The Yearling

Chapter III

Jody opened his eyes unwillingly. Sometime, he thought, he would slip away into the woods and sleep from Friday until Monday. Daylight was showing through the east window of his small bedroom. He could not be certain whether it was the pale light that had awakened him, or the stirring of the chickens in the peach trees. He heard them fluttering one by one from their roost in the branches. The daylight lay in orange streaks. The pines beyond the clearing were still black against it. Now in April the sun was rising earlier. It could not be very late. It was good to awaken by himself before his mother called him. He turned over luxuriously. The dry corn shucks of his mattress rustled under him. The Dominick rooster crowed boisterously under the window.

“You crow now,” the boy said. “See kin you rout me out.”

The bright streaks in the east thickened and blended. A golden flush spread as high as the pines, and as he watched, the sun itself lifted, like a vast copper skillet being drawn to hang among the branches. A light wind stirred, as though the growing light had pushed it out of the restless east. The sacking curtains eddied out into the room. The breeze reached the bed and brushed him with the cool softness of clean fur. He lay for a moment in torment between the luxury of his bed and the coming day. Then he was out of his nest and standing on the deerskin rug, and his breeches were hanging handily, and his shirt right side out by good fortune, and he was in them, and dressed, and there was not any need of sleep, or anything but the day, and the smell of hot cakes in the kitchen.

“Hey, ol’ Ma,” he said at the door. “I like you, Ma.”

“You and them hounds and all the rest o’ the stock,” she said. “Mighty lovin’ on a empty belly and me with a dish in my hand.”

“That’s the way you’re purtiest,” he said, and grinned.

He went whistling to the water-shelf and dipped into the wooden bucket to fill the wash-basin. He sousled his hands and face in the water, deciding against the strong lye soap. He wet his hair and parted and smoothed it with his fingers. He took down the small mirror from the wall and studied himself a moment.

“I’m turrible ugly, Ma,” he called.

“Well, there ain’t been a purty Baxter since the name begun.”

He wrinkled his nose at the mirror. The gesture made the freckles across the bridge blend together.

“I wisht I was dark like the Forresters.”

“You be proud you ain’t. Them fellers is black as their hearts. You a Baxter and all the Baxters is fair.”

“You talk like I wasn’t no kin to you.”

“My folks runs to fairness, too. They ain’t none of ‘em puny, though. Iffen you’ll learn yourself to work, you’ll be your Pa all over.”

The mirror showed a small face with high cheek bones. The face was freckled and pale, but healthy, like a fine sand. The hair grieved him on the occasions when he went to church or any doings at Volusia. It was straw-colored and shaggy, and no matter how carefully his father cut it, once a month on the Sunday morning nearest the full moon, it grew in tufts at the back. “Drakes’ tails,” his mother called them. His eyes were wide and blue. When he frowned, in close study over his reader, or watching something curious, they narrowed. It was then that his mother claimed him kin.

“He do favor the Alverses a mite,” she said.

Jody turned the mirror to inspect his ears; not for cleanliness, but remembering the pain of the day when Lem Forrester had held his chin with one vast hand and pulled his ears with the other.

“Boy, your ears is set up on your head like a ‘possum’s,” Lem said.

Jody made a leering grimace at himself and returned the mirror to the wall.

“Do we got to wait for Pa to eat breakfast?” he asked.

“We do. Set it all in front of you and there’d likely not be enough left for him.”

He hesitated at the back door.

“And don’t you slip off, neither. He ain’t but to the corn-crib.”

From the south, beyond the black-jacks, he heard the bell-like voice of old Julia, giving tongue in great excitement. He thought he heard, too, his father, giving her a command. He bolted away before his mother’s sharp voice could stop him. She, too, had heard the dog. She followed to the door and called after him.

“Don’t you and your Pa be gone too long now, follerin’ that fool hound. I’m o’ no mind to set around waitin’ breakfast and you two piddlin’ around in the woods.”

He could no longer hear either old Julia or his father. He was in a frenzy for fear the excitement was over; the intruder gone and perhaps dog and father with it. He crashed through the black-jacks in the direction from which the sounds had come. His father’s voice spoke, close at hand.

“Easy, son. What’s done ‘ll wait for you.”

He stopped short. Old Julia stood trembling, not in fear but in eagerness. His father stood looking down at the crushed and mangled carcass of black Betsy, the brood sow.

“He must of heered me darin’ him,” Penny said. “Look careful, boy. See do you see what I see.”

The sight of the mutilated sow sickened him. His father was looking beyond the dead animal. Old Julia had her sharp nose turned in the same direction. Jody walked a few paces and examined the sand. The unmistakable tracks made his blood jump. They were the tracks of a giant bear. And from the print of the right front paw, as big as the crown of a hat, one toe was missing.

“Old Slewfoot!”

Penny nodded.

“I’m proud you remembered his track.”

They bent together and studied the signs and the direction in which they had both come and gone.

“That’s what I call,” Penny said, “carryin’ the war into the enemy’s camp.”

“None o’ the dogs bayed him, Pa. Lessen I didn’t hear, for sleepin’.”

“None of ‘em bayed him. He had the wind in his favor. Don’t you think he didn’t know what he was doin’. He slipped in like a shadow and done his meanness and slipped out afore day.”

A chill ran along Jody’s backbone. He could picture the shadow, big and black as a shed in motion, moving among the black-jacks and gathering in the tame and sleeping sow with one sweep of the great clawed paw. Then the white tusks followed into the backbone, crushing it, and into the warm and palpitating flesh. Betsy had had no chance even to squeal for help.

“He’d a’ready fed,” Penny pointed out. “He ate no more’n a mouthful. A bear’s stomach is shrunk when he first comes outen his winter bed. That’s why I hate a bear. A creetur that kills and eats what he needs, why, he’s jest like the rest of us, makin’ out the best he kin. But an animal, or a person either, that’ll do harm jest to be a-doin’—You look in a bear’s face and you’ll see he’s got no remorse.”

“You aim to carry in old Betsy?”

“The meat’s bad tore up, but I reckon there’s sausage left. And lard.”

Jody knew that he should feel badly about old Betsy, but all that he could feel was excitement. The unwarranted kill, inside the sanctuary of the Baxter acres, had made a personal enemy of the big bear that had evaded all the stock owners for five years. He was wild to begin the hunt. He acknowledged to himself, as well, a trace of fear. Old Slewfoot had struck close to home.

He took one hind leg of the sow and Penny the other. They dragged it to the house with Julia reluctant at their heels. The old bear-dog could not understand why they did not set out at once on the chase.

“I’ll swear,” Penny said, “I’m daresome to break the news to your Ma.”

“She’ll rare for certain,” Jody agreed.

“Betsy was sich a fine brood sow. My, she was fine.”

Ma Baxter was waiting for them by the gate.

“I been a-callin’ and I been a-callin’,” she hailed them. “What you got there, piddlin’ around so long? Oh dear goodness, oh dear goodness — my sow, my sow.”

She threw her arms toward the sky. Penny and Jody passed through the gate and back of the house. She followed, wailing.

“We’ll hang the meat to the cross-piece, son,” Penny said. “The dogs’ll not reach it there.”

“You might tell me,” Ma Baxter said. “The least you kin do is tell me, how come her dead and tore to ribbons right under my nose.”

“Old Slewfoot done it, Ma,” Jody said. “His tracks was certain.”

“And them dogs asleep right here in the clearin’?”

The three had already appeared, nosing about the fresh smell of the blood. She threw a stick in their direction.

“You no-account creeturs! Hornin’ in on our rations and leavin’ sich as this to happen.”

“Ain’t a dog borned as smart as that bear,” Penny said.

“They could of barked.”

She threw another stick and the dogs slunk away.

The family went to the house. In the confusion, Jody went first into the kitchen, where the smell of breakfast tortured him. His mother could not be too disturbed to notice what he was doing.

“You git right back here,” she called, “and wash your dirty hands.”

He joined his father at the water-shelf. Breakfast was on the table. Ma Baxter sat, swaying her body in distress, and did not eat. Jody heaped his plate. There were grits and gravy, hot cakes, and buttermilk.

“Anyway,” he said, “we got meat to eat for a whiles now.”

She turned on him.

“Meat now, and none this winter.”

“I’ll ask the Forresters out of a sow,” Penny said.

“Yes, and be beholden to them rascals.” She began to wail again. “That blasted bear — I’d like to git my hands on him.”

“I’ll tell him when I see him,” Penny said mildly between mouthfuls.

Jody burst out laughing.

“That’s right,” she said. “Make a fun-box outen me.”

Jody patted her big arm.

“Hit jest come to me, Ma, how you’d look — you and ol’ Slewfoot mixin’ it.”

“I’d bet on your Ma,” Penny said.

“Nobody but me don’t take life serious,” she lamented.