lled only by a glass or two of Lung Balm.
Her condition must have been critical, for one night after several
necessary doses of Balm her head seemed affected. She became
abusive to the lady of the house and at the end of the month a less
interesting help was in her place.
There were many lessons good and bad that Yan might have drawn from
this; but the only one that he took in was that the Black-cherry bark
is a wonderful remedy. The family doctor said that it really was so,
and Yan treasured up this as a new and precious fragment of woodcraft.
Having once identified the tree, he was surprised to see that it was
rather common, and was delighted to find it flourishing in his own
Glenyan.
This made him set down on paper all the trees he knew, and he was
surprised to find how few they were and how uncertain he was about
them.
Maple--hard and soft.
Beach.
Elm--swamp and slippery.
Ironwood.
Birch--white and black.
Ash--white and black.
Pine.
Cedar.
Balsam.
Hemlock and Cherry.
He had heard that the Indians knew the name and properties of every
tree and plant in the woods, and that was what he wished to be able to
say of himself.
One day by the bank of the river he noticed a pile of empty shells of
the fresh-water Mussel, or Clam. The shells were common enough, but
why all together and marked in the same way? Around the pile on the
mud were curious tracks and marks. There were so many that it was hard
to find a perfect one, but when he did, remembering the Coon track,
he drew a picture of it. It was too small to be the mark of his old
acquaintance. He did not find any one to tell him what it was, but one
day he saw a round, brown animal hunched up on the bank eating a clam.
It dived into the water at his approach, but it reappeared swimming
farther on. Then, when it dived again, Yan saw by its long thin
tail that it was a Muskrat, like the stuffed one he had seen in the
taxidermist's window.
He soon learned that the more he studied those tracks the more
different kinds he found. Many were rather mysterious, so he could
only draw them and put them aside, hoping some day for light. One
of the strangest and most puzzling turned out to be the trail of a
Snapper, and another proved to be merely the track of a Common Crow
that came to the water's edge to drink.
The curios that he gathered and stored in his shanty increased in
number and in interest. The place became more and more part of
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