Snow Ride Read Online Free Page B

this,” she said. “I was out here with Mr. Daviet, who has been doing this for practically centuries. Know what he said?”
    “What?” Stevie asked.
    “ ‘By the size of the trunk on this tree, I’d judge it to be nearly two hundred years old. It’s probably been tapped for sap every year of the last hundred and fifty. Doesn’t seem to have hurt it much, does it?’ ”
    Stevie looked around her and saw that the maples in the woods were all big old trees, surely veterans of many years of tapping. None of them seemed the worse for being tapped every year. And besides, if nobody tapped the maple trees, how would she ever have the wonderful syrup on her pancakes?
    “My turn to try,” Stevie said, now more eager than ever to pitch in.
    Betsy handed her the drill. It was the big, jointed kind. She put the pointed end against the trunk as her friends had done and braced her body against the round end. She leaned forward toward the tree trunk and began cranking the drill. The blade bit into the trunk.
    “It’s working!” Stevie declared proudly. The next thing that happened was that the bark of the tree cracked and the bit slid aside. Stevie completely lost her balance and ended up sitting in the snow, the drill hanging limply from where it had caught in the bark on the side of the tree.
    “Ah, that’s what we call ‘getting the hang of it,’ ” Betsy said, laughing and offering Stevie a hand to help her get up. “The trick is not to push too hard on the drill. It’ll slip out every time when you push like that. Now try again.”
    Stevie didn’t like falling down. Looking ridiculous wasn’t her favorite activity. She was tempted to hold off trying again because she didn’t want to make a fool of herself a second time. But even more, she didn’t like the idea that there was something she couldn’t do. She took the drill in her hand and began again, a little more cautiously this time.
    Betsy stood next to her and coached. “That’s right, now begin it gently and slowly. Easy pressure.”
    Stevie listened and she followed the instructions. They worked. Before too long the drill was cutting straight into the trunk of the tree. A small collection of shavings curled out of the hole in the trunk, drifting down into the snow beneath the drill.
    “Now you can put a little more pressure on, but not too much. Let the tool do the work.”
    That was a familiar idea to Stevie. One of the secrets of riding that she’d learned the hard way was to let the horse do the work. As a rider, what she had to do was tell the horse what she wanted, make sure he understood, and then let him do it. Beginning riders often had the mistaken notion that they had to keep telling the horseeverything, all the time. It usually resulted in a kind of “kick and yank” riding that was bad for the horse
and
the rider. Now all she had to do was let the drill do the work—except, of course, she had to keep on cranking it.
    “That’s deep enough!” Dinah declared, studying the amount of the drill bit that had disappeared into the tree trunk. “You’ve gotten beneath the bark and into the tree. That’s all you need!”
    Stevie dropped down to her knees to look for herself. It was unmistakable. She’d done it. She pulled the drill back out of the tree trunk. Proudly she took the spile that Dinah handed her and tapped it into the tree with the hammer Betsy gave her. Then, with some ceremony, she hung a bucket on the spile and placed a cover on the bucket.
    “Ta-
dah
!” she cried.
    Dinah and Betsy clapped.
    “Now let’s get back to work,” Dinah said.
    They found many more trees in the grove by the edge of the field and tapped them all. Then they moved on to another maple grove, and a third. After a while it seemed to Stevie that there was a nearly endless supply of maple trees and perhaps they’d never be done, never use all the buckets they’d brought. That was when she understood what Betsy and Dinah had meant about wishing