The Indifference of Tumbleweed Read Online Free

worked part of the time. Of his children, Reuben and I were the only ones to retain a suggestion of an Irish lilt, having learned it from our parents when it was still strong in them. How people spoke was a topic of endless comment, with immigrants from so many different countries, all striving to sound as American as they could.
    â€˜Coyotes?’ I was mortified. ‘Were they not wolves?’
    â€˜What’s the difference?’ asked Nam, who was looking mulish at having missed the night sounds.
    â€˜A coyote is smaller, with a bushy tail,’ my father instructed her. ‘And it sings a wilder song.’
    The poetry in my father’s soul was an Irishness that would never fade, and which I devoutly hoped had been passed to me, though I had little reason to think it likely.
    â€˜Are they a danger, Dadda?’ asked my little sister.
    â€˜Not at all, my pet. Apart from keeping us awake all night, of course.’
    â€˜I did not wake once,’ she said sadly.
    It fell to me, for some reason, to record the days as they passed. I had a journal, bound in good red calfskin, for keeping a log of our journey, as a ship’s captain would do. Every evening, at least to begin with, my father would ask to see it, and suggest entries to be added. During the first week, I had written three entries. The third one went:
    11 th May. Warm day, with a clear sky. Mr Franklin greased the axle of our wagon, and with a dab of spare grease fixed the squeak on Grandma’s spinning wheel. Mr Bricewood’s dog caught a chipmunk and killed it. We ate salt beef and rye, with a cup of Daddy’s beer. The water tastes dusty. We expect to reach a river in a day or so, for refilling.
    â€˜Good,’ my father approved, his dark eyes still on the page. ‘You have a talent for this, my girl. Who else would ever think to say the part about the chipmunk?’
    â€˜Is it too much?’ I worried. ‘The book might be full before we reach -’ I had been intending to say ‘the end’ but it sounded strange. We knew there must be an end, that we would have to stop when the land ran out, and the vast ocean took its place. But we had no name for the precise place we were heading to, other than ‘Oregon City’ – which was really no city at all. We had no pictures in our minds of the fresh buildings we would know as home when the journeying ceased.
    He shook his head. ‘Who’s to say what argument that might settle, in a month’s time? Jude might claim ’twas a prairie dog that was caught, or Reuben might insist it was a raccoon, and up pipes young Charity Collins, with her journal, to say “No, boys, it’s written here that the creature was a chipmunk. It says so in plain writing.”’ We laughed at the idea, and I felt deeply important.
    And yet it worried at me, the inadequacy of those few words. The dog was in reality a big shaggy dimwit named Melchior, barely a year old with feet scarcely under his control. The chipmunk had no notion of its danger, sitting in all innocence under a tuft of long spiny grass. It lifted its tiny head, eyes fixed on the sudden change to its world and the new sounds we brought with us. Voices, rumbles, squeaks – the invasion that mankind represents to the natural world perhaps a wholly new perception for a creature born during the previous winter or spring. I was watching the munk when Melchior attacked. I was as startled as the little creature itself must have been. His ears rose, his jaws opened and he lunged directly at his prey, like a great whale swallowing a fish. It must have died at the first bite of those strong young teeth. But he did not swallow it like a whale at all. He dropped it, limp and damp and stared at it for a long time. Then he nudged it carefully, perhaps thinking it might bite back. And then our wagon began to move, and I was drawn away from the scene of the careless slaughter, before I could see