Gary Paulsen by Alida's Song

Author:Alida's Song [Song, Alida's]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-51216-1
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 1999-04-09T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

They went well into night and all of it was new to the boy. Though he loved his grandmother—and he frequently thought of it that way, that of all the adult people in his life he loved only his grandmother—he came from a different world. He was from a city—or at least a large town—where they had electricity and radio and television (though it was new then and not everybody had it and there were only two channels, which often had snowy pictures, and all he had ever seen was blurred) and traffic and other people.

Here it was quiet and with no danger other than the geese—which came at the boy as he walked from the barn to the house with empty buckets and by god, he thought, that gander wouldn't try it again, having taken a bucket across the side of the head so hard it staggered away with one wing down and flapping—and no electricity and no radio. Not even lights. It was all different, all new to him.

In the kitchen there was the Coleman lantern hanging from the ceiling, which hissed and gave off a flat white light, but this evening Olaf did not fire up the lantern. Instead he used oil lamps. He lit two of them in the kitchen and adjusted the wicks to give off a soft yellow light and the boy's grandmother at last relented and stopped working, although she did not leave the kitchen but sat in the corner by the oil lamp and crocheted while she watched the men cook.

They filled a large pan with hot water from the reservoir on the cookstove, which stood by the kitchen sink and hand pump, and as they dirtied a pan or dish they would throw it to the boy at the sink and he would wash it and dry it and hand it back and they would dirty it again.

Olaf brought out casings packed in salt from a jar under the sink. They looked like pale dead snakes and the boy could not see what they would be used for until Olaf rinsed them in fresh cold water to take the salt off and cut them in four-foot pieces.

“Hog guts,” Olaf said to the boy. “They make the best casings.”

Not for me they don't, the boy thought. But he remained quiet and watched Olaf and Gunnar peel potatoes and process them in a hand grinder, then mix them with raw ground-up venison and a little salt.

Gunnar put a large pot of water on the stove and added pitch pine to the fire under the burners. This had the same effect as pouring gas on a fire and the stove became nearly red hot. It was summer and though the evening was cooler than the day it wasn't that cool and soon the kitchen was sweltering. Olaf and Gunnar both took off their shirts and the boy was surprised to see they were wearing long underwear. They kept their bib overalls on and

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