The Long Winter (Little House 6)

“Foster butchered his oxen,” Pa answered. “I got there just in time. Every last bit, to bones and gristle, sold twenty-five cents a pound. But I got four pounds and here it is! Now we’ll live like kings!”

Ma quickly took the paper off the meat. “I’ll sear it all over well and pot-roast it,” she said.

Looking at it made Laura’s mouth water. She swallowed and asked, “Can you make a gravy, Ma, with water and brown flour?”

“Indeed I can,” Ma smiled. “We can make this last a week, for flavoring at least, and by that time the train will surely come, won’t it?”

She looked smiling at Pa. Then she stopped smiling and quietly asked, “What is it, Charles?”

“Well,” Pa answered reluctantly, “I hate to tell you.” He cleared his throat. “The train isn’t coming.”

They all stood looking at him. He went on, “The railroad has stopped running trains, till spring.”

Ma threw up her hands and dropped into a chair. “How can it, Charles? It can’t. It can’t do that. Till spring? This is only the first of January.”

“They can’t get the trains through,” said Pa. “They no sooner get a train through a cut than a blizzard comes and snows it in again. They’ve got two trains between here and Tracy, snowed under between cuts. Every time they cleared a cut they threw up the snow on both sides, and now all the cuts are packed full of snow to the top of the snowbanks. And at Tracy the superintendent ran out of patience.”

“Patience?” Ma exclaimed. “Patience! What’s his patience got to do with it I’d like to know! He knows we are out here without supplies. How does he think we are going to live till spring? It isn’t his business to be patient. It’s his business to run the trains.”

“Now, Caroline,” Pa said. He put his hand on her shoulder and she stopped rocking and rolling her hands in her apron. “We haven’t had a train for more than a month, and we are getting along all right,” he told her.

“Yes,” Ma said.

“There’s only this month, then February is a short month, and March will be spring,” Pa encouraged her.

Laura looked at the four pounds of beef. She thought of the few potatoes left and she saw the partly filled sack of wheat standing in the corner.

“Is there any more wheat, Pa?” she asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know, Laura,” Pa said strangely. “But don’t worry. I bought a full bushel and it’s by no means gone.”

Laura could not help asking, “Pa, you couldn’t shoot a rabbit?”

Pa sat down before the open oven and settled Grace on his knee. “Come here, Half-Pint,” he said, “and you, too, Carrie. I’m going to tell you a story.”

He did not answer Laura’s question. She knew what the answer was. There was not a rabbit left in all that country. They must have gone south when the birds went. Pa never took his gun with him when he was hauling hay, and he would have taken it if he had ever seen so much as one rabbit’s track.

He put his arm around her as she stood close against Carrie on his knee. Grace cuddled in his other arm and laughed when his brown beard tickled her face as it used to tickle Laura’s when she was little. They were all cosy in Pa’s arms, with the warmth from the oven coming out pleasantly.

“Now listen, Grace and Carrie and Laura,” said Pa. “And you, too, Mary and Ma. This is a funny story.” And he told them the story of the superintendent.

The superintendent was an eastern man. He sat in his offices in the east and ordered the train dispatchers to keep the trains running. But the engineers reported that storms and snow stopped the trains.

“Snowstorms don’t stop us from running trains in the east,” the superintendent said. “Keep the trains running in the western end of the division. That’s orders.”

But in the west the trains kept stopping. He had reports that the cuts were full of snow.

“Clear the cuts,” he ordered. “Put on extra men. Keep the trains running. Hang the costs!”

They put on extra men. The costs were enormous. But still the trains did not run.

Then the superintendent said, “I’ll go out there and clear those tracks myself. What those men need is someone to show them how we do things in the east.”

So he came out to Tracy, in his special car, and he got off there in his city clothes and his gloves and his fur-lined coat and this is what he said. “I’ve come out to take charge myself,” he said. “I’ll show you how to keep these trains running.”

In spite of that, he was not a bad fellow when you knew him. He rode out in the work train to the big cut west of Tracy, and he piled out in the snow with the work crew and gave his orders like any good foreman. He moved that snow up out of the cut in double-quick time and in a couple of days the track was clear.

“That shows you how to do it,” he said. “Now run the train through tomorrow and keep it running.” But that night a blizzard hit Tracy. His special train couldn’t run in that blizzard, and when it stopped blowing the cut was packed full of snow to the top of the snowbanks he’d had thrown up on both sides.