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By Root 1668 0

I did was to hunt game with one of the Sharps carbines from the box in the cabin. It was a breech loader—I had always used an old muzzle loader of Roland’s. I have to say that there was nothing in Miss Beecher about hunting game over the prairie. Nor had I ever shot anything myself except a jar or a large vegetable propped on the fence behind Roland Brereton’s cow pasture. And the Sharps carbine was rather different from my brother-in-law’s long hunting rifles. It was soon apparent to me, for example, that the rapid-loading feature of the rifle had no use in bird hunting—one shot had to kill the feathered creature, or it was gone. A slower or more numerous quarry was what the Sharps carbine was intended for. But I got a few turkeys. What I would do was scout about during the day, looking for the spots in the trees where the turkeys were roosting, then I would come back at night, if there was a little moonlight, and find the turkeys and shoot one. Prairie chickens, which were hard to shoot and easy to snare, formed the main meat in our diet. We soon learned from our neighbors to eat the legs and wings and dry the breasts for winter. I would say to my own credit that we ate meat almost every day, and to the credit of Miss Beecher that it was cooked in a palatable fashion most of the time. Of course there were corncakes and mush and corn pudding and corn on the cob and then more mush and corncakes and corn pudding and corn on the cob. But I also found walnuts in Mr. Jenkins’s woodlot, and hickory nuts and hazelnuts, along with some sour grapes and wild plums. A man on his way west paid for a night with us with two pumpkins. We dried the flesh and saved the seeds.

We chopped wood "just to be safe," though we were confident the winter ahead would be mild and sunny, with only enough snow for a picturesque effect.

We built ourselves a bed, strung with ropes. Once the roof was up and the sail came down, I used part of it to make a bed tick stuffed with prairie grass that I gathered. I stuffed pillows with the feathers of the birds I killed and plucked. I wouldn’t say that any of these efforts were easy for a woman of my limited skills, but throughout the end of September and into October, the one thing that we seemed to have a supply of was time. There were no errands, no engagements. Our tasks were right at hand, and we did them. Many times it seemed that just when I was perplexed about how to do something, a knock would come, and someone making his way over the prairie, or eager to talk or trade, would be standing there, and that person would know just what to do to spit a chicken or keep off the ants or preserve wild plums or paste newspapers over the walls. And of course, Miss Beecher’s book was always at my elbow. Thomas knew someone who knew a cousin of the Beechers. We marveled at the coincidence. I congratulated myself on my choice of a husband.

The only other male I had been alone with for any time at all in the course of my life was my cousin Frank, who was twelve years old and whom I had known since his babyhood. Once in a while, my father or one of my sisters’ husbands and I found ourselves in a room together for a few moments, but in general, in Quincy and, as far as I knew, everywhere else in the world, men and women avoided one another’s company except in groups. It was thus a novelty and a surprising pleasure to find myself alone with Thomas morning, noon, and night. I could not help covertly watching him, trying to discover his ways and attitudes. I drew a few conclusions. One was that he was not like most men I knew—he never put his feet up or tipped backwards in his chair. He neither wore his hat in the house nor threw it down when he came in, but always hung it neatly beside the door; nor did he smoke or chew tobacco and expectorate. He enjoyed reading. When I asked to look at his books, I saw volumes by Charles Dickens and William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope, as well as new books he’d brought from the east—a book by Mr. Thoreau, a book called Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There, Mrs. Stowe’s book