Read To Make My Bread for Free Online

They sat as they had been sitting for the past two days, listlessly around the fire, except when one of them had dragged out for wood.
    â€œWell,” Emma said at last. “It looks as if we can’t meet our good fortune.”
    â€œHit’s late coming,” Granpap told her.
    Kirk got up slowly. He took his old felt hat down from the wall and buttoned his shirt at the neck. They watched him go. They were still listless. The hope had not got into them, really.
    Later Frank recovered a little and got up to go. Granpap and Basil went with him. They met Kirk just on the other side of Thunderhead. He had stopped on the trail, and was very sick from some crackers he had eaten at the store. Beside him was the food for the two families. And inside the meal sacks were two big soupbones. Swain had slaughtered a steer. There was very little meat on the bones, but at least the marrow would make enough flavor for soup. Frank left them at the fork of his trail and walked down carrying his part of the raw food.
    Hearing that Kirk had been sick from the crackers, Emma made them all wait for soup. Her eyes glistened as she looked at the food. Before they had shone with a cold hard spark. Now they glistened warmly. She looked at the children warmly. For the last two days she had almost hated them, because she could do nothing to help them in their misery.
    Long before all the power had been cooked from the bone she served the soup. She was forced to do this. For as soon as the soup began to send out an odor of cooked meat the faces in the cabin drew closer to the pot and hung over it. She was dizzy with hunger, and she saw the faces in a sort of daze as they moved closer to the pot. When the last drop of soup had been gulped down, Granpap took the bone from the pot. He laid it on the table and taking his ax from the corner tried to crush the bone. He was too weak to raise the ax very high, and it bounded off. The slippery bone fell to the floor. Everyone was watching Granpap. Their hunger was still very strong. And the dogs were watching. They pounced on the bone and would have taken it, but Kirk and Basil kicked them off. Granpap motioned the two boys away and raised his ax over the bone that lay on the floor. This time he smashed the bone in pieces, and there was enough for all of them. For some time after there was the sound of people sucking at bones, and when they were finished the dogs took what was left. They crunched with their sharper teeth and in their turn sucked at the edges.
    Emma cooked the fatback and made corn pones. Then Granpap and the boys were strong enough to use the shot Kirk had brought from Swain’s. As long as that lasted they would have meat.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T HE dogs, lean from the winter, dug into mole hills and ate scraps from the rabbits, so they grew a shade less scrawny. Plott, Granpap’s bitch, was big with puppies. One day before light she woke them up with her howling and before John and Bonnie could reach her four puppies were born. Three were dead. The fourth John and Bonnie took for their own. They named it Georgy after the place outside where Granpap had fought when he was a boy.
    John and Bonnie nursed the little furry pup as they sat around the fire at night. Though the spring was balmy as the fall had been, the nights were still frosty. Now they were all able to look back on the hard days and talk about them. The cold winter reminded Granpap and Emma of the great blizzard. John envied Kirk and Basil, for they remembered seeing the frozen cattle. The night of that storm some twenty frightened cattle, blinded by the snow, rushed across Swain’s meadow until the rocky cliff of Barren She Mountain stopped them.
    Jim Hawkins, who lived on the meadow side of Laurel Creek, had left Swain’s store just in time, for as he reached his cabin the terrible blizzard began. He heard the animals scream. Two days later when people could travel through the snow, word went around that there