So, on this day in August, Jibby and I were out “running” the trot-line and Wampus was in the stern of our skiff, and here came old Uncle Beeswax rowing out from the shore of Buffalo Island toward us. There was quite a breeze blowing and his long gray whiskers blew out like a pennant. He rowed up alongside, and he was almost bobbing up and down on his seat, he was so excited. “My, my!” he cried. “My, oh, my! I just ran across the grandest grape tree I ever saw in my whole life, bar none whatever! More wild grapes than I ever saw in one place in all my born days. A big tree and just loaded down and weighted down and covered with grapes.” Well, we knew why he had come to tell us. He had said that sometime when he found a fine grape tree he would let us know and take us with him to get wild grapes, and he had found one. It was loaded down with wild grapes, Uncle Beeswax said. There were so many wild grapes the tree looked blue instead of green. It was worth going miles to see--just to see, mind you!--and all those grapes were ours just for the getting! Bushels of them! No wonder Uncle Beeswax was excited. He was so excited he sputtered when he tried to talk, and his old hands trembled. It meant money for him because he sold wild grapes to women who wanted to make jelly, but he was almost as pleased because he could show Jibby and us a real grape tree, and lead us where we could get our share of grapes from the most wonderful grape tree any man ever saw. It was a poor year for grapes, but that is the way the wild grapes behave. You’ll walk miles and see only a few skinny bunches that are all bird-picked and not worth bothering with, and then you’ll run across one tree just loaded down with vines and the vines loaded with full bunches of lovely blue grapes. Uncle Beeswax tried to tell us where the tree was, but we could not understand. We thought we had walked all over Buffalo Island, and we had never seen a tree like that. So he took a piece of paper from Jibby and a pencil from Wampus and he tried to draw a map. By the map we understood pretty well where the tree must be, and the reason we had never seen it was because it was hidden. The map Uncle Beeswax made showed why. Right straight across the river from the tree Jibby had his trot-line tied to was a sycamore tree on Buffalo Island. If you rowed across from Jibby’s trot-line tree to the sycamore tree and climbed the bank, you got into a tangle of briars and tall nettles and wild flax and poison ivy thirty or forty feet wide, and that was a jungle nobody would want to break through. Just back of that was a sort of gully that the river had hollowed out, and that gully had been mushy mud all summer. It ran up and down for an eighth of a mile, both ways.