My antonia how long

What happens in my Antonia? My Antonia Summary. In the late s, recently orphaned Jim Burden leaves his home in Virginia to live with his grandparents in rural Nebraska. He quickly settles into his new life with Jake Marpole and Otto Fuchs, the farm hands, and his loving grandparents. Nouhoum Karobalsk Professional.

What is the purpose of my Antonia? As a result, the novel provides modern readers a glimpse into the lives of the early white settlers of the American West. Eugena Ligero Professional. Why is Antonia so important to Jim?

In the novel, Antonia is important to Jim because she is the personification of all the things that he holds dear. In his mind, she is a connection to his new home in Nebraska and his early teen years; she could even be considered his first love interest. Ivania Hehndel Explainer. How many children does Antonia have? Dunja Calvert Explainer. How many pages is Antonia? Pelegrin Selby Explainer. Where is Antonia Shimerda from? She came from Bohemia to America with her family on November 5, It was Anna's father who wanted to move their family to this new country so that they would have a better life.

Just like the Shimerdas , the Sadilek was a family of six, with two boys and two girls. Abdulaziz Simonek Pundit. What does Antonia symbolize? Cather's poetic and moving depiction of it is perhaps the most famous and highly praised aspect of the novel. The landscape symbolizes the larger idea of a human environment, a setting in which a person lives and moves.

How many chapters is My Antonia? Cather divided this book into five different sections. The first section has 19 chapters , the second one has 15, the third has four, the fourth has four, and the fifth has three. While he waits alone in his house, he suspects that Mr. Shimerda's spirit is hanging around. Jim watches Otto build the coffin for Mr.

He attends the funeral. Jim starts going to school in town. Jim and his grandparents move into town, and Jim starts growing up. He becomes more of a guy and less of a twelve-year-old kid. When the hired girls come to town, Jim ends up hanging out with them. Jim takes part in the town dances given by the visiting Italians. Jim muses on the town's social ladder. During his senior year of high school, Jim starts hanging around at saloons and fringe dances — until his grandmother makes him promise not to.

She also tells him to stay away from Lena. Jim has sexy dreams about Lena. Jim graduates from high school and gives a speech at the ceremony that impresses the country girls. He spends the summer preparing for college.

He is both embarrassed and angry about the episode. Jim goes to college and studies under Gaston Cleric. He was very hospitable and jolly. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very doleful, and he sang words to some of them. Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs.

Shimerda and gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. We had to walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little horse-pond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green.

Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.

That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside.

Then the dog dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and petted by his master. She knew 43 a dog who had a star on his collar for every badger he had killed. The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all dead — all but one.

While we were lying there against the warm bank, a little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us — a thin, rusty little chirp.

She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that in her village at home there was an old beggar woman who went about selling herbs and roots she had dug up in the forest.

If you took her in and gave her a warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a cracked voice, like this. Old Hata, she was 44 called, and the children loved to see her coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her. What were we to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false pretenses?

I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek, and then turn and run home.

We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the magical light of the late afternoon. All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.

It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day. And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass. We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging his feet along as if he had no purpose.

We broke into a run to overtake him. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and peered about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it against her cheek. She was the only one of his family who could rouse the old man from the torpor in which he seemed to live. She turned to me. Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and lifted it carefully away, talking to him rapidly.

I heard the name of old Hata. He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood looking down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he listened as if it were a beautiful sound. When he saw me examining it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well. Very fine, from Bohemie.

It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not got here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you. Even the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected substantial presents in return. As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass.

She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.

This change came about from an adventure we had together. I offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled — hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling, burry stalks.

We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get warm by 49 his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas melons, heaped in the storeroom for winter. We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections; whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers. We might get some puppies, or owl eggs, or snake-skins.

The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the surrounding country, but gray and velvety.

The holes were several yards apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if the town had been laid out in streets and avenues.

One always felt that an orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I picketed Dude down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a hole that would be easy to dig.

The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried under ground. Here and there, in the town, we came on larger gravel patches, several yards away from any hole. If the dogs had scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried it so far?

It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure. We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which much travel went. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled round, and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was not merely a big snake, I thought — he was a circus monstrosity.

His abominable 51 muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I saw his coils tighten — now he would spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself.

I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick. You sure? Why you not run when I say? You might have told me there was a snake behind me! I suppose I looked as sick as I felt. Now we take that snake home and show everybody. Cautiously we went back to the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly in the light.

A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green liquid oozed from his crushed head. I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long. He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to taper, so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four.

As I turned him over I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil. Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all warm-blooded life. I followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all. Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the rear.

The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw toward the house. He was sitting on the edge of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. He did not say anything for a minute, but scratched his head and turned the snake over with his boot. How come you to have a weepon? He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight hard? I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was crazy. That was just as well. Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter was fortunate in circumstance.

My big rattler was old, and had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. A snake of his size, in fighting trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the neighbors came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever 56 killed in those parts. She liked me better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again.

I had killed a big snake — I was now a big fellow. Peter told his troubles to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which fell due on the first of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it, and to give a mortgage on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow.

His creditor was Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name throughout the county, of whom I shall have more to say later. Peter could give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter.

He only knew that he had first borrowed two hundred dollars, then another hundred, then fifty — that each time a bonus was added to the principal, and the debt grew faster than any crop he planted.

Now everything was plastered with mortgages. Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood from the lungs that his fellow- workmen 58 thought he would die on the spot. They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay, very ill indeed.

Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away. The Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to put them out of mind. Just as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said, and wanted to talk to Mr.

Shimerda and his daughter; he had come to fetch them. My plan must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about humoring the desires of other people. She asked Peter to wait a moment, and when she came back from the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches and doughnuts for us. After the sun sank, a cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie.

If this turn in the weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We burrowed down in the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would never get well.

We lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars grew magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his land, too, some such belief.

The little house on the hillside was so much the color of the night that we could not see it as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows guided us — the light from the kitchen stove, for there was no lamp burning.

We entered softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I sat down on 60 the bench by the wall and leaned our arms on the table in front of us. The firelight flickered on the hewn logs that supported the thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound when he breathed, and he kept moaning. We waited. The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then swept on again, singing through the big spaces.

Each gust, as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on.

Presently, in one of those sobbing intervals between the blasts, the coyotes tuned up with their whining howl; one, two, three, then all together — to tell us that winter was coming. This sound brought an answer from the bed, — a long complaining cry, — as if Pavel were having bad dreams or were waking to some old misery. Peter listened, but did not stir. He was sitting on the floor by the kitchen stove. The coyotes broke out again; yap, yap, yap — then the high whine.

Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow. I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed. His shirt was hanging open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell horribly.

He began to cough. Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up the tea-kettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey. The sharp smell of spirits went through the room. Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle and slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had outwitted some one. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous, unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised him for being so simple and docile.

Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a whisper. She leaned forward and strained her ears to hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around his bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them. He seemed to be cursing people who had wronged him. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders, but could hardly hold him in bed. At last he was shut off by a coughing fit which fairly choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and held it to his mouth.

Quickly it was covered with bright red spots — I thought I had never seen any blood so bright. When he lay down and turned his face to the wall, all the rage had gone out of him. He lay patiently fighting for breath, like a child with croup. From our bench we could see what a hollow case his body was. His spine and shoulder-blades stood out like the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields. That sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it. Gradually, relief came to all of us.

Whatever it was, the worst was over. Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without a word Peter got up and lit his lantern. He was going out to get his team to drive us home. Shimerda went with him. We sat and watched the long bowed back under the blue sheet, scarcely daring to breathe. What she did not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing else for days afterward.

When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they were asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another village. After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by the parents of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a supper and continued far into the night. There was much dancing and drinking.

At midnight the parents of the bride said good-bye to her and blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to his sledge and tucked her under the blan kets. Pavel drove. All the drivers were more or less the worse for merry-making, and the groom was absorbed in his bride.

The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together. There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove came up over the hill behind the wedding party.

The wolves ran like streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were hundreds of them. Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control, — he was probably very drunk, — the horses left the road, the sledge was caught in a clump of trees, and overturned.

The occupants rolled out over the snow, and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed 65 their horses. The groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest — all the others carried from six to a dozen people. Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost.

Pavel sat still and watched his horses. It was only necessary to be calm and to guide them carefully. At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked back. Enough for all of us.

In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a whirling black group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed. He sprang up as if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back. It was even then too late. The black ground-shadows were already crowding over the heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the fields, his harness hanging to him, wolves at his heels.

They were within a few miles of their village now. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge; Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in the harness, and overturned the sledge.

When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone upon the familiar road. Pavel gave Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He called to the groom that they 67 must lighten — and pointed to the bride. The young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away. In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him.

He said he never remembered exactly how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it before — the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early prayers. Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever since.

They were run out of their village. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America. Pavel 68 died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and left the country — went to be cook in a railway construction camp where gangs of Russians were employed.

During the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted his eyes. He seemed not to care about anything. Every one said Peter kissed the cow before she was led away by her new owner. I did not see him do it, but this I know: after all his furniture and his cook-stove and pots and pans had been hauled off by the purchasers, when his house was stripped and bare, he sat down on the floor with his clasp-knife and ate all the melons that he had put away for winter.

When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping beard, surrounded by heaps of melon rinds. The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect 69 upon old Mr. When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log house and sit there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows penned him in his cave. At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.

I remember how the world looked from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning: the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and disappearing in the red grass. Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was, faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride.

Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the center; but grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there. Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like strokes of Chinese white on canvas.

The old figure stirred me as it had never 71 done before and seemed a good omen for the winter. As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the old country and was very handy with tools.

It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the box, and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. They had heard about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come. They tumbled in beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that happened to be broken.

The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white stretches of prairie was almost blinding. The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft between snow-drifts — very blue when one looked down into it. The tree-tops that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind had the burning taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if some one had opened a hartshorn bottle.

The cold stung, and at the same time delighted one. The cornfields got back a little of their color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual impression of the stinging lash in the wind. The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept shivering beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. The great fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like wild things.

They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go home again. She got so cold that we made her hide her head under the buffalo robe. It was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused to go in with them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache terribly if I went near a fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my comforter, and I had to drive home directly against 74 the wind.

The next day I came down with an attack of quinsy, which kept me in the house for nearly two weeks. The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days — like a tight little boat in a winter sea.

The men were out in the fields all day, husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long caps pulled down over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think they were like Arctic explorers.

I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She 75 baked either pies or cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she made my favorite pudding, striped with currants and boiled in a bag.

Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centered around warmth and food and the return of the men at nightfall.

I used to wonder, when they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously: feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs. When supper was over, it took them a long while to get the cold out of their bones. I can see the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept faith with!

Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bar-tender, a miner; had wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.

Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his name with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him behave like a crazy man — tore him all to pieces and actually made him ill.

But he was so soft-hearted that any one could impose upon him. They were both of them jovial about the cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and to meet emergencies.

It was a matter of pride with them not to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort of 77 men who never get on, somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.

On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes howling down by the corrals, and their hungry, wintry cry used to remind the boys of wonderful animal stories; about gray wolves and bears in the Rockies, wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains.

Sometimes Fuchs could be persuaded to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known. I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother, who was working her bread on the bread-board, laugh until she wiped her eyes with her bare arm, her hands being floury. It was like this:— When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of his relatives to look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat, to join her husband in Chicago.

The woman started off with two children, but it was clear that her family might grow larger on the journey. In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but three!

This 78 event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety, since he was traveling with her. The steerage stewardess was indignant with him, the doctor regarded him with suspicion. The first-cabin passengers, who made up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and often inquired of him about his charge. On the train it was very difficult to get milk for the babies and to keep their bottles clean. The mother did her best, but no woman, out of her natural resources, could feed three babies.

The husband, in Chicago, was working in a furniture factory for modest wages, and when he met his family at the station he was rather crushed by the size of it. He, too, seemed to consider Fuchs in some fashion to blame. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to have a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr. Shimerda out hunting. They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers.

I guess rabbits must be getting scarce in this locality. He asked me if they was good to eat. Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them.

I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat family. When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake packing a hamper basket in the kitchen. After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. She heard our wagon, looked back over her shoulder, and catching up her pail of water, started at a run for the hole in the bank.

Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy path toward the door sunk in the draw-side.

Blue puffs of smoke came from the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the wind whisked them roughly away. The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over as if he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but, glancing up at her mother, hid again. The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on a gunnysack stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered he threw a grainsack over the crack at the bottom of the door.

The air in the cave was stifling, and it was very dark, too.