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Show 226 there or the skin might split when I stretched it to cure, me grateful when there was still body heat in the animal because my bloody hands were freezing. The sun would not be risen yet and the hour before the dawn was usually the coldest. Only once did I fall into a hole over my boots, the icy water pouring down in, me pulling the boots off and pouring it back out, so cold when I got back to Billy that I didn't want to ride and I built a fire and standing near it barefoot and pantless tried at 0 degrees to dry my socks and pants. It didn't work and I rode home wet, changed and rushed back out to skin out my catch before they froze solid. At first I stretched each hide on boards I had carved to shape, later on metal stretchers bought with my profits. Muskrat hides brought some years only a dollar a prime pelt but sometimes two or even two-fifty or three, to make coats, I suppose, for elegant ladies in New York and Chicago. Then I would wash the blood off my hands, milk the cows and feed the stock, then go inside to wash the manure off my hands and to eat breakfast. I caught the school bus around eight, the sun rising and the day just beginning. I remembered too a spring colt, one of Maud's spirited bay foals, a beautiful, perfect thing. Playful ./ith me but never gentle, never a pet, one fresh summer morning while I was walking behind a team down into the fields, the colt following and frisking around us, he came past me and gave me both hind hooves in the chest. He kicked and the two hooves thudded on my chest but not with enough force to hurt me, like a love tap. Once I was riding bareback with my younger brother Davy, he in front guiding, and we were racing Dixie down a path in the river bottom and ahead of us I saw a limb overhanging the trail just high enough for Dixie but not us to duck under. Davy and I were laughing, he didn't see it, when he saw it he couldn't pull back hard enough on the reins, and when I reached around him |
