I hoped that
snooping old woman wouldn't come to see us any more.

Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in Otto's
sock. 'She's not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to you. No, I
wouldn't mourn if she never came again. But, you see, a body never knows
what traits poverty might bring out in 'em. It makes a woman grasping to
see her children want for things. Now read me a chapter in "The Prince
of the House of David." Let's forget the Bohemians.'

We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral
ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped
they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big bulls,
Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they began to
tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with
their hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew
to a far corner of his own corral, and then they made for each other at
a gallop. Thud, thud, we could hear the impact of their great heads, and
their bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen shelves. Had they not been
dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces. Pretty soon the fat
steers took it up and began butting and horning each other. Clearly, the
affair had to be stopped. We all stood by and watched admiringly while
Fuchs rode into the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again
and again, finally driving them apart.

The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the twentieth
of January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto
came in white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet.
They began to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:

'You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was
a full-grown blizzard ordered for you.'

All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of featherbeds being emptied. That
afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in their
tools and made two great wooden shovels with long handles. Neither
grandmother nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens
and brought in a pitiful contribution of eggs.

Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn--and the
snow was still falling! There had not been such a storm in the ten years