Winterbound Read Online Free Page B

here, and we could train morning-glories up it,” Kay proposed sarcastically. “They’d go well with the storks!” But Caroline had the most practical suggestion.
    â€œWe could fence off the fireplace in back with chicken wire and raise baby chicks there. Shirley said they knew a woman and she raised baby chicks in her fireplace all winter, and they slept under the stove to keep warm.” “Heavens!” cried Garry. “Can you see Big Bertha hatching out a family? How would you like a lot of little chicks running about on cast-iron legs?”
    â€œI said back of the stove,” retorted Caroline, who was extremely literal-minded. “And I don’t see why you always make fun of me when I have an idea!”
    So far the first official kindling of Big Bertha had been put off, for it was still possible to use the fireplace, even though obscured by her portly presence, and when the logs were blazing and she stood silhouetted against the glow the effect suggested a fat hippopotamus basking genially in the warmth.
    On the afternoon that the children drove to the cidermill Garry took a basket and went up the hill for frost grapes. It was a bit late to gather them, but Mrs. Rowe had said they were good for jelly, and Garry knew where there was a big vine, not too high for easy reach, for as a rule frost grapes are like squirrels and cling to the highest branches. She climbed the rise behind the house, crossed two steep pastures, and sat down on the last stone wall to rest and gaze about her. The sun lay warm on the lichen-covered rocks, a woodpecker was busy on a dead chestnut tree close by, and a chipmunk slipped out from a chink in the wall, ran a few inches in his curious jerky way, exactly as if he were being pulled on a wire, Garry thought, stared at her and slipped back again.
    How could anyone want to live anywhere but in the country, she wondered, her eyes resting on the valley below her, on the long roof of the old house set among its yellowed maple trees and on the smaller gray roof below it, with smoke curling up from its chimney, a gray wisp on the clear air. Out here it was as though the city did not exist, and so far as Garry was concerned it could cease to exist forever, for she had none of Kay’s hankerings for city life and comforts, and it never cost her a moment’s concern whether the daily paper arrived by the noon mail or not, except for the one day in the week when it had gardening news.
    If Garry had any definite ambition beyond the presentit was to be a scientist like her father, to go on expeditions, to explore, Central America or anywhere else, it didn’t matter, so long as it was wild. She devoured travel books whenever she could get them and liked to pore over the Atlas. But she was interested in live things, not so much in prehistoric ones or the remains of dead civilizations. She saw life, the whole world as it were, stretching out immeasurably in all directions, radiating from that one tiny unimportant focus which was herself, Margaret Ellis. It was all there, she was just at the beginning of it. There was no hurry at all. It was a play which might begin at any moment. Sooner or later things would happen. Meantime she had the happy faculty of being able to live in the moment and to become very thoroughly engrossed in present interests. Gardening was the chief one. She liked things that she could touch with her hands, plant and tend and make grow. She liked to dig in the earth, handle stones, drive nails into wood, and whatever she did she did thoroughly. It was a family joke about Garry that at nine years old, having been given a small skin horse for a birthday present she had taken her weekly dime to the secondhand bookstore she passed on the way to school where in one of the outside bargain boxes lay a pile of remaindered copies of a veterinarian handbook entitled: The Horse: Its Care in Sickness and Health . The old bookseller, who had noticed her