132 Singing Valleys 



Indians used to burn the brush in a wide band around their 

 plantings, which allowed the deer no covert. And usually 

 there were several sharp-eyed small boys, armed with bows 

 and arrows and sling shots, on guard against the marauders 

 from the woods. 



The white men who had taken the country from the 

 Indians planted their fields more lavishly and were more care- 

 less in guarding them. But the white men had guns. They did 

 not wait for the deer to swim the river and fatten and grow 

 sleek on their corn. They hunted the deer in their own forests, 

 up and down the mountain slopes. And though they were 

 clumsier and noisier in their tracking than the red men were, 

 their guns were as usable in the woods as in the open which 

 the Indians' bow and arrows had not been. 



The white men built houses in their cornfields. The first 

 house was usually of logs with the stones gathered from the 

 cornfield made into an end chimney. 



Sometimes they did not go to the trouble of putting up a 

 cabin. There was one family lived for a year or more in a hollow 

 sycamore tree by the river. The man and the woman and their 

 children were as cosy inside its bark wall as the gray squirrels 

 were in their holes in the upper branches. 



But after a year or two, the white men usually set to build- 

 ing a taller, wider house of brick or stone beside the cabin, 

 which became the kitchen of the new dwelling. Gradually, 

 out beyond this, a cluster of other buildings grew up, following 

 the farmhouse patterns of Massachusetts and Vermont. The 

 new house had a dooryard with lilac bushes and snowballs, and 

 a flowery almond grown from a slip a woman had brought in 

 a pickle jar all the way from Connecticut. But beyond the 

 house on all three sides, the cornfields ran away to touch the 

 horizon. From the time the first green shoots appeared out 

 of the damp earth the fields were alive. Even the lightest 

 breeze fluttered the long leaf ribbons. Rain at night tinkled on 

 them. Under the midday sun they crackled as they grew. 



The men who lived in the houses set in the cornfields knew 



