But Sophy only laughed, and putting her hands on Pam’s shoulders gave her a gentle shake.
“As if anyone thought the worse of you for a thing you cannot help! Besides, we all want to make much of you for the dear, plucky way in which you have tackled a difficult situation. You will have to find a better excuse than that if you want to be unsociable!”
CHAPTER X
Someone’s Desperate Plight
The weeks of winter wore on, and Christmas passed in quite a whirl of hard work and social activities. There were packing bees, when everyone worked with perspiring energy at packing apples in boxes and barrels for sending to the cities. Pam liked that work; the apples reminded her of summer, and they linked her up with warmth and sunshine. There were also bees for making lard, but they were not so interesting. The fat portions of several pigs were cut into small squares, and boiled down in great pans, then strained. It was greasy, horrid work, but, like other unpleasant tasks, it was very necessary, and, as no one else seemed to mind the grease, Pam decided that it was of no use for her to make a fuss about it either.
Christmas brought the most acute home-sickness for Pam, who had never before been away from her family at the great festival. They wanted her rather badly, too, which fact did but add to her pain. Greg was ill with rheumatic fever—very ill, her mother wrote. Pam knew that the doctor’s bill for Muriel’s illness was not all paid off yet, so it was ghastly to think of another being piled on to it. Mrs. Walsh was in great trouble about Pam, and she wrote that as soon as Greg was able to leave his bed Jack would travel to New Brunswick to help her. It was this last piece of information that gave Pam the courage to wear a smiling face, and to hold her own at the gatherings with which the forest-dwellers beguiled the winter nights.
It had been difficult to travel the forest ways after dark in the summer-time and in the fall. Now, with snow on the ground and the trees bare of leaves, it made little difference, while the moonlight nights were almost as light as the days. Don Grierson had a sleigh with fur robes made from the skins of animals he had shot himself—quite a luxurious vehicle—and he would come driving along after dark to take Sophy and Pam out to the various gatherings. The dog would be left to guard the house, and the two went away feeling certain that all would be right until they came back again.
The new year came in with raging storms, and these were followed at the middle of the month by still colder weather, such cold as Pam had never even dreamed of before. Then people began to talk of having heard wolves howling round the lone farms at night. The children were not allowed to go to school alone, and men traversing the forest after dark carried fire-arms.
Even Pam carried an ancient but useful fowling-piece when she walked the forest ways. She had learned to shoot, and she could manage to hit the thing she aimed at. One day she contrived to shoot a hare, and although she cried over it all the way home, she had to admit that it was uncommonly good eating, and made a most agreeable change in their usual food. Besides, as Sophy pointed out, the creature would probably have fallen a victim to a wolf or a fox, or it might have perished miserably of starvation.