My Ántonia | Page 9

a thick-set
strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning
yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to
look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against
the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and
over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of
winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow,

to be running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out,
her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I
did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.
The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house,
and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral.
Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with
copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said,
was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy
stick or a corn-knife; she had killed a good many rattlers on her way
back and forth. A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was
bitten on the ankle and had been sick all summer.
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked
beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early
September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still
with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in
the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the
shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild
buffalo were galloping, galloping ...
Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the
big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering
vines--and I felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to
walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world,
which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that
the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if
one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one
would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our
heads making slow shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the
pitchfork we found standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while
I picked them up out of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag,
I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might so easily
do.
When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there

in the garden awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. `Aren't you afraid of
snakes?'
`A little,' I admitted, `but I'd like to stay, anyhow.'
`Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big
yellow and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to
keep the gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of
that hole in the bank over there. That's a badger hole. He's about as big
as a big 'possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a
chicken once in a while, but I won't let the men harm him. In a new
country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come
out and watch me when I'm at work.'
Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went
down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings
of the draw; when she came to the first bend, she waved at me and
disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and
content.
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.
There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full
of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the
berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as
any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.
The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the
sheltered draw-bottom the