The Egg and I

by Betty Macdonald

  A month after the potatoes, we dug the carrots, beets, rutabagas, mangels, celery root and parsnips. In between the potatoes and these root vegetables came the apples, pears, squashes, pumpkins and green tomatoes. We left the cabbage, Swiss chard, broccoli and kale in the garden along with the winter spinach, then several inches high, and a fall planting of early peas, but not the celery. We tried it one year and it was pithy and bitter, so along in October we lifted out the celery, being careful to take along lots of damp earth, and buried it in layers in a special dark, damp corner. It kept beautifully.

  In September we bought a cider press and I gathered buckets and buckets of windfall apples and set them outside the feed room, where Bob squashed them into cider for vinegar and cider to drink. I made one five-gallon crock of cherry leaf sweet pickles and one five-gallon crock of garlic dill pickles. I found a wild plum tree down at the edge of the big burn loaded with hard green plums which Mrs. Hicks said made wonderful olives. I intended to experiment with perhaps a pint or two but Bob got wind of it and came staggering in with a washtub of plums. They were the size of jumbo green olives and the consistency of bullets. I made a five-gallon crock full and gave the rest to Mrs. Hicks. Five gallons of this, fifty quarts of that—two hundred jars of everything. “At this rate we will have to hire a full-time worker just to unscrew jar lids,” I muttered to myself.

  But then one clear warm day I walked down into the valley and picked a market basket of field mushrooms and experimented, of my own volition, with canning them. My canning book told me how to can mushrooms but said, “Never can the wild or field mushrooms. Only an expert can tell the difference between a deadly poisonous variety and the common field mushroom.” They didn’t scare me though. “What is a little mushroom poisoning compared to the dangers of botulism?” I said. “And if we are going to allow ourselves to be scared by a few mushrooms, who is going to eat those thousands and thousands of jars of potential death disguised as string beans, peas, asparagus, beets, carrots, spinach and meat.” Ha! I scoffed as I compared a small button mushroom with the picture of the Destroying Angel toadstool which I had propped up beside the pressure cooker. Maybe it was and maybe it was not so I tossed it into the pot.

  It was also my idea to gather a water bucket of hazel nuts and a bushel of Oregon grapes. The hazel nuts were wild filberts which grew plentifully along the edge of the roads—the Oregon grapes made a wonderful jelly to serve with game.

  Then it was time for the butchering, Earlier in the fall I had begged Bob to take over the feeding of the pigs because I was becoming too fond of Gertrude and Elmer and did not wish to go through the winter bursting into tears every time I fried the breakfast ham or bacon. Bob thought this was pretty silly of me at first, then he took to telling me of little incidents where the pigs showed great intelligence or affection and the next I knew, I was again feeding the pigs. The day of the butchering I took the baby and walked down to Mrs. Kettle’s. That they too had been butchering I could tell from a heap of entrails in the driveway opposite the kitchen door. The entrails hadn’t really begun to smell too bad—just very entrailly—but the flies were like a black undulating cloth thrown over the gray shiny pile, and the back porch was heaped with cut meat which even my cursory glance revealed to be dotted with little clumps of fly eggs. It was not appetizing but didn’t bother the Kettles as I could tell from the smell of roast pork coming from the kitchen. Mrs. Kettle had just made a fresh pot of coffee and baked a coffee cake and in spite of the entrails, the butchering and the fly eggs I was soon sitting at the kitchen table, eating and drinking with good appetite. The entrails were in my direct line of vision as I sat at the table but still I had another piece of the crusty coffee cake and another cup of coffee while Mrs. Kettle discussed the relentless piling up of the manure around the barn and the ever-present money shortage. “A year ago my stomach would have rebelled actively at first sight of the entrails,” I reflected dreamily. I had come a long way in a year—but was I climbing upward toward some sort of well balanced maturity or sliding downhill into a slothful indifference? I asked Bob about it at dinner but he merely looked at me quizzically and went to bed without answering.

  The next day we received a long and heartening letter from Bob’s sister and husband urging us to buy a place nearer Seattle—what about one of the islands in the Sound, they asked. Bob read the letter and with no comment tossed it back to me. This was Bob’s ranch and his work and he was happy in it and he resented any outside interference. I said nothing to Bob but after dinner I wrote a long account of the Indian picnic, moonshiners and the Kettles to both my family and Bob’s. Just the actual setting down of the happenings made them lose their portent to me but I hoped they would arouse a little consternation on the other side.

  By noon the next day the hams and bacons were soaking in brine; Bob was cutting applewood for the smokehouse; I was trying out lard and grinding up meat for sausage and thinking, “It’s all in the mind, anyway, and by adopting the right attitude even I can be cold-blooded and think ‘This is just pork—it bears no resemblance to my pigs.’” Then Bob came in bearing Gertrude’s and Elmer’s heads and asked me to cook them and make head cheese. It was just as if he had brought in Sport’s and the puppy’s heads and asked me to cook them. I gave an agonized howl and pushed him out of the kitchen and he disgustedly boiled the heads himself in a kettle outside.

  I sent a pork roast to Mrs. Kettle and one to Birdie Hicks but there was still more pork than I had ever seen, leering at me from the pantry. Mrs. Hicks volunteered to help me make salt pork for beans and said that everything else which we were not able to eat immediately should be put in the sausage. I thought we should have butchered the pigs one at a time but Bob wanted to get the smoking done all at once.

  Under Birdie’s supervision, I made the well-seasoned sausage into little cakes and packed them in a great stone crock—first a layer of lard, then a layer of cakes, then a layer of lard. She said that they would keep indefinitely that way; I didn’t understand why—still don’t—but she was right.

  The mountains were getting ready for winter, too. They were very sly about it and tried to look summery and casual but I could tell by their contours that they had slipped on an extra layer of snow—that the misty scarf blowing about that one’s head would soon be lying whitely around her neck. With the bright fall weather, the moonlight and the activity on the ranch, I had not yet cringed before their overbearing hauteur but it was there—I could feel it but I didn’t care yet.

  21

  Game or Who Is?

  I WAS ALL RIGHT at flushing game, Bob decided, but at retrieving I was a washout. This was due to my nearsightedness and not to any lack of cooperation on my part, I might add. So Bob bought a dog and I uncovered another weak spot in my character.

  “This dog,” Bob dramatically informed me, as he gingerly untied a large, curly haired, mahogany-colored dog which he had roped in the back of the truck, “is a thoroughbred, Chesapeake retriever, has a pedigree, is a wonderful hunting dog and is very, very vicious.” Then, with what I considered an overdose of caution he secured the dog to the feed room door with a hawser large enough to anchor a man-o’-war. During all of this the vicious dog regarded us stonily with pale green eyes and didn’t twitch a muscle.

  Bob added, as he made a large safe detour around Dog to get his feed pails, “He has bitten almost everyone in Town, but I understand dogs and if I take all the care of him, keep him tied up and just use him for hunting, I think it will be safe enough.” The dog trainer went importantly off to the chicken house and Dog and I looked at each other. He had on a handsome studded collar with a name tag but from a safe distance I couldn’t make out the name and when I received only the cold pale green stare for my friendly overtures of “Here Boy” and “Old Fellah,” I started on my evening chores, leaving Dog to brood.

  During dinner that night Bob told me how, when I was in the hospital, he and the doctor had been discussing hunting and the doctor had told him about
Dog. The doctor didn’t finally make up his mind to part with the dog until it had bitten two postmen and three delivery boys. Bob talked about building a dogyard with eight-foot wire, the steady nerves it takes to train dogs, the heinous crime of treating dogs like pampered humans—here, I surreptitiously placed my napkin over the puppy who was lounging in my lap—and other firm manly things to do with discipline and hunting, and then he left for the Hickses to see about borrowing the team for disking.

  Later, remembering I had not fed my goslings and forgetting about Dog, I heedlessly rushed into the feed room and was scooping up chick feed when I felt a nudge at the back of my knees. I turned and there was Dog the vicious, Dog the terrible, offering me his large feathery paw. We solemnly shook hands and I learned from his nameplate that his name was Sport and from him that he never wagged his tail, was dignified and really very shy. Throwing caution to the winds I untied the rope and took him with me to feed the ducks. There I decided to test out the hunting theory to see if it was as ridiculous as the danger theory. I threw Sport a stick to retrieve and he lalloped after it, then tore down to the edge of the orchard and buried it under the plum tree. I confess that I hugged him for this because now there were two of us who seemed to have had no vocational guidance.

  When I heard Bob’s car in the drive, I removed Sport from behind the Stove and tied him in the feed room and that was the way things were. Sport knew that I knew that he was neither vicious nor a sport but we decided to let Bob dream on for a while.

  When Bob was attacked by the she-bear, Sport just happened to be behind the stove—a little out of breath but trying to look as if he’d been there for hours.

  When Bob and Crowbar and Geoduck Swensen and Crowbar’s large bear dog were on the scent of the cougar, Sport came out of the woods like a streak of flame and plastered himself to me to shiver and whine. I attributed this to a ferocious attempt at his life on the part of the cougar. Bob said, “More likely a face to face encounter with a squirrel.” Bob knew about Sport, then.

  Bob, Sport and I went hunting in the fall. Great sport for Bob and Sport—all work and no credit for me. The procedure was for us to start up the road with Sport disappearing into the woods at intervals supposedly to flush a covey of quail or some grouse. He would crash around like a bulldozer for a while and then appear all smiles and minus anything at which to shoot, except him, which proved a stronger and stronger temptation as the day wore on. Finally I would cut through the brush and flush some grouse, which left the ground just in front of me with a roar of wings that scared me so I fell over a log into some blackberry vines. Bob would take aim and fire and usually get one or two birds which always fell in a very dense thicket. Wallowing in, bent double, in an attempt to see the birds, with Sport rushing between my legs and back and forth just in front of me, I would inadvertently stumble on the first grouse, the other being only a few feet away. Thoroughly scratched by blackberries, stinging from nettles and small whipping twigs, I would reach for the first grouse but Sport had found it too and, snapping it up, bounded off to find Bob. I could hear Bob praising and patting as I crawled under a log with the salal snagging my cheeks and blackberries wrapping themselves around my legs. Emerging at last I would give Sport a dirty look as Bob calmly and without comment took my grouse and stowed it in his hunting jacket.

  Bob really tried to train Sport. Every afternoon for a week or so during the early summer he’d work on him. Through my open kitchen windows I could hear violent disagreement between the dog trainer and the hunter. From the kitchen it sounded as though Sport wanted to sit heavily on his tail and shake hands but Bob wanted him to take cover, or uncover or something quite different. “Jeeeeeeee . . . zuz . . . how could anything be so dumb?” screamed the exasperated trainer as Sport eagerly offered the other paw.

  His breed, color, build and pedigree said that Sport was a hunting dog—he wasn’t—he was a friendly dog. He loved companionship, warm fires, the baby and me. He preferred chocolates to dog biscuits or meat and he was passionately fond of music. I still bear the emotional scars of the first time I heard Sport howl. It was the first night of the harvest moon and I was lying contentedly in bed watching the silvery moonlight on the pond when suddenly the quiet air was ripped to shreds by the most terrifying noise. It sounded as though a freighter had gone aground on the front porch and was giving a long hoarse shout for help—it sounded like an ape man roaring for his mate—it sounded like the death call of an elephant. It woke Bob from a sound sleep and sent him flying for his gun. Just as he reached the window it came again—louder—more terrifying. Bob thrust his head and shoulders through the open window—then he burst into roars of laughter. “Come here, Betty,” he said. I went over to the window and there below us sitting in a shimmering pool of moonlight was Sport, looking as self-conscious and embarrassed as only a Chesapeake who had built up a terrible reputation of fierceness could look when he was caught wallowing in moonlight and howling for love.

  I was, still am, a strong swimmer but Bob took neither Sport nor me on his duck-hunting expeditions. For this sport he either went to the Dungeness marshes, where he got teal and canvasbacks which tasted like fish and were perfect stinkers to pick, or he and Geoduck and Clamface went to a secret private preserve they had and shot mallards which were very very good but stinkers to pick. The private preserve was a lake owned by a Mrs. Peterson, and known as Peterson’s Lake. Mrs. Peterson loved ducks and spent all of her pension money buying feed for the thousands which lived on her lake. When she first bought the lake there were no ducks but she wanted ducks more than anything, she told Geoduck and Clamface who happened to be hunting up there. Geoduck on the spur of the moment told her that if she would paint her house green like a mallard, the ducks would come there to live, for green was their favorite color. So she painted her house mallard green and the next year, nobody knows why, thousands of mallards took up residence on her lake. She was hysterically grateful and told Geoduck and Clamface that from that day forward they, and their friends, could hunt ducks there. She shot, quite accurately, at anyone else who set foot on her property.

  Her mallards were fat and friendly and Bob preferred the salt marshes for duckhunting but I preferred the mallards. Roast mallard duck, wild rice and Oregon grape jelly made a superb combination.

  Sometimes, in fact many times, hunters became lost in the mountains. Even the experts like the Swensens got lost on occasion. Our first meeting with Crowbar was the result of his being lost in the woods near us. It was that first November and I had not yet become used to the coyotes howling and this night I had lain awake for hours and hours listening to that morbid sound, when suddenly I heard two shots—close together—from the forest west of us. I waited a while—then it came again—two shots. I waked Bob and told him. He immediately got his gun and fired an answering shot. The two shots came again, Bob answered with one, then he started the fire and put a pot of coffee on. After quite a while we heard the shots again much nearer—Bob answered. This went on through two pots of coffee and all of my morning’s wood and I think that Bob and I were more tired than the hunter when about three-thirty Crowbar Swensen, who was supposed to know those mountains better than the deer, came wearily into the kitchen. He said he had spent the fore part of the night in a tree and would have been content to stay there until dawn, if he hadn’t discovered that a cougar had bedded down just below him the night before. Crowbar was dripping wet and chattering with the cold so Bob poured him a water glass of the whiskey we had bought in Town and offered him dry clothes. He gulped the whiskey without a tremor or a chaser, scoffed at the coffee and dry clothes and the moment the first vestige of dawn appeared he left to pack in his deer.

  It was just a year later when Crowbar took us for a drive to show us the “best deerhunting country in the world.” We drove down into the foothills and then took a single-track, very bumpy road through miles and miles and miles of burned-off land. “This here’s a real burn,” Crowbar told us taking both hands off the steering
wheel to encompass the entire bleak landscape in one grand gesture. “This here was the biggest forest fire in the whole world.” He could have been right, too, for anything in that country to be large enough to be noticed would have to be the biggest in the world. The moon was up, but a heavy mist had begun to settle, so that it seemed as if we were driving through an endless swamp with the silvery water rising to the knees of the millions and millions of stark snags and skeleton trees which covered the hills and stood quietly on either side of the road. The road dipped into hollows and rose to the crest of hills but we seemed to be getting nowhere, for the scene remained the same. I tried locating a particularly tall snag on a distant hill to use as a marker in our progress but I always lost it. There were so terribly many of those tall snags. So many desolate hills. There was no sign of habitation. No sign of life although Crowbar assured us that in the daytime the hills, even the roads, were alive with deer. On and on we drove past lowlands and hollows filled with the seething gray mist, past the spiked hills outlined by the pale moonlight. The dampness was penetrating and the night grew colder and I was thinking, “This is what Purgatory must be like,” when Crowbar at last decided that we had seen enough, turned the car around and we started home. Even bright sunlight, blue skies and bird song would have had a hard time lightening that landscape.

  22

  The Theatah—The Dahnse!

  MOST social gatherings I can do without, I have said. By that I meant all women’s teas, luncheons, evening bridge parties, all New Year’s Eve celebrations, and all large parties. I lived to eat those words—in fact I lived to eat them over and over again like a cud. For, by the time I had lived on the chicken ranch for a couple of years I would have crawled on my hands and knees over broken glass to attend the Annual Reunion of the Congenital Idiots’ Association.