So he showed Jibby how to fix hooks on a trot-line. You know what a trot-line is. It is a long, stout fish-line--mighty stout, too--and sometimes a quarter of a mile long, or more. You tie one end to a tree on the bank and have the rest of the line coiled in your skiff, with the hooks tied on about three or four feet apart, and while some one rows your skiff out into the river you pay out the line. When you come to the end of the line, you tie a big anchor rock on the end of it and chuck it overboard. The hooks are not fastened directly onto the trot-line. Each hook is on a short line of its own--maybe a foot and a half long, and the ends of these lines are tied to the trot-line. That lets them float free and gives a fish some play when it gets caught. Otherwise it might break away easier. It was the way Jibby was tying these hook-lines to the trot-line that Uncle Beeswax did not like. “If you tie them that way, Jibby,” he said, “they’ll slide back and forth along the line when a big fish gets on them. This is the right way.” So he showed Jibby, but Jibby did not bother to go over the job again. He thought the line might do as it was, because it was a big job to untie hundreds of hard knots and he wanted to get his trot-line in the water and catch some fish. After that old Uncle Beeswax used to stop at the island every day he went by, and he knew more about the old river, and told us more, than any man ever did, except, maybe, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar. What Uncle Oscar did not know Uncle Beeswax did. Anyway, Jibby Jones put out his trot-line that afternoon after Uncle Beeswax went. He tied one end to a tree by the mud cove and Wampus and I rowed the skiff while Jibby paid out the trot-line and he anchored the far end out beyond the middle of the river with a rock big enough to hold a house from floating away. After that we “ran” the trot-line twice a day and we always got fish--sometimes three or four catfish and white perch and sometimes a carp or two, but always some. When you “run” a trot-line one fellow rows the skiff to keep the current from sweeping it downstream too strong, and the other sits in the bow of the boat with the trot-line dragging over it. He pulls the boat along by pulling on the trot-line, and when he comes to a hook-line he takes off the fish--if there is one--and baits the hook and lets it slide back down into the water. So that’s that. There was Jibby’s trot-line stretching out a quarter of a mile or so from our island, dipping into the river just a few feet beyond the tree it was tied to, like a submarine cable that did not go quite to Buffalo Island. When we were out “running” the line, old Uncle Beeswax would row toward us, if he happened to be rowing by, and he would ask how many fish we were getting, and things like that.