to whittle; and then the pine was alwayssplitting. It split in the axles when he was making the linchpin holes,and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins that were tied in; thewheels themselves split, and had to be strengthened by slats nailedacross the rifts. The wagon-bed was a candle-box nailed to the axles,and that kept the front-axle tight, so that it took the whole width of astreet to turn a very little wagon in without upsetting.

  FORAGING.]

  When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with hisbrothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. Hestarted early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the froststill bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-topsand the roof of the wood-shed, and hurried off to the woods so as to getthere before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for themwas in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, andaround them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts layscattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some stillyellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up tothe nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen,wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever. The leaves had dropped fromthe trees overhead, and the branches outlined themselves against theblue sky, and dangled from their outer stems clusters of the unfallenfruit, as large as oranges, and only wanting a touch to send themplumping down into the grass where sometimes their fat hulls burst, andthe nuts almost leaped into the boys' hands. The boys ran, some of themto gather the fallen nuts, and others to get clubs and rocks to beatthem from the trees; one was sure to throw off his jacket and kick offhis shoes and climb the tree to shake every limb where a walnut wasstill clinging. When they had got them all heaped up like a pile ofgrape-shot at the foot of the tree, they began to hull them, with blowsof a stick, or with stones, and to pick the nuts from the hulls, wherethe grubs were battening on their assured ripeness, and to toss theminto a little heap, a very little heap indeed compared with the bulk ofthat they came from. The boys gloried in getting as much walnut stain ontheir hands as they could, for it would not wash off, and it showed fordays that they had been walnutting; sometimes they got to staining oneanother's faces with the juice, and pretending they were Indians.

  The sun rose higher and higher, and burned the frost from the grass, andwhile the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter andhotter, and began to take off their shoes and stockings, till every oneof them was barefoot. Then, about three or four o'clock, they wouldstart homeward, with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon, and theirshoes and stockings piled in on top of them. That is, if they had goodluck. In a story, they would always have had good luck, and always gonehome with half a bushel of walnuts; but this is a history, and so Ihave to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnutsrattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of thewagon. They usually had no such easy time getting them as they alwayswould in a story; they did not find them under the trees, or ready todrop off, but they had to knock them off with about six or seven clubsor rocks to every walnut, and they had to pound the hulls so hard to getthe nuts out that sometimes they cracked the nuts. That was because theyusually went walnutting before the walnuts were ripe. But they made justas much preparation for drying the nuts on the wood-shed roof whetherthey got half a gallon or half a bushel; for they did not intend to stopgathering them till they had two or three barrels. They nailed a cleatacross the roof to keep them from rolling off, and they spread them outthin, so that they could look more than they were, and dry better. Theysaid they were going to keep them for Christmas, but they had to trypretty nearly every hour or so whether they were getting dry, and inabout three days they were all eaten up.

  I dare say boys are very different nowadays, and do everything they saythey are going to do, and carry out all their undertakings. But in thatday they never carried out any of their undertakings. Perhaps theyundertook too much; but the failure was a part of the pleasure ofundertaking a great deal, and if they had not failed they would haveleft nothing for the men to do; and a more disgusting thing than a worldfull of idle men who had done everything there was to do while they wereboys, I cannot imagine. The fact is, boys _have_ to leave a little formen to do, or else the race would go to ruin; and this almost makes mehalf believe that perhaps even the boys of the present time may beprevented from doing quite as much as they think they are going to do,until they grow up. Even then they may not want to do it all, but only asmall part of it. I have noticed that men do not undertake half so manythings as boys do; and instead of wanting to be circus-actors andIndians, and soldiers, and boat-drivers, and politicians and robbers,and to run off, and go in swimming all the time, and out hunting andwalnutting, they keep to a very few things, and are glad then if theycan do them. It is very curious, but it is true; and I advise any boywho doubts it to watch his father awhile.