Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis

Author:Harold L. Davis [Davis, Harold L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 1935-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The country was pleasanter to ride in than it had looked. There was no marshy ground except close to the streams, and though all the slopes were one solid thatch of stiff salal and deer-brush and balm-bush and mountain-laurel, the wild game and half-wild cattle had made trails through it everywhere. With a horse that had been trained to jump logs, a man could ride anywhere at a gallop without danger of being thrown except on a few of the steepest slides. Even being thrown was not so bad as in open country. There was no place to light except on the brush, and once you had learned not to come down face first, the shock was not much different from jumping on a haystack or a stiff set of bedsprings.

It was a bee country all through those mountains. Outside of the fireweed there were few flowers, but none were needed. All the leaves of the alders were sticky with a clear honey, very white and heavy, and in places where the bees hadn't ranged it was crystallized on the dead foliage in flakes as big as a twobit-piece. The balm-leaves carried it, too, and the bees were still out working in them. One cabin that Luce and Clay looked into had been preempted by an old swarm to store honey in. All the space between the inner and outer walls and between roof and ceiling was one solid comb, so old in places that it was turned black, and the workers were carry- ing their new stock down through a knothole in the floor. None of their honey had ever been disturbed, which proved that there were no bears in the country. Not enough small game for them to thrive on, probably, and no berries except the worthless salal. The only useful fruit in sight was wild crabapples. Thickets of them grew up every canyon, loaded with sour little seedlings not much bigger than garden peas. They cooked well if one had the patience to gather them, and when Luce found a cabin close to a grove of them she refused to look farther, though there was the carcass of a dead deer twenty feet from the front door, half-eaten by timber-wolves.

"We can burn it," she said. "The roof sheds water, and there's benches and a table and a fireplace and no rats. When you've been wintering on what you can find as long as I have you'll learn not to expect much more than that. Get some wood, and we'll boil some water to scrub things up with."

Her housekeeping fever was surprising. Clay had supposed women interested themselves in such matters mostly because they were too timid or too puny to do anything else. But she could herd, harness, and skin a team and ride as well as he could, and here she was talking about scrubbing and cooking and fruit-canning as whole-heartedly as if she had never ventured foot outside the scullery. She was downright exultant about discovering a case of empty fruit-jars on an overhead shelf.

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