A Busy Year at the Old Squire's

by C. A. Stephens

The horses were great, docile creatures, with shaggy, clumsy legs, hoofs as big as dinner plates, and fetlocks six inches long. Later we had to shear their legs, because the long hair loaded up so badly with snow. Several of them were light red in color, and had crinkly manes and tails; and three or four weighed as much as sixteen hundred pounds apiece. Each horse had its name, age, and weight on a tag. I still remember some of the names. There was Duncan, Ducie, Trube, Lill, Skibo, Sally, Prince, and one called William-le-Bon.

They reached us in October, but we were several weeks getting them paired in spans and ready to go up into the woods for the winter's work.

The first snow that fall caught us in the midst of "housing-time," but fine weather followed it, so that we were able to finish our farmwork and get ready for winter.

Housing-time! How many memories of late fall at the old farm cling to that word! It is one of those homely words that dictionary makers have overlooked, and refers to those two or three weeks when you are making everything snug at the farm for freezing weather and winter snow; when you bring the sheep and young cattle home from the pasture, do the last fall ploughing, and dig the last rows of potatoes; when you bank sawdust, dead leaves or boughs round the barns and the farmhouse; when you get firewood under cover, and screw on storm windows and hang storm doors. It is a busy time in Maine, where you must prepare for a long winter and for twenty degrees below zero.

At last we were ready to start up to the logging camp with the sixteen horses. We hitched three spans of them to a scoot that had wide, wooden shoes, and that was loaded high with bags of grain, harnesses, peavies, shovels, axes, and chains. The other ten horses we led behind by halters.

Asa Doane, one of our hired men at the farm, drove the three spans on the scoot; Addison and I sat on the load behind and held the halters of the led horses. We had often taken horses into the woods in that way, and expected to have no trouble this time; although these horses were young, they were not high-spirited or mettlesome. We started at daybreak, and expected, if all went well, to reach the first of the two lumber camps by nine o'clock that evening.

We had a passenger with us—an eccentric old hunter named Tommy Goss, with his traps and gun. He had come to the farm the previous night, on his way up to his trapping grounds beyond the logging camps, and as his pack was heavy, he was glad of a lift on the scoot. Tommy was a queer, reticent old man; I wanted him to tell me about his trapping, but could get scarcely a word from him. We were pretty busy with our horses, however, for it is not easy to manage so many halters.

The air was very frosty and sharp in the early morning; but when the sun came up from a mild, yellow, eastern sky, we felt a little warmer. Not a breath of wind stirred the tree tops. The leaves had already fallen, and lay in a dense, damp carpet throughout the forest; the song birds had gone, and the woods seemed utterly quiet. When a red squirrel "chickered" at a distance, or when a partridge whirred up, the sound fell startlingly loud on the air.

There was, indeed, something almost ominous in the stillness of the morning. As we entered the spruce woods beyond the bushy clearing of the Old Slave's Farm, Addison cast his eye southward, and remarked that there was a "snow bank" rising in the sky. Turning, we saw a long, leaden, indeterminate cloud. It was then about nine o'clock in the morning.

By ten o'clock the cloud had hidden the sun, and by noon the entire sky had grown dark. The first breath of the oncoming storm stirred the trees, and we felt a piercing chill in the air. Then fine "spits" of snow began to fall.