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she showed us treasures around our own home that we had lived with unwittingly. A bed of comfrey grew in profusion between the horse lot and the garden fence. We had meant to clear out "those weeds," but had fortunately been too busy. Now we had hot comfrey tea at bedtime, particularly when we felt as if a cold were coming on. And she laughed when we grieved to her that now we couldn't order any start of Jerusalem artichoke. We had a fencerow full of it that Zack's great-grandmother must have started and succeeding generations hadn't recognized.
    All in all, Lantana came near to being the most valuable of us, for she showed us the thousands of edible, useful, helpful growing things that our culture had discarded as unsophisticated. And they worked!
    So when her dark face was bent over her whittling, we listened to her tales and her advice, for we were trying to soak up all we could while we had her. And her tales were wonderful, all about great catfish that her father had caught from the river when she was a girl, expeditions to catch snakes to sell to "them perfessers " at the college, dark nights when hoot owls called and "de Boogeyman" lurked in the shadows on the way to the privy as they went with the lantern.
    There were many of these dark days, for the winter was stormy past all recollection. Even at the risk of a wetting, we did much visiting back and forth, for all of us, I think, felt a need for other human beings. And on one such gloomy day, Lantana put aside her whittling and held her hands to her face.
    "Law, Miss Luce,- we've been lettin ' our heads just set on our shoulders without workin '. You know what? Down this here river there's many a little old farm like this 'n. Now there's some folks on some of em , and that's all right, but on lots of em I feel like everybody's done gone off, just like Mrs. Yunt and the old gentleman up the road. And every one of them has livestock!"
    I looked at her in astonishment, amazed that we could have been so preoccupied that it hadn't occurred to us. "What was penned up is dead, by now, but there's got to be lots of cows and horses and mules and calves all over, fenced into big pastures, slowly starving to death for want of the hay in the barns that they can't get to. We've got to get out with the wagon and tools, Lantana, and see what we can do."
    A break came two days later. The sun shone forth, weakly but with enough persistence that we felt the rains were over for a little while. Then Mom Allie, Lantana, Lucas, and I loaded hay hooks, wire cutters, pitchforks, and assorted halters and ropes onto the big wagon that Zack and I had built, hitched it behind Maud, and took off down the wagon track that followed the river for miles.
    I hadn't known that other farms could be reached by that route, but Lantana insisted that nobody had ever gone any other way in her youth.
    "You can go 'way round by the road, twelve or fo'teen miles, and get there by car, but in the old days, we had to walk or ride a mule, and this was the short way.. Go five miles along this old track, and you'll see ten or eleven little trails cuttin ' into it. They goes to farms that's not more than a quarter mile from the water."
    While we had no hope of covering the entire count of farms, we intended to go as far as we could and to do as much as possible in the space of a day. The first track we spotted some half mile from the point at which our own trail intersected the river track. We had to break out the axe, for saplings had grown up between the old wagon-wheel ruts. Lucas and I soon had them down enough for Maud to negotiate, and I ranged ahead, then, chopping out and laying by whatever blocked the way.
    That first farm shook us. Penned closely in a new, tight barnyard had been ten weanling calves. They lay in a bunch, their skin hanging over their bones like spotted leather. The cold weather had kept them fairly well, but there wasn't enough flesh left on them to raise a stink.
    We knew that nobody could