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Show 34 even scraped the intestines to make casings for sausages, but Mama considered it too messy. She formed her sausage into patties. We were a self-contained little entity at Three Creek with our anthill activity in the midst of the three-hundred and forty acre section which Papa and his brothers had fenced. There were two other owners in the valley, the 8-acre plot for the Pahvant Ranger Station with its bright-green little house, almost always vacant, and the Hawley ranch adjoining ours to the south. Their house, likewise was almost always vacant and was about two miles from ours. We had our own back-drop of purple hills, seven peaks around us, hoary old Grandpa's Peak starting at our northwest fence corner. We also had our own grand opera, furnished nightly by the coyotes. At first we lived in a tent with a box-bottom of lumber, with an added tent for the kitchen, but Papa and Uncle Will went down Pole Canyon and cut tough logs of cottonwood, peeled them to show the white under bark, and notched them to put up a log cabin. It was large, fifteen by eighteen, and accomodated two bunk beds: simple boxes nailed to the walls, supported by one leg, and filled with the soft wild timothy. The logs were chinked with clayey mud from the brook. We had our own ice water served directly from the little spring which bubbled up from between boulders a few feet from the house. We loved and were proud of our sweet, cold water. Grandma Rawlinson, when she came to visit us, opined our lack of water-cress, so when we went picnicing over the hogs-back into Grass Valley she found some and came home with her apron full of it to transplant. This, with the sage-brush tea she forced down us to "cleanse" our blood, |