2 The Population Shrinks

Chapter 2 IN WHICH The Population Shrinks Pushing back the deerskin door of my hemlock home, I enter the smoke and minty smelling tree hollow and slump to the pile of furs that replaces my outgrown sapling bed. I put my face down to cry, but no tears come. After a long while I get up. I have to provide for Alice and myself. I should be making a box trap to catch rabbits, or a deadfall to take a deer. I don't move to do either, for I have no spirit for the jobs. It's almost as if I am completely helpless without Frightful. I guess I am, so I had better do something to keep myself going. Walking to my desk, I sit down at the table I built for writing. I look at my clay fireplace, which I now use only for heat and cheeriness, not cooking. I made an elaborate stone stove and oven outside where I bake, grill, and boil.

Stoves, tables, clay fireplace—I keep filling my head with thoughts about these things so I won't think about Frightful. Reading always clears my mind; I'll try that. I open my journal, a handsome leather-bound notebook Miss Turner gave me last summer. She said the birch-bark scrolls I used when I first came to the wilderness were too fragile for notes, but I still have them and they are as good as ever. I thumb through the first pages hoping to find something to distract me, like a sketch of a snare, when I notice gaps in the June entries of last year. Wondering why, I begin reading the June 27 entry. "Alice, my sister who is two years younger than I am, is going to live on the mountain with me—for better or worse. "The way I look at it, she's here by default. Mom; Dad; my four brothers, John, Jim, Hank, and Jake; and my four sisters, Alice, Mary, Joan, and Nina climbed up my mountain three weeks ago and announced they were here to stay. Dad was going to plow the abandoned fields, sow seeds, and reap the grain. The boys said they would help build the

house from the planks and two-by-fours Dad brought up here for that purpose. Mom and the girls were eager to grow a garden and keep a cow. "Well, the house never got built. Mrs. Fielder, whom I always call Mrs. Strawberry because she and I gathered wild strawberries the spring I arrived on the mountain, was kind to my family. She offered them rooms in her large old farmhouse until they got started. She's alone and said they would be company for her. "Hardly had my father borrowed Mrs. Strawberry's horse, Slats, and the plow, and taken them up one side of my meadow and down again, than he knew why his grandfather had abandoned this land. He was not plowing soil. He was plowing rocks. Mrs. Strawberry put it this way. 'If you want to grow stones, Mr. Gribley, this is the place for you. Here in these mountains, stones are our best crop.' "Next Dad tried to put in a garden. After hours of digging to find soil in my meadow, he gave up. As a last resort he called in a soil conservation officer and conferred with him.

'The land's good for trees and wildlife,' he told Dad, 'and maybe a few wild plants that like poor soil—and that's about all.' "June seventeenth he and Mother climbed the long, hard mountain trail to my home. One look at their faces told me they had not come for sumac tea." I chuckle as I remember Dad asking me where Alice was—she spent most of her time up here with me—and I told him she was at the spring fiddling with a gadget she had been working on for days. "Children," Dad said when Alice came down from the spring, "pack up your things. We're going to leave. It's impossible to farm this mountain. Men more skilled than I have tried and failed. If they couldn't do it, it's insane for me to think I can. I'm going back to what I am good at—working on the docks near the sea." "Well, I'm not going," Alice replied nicely but firmly. The irises in Alice's eyes look as if they are made of little pieces of blue and white crystal. When she's excited, each piece sparkles. They flashed

until I thought they would splinter and crack when she told Dad she wasn't going back to the city. "I love it here!" she said. "I'm going to stay." "Indeed, you're not," he answered, much to my relief. I really didn't want to be responsible for a thirteen-year-old. "You're coming back to the city with Sam and the rest of us." "Is Sam going back?" She turned to me incredulously. "Of course," Dad answered without thinking. He hesitated. "You will, won't you, Sam?" "No, sir," I answered. "I don't think I will. I'm doing very well here and love it." Alice ran to Mother. "Please, let me stay," she whined like a lost puppy. Mom walked off to think, made up her mind, and came back to me. "Alice can stay, Sam," she said, "if you think you can support another person. She is far safer here than in the city." My heart plunged to my toes. This is my home, my mountain, the world I had created all by

myself. I needed a little sister like Frightful needed vegetables. "What about Alice's education?" my father asked, not liking the idea either. "She can go to correspondence school." Mother answered so promptly that it seemed that she had given this more thought than was apparent at first. "If kids can live on sailboats going around the world," she said, "and get a good education through correspondence schools, so can Alice." Dad could not come up with another objection. When Mother had said Alice would be safer in the woods with me than out on the mean streets, she had won. "But for one year only," he said. Then he winked at me. "Don't worry," he whispered behind his hand. "She won't be here long. Alice gets homesick. She'll be crying like a lamb by tomorrow, and you can bring her home." In a louder voice he said, "I'm leaving my toolbox and tools at Mrs. Strawberry's for you. I won't be needing them."