My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

I really cannot tell how he contrived to free himself, or why he is not in that tree to this day. The squirrel is.

In a region where the cornfields and wheat-fields were often fifty and sixty acres in extent there was a plenty of quail, but I remember again but one victim to my gun. We set figure-four traps to catch them; but they were shrewder arithmeticians than we, and solved these problems without harm to themselves. After they began to mate, and the air was full of their soft, amorous whistling, we searched to find their nests, and had better luck, though we were forbidden to rob the nests when we found them; and in June, when the pretty little mother strutted across the lanes at the head of her tiny brood, we had to content ourselves with the near spectacle of her cunning counterfeit of disability at sight of us, fluttering and tumbling in the dust till her chicks could hide themselves. We had read of that trick, and were not deceived; but we were charmed just the same.

It is a trick that all birds know, and I had it played upon me by the mother snipe and mother wild-duck that haunted our dam, as well as by the quail. With the snipe, once, I had a fancy to see how far the mother would carry the ruse, and so ran after her; but in doing this I trod on one of her young—a soft, gray mite, not distinguishable from the gray pebbles where it ran. I took it tenderly up in my hand, and it is a pang to me yet to think how it gasped once and died. A boy is a strange mixture—as the man who comes after him is. I should not have minded knocking over that whole brood of snipes with my gun, if I could; but this poor little death was somehow very personal in its appeal.

I had no such regrets in respect to the young wild-ducks, which, indeed, I had no such grievous accident with. I left their mother to flounder and flutter away as she would; and took to the swamp where her young sought refuge from me. There I spent half a day wading about in waters that were often up to my waist, and full of ugly possibilities of mud-turtles and water-snakes, trying to put my hand on one of the ducklings. They rose everywhere else, and dived again after a breath of air; but at last one of them came up in my very grasp. It did not struggle, but how its wild heart bounded against my hand! I carried it home to show it and boast of my capture, and then I took it back to its native swamp. It dived instantly, and I hope it found its bereaved family somewhere under the water.

VI

The winter, which was so sore a trial for my mother in the log-cabin, and was not, perhaps, such a poetic rapture for my father as he had hoped, was a long delight to their children.

The centre of our life in the cabin was, of course, the fireplace, whose hugeness and whose mighty fires remained a wonder with us. There was a crane in the chimney and dangling pot-hooks, and until the cooking-stove could be set up in an adjoining shed the cooking had to be done on the hearth, and the bread baked in a Dutch-oven in the hot ashes. We had always heard of this operation, which was a necessity of early days; and nothing else, perhaps, realized them so vividly for us as the loaf laid in the iron-lidded skillet, which was then covered with ashes and heaped with coals.

I am not certain that the bread tasted any better for the romantic picturesqueness of its experience, or that the cornmeal, mixed warm from the mill and baked on an oak plank set up before the fire, had merits beyond the hoe-cake of art; but I think there can be no doubt that new corn grated to meal when just out of the milk, and then moulded and put in like manner to brown in the glow of such embers, would still have the sweetness that was incomparable then. When the maple sap started in February, we tried the scheme we had cherished all winter of making with it tea which should be in a manner self-sugared. But the scheme was a failure—we spoiled the sap without sweetening the tea.

We sat up late before the big fire at night, our faces burning in the glow, and our backs and feet freezing in the draft that swept in from the imperfectly closing door, and then we boys climbed to our bed in the loft. We reached it by a ladder, which we should have been glad to pull up after us as a protection against Indians in the pioneer fashion; but, with the advancement of modern luxury, the ladder had been nailed to the floor.

Once aloft, however, we were in a domain sacred to the past. The rude floor rattled and wavered loosely under our tread, and the window in the gable stood open or shut at its own will. There were cracks in the shingles, through which we could see the stars, when there were stars, and which, when the first snow came, let the flakes sift in upon the floor. I should not like to step out of bed into a snow-wreath in the morning now; but then I was glad to do it, and so far from thinking that or anything in our life a hardship, I counted it all joy.