The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and
the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. 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 ...
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.
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