“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. “............