66 Singing Valleys 



to a hill. A hole, four inches deep, four kernels of corn 

 ancient homage to the planting gods of the Maya and the 

 dry earth brought over them with a clamshell hoe. A month 

 later, and the ground between the charred stumps would be 

 a-flutter with new green leaves, and crying for the hoe again. 

 Two months more and there would be waving tassels, with 

 the orioles and redwings lighting on them to peck daintily. 

 Another month, and there would be new ears full of sweet 

 milk, to boil in the big iron pots, and to roast in the embers. 

 And when the moon came up, big and round and golden out 

 of the sea, there would be baskets heaped with ears as golden 

 as the moon, to carry home and hang from the house rafters 

 to dry. 



Corn for the mortars that stood beside every hearth in 

 Plymouth; corn for bread and nokake and suppawn and suc- 

 coquatash. 



They planted, that first spring, five acres of barley and peas, 

 and twenty acres of corn, dressed carefully with herring. How 

 did the Massachusetts Indians know that their crop of weachin 

 would yield its harvest only if they fed it with fish? There was 

 nothing in more ancient corn-lore to teach them this. The 

 tribes of Virginia, according to Hariot, "never fatten the 

 ground with muck, dung, or any other thing; neither plough 

 nor dig it." 



Visitors from Virginia looked on the New England corn- 

 planting methods with disfavor. "There is not much in that 

 land/' one of them reported. "Except a herring be put into the 

 hole that you set the corne or maize in, it will not come up." 

 To which the men of Massachusetts retorted that the reason 

 why Virginians did not dress their fields with fish was not for 

 reason of the richness of their soil, but the poverty of their 

 waters. 



New Englanders continued to set their corn, a herring to a 

 hill, for many years, and until the increase of domestic ani- 

 mals gave them manure. One writer tells of the wolves coming 

 down into the Cape Cod cornfields, drawn by the smell of the 



