Then such coasting! Just think of dragging your sled of a moonlight night up a mile of easy tramping to the foot of the mountain, whence you come down again, now fast, now slow, now “like a streak” down a sharp incline, now running over a even-rail fence buried in the glittering drifts, and bringing up at last at a neighbor’s door, or at the back side of your own barnyard!
It is great fun, too, to slide on the drifts with “slews” or “jumpers.” These are made sometimes of one, sometimes of two barrel-staves, and are sure to give you many a jolly bump and wintersault.
There is fun to be had in the drifts too, digging caves or under-snow houses, wherein you may build a fire without the least danger. Here you can be Esquimaux, and your whole tribe sally forth from the igloë and attack a terrible white bear, if one of the party will kindly consent to be a bear for awhile. You can make him white enough by pelting him with snow, and he will bear enough before he is finally killed.
There is fun, too, and of no mean order, to be got out of the regular farm duties. Not much, perhaps, out of bringing in the wood, or feeding the pigs, or turning the fanning-mill; but foddering the sheep and calves, which, very likely, are pets, takes the boys to the hay-mow, where odors of summer linger in the herds-grass, and the daisy and clover-tops are almost as green and white and yellow and purple as when they fell before the scythe.
What a place is this elastic floor for a “wrestle or a summersault!” and then, who “da’s’t” climb to the big beam, into the neighborhood of the empty swallows nests and dusty cobwebs, and take the flying jump therefrom to the mow? Here, too, are hens’ nests to be found, with frost-cracked eggs to carry in rats, and larger prey, also to be hunted when the hay is so nearly spent that the fork sticks into the loose boards at the bottom of the hay.
But of all things which the farmer’s boy is wanted to do, and wants to do, there is nothing such clear fun as the breaking of a yoke of calves. First, the little yoke is to be got on to the pair somehow and a rope made fast to the “nigh” one’s head, that is, the calf on the left side, where the driver goes. Then comes bawling and hauling and pushing, and often too much beating, until the little cattle are made to understand that “Gee” means turn to the right, and “Haw” means turn to the left, and that “Whoa” means stop, and “Back” means, of them all, just what is said.
UPON THE HAY-MOW.
Every command is roared and shouted; for an idea seems to prevail that oxen, big and little, are deaf as adders, and can never be made to hear except at the top of the voice. In a still winter day, you may hear a grown-up ox-teamster roaring at his patient beasts two miles away; and a calf-breaker not half his size may be heard more than half as far. Then, on some frosty Saturday, when the little nubby-horned fellows have learned their lessons, they are hitched to a sled, and made to haul light loads, a little wood, or some of the boys,—the driver still holding to the rope, and flourishing his whip as grand as a drum-major.
Once in a while the little oxen of the future take matters into their own hoofs and make a strike for freedom, upsetting the sled and scattering its load, and dragging their driver headlong through the snow.