Staring at the Sun Read Online Free

but in time she might discover the question, and later she might discover the answer. She knew about the mink because of Aunt Evelyn’s prints. There were two of them, left behind years earlier with a promise of early collection, and subsequently shuffled from wall to wall. In the end, they were put in Jean’s room. Fatherwondered if one of them wasn’t unsuitable; but Mother insisted that Evelyn’s pictures stay together. It was only honest, she said.
    The horizontal picture showed two men in a forest somewhere; they wore old-fashioned clothes and hats. The one with the beard was holding up a ferret by the scruff of its neck, while the other man, the one without the beard, leaned on his gun. There was a pile of dead ferrets at his feet. Except that they weren’t ferrets, because the title of the picture was Mink Trapping; and underneath was a story Jean had read many times.
The Mink, like the muskrat and ermine long-tailed weasel, does not possess much cunning, and is easily captured in any kind of trap; it is taken in steel traps and box traps, but more generally in what are called deadfalls. It is attracted by any kind of flesh, but we have usually seen the traps baited with the head of a ruffed grouse, wild duck, chicken, jay, or other bird. The Mink is excessively tenacious of life, and we had found it still alive under a deadfall, with a pole lying across its body pressed down by a weight of 150 lbs., beneath which it had been struggling for nearly twenty-four hours.
    “Excessively tenacious of life” was not the only part she didn’t yet understand. What was a ruffed grouse? Or a muskrat? She knew what a wild duck was, and there had been a pair of barking jays last spring in the beech wood at the dogleg fourteenth, and they had chicken for Sunday lunch when her father had done a customer a favour. Mrs. Baxter would come in to pluck and draw it for her mother in the morning, and would call back at about five o’clock for one of the legs, which would be wrapped in greaseproof paper. Jean’s father liked to make jokes about Mrs. Baxter’s leg while he was carving, jokes which made his daughter giggle and his wife purse her lips.
    “Does Mrs. Baxter have the head as well?” Jean once asked.
    “No, dear. Why?”
    “What do you do with it?”
    “Throw it in the dustbin.”
    “Shouldn’t you keep it to sell to the mink trappers?”
    “You just get them to call, my girl,” replied her father jovially. “You just get them to call.”
    The vertical print in Jean’s room showed a ladder set up against a tree, with words painted on the rungs. INDUSTRY said the bottom rung; TEMPERANCE said the second, though really it only said TEMPERAN , because the last two letters were cut off by the knee ot the ladder climber. Then came PRUDENCE, INTEGRITY, ECONOMY, PUNCTUALITY, COURAGE and, the top rung, PERSEVERANCE . In the foreground people were queuing to climb the tree, which had Christmas balls hanging from its leaves, with more words written on them like “Happiness,” “Honor,” “the Favor of God” and “Goodwill to Men.” In the background were people who didn’t want to climb the tree; they were gambling, swindling, betting, going on strike and entering a large building called Stock Exchange.
    Jean understood the general intention of the picture, though sometimes she absently confused this tree with the Tree of Knowledge, which she had heard about in Scripture. The Tree of Knowledge was clearly a bad thing to have climbed; this tree was clearly a good thing, even if she didn’t really understand all the words on the rungs, or the two written on the main shafts of the ladder: MORALITY , said one, HONESTY , the other. Some of the words she thought she understood. Honesty meant keeping Aunt Evelyn’s two pictures together, and not moving your ball to a better position when no one was looking; Punctuality meant not being late for school; Economy was what her father did at the shop and her mother did at