Bud came to the little house and, seeing a white envelope tied with a red ribbon to the door latch, stood dumfounded. "Merry Christmas" was written across the envelope and the card inside it read:
Merry Christmas to our boy, Bud-Allan. Gram and Gramps
Bud opened the door and gasped. Last night after he had gone to bed somebody must have strewn fresh straw on the floor of the little house. There was a drinking fountain, a mash hopper, a grain feeder and a container for oyster shell. A regal young cockerel strutted around six pure-white pullets.
Bud entered the little house and pulled the door shut behind him, latching it so no one could intrude on this wonderful moment. His heart seemed to be beating in his throat and tears had sprung to his eyes. Now for the first time in his life he knew what Christmas could mean.
He caught up the cockerel and, as he stroked it, looked around at the pullets and thought of the flock they would become.
Bud was sure he had always wanted White Wyandottes like these.
chapter 8
Gramps took a turn for the better soon after the Christmas guests departed, but his improvement was not an unmitigated blessing. The better he felt, the more his enforced confinement chafed. Sores that were opened because he had to stop hunting Old Yellowfoot after only one day were rubbed raw because he could not go into the winter woods at all. There was little he could have done there if he had gone, but he still fretted to go.
He read and reread Africa's Dangerous Game, the book Bud had given him for Christmas, and criticized each chapter as he read it. The book was the abridged journal of an obscure professional hunter, and Gramps had no sympathy at all for the hardships the author had suffered or the perils he had faced. After all, Gramps said, he didn't have to go looking for rogue elephants, man-killing lions or short-tempered buffalo. And since he had gone after them of his own free will, he should have known about the perils he would have to face before he had ever started out. Of course he could expect trouble—what hunter couldn't?—but the book would have been far more interesting if he had given more space to hunting and less to the unendurable agonies that had beset him. In fact, Gramps thought the long chapter in which the hunter crossed the desert might better have been condensed into a single sentence reading, "Don't cross this desert unless you carry plenty of water."
Although the stature of the hero of Africa's Dangerous Game dwindled with each perusal, reading was a way to help ease the long hours when Gramps could do little. And so Bud brought home books from the school library. Usually he chose books with outdoor themes, and instead of taking them to his room, he purposely left them on the kitchen table where Gramps would see them. Gramps was always volubly critical and often openly scornful of the books Bud brought home for him, but he read them all.