The Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds | Page 2

off by the billion. Here it is almost cold enough to snow, and we're being eaten alive by mosquitos."
"I reckon it wouldn't do much good to invent a way of killing the brutes," Will suggested, "as long as the swamps and pools of the Northwest Territories are turning them out at the rate of a billion a minute."
"I read a story about how to get rid of mosquitos the other day," Sandy said. "It might be a good idea to try it."
"You can always read how to do things, in the newspapers," Tommy argued. "The only trouble is that the ideas don't work."
"This one will work," declared Sandy. "The way to kill mosquitos," he continued, "is to throw a great long rope up in the air. You let it stay up in the air; that is, one end of it, and grease it carefully with cold cream and tie a piece of raw beefsteak at the upper end. That will attract the mosquitos. Then when you get several millions up the rope, you cut it in two about twenty feet from the ground and pull the lower end down."
"It'll be the foolish house for yours!" Tommy laughed. "How are you going to throw one end of a rope up in the air and make it stay there?"
"I didn't say how to make it stay up in the air," grinned Sandy. "I just said you had to make it stay up in the air. Then when the mosquitos get tired of staying up in the ambient atmosphere, they'll come crawling down the rope and fall off where you cut it."
"I guess your dome needs repacking all right!" laughed Tommy.
"And then, when they come to the place where the rope has been cut off, they'll take a tumble for themselves, and you stand under the line and beat their heads off with an axe."
"Poor child!" laughed Tommy.
"If you leave it to me," George declared with a grin, "that story about how to kill mosquitos came out of Noah's ark on crutches."
The sun was setting over the great wilderness to the west, and the boys hastened to pile more wood on the fire. The forest was alive with the cries of birds, and the undergrowth showed curious eyes peering out at the intruders.
"This beats little old Chicago," cried George, bringing out a great skillet of ham. "When we live in the city, we've got to eat in the house and smell dishwater. When you live out doors, you've got a dining room about a thousand miles square."
"And when you live in Chicago," Tommy continued, "you can't get fresh fish right out of the brooks. When you want a fish here, all you've got to do is to run out to the river, grab one in your arms, and bring him in!"
"Then run out and get one now!" advised Will.
"Perhaps you think I can't!" shouted Tommy.
Seizing a head-net the boy dashed away to the margin of Moose river. His chums saw him walking about in quest of a minnow for a moment and then heard the swish of a line. In ten minutes he was back at the camp with a whitefish weighing at least five pounds.
There is incessant fishing in the wilderness north of Lake Superior throughout every month of the year. All through the long winter the ice is cut away in order that the fish may be reached, and there is every sort of fishing between that which engages the labors of sailing vessels and men, down through all the methods of fish-taking, by nets, by spearing, still-fishing and fly-fishing.
Though the region has been famous, and therefore much visited, for many years, the field is so extensive, so well stocked, and so difficult of access, that even today almost the very largest known specimens of each class of fish are to be had there.
"These are the kind of fish the Indians live on during the winter," Tommy explained as he scraped the scales from his prize. "Only," he continued, "the Indians don't clean them at all. They simply make a hole in the tail end of each fish and string them up like beads on sticks which they set up in racks."
"I never did like cold-storage fish," Sandy declared, in a tone of disgust. "They taste like dry corn meal!"
While the fish cooked and the boys sat in the protecting smudge of the campfire, the sound of paddles was heard up the river. The swish and splash came on steadily for a moment and then suddenly ceased.
"I thought we were going to have company," suggested Will.
The boys listened for a time but no further sounds were heard.
"Now what would any one be doing in this wilderness?" Sandy asked. "What would any one be sneaking around us for?"
"Perhaps they don't even know