to feed during famine times on the inner bark of
cedar and white birch, as well as on the inner bark of the slippery elm
and basswood, but these cannot be got without injury to the tree, so
omit them.

When the snow is off the ground the plants respond quickly, and it is
safe to assume that all the earliest flowers come up from big, fat
roots.

A plant can spring up quickly in summer, gathering the material of
growth from the air and soil, but a plant coming up in the early spring
is doing business at a time when it cannot get support from its
surroundings, and cannot keep on unless it has stored up capital from
the summer before. This is the logic of the storehouse in the ground for
these early comers.

_Wapato._ One of the earliest is wapato, or duck potato, also called
common Arrowleaf, or Sagittaria. It is found in low, swampy flats,
especially those that are under water for part of the year. Its root is
about as big as a walnut and is good food, cooked, or raw. These roots
are not at the point where the leaves come out but at the ends of the
long roots.

_Bog Potato._ On the drier banks, usually where the sedge begins near a
swamp, we find the bog potato, or Indian potato. The plant is a slender
vine with three, five, or seven leaflets in a group. On its roots in
spring are from one to a dozen potatoes, varying from an inch to three
inches in diameter. They taste like a cross between a peanut and a raw
potato, and are very good cooked or raw.

_Indian Cucumber._ In the dry woods one is sure to see the pretty
umbrella of the Indian cucumber. Its root is white and crisp and tastes
somewhat like a cucumber, is one to four inches long, and good food raw
or boiled.

_Calopogon._ This plant looks like a kind of grass with an onion for a
root, but it does not taste of onions and is much sought after by wild
animals and wild people. It is found in low or marshy places.

_Hog Peanuts._ In the early spring this plant will be found to have a
large nut or fruit, buried under the leaves or quite underground in the
dry woods. As summer goes by the plant uses up this capital, but on its
roots it grows a lot of little nuts. These are rich food, but very
small. The big nut is about an inch long and the little ones on the
roots are any size up to that of a pea.

_Indian Turnip or Jack-in-the-Pulpit._ This is well known to all our
children in the East. The root is the most burning, acrid, horrible
thing in the woods when r