CHAPTER VI
THE DECEMBER VACATION
Long before the coldest weather came, everything was made ready for a six or eight months' winter. The double windows were surrounded by cotton wool and gummed paper to keep out the draughts. The open rafters of the kitchen now served as a store room. From them hung dried fish, smoked pork, and even several weeks' supply of rye bread in large hard cakes with a hole in the middle of each.
As soon as the December holidays came, parties at neighboring houses followed each other in quick succession. Sometimes these were ski-ing parties of school children with the teacher in charge. Sometimes the older folks gathered, and sometimes whole families. There was always a dinner, and almost always dancing and the playing of games.
One day Juhani's whole family went to the home of a friend who lived fully ten miles distant. It was only about nine in the morning when they started in two low sleighs. The air was crisp and so still that it did not seem to stir, the sky intensely blue, as they hurried over snow-covered roads, past many forests, each tree bright in its pearly gown; past two farms whose buildings looked strikingly red and bare against their white background.
As they neared their destination, a bright-looking boy, accompanied by a kind of wolf hound, raced up on his skis to meet them. "You're just in time," he shouted when sufficiently near, "to help me make a fox trap. An old scamp of a fox has been after our chickens and I mean to get him."
"Where are you going to set the trap?" called back Juhani eagerly.
"I'm going to show you," responded the other, and as Juhani dismounted from the sleigh, the two made their way to some distance back of the barn. Here Juhani's friend had everything ready. First he drove a long stake into the ground. This stake was forked at the end with the central prong the longest. "Feel the edges," he said to Juhani.