Free The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder Page A

have been
     mostly failures, but we have four cows now and some calves. We have the four horses and
     the colts and the machinery and there are the sheep. . . . If we could only get one crop.
     Just one good crop, and we'd be all right. Let's try it one more year. Next year may be a good crop year and we are all fixed for farming now, with no money to start
     anything else.”
    It sounded reasonable as Manly put it. There didn't seem to be anything else they could
     do, but as for being all fixedthe five hundred dollars still due on the house worried
     Laura. Nothing had been paid on it. The binder was not yet paid for and interest payments
     were hard to make. But still Manly might be right. This might be when their luck turned,
     and one good year would even things up.
    Manly bought two Durham oxen that had been broken to work. They were huge animals. King
     was red and weighed two thousand pounds. Duke was red-and-white spotted and weighed
     twenty-five hundred pounds. They were as gentle as cows, and Laura soon helped hitch them
     up without any fearbut she fastened Rose in the house while she did so. They were cheap:
     only twenty-five dollars each and very strong. Now Skip and Barnum took the ponies' places and did the light work, while the cattle hitched
     beside them drew most of the load.
    T h e plowing was finished easily and the breaking of the sod was done before the ground
     froze. It was late in doing so for it was a warm, pleasant fall.
    T h e winter was unusually free of bad blizzards, though the weather was very cold and
     there was some snow.
    T h e house was snug and comfortable with storm windows and doors, and the hard-coal
     heater in the front room between the front door and the east window. Manly had made the
     storm shed, or summer kitchen, tight by battening closely all the cracks between the board
     sheeting, and the cook-stove had been left there for the winter. The table had been put in
     its place in the front room between the pantry and bedroom doors, and Peter's cot-bed
     stood against the west wall of the room where the table used to stand. Geraniums blossomed
     in tin cans on the window sills, growing luxuriantly in the winter sunshine and the warmth
     from the hard-coal heater.
    The days passed busily and pleasantly. Laura's time was fully occupied with her housework
     and Rose, while Rose was an earnest, busy little girl with her picture books and letter blocks and the cat, running around the house, intent on
     her small affairs.
    Manly and Peter spent much of their time at the barn, caring for the stock. The barn was
     long, from the first stalls where the horses and colts stood, past the oxen, King and
     Duke, the cows and the young cattle, the snug corner where the chickens roosted, on into
     the sheep barn where the sheep all ran loose.
    It was no small job to clean out the barn and fill all the mangers with hay. Then there
     was the grain to feed to the horses, and they had to be brushed regularly. And all the
     animals must be watered once a day.
    On pleasant days Manly and Peter hauled hay in from the stacks in the fields and fed the
     animals from that, leaving some on the wagon in the sheep yard for the sheep to help
     themselves.
    This was usually finished well before chore time, but one afternoon they were delayed in
     starting. Because the snow drifts were deep, they were hauling hay with King and Duke. The
     oxen could go through deep snow more easily than horses, but they were slower, and darkness came while Manly and Peter were still a mile
     from home.
    It had begun to snow: not a blizzard, but snow was falling thickly in a slow, straight
     wind. There was no danger, but it was uncomfortable and annoying to be driving cattle,
     wallowing through snow in the pitch dark and the storm.
    Then they heard a wolf howl and another; then several together. Wolves had not been doing
     any damage recently and there were not so many left in the