Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

Author:Jonathan Raban
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780517282311
Publisher: Random House Value Pub
Published: 1996-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Wollastons were bent on self-sufficiency, on making the homestead pay. Many, if not most, of their neighbors were subsidizing their farms by taking outside jobs. They taught school, or left their claims in the care of their wives while they worked on the railroad or hauled logs back in Minnesota. The Wollastons, with their experience of running a country store and farming in South Dakota, were among the best-equipped of all the homesteaders to turn a clear profit on their half-section of land. Unlike the dozens of gimcrack craft that now dotted the nearby prairie, the Wollaston ship was unusually well found.

Diversification was the key to making it pay. Grain and beef cattle would produce the long-term income, but the daily cash flow had to come out of the kitchen garden, the henhouse, the milch cows. (One of the big projects undertaken at the research farm of James J. Hill, the railroad magnate and homestead promoter, was the development of a new breed of “general-purpose cow,” good for milk during her lifetime and for meat after her execution. But this happy animal never really got off Hill’s drawing board.)

So Dora Wollaston sold eggs and vegetables to Clark’s store in Mildred. She spent hours every week making butter: patiently beating the churned cream with a paddle until the pale globules of milk fat and curd at last combined into a single primrose-colored slab. Dora’s butter had a fine reputation in the neighborhood: the store sold it under the Wollaston name, and Dora authenticated each 1-pound package with her signature.

Closely following the instructions in Holmes’s Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, Ned built eight hives, which he set out in the slight declivity in the low buffs to the south, across the swale from the farmhouse. The site was as near as he could find, in this treeless country, to the “speckled glade” recommended by Holmes in his book. It was at least sheltered from the worst of the north and west winds. The bees came by mail order from Sears, Roebuck.

As the bees multiplied in the hives through the spring, Ned thought of them, fondly, as his eager labor force, foraging through the surrounding country on his behalf, supping on the yuccas and the butte candles, working the new fields of nectar-rich alfalfa. He enjoyed visiting the hives most evenings, an hour or so before sunset. He would drape a swath of butter muslin over the top of his Stetson, and Dora would tack it down round his jacket at chest height. Veiled and gloved, he once frightened the superstitious Johnnie Conlon half out of his wits. For days Conlon refused to be persuaded that he hadn’t seen a banshee in the hills.

It gave Ned deep pleasure to watch the mail-shocked Sears, Roebuck immigrants settle and grow into eight big and prosperous bee communities. They were tough little survivors, bred from European stock, now on the loose in America (which has no native honeybees). They flew low through the sagebrush, dodging the marauding kingbirds.

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