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Show 35 brought us up to par vitamin-wise. Besides all the milk, butter, eggs and cream (so thick you could cut it with a knife), we had chicken, cotton-tail rabbit, grouse, or Papa killed a beef. When it rained, those sudden mountain storms, then the sun came quickly out, we gathered mushrooms by the dishpanful and fried them in butter. We all learned to tell the good from the poison kind. Mama baked bread from the "start" of yeast she kept lively with potato water and sugar, made salt-rising bread, sour-dough, flap-jacks and "lumpy dick"(milk thickened with flour, seasoned with salt and pepper and butter). We made our own games and the rules to play them. We harnessed lizards to match-boxes, but they ran down holes and shed the gear. It was a little ludicrous one day to see a lizard running around with a red ribbon on his hind leg. They climbed upside down on the inside of the tent, shot out from underfoot. Chipmunks came to the house from the sagebrush nearby and got so familiar they ran over our feet for the crumbs we dropped. We hunted arrowheads and came home with tobacco sacks full of flint and pine gum. We built little dugways around the sides of washes and improvised vehicles to run on them. Eldon made a little furnace in the side of one and we made sage tea, with me fetching a can, then water from the spring, then cream from the house, then sugar. Even though we came out with ninety-five percent cream and sugar, the tea was still bitter. Eldon was always hunting something to make cigarettes, roll them like Papa and Uncle Will, and |