Read Into the Wilderness for Free Online Page B

very
hungry indeed and she worked her way through the plate quickly. Her appetite
and appreciation were not lost on Curiosity, who set her dough to rise and
poured
Elizabeth
more milk.
Elizabeth
thought of asking Curiosity to sit and eat with her, but she realized that the
older woman had probably been up for hours and had eaten long ago, and that she
had many hours of work ahead before she would find time to sit down again.
Elizabeth
was thinking
about Curiosity when a back door opened in a flurry of snow and Galileo came
in, stamping and whooshing with the cold.
    "My
Lord!" he said, dumping his load of firewood onto the hearth. "But
what a weather. Good morning, Miss Elizabeth!"
    Elizabeth
returned his greeting but he had already turned to address his wife.
    "And
I suppose you still need those supplies, and I suppose I still have to hitch
the team and go down to the village in this snow." He shook his head.
    "And
I suppose snow is nothing new and I suppose it's Christmas Eve and I suppose
you don't want me serving up beans and pickled cabbage for dinner, do
you?" Curiosity answered in staccato. But they were grinning at each
other, and Daisy did not seem in the least perturbed, so
Elizabeth
assumed that this tone was an
everyday one.
    "Are
you going into town?" she asked Galileo. "May I come along?" She
had already slipped down from her stool. "Please do wait, it will only
take me a minute."
    It
barely seemed worth the effort of hitching the team, for the sleigh brought
them into the village in just a few minutes.
Elizabeth
wished that she had walked, for the
village fairly flew by: scattered cabins, the church of raw wood, its windows
shuttered and the little steeple without a bell. The parsonage stood off to the
right, a somewhat finer building of board and shingle rather than logs, but
small and with only a few window sashes. To the far left, a finer house of
field stone and brick; no doubt it belonged to the doctor. There were a
smokehouse, stables, and black smithy She noted, although she tried not to, that
each cabin had a dooryard cluttered with stacked wood, farm tools, and dark icy
patches where dishwater had been tossed. Here and there laundry had been hung
out and shirts and trousers and sheets seemed to be standing sentry, frozen
into awkward contortions. There were few people to see: outside a cabin of
squared logs a woman wrapped in shawls drew water at a stone well, an old
raccoon cap on her head and a baby strapped to her chest with a leather belt.
Down at the edge of Half Moon Lake, surrounded with tree stumps like beard
stubble, there were men out on the ice fishing with nets. Boys pushed a ball
with long sticks, shouting and tussling.
    Elizabeth
was
both relieved and disappointed: relieved to see people carrying on with normal
lives such as she had known in
England
,
and disappointed that everything was so familiar. The village was, if anything,
shabby, and the buildings, while solid, were plain. The trading post was a log
building like the rest but with a long, deep porch, empty now, and tiny glass windows
on either side of the door. There was nothing picturesque about
Paradise
. It was hewn too rawly from the forest, it sat
too awkwardly on the shores of the lake.
    What a terrible prig you are , she
sniffed at herself. You'll have to do
better than that, my girl, if you intend to teach school here.
    Watching
Galileo tie the team to the hitching post,
Elizabeth
realized with a start that the
people in this place would have children, and that she must convince them to
send those children to her school. And more, there was no way to be introduced
to them, except to do it herself. She had never in her life taken up a
conversation with a person to whom she had not been properly and formally
introduced, with the exception of servants and shop clerks. Almost paralyzed
with worry, she watched as Galileo solved her problem by stepping into the room
behind her and calling out: "Good morning. This here is Miss