In the summer, when we are up there on Birch Island, we fish in quite a few places and in quite a few ways, but we don’t do much fishing on our own island; it is about as poor a place as there is in the whole Mississippi River. Once in a while, though, we do go across the island to where the slough is, and try it. If the river is high enough, and not too muddy, we catch a few fish there, and sometimes we try it because it is so near--only a few hundred feet from the back doors of our cottages. So, this day, we got our cans of worms and our fishpoles and went back through the woods and weeds and nettles to see how the fishing was there. All our cottages set on the bank of the “chute” or what is now the main channel of the river, but Orph Cadwallader’s cottage sets back a couple of hundred feet or so, because he is the caretaker, and we went to the part of the slough back of Orpheus Cadwallader’s cottage because we thought the fishing would be best there, but when we got there it looked pretty bad. Along the edges of the slough the weeds had grown tall and thick and beyond them was nothing but mud--just soft, slushy mud, slanting down to the water of the slough like the edge of a dinner plate. We tried to throw our lines far enough out to get to water deep enough to have fish in it, but it couldn’t be done--the lines would not reach. We tried putting some driftwood on top of the slush mud, to walk out on, but that was no good either. When we put a foot on a stick of driftwood, it went right down in the mud, as if there was no bottom. “Aw, come on!” Wampus said. “This is no good. If there are any big carp in there they can stay there, for all I care. We can’t get out to where they are, and they can’t come in to us. Let’s go home.” We all thought the same. But Jibby Jones stood still. “Wait a minute!” he said. “When I was in the North Woods with father, I saw them catching fish through the ice with saplings.” “Ice!” Wampus shouted. “Ice! I’d like to see some ice! There’s not much ice around here that I can see.” “And a sapling wouldn’t reach as far as our fishpoles do,” said Tad. “You don’t understand,” said Jibby. “What I mean to say is that they bent the saplings down and tied their lines on the tips of them. Then they set the saplings with a sort of trigger, so that when the fish bit at the bait the sapling sprung up and pulled the fish out.” “Come on; let’s get home!” said Wampus. “The mosquitoes are eating me alive.” But Jibby aimed his nose toward a tall, thin elm sapling near the edge of the weeds and followed his nose. “This tree will do,” he said, and he took hold of it as high as he could reach and threw his weight on it. But his weight was not enough to bend it down. “Come on, you fellows, and help,” he said; “perhaps we will catch a good fish.” We laughed, but we all took hold of the tree. We began to bend it toward the slough.