Jibby Jones by Ellis Parker Butler

In the summer, when we are up there on Birch Island, we fish in quite a few places and in quite a few ways, but we don't do much fishing on our own island; it is about as poor a place as there is in the whole Mississippi River. Once in a while, though, we do go across the island to where the slough is, and try it. If the river is high enough, and not too muddy, we catch a few fish there, and sometimes we try it because it is so near -- only a few hundred feet from the back doors of our cottages. So, this day, we got our cans of worms and our fishpoles and went back through the woods and weeds and nettles to see how the fishing was there.

All our cottages set on the bank of the "chute" or what is now the main channel of the river, but Orph Cadwallader's cottage sets back a couple of hundred feet or so, because he is the caretaker, and we went to the part of the slough back of Orpheus Cadwallader's cottage because we thought the fishing would be best there, but when we got there it looked pretty bad. Along the edges of the slough the weeds had grown tall and thick and beyond them was nothing but mud -- just soft, slushy mud, slanting down to the water of the slough like the edge of a dinner plate.