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Show 225 view was wintery and grey, and even though Chicago was not my city and a hard place to dream in--at first all t^e space and unaccustomed light of my new room had turned me on and I had dreaded night and day. Most of my night dreams vanished with the day, though I i ' i cnce dream of love fulfilled and remember it. In the grey Chicago daylignt teamed that as an anthropologist I discovered the basic rhythm of life. -:^r,d the way back to it and so saved us all. I dreamed of horses too, remembe'-~r: the winter I had a trap line in the swamp bordering the river in the lower tart of The Ranch and how I had gotten up in the dark of night at five in the -f-ning through December and January and put on hat and coat and mittens, drev. tn rubber boots, and went out and bridled Dixie's first son Billy and crawled on him bareback, boots dangling, gunny sack across his withers to put t*= -uskrats in. In that freezing morning air I would gallop down into the ranch with the day's first life stirring, tie Billy and then go tromping through the swamp. As a high school sophomore coming up to fifteen I was an old hand at r e paths of muskrats, the signs, where to place the trap, if possible s: t-at the caught rat would drown himself, for otherwise he often chewed off '••is leg and escaped. (Now and then I caught a three-legged one.) I knew how t: -ill them if they did not drown, the one sharp blow to the back of the heat, -erciful, and not damaging to the hide. So I had placed my traps and now I ^ = c to >-emember where each one was, and if one never produced, to set it in a better- spot, previously noted. Then, carrying three or four rats in my gunny sa:<, -y feet in socks and rubber boots numb from being so long in the icy wate-. would go back to Billy and his warm back and ride for home. There, te-'re I went inside to wash and eat, I hung each muskrat from a wire wound a--;.-d ^'ts tail and carefully skinned it out, cutting around the tail and arourt e;c- foot and pulling the skin off inside out like a sweater, cutting it of- -ry- around the face, not too big a hole |
