Grandmother called my
attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a
leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I
must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had
killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who
lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all
summer.
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than
anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing
morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort
of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,
galloping {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the big
yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines--and I
felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk
straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which
could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world
ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a
little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off
into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow
shadows on the grass.
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