Shrill Whistles from Willow Branches

We must have been about seven or eight when Bob and I got our first jackknives. Daddy gave us each a small bone-handled pocketknife. We instantly learned to play Mumblety-peg, a pastime in which you balance the open knife on the back of your hand and then, with the other hand, strike downward on the handle so it flips over in a way that makes it stick in the ground. We played another knife game after we played Marbles using the dirt marble circle for a target. (The girls would shriek that we were going to kill each other and run to tell Mom on us.) You’d have thought we were playing William Tell with real arrows. (We probably would have.) The players flip their knifes at the same time (scream, girls!) in a way that they can best control how they land and stick in the ground. When all the knives were thrown you’d rush in to section-off (win) the biggest portion of the circle you could by drawing a straight line in the direction your blade had entered the ground. If someone drew their line in your path before you got there with your knife, you could only claim territory up to their line. So, it could get fierce—all those fingers and knives moving oh, so swiftly. You finished the game by taking one more turn trying to enlarge your stake in the circle. (Billy Johnson was so good at this game.) When this game got overly rambunctious and competitive, we’d show off by jabbing our knives between our fingers as fast as we could as our hand rested on the ground. The girls simply covered their eyes when we did this. We made willow whistles from a four-inch section of a straight branch of a weeping willow tree with our knives. If you pull on it, the bark will slip right off of the twig in one piece. You can then cut a one-inch notch half way through one end of the twig and a corresponding V-cut opening (that will fall over the notch) in the bark, slip the bark back over the twig and have a very shrill whistle. Dad could make one of these with his large pocketknife in a minute.