Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the
highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was
all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing
across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and
doubling like a rabbit before the hounds. On the level land the tracks had
almost disappeared--were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would
not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was
easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed
them so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like
gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used
to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on
the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn
rosy in the slanting sunlight.
This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got
off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering
children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to
hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by
that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near
that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of
coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's
experience is.
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