The Yearling

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  Penny said, “I’m shore sorry, ol’ feller,” and fired.

  The buck dropped, kicked a moment and lay still. Julia lifted her hound’s voice in a howl of triumph.

  Penny said, “Now I hated to do that.”

  The buck was large and fine, well fattened on acorn mast and palmetto berries. His red coat of summer, however, was already shabby. It had turned to the winter’s grayness, the color of the Spanish moss, or the lichens that grew on the north side of the pine trees.

  “A month from now,” Penny said, “what with runnin’ all over the scrub courtin’, he’d of been pore and his meat stringy.”

  He stood beaming.

  “Now ain’t this our day, boy? Ain’t this jest our day?”

  They dressed the buck.

  Penny said, “I mistrust kin old Cæsar tote all we got.”

  “I’ll walk, Pa. Do the buck weigh more’n me?”

  “As many stone agin. We’d both best walk.”

  Cæsar accepted his load patiently. He seemed to have no fear of the yearling bear, as he had had of the large one. Penny walked ahead, leading him. Jody felt as fresh as though the day were only beginning. He ran in front. The dogs trailed behind. It was not much after noon when they reached the clearing. Ma Baxter was not expecting them so soon. She heard them and came to the gate to meet them. She shaded her eyes against the sun. Her heavy face lightened at sight of the game.

  “I don’t mind stayin’ alone when you-all come home with sich as that,” she called.

  Jody broke into a babble of talk. His mother only half-listened, concerned with the quality of the meat of buck and bear. He left her and slipped into the shed to Flag. There was not time to sit and talk. He let Flag smell his hands and shirt and breeches.

  “That’s bear smell,” he told him. “You run like lightnin’ do you ever smell it clost. And that’s wolf. Since the flood, they’re wusser’n the bear, but we shore cleaned ’em out this mornin’. There’s three-four left, and you run from them. Now t’other smell is your kin-folks.” He added with a horrified fascination, “Mebbe your daddy. No need to run from them. Yes, they is, too. A ol’ buck’ll kill a fawn or a yearlin’, Pa says, times, in ruttin’ season. You jest run from ever’thing.”

  Flag switched his white tail and stamped his feet and tossed his head.

  “Don’t you say ’No’ to me. You listen to what I tell you.”

  He untied him and took him outside. Penny was calling him to help with the carrying of the game to the back of the house. Flag bolted at scent of the bear, then returned to sniff cautiously from a distance, craning his slim neck. The skinning and cutting up of the meat took the rest of the afternoon. Dinner had not been cooked. They were not hungry and Ma Baxter waited and cooked the big hot meal an hour ahead of the usual supper time. Penny and Jody ate ravenously at first, but were suddenly so tired that appetite left them when they were half through. Jody left the table to go to Flag. The sun was only now setting. His back ached and his eyes grew heavy. He whistled Flag in. He had wanted to listen to his mother’s and father’s talk about the trading, and to decide what he wanted from Jacksonville for his special portion. But his eyes would not stay open. He stumbled into bed and was instantly asleep.

  Penny and Ma Baxter spent the evening discussing their most urgent needs for the winter. Ma Baxter drew up at last a list, carefully written in pencil on ruled paper.

  A bolt good wool for huntin jeans for Mr. B & Jody

  A haf bolt perty blue and wite check gingham for Mrs.

  B now a real perty blue

  A bolt domestick A sack cofee beans

  A barrl flowr

  A ax hed

  Sack salt 2 lb sody

  2 stiks lead for shot

  Buckshot 4 lb

  Some more shel casis Mr. B’s gun

  1 lb powder for shels

  Homespun 6 yd

  Hickory shirtin 4 yd

  Osnaburg 6 yd

  Brogan shoes, Jody

  ½ quire paper

  1 box buttons, pantaloon

  1 paper shirt buttons

  1 bottle caster oil 50¢

  1 box worm candy

  1 box liver pills

  1 pain curer

  1 vial laudnum

  1 do camphire

  1 do Paragorick

  1 do lemon

  1 do pepermint

  Now if enuf money left 2 yd black alpacy

  The Forresters stopped the next morning on their way. Jody ran out to meet them and Penny and Ma Baxter followed. Buck and Mill-wheel and Lem were crowded together on the wagon seat. The wagon body behind them was filled with a quarreling, wrestling, whining tangle of shiny black fur, shot through with flashes of small teeth and claws and pairs of bright beady black eyes. Their individual ropes and chains were hopelessly tangled. A barrel of moonshine whiskey stood in the middle. One cub with a longer chain had climbed to its top and sat loftily above the tumult. Jody jumped up on a wagon wheel to peer in. A clawed paw went past his face and he dropped back to the ground. The wagon-load was bedlam.

  Penny called, “Don’t be surprised do all Jacksonville take out and foller you.”

  Mill-wheel said, “Mebbe hit’d raise the price.”

  Buck said to Jody, “I cain’t git over how Fodder-wing would of loved to of seed ’em.”

  If Fodder-wing had been alive, Jody thought wistfully, the two of them might have been taken along to Jacksonville. He looked longingly at the cramped space on the floorboards under the men’s feet. He and Fodder-wing could have sat there comfortably, and so have seen the world.

  Buck took the Baxters’ list.

  He said, “This look like a heap o’ things wrote out here. If we don’t git a good price and the money don’t hold out, what must I skip?”

  “The gingham and the domestick,” Ma Baxter said.

  Penny said, “No, Buck, you git Ma’s gingham, whatever come. Git the gingham and the ax head and the shell cases and lead. And the hickory shirtin’, that’s Jody’s portion.”

  “Blue and white,” Jody called. “All mingledy, Buck, like a joint snake.”

  Buck shouted, “Well, if they ain’t money enough, we’ll stop and ketch some more bears.”

  He slapped the reins over the backs of the horses.

  Ma Baxter shrilled after him, “The wool cloth’s the worst needed.”

  Lem said, “Stop this wagon. You see what I see?”

  He jerked his thumb at the deer-hide stretched on the smoke-house wall. He jumped down from the wagon-seat and opened the gate and walked with long rangy strides to the smoke-house. He turned aside, searching. He discovered the antlers, drying on a nail. He walked deliberately to Penny and knocked him against the smoke-house wall. Penny went white. Buck and Mill-wheel came hurrying. Ma Baxter turned and ran into the house for Penny’s gun.

  Lem said, “That’ll learn you to lie to me and slip off that-a-way. Wasn’t goin’ after the buck, eh?”

  Penny said, “I’d ought to kill you for that, Lem, but you’re too sorry to kill. Gittin’ that buck was pure happen-so.”

  “You’re lyin’.”

  Penny turned to Buck, ignoring Lem.

  He said, “Buck, no man’s never knowed me to lie. If you-all had remembered that, you’d not of got beat in the dogtrade.”

  Buck said, “That’s right. Don’t pay him no mind, Penny.”

  Lem turned and stalked back to the wagon and climbed into the seat.

  Buck said in a low voice, “I’m powerful sorry, Penny. He’s mean, at best. He’s been this-a-way ever since Oliver takened his gal away from him. He’s got ugly as a buck-deer that cain’t find his doe.”

  Penny said, “I was aimin’ to give you-all a quarter o’ the venison on your way back. I’ll swear, Buck, this be hard to forgive.”

  “I’d not blame you. Well, don’t fret about your share in the cubs, or the tradin’. Me and Mill-wheel kin tie Lem in knots ary time he need it.”

  They returned to the wagon.
Buck lifted the reins and turned the horses around. He would pick up the north road past the sink-hole. It would take them through Hopkins Prairie, past Salt Springs, and so north to Palatka, where they would cross the river and perhaps spend the night before proceeding. Jody and Penny watched after the wagon and Ma Baxter, peering from the door, set down the gun. Penny went into the house and sat down.

  Ma Baxter said, “Why’d you take it from him?”

  “When one man’s on-reasonable, t’other has got to keep his head. I ain’t big enough to fight him jest-so. All I could of done was to of takened the gun and shot him. When I kill a man, hit’ll be for somethin’ more serious than a ignorant man’s meanness.”

  He was plainly unhappy.

  “Now I would love to live peaceable,” he said.

  To Jody’s surprise, his mother said, “I reckon you done the right thing. Don’t set studyin’ about it no more.”

  He could not quite understand either of them. He was filled with resentment at Lem, and with disappointment that his father had let him go unpunished. He was confused by his own feelings. Just as he had changed his allegiance from Oliver to the Forresters, Lem betrayed his father. He finally solved it in his mind by deciding to hate Lem, but to continue to like the others, especially Buck. The hate and the friendliness were of equal satisfaction.

  There was nothing in particular to be done in the way of work, and he spent the morning helping his mother peel pomegranates and string the peelings to dry. They were the best remedy, she said, for dysentery. He ate so many pomegranates that she was afraid he would need the remedy before it was ready. He liked to bite the transparent crispness from around the seeds.

  Chapter XXV

  NOVEMBER slid into December with no more sign than the high, sad cry of the wood ducks flying. They left their hammock nests and moved from lake to pond and back again. Jody wondered why some birds cried in flight while others were silent. The whooping cranes gave their rusty call only in motion. Hawks screamed from the air but sat still and frozen in the tree. Sapsuckers were noisy on the wing but gave themselves to the bark of trees with no further sound than the tat-tat of their pecking. Quail spoke only from the ground, and soldier blackbirds shrilled from the rushes. Mocking birds sang and chattered day or night, on the wing, or perched along the fences or in the poke-berry bushes.

  The curlews were coming south. They came every winter from Georgia. The old ones were white with long curved bills. The young ones, from the spring hatching, were graybrown in color. The young curlews made fine eating. When fresh meat was scarce, or the Baxters were tired of squirrel, Penny and Jody rode old Cæsar to Mullet Prairie and shot half a dozen. Ma Baxter roasted them like turkey and Penny swore the flavor was even sweeter.

  Buck Forrester had traded the bear cubs in Jacksonville for a good price. He had brought the Baxters all the articles on Ma’s list and a small sack of silver and copper in change, to boot. Relations between the Forresters and the Baxters were strained since Lem’s attack on Penny and after the settlement the big dark men rode by without stopping.

  Penny said, “Likely Lem persuaded the rest I raly meant to cheat about the deer. We’ll git it all straight one day.”

  Ma Baxter said, “Hit suits me jest as good to have nothin’ to do with ’em.”

  “Now Ma, don’t fergit how Buck lit in when I was snake-bit.”

  “I ain’t fergot. But that Lem’s like a snake hisself. Turn and strike at you jest ’cause he hears the leaves rustle.”

  Buck stopped one day, however, to announce that he believed they had accounted for all the wolves. They had shot one at the corral, had trapped three more and had seen no sign of one since. The bears were giving them constant trouble. The most troublesome was old Slewfoot, whose maraudings were taking him, Buck said, from the river on the east to Lake Jumper on the west. His favorite stopping place was the Forrester corral. He watched the wind and eluded both dogs and traps, slipped into the corral and made off with a calf whenever it pleased him to do so. The nights the Forresters sat up and waited for him, he did not appear.

  Buck said, “Hit’ll not do you much good to look out for him, but I thought I’d pass the word.”

  Penny said, “My lot lays so clost to the house, mebbe I kin ketch him at his tricks. I thank you. Buck, I been wantin’ to say somethin’. I hope you ain’t mixed up in your mind about that buck Lem got so ornery about.”

  Buck said evasively, “That’s all right. What’s one deer? Well, so long.”

  Penny shook his head and went back to his work. It disturbed him not to be on friendly terms with his only neighbors in his small scrub-world.

  Work was light and Jody spent long hours with Flag. The fawn was growing fast. His legs were long and spindling. Jody discovered one day that his light spots, the emblem of deer infancy, had disappeared. He examined the smooth hard head at once for signs of horns. Penny saw him at it and was obliged to laugh at him.

  “You shore expect wonders, boy. He’ll be butt-headed ’til summer. He’ll not have no horns ’til he’s a yearlin’. Then they’ll be leetle ol’ spiky ones.”

  Jody knew a content that filled him with a warm and lazy wonder. Even Oliver Hutto’s desertion and the Forresters’ withdrawal were distant ills that scarcely concerned him. Almost every day he took his gun and shot-bag and went to the woods with Flag. The black-jack oaks were no longer red but a rich brown. There was frost every morning. It made the scrub glitter like a forest full of Christmas trees. It reminded him that Christmas was not far away.

  Penny said, “We’ll flunk around ’til Christmas, and we’ll go to the Christmas doin’s at Volusia. Then after that we’ll git down to work agin.”

  Jody found a patch of Cherokee beans in the pine woods beyond the sink-hole. He gathered his pockets full of the bright red seeds. They were as hard as flint. He stole a large needle and a length of stout cotton thread from his mother’s sewing basket and took them with him when he went prowling. He sat down in the warmth of the sun with his back against a tree and strung them laboriously, a few each day, to make a necklace for his mother. The seeds were strung unevenly but the effect pleased him. He carried the completed necklace in his pocket so that he might look at it often, until it began to have a sticky appearance from crumbled biscuits and squirrel tails and other such articles. He washed the necklace at the sink-hole and hid it on a rafter of his bedroom.

  There had been nothing special for Christmas the year before except a wild turkey for dinner because there had been no money. This year there was the money left from the sale of the bear cubs. Penny set aside a portion for cottonseed and said the rest might be spent for Christmas.

  Ma Baxter said, “Now if we goin’ to the doin’s, I want to go tradin’ to Volusia ’fore then. I want me four yards o’ alpacy so I kin have Christmas decent.”

  Penny said, “Wife, your figger’s no secret. I ain’t quarrelin’, for you’re plumb welcome to all I got. But seems to me four yards won’t no more’n make you a pair o’ drawers.”

  “If you got to know, I aim to fix over my weddin’ dress. Hit’s long enough, for I ain’t growed up nor down. I done my growin’ sideways, and I aim to set in a piece down the front so’s it’ll meet around me.”

  Penny patted her broad back.

  “Now don’t take on. A good wife like you deserves a piece o’ goods to set down the front of her weddin’ dress.”

  She said, mollified, “You jest tootlin’ me. I don’t never ask for nothin’ and you git so you don’t expect me to ask for nothin’.”

  “I know. Hit frets me, you makin’ out with so leetle. I’d love to fetch you a bolt o’silk, and do the Lord spare me, one day you’ll have a well o’ water at the house, and not have to wash no more at the sink-hole.”

  She said, “I want to go to Volusia tomorrer.”

  He said, “Now give Jody and me a day-two to hunt some, and mebbe we kin carry some meat and hides to the store and you kin trade to your heart’s content.”

&n
bsp; The first day’s hunt brought nothing.

  “When you ain’t lookin’ for deer,” Penny said, “they’re all over the place. When you hunt ’em, you’d think you was in a tormented city.”

  A puzzling incident occurred. South of the island Penny tried to put the dogs on the track of what appeared to be a small yearling or a well-grown fawn. The dogs refused to take the trail. Penny did a thing he had not done in years. He broke a switch and thrashed old Julia for her stubbornness. She yelped and whined, but still refused. The mystery became clear at the end of the day. Flag showed up, as he had made a habit of doing, in the middle of the hunt. Penny exclaimed sharply, then knelt to the ground to compare his tracks with those the dogs had refused to follow. They were the same. Old Julia, wiser than he, had recognized either the track or the scent of the newest Baxter.

  He said, “That makes me feel right humble. A dog know-in’ what you mought call kin-folks.”

  Jody was elated. He felt a deep gratitude to the old hound. He should have hated having Flag frightened by their pursuit.

  The second day’s hunt was more profitable. They found deer feeding in the swamp. Penny shot a large buck. He trailed still another, a smaller, and jumped it in a bay-head. He gave Jody a shot, and as he missed, shot it down. They had come on foot, for slow-trailing was the only chance these days of getting game, except by accident. Jody tried to carry the smaller deer, but its weight knocked him almost to the earth. He stayed with the kill while Penny went back for the horse and wagon. Flag was with them when they returned.

  Penny called, “This pet o’ yours loves a hunt as good as the dogs.”

  On the way home, Penny pointed out where the bears were feeding. They were eating the berries of the saw palmetto.

  “Hit cleans ’em out and tonics ’em. They go into their winter beds fat as butter. The bears is like to be our salvation for fresh this year.”