I looked into this tree and that, suddenly to have my gaze arrested by a threshing commotion in the very top of a lofty spruce.  I saw a dark form moving against a background of blue sky.  Instantly I thought it must be a lynx and was about to raise my rifle when a voice as from the very clouds utterly astounded me.  I gasped in my astonishment.  Was I dreaming?  But violent threshings and whacks from the tree-top absolutely assured me that I was neither dreaming nor out of my head.  “I get you—­whee!” shouted the voice.  There was a man up in the swaying top of that spruce and he was no other than Takahashi.  For a moment I could not find my voice.  Then I shouted: 

“Hey up there, George!  What in the world are you doing?  I came near shooting you.”

“Aw hullo!—­I come down now,” replied Takahashi.

I had seen both lynx and lion climb down out of a tree, but nothing except a squirrel could ever have beaten Takahashi.  The spruce was fully one hundred and fifty feet high; and unless I made a great mistake the Jap descended in two minutes.  He grinned from ear to ear.

“I no see you—­no hear,” he said.  “You take me for big cat?”

“Yes, George, and I might have shot you.  What were you doing up there?”

Takahashi brushed the needles and bark from his clothes.  “I go out with little gun you give me.  I hunt, no see squirrel.  Go out no gun—­see squirrel.  I chase him up tree—­I climb high—­awful high.  No good.  Squirrel he too quick.  He run right over me—­get away.”

Takahashi laughed with me.  I believed he was laughing at what he considered the surprising agility of the squirrel, while I was laughing at him.  Here was another manifestation of the Jap’s simplicity and capacity.  If all Japanese were like Takahashi they were a wonderful people.  Men are men because they do things.  The Persians were trained to sweat freely at least once every day of their lives.  It seemed to me that if a man did not sweat every day, which was to say—­labor hard—­he very surely was degenerating physically.  I could learn a great deal from George Takahashi.  Right there I told him that my father had been a famous squirrel hunter in his day.  He had such remarkable eyesight that he could espy the ear of a squirrel projecting above the highest limb of a tall white oak.  And he was such a splendid shot that he had often “barked” squirrels, as was a noted practice of the old pioneer.  I had to explain to Takahashi that this practice consisted of shooting a bullet to hit the bark right under the squirrel, and the concussion would so stun it that it would fall as if dead.

“Aw my goodnish—­your daddy more better shot than you!” ejaculated Takahashi.

“Yes indeed he was,” I replied, reflectively, as in a flash the long-past boyhood days recurred in memory.  Hunting days—­playing days of boyhood were the best of life.  It seemed to me that one of the few reasons I still had for clinging to hunting was this keen, thrilling hark back to early days.  Books first—­then guns—­then fishing poles—­so ran the list of material possessions dear to my heart as a lad.