Then, with hand trembling so it seemed the glass would drop, he exclaimed, “Man! Oh, man! It’s a silver fox and a beauty! If only he gets him! If he does!”
They were hunters, these boys. “Strange hunters!” some might say. “No guns! No traps!” This valley was alive with rich, fur-bearing animals. With guns and traps one might reap a winter’s harvest. Without guns or traps how was it to be done! This had been the question uppermost in their minds some weeks before. In the end they had found the answer, or thought they had. And a strange answer it was.
They had arrived, this little family of four homesteaders, along with hundreds of others in the Matanuska Valley, too late in the spring to clear land and raise a crop. They had been obliged to content themselves with a large garden and an acre of potatoes.
Such potatoes as those had been! “We’ll sell two hundred bushels!” Lawrence had exulted. “That will go a long way toward buying a small tractor. Then just watch our smoke!”
“Oh, no you won’t!” Jack Morgan, an old-time settler in the valley, had laughed.
“What? Why not?” the boy demanded.
“Who’ll you sell ’em to?” the old-timer asked in a kindly voice.
“Why, we—we’ll ship ’em out.”
“You can’t, son,” Jack’s voice rumbled. “That’s the trouble. At present there’s no market for farm products here. Never has been. That’ll be worked out in time, now the government is interested. But just now we have to eat our own potatoes.”
“But how do you get any money?” Lawrence had demanded.