those days, we fell to playing. It
must have taken us all of a month, working intermittently, to make our
tree-house; and then, when it was completed, we never used it again.

But I run ahead of my story. When we fell to playing, after breakfast,
on the second day away from the caves, Lop-Ear led me a chase through
the trees and down to the river. We came out upon it where a large
slough entered from the blueberry swamp. The mouth of this slough was
wide, while the slough itself was practically without a current. In the
dead water, just inside its mouth, lay a tangled mass of tree trunks.
Some of these, what of the wear and tear of freshets and of being
stranded long summers on sand-bars, were seasoned and dry and without
branches. They floated high in the water, and bobbed up and down or
rolled over when we put our weight upon them.

Here and there between the trunks were water-cracks, and through them we
could see schools of small fish, like minnows, darting back and forth.
Lop-Ear and I became fishermen at once. Lying flat on the logs, keeping
perfectly quiet, waiting till the minnows came close, we would make
swift passes with our hands. Our prizes we ate on the spot, wriggling
and moist. We did not notice the lack of salt.

The mouth of the slough became our favorite playground. Here we spent
many hours each day, catching fish and playing on the logs, and here,
one day, we learned our first lessons in navigation. The log on which
Lop-Ear was lying got adrift. He was curled up on his side, asleep. A
light fan of air slowly drifted the log away from the shore, and when
I noticed his predicament the distance was already too great for him to
leap.

At first the episode seemed merely funny to me. But when one of the
vagrant impulses of fear, common in that age of perpetual insecurity,
moved within me, I was struck with my own loneliness. I was made
suddenly aware of Lop-Ear's remoteness out there on that alien element
a few feet away. I called loudly to him a warning cry. He awoke
frightened, and shifted his weight rashly on the log. It turned over,
sousing him under. Three times again it soused him under as he tried to
climb out upon it. Then he succeeded, crouching upon it and chattering
with fear.

I could do nothing. Nor could he. Swimming was something of which we
knew nothing. We were already too far removed from the lower
life-forms to have the instinct for swimming, and we had not yet become
sufficiently m