Snow Ride Read Online Free Page A

company.
    Dinah laughed, pleased by Stevie’s reaction. “They don’t call this place Ver-mont for nothing,” she said. “It’s
from
French, you know. The
Ver
means green and the
mont
—”
    “Don’t tell me. It means mountain,” Stevie finished for her.
    “Go to the head of the class,” Dinah said.
    “Nope, go to the back of the sleigh instead,” Betsy corrected her. “Because we’re almost here, and it’s time to get to work.”
    Betsy gave the reins a final snick to urge the horse across the field. When they reached the edge of the forest, she pulled gently but firmly and brought the horse and the sleigh to a halt.
    “Everybody out,” she said. She secured the reins to keep the sleigh stopped, and the three girls piled out, ready to start their work. “Come on, now, I’ll show you what we do.”
    Stevie helped unload some of the equipment they’d so recently loaded onto the sleigh. She took a few buckets and some spiles and carried one of the large drills.
    Betsy began by examining some of the trees. “I’m looking for the sugar maples,” she explained.
    Stevie looked at the trees that surrounded them. Theywere all tall, they were all bare. They all looked alike. There seemed to be no way to tell any of them apart. Stevie had a sudden image of them going to a lot of work to collect sap from oaks or ashes.
    “How can you tell which are the sugar maples?” she asked.
    “They’re the ones with the sugar maple leaf painted on the bark at eye level,” Betsy explained, pointing to the nearest tree.
    Stevie blinked, looked again, and then laughed.
    “A real naturalist can tell the trees apart when they don’t have leaves,” Dinah explained, “but it can be kind of risky, so a long time ago they came up with this bright idea of marking the trees in the summer when it’s not hard to tell. It saves us a lot of trouble. It also keeps us from ruining a batch of syrup by adding the wrong sap.”
    “Bingo!” Dinah announced. “Here are three together.”
    The girls trod over to the trees Dinah had spotted. Betsy took her drill, checked to see that the bit was in tightly, and began the job. She drilled a hole into the trunk of the tree, about three feet above the ground. Stevie watched the wood shavings emerge from the hole, and then when the bit had gone in about an inch and a half, Betsy pulled the drill back out.
    “That’s it,” Betsy said. “That’s as far as I need to go.” Noticing Stevie’s surprise at the shallowness of the hole, she explained that the sap ran right beneath the bark ofthe tree. Then she poked one of the spiles into the hole she’d drilled, tapped it gently with a hammer, hung a bucket from the spile, put a simple cover over the top of the bucket, and declared the job done—until the next tree.
    “That’s all there is to it?” Stevie asked.
    “That’s all until the next tree,” Dinah said. “And here’s the next tree.”
    Dinah took her own drill and checked the bit. Then she began drilling. She repeated the procedure exactly as far as Stevie could tell, but she wasn’t satisfied.
    “I put it in at the wrong angle,” she explained, pulling the drill back out. “You’ve got to angle the drill upward so the sap can flow downward through the spile. Also, it’s a good idea to tap right under a big branch. See, a big branch is doing a lot of growing, so the tree will be sending the most sap in that direction.” She studied the shape of the tree a little more, judged where the biggest branch was, placed the drill bit on the trunk, and began again. “I don’t mind, and it only takes a few minutes, but too many holes punched in the tree can’t be good for it,” Dinah said. “It also takes valuable time from our tapping.”
    “Well, just how good can it be for the tree to have us take its sap out anyway?” Stevie asked. She was beginning to feel just a little bit sorry for the trees.
    Betsy laughed. “I wondered the same thing the firsttime I did