ng rush of their wings; and
he ran forward, yelling, "How many did you hit? Where are they? Where
are you? Are they coming back? It's my turn now!" and making an outcry
that would have frightened away a fleet of ironclads, but much less a
flock of ducks.

One shot always ended the morning's sport, and there were always good
reasons why this shot never killed anything.

XIV.

FORAGING.

THE foraging began with the first relenting days of winter, which
usually came in February. Then the boys began to go to the woods to get
sugar-water, as they called the maple sap, and they gave whole Saturdays
to it as long as the sap would run. It took at least five or six boys to
go for sugar-water, and they always had to get a boy whose father had an
auger to come along, so as to have something to bore the trees with. On
their way to the woods they had to stop at an elder thicket to get
elder-wood to make spiles of, and at a straw pile to cut straws to suck
the sap through, if the spiles would not work. They always brought lots
of tin buckets to take the sap home in, and the big boys made the little
fellows carry these, for they had to keep their own hands free to
whittle the elder sticks into the form of spouts, and to push the pith
out and make them hollow. They talked loudly and all at once, and they
ran a good deal of the way, from the excitement. If it was a good
sugar-day, there were patches of snow still in the fence corners and
shady places, which they searched for rabbit-tracks; but the air was so
warm that they wanted to take their shoes off, and begin going barefoot
at once. Overhead, the sky was a sort of pale, milky blue, with the sun
burning softly through it, and casting faint shadows. When they got
into the woods, it was cooler, and there were more patches of snow, with
bird-tracks and squirrel-tracks in them. They could hear the blue-jays
snarling at one another, and the yellowhammer chuckling; on some dead
tree a redheaded woodpecker hammered noisily, and if the boys had only
had a gun with them they could have killed lots of things. Now and then
they passed near some woodchoppers, whose axes made a pleasant sound,
without frightening any of the wild things, they had got so used to
them; sometimes the boys heard the long hollow crash of a tree they were
felling. But all the time they kept looking out for a good sugar-tree,
and when they saw a maple stained black from the branches down with the
sap runnin