Grand Change by William Andrews Page B

axes of winter rang in lonely echo. And the crosscut saws see-sawed in their sidewise bite, with two men kneeling, their arms pumping like the drivers of a locomotive, the saw teeth barely missing their upright shins, the spurting sawdust speckling their gumboots and the snow at their toes.
    Then, on moonlit evenings, the blood mares drew the pung and jaunting sleighs, their tails and manes a wisping blur, their swift hooves flipping fragments of snow over the dashboards and peppering the buffalos and ticking of the leather mitts, their shadows bobbing, weaving and poking at the white-capped fence posts sailing past.
    The January thaw gave an interesting twist to the scene. The snow sank, and with it torrents of rain and rivers and lakes appeared in low-lying areas, horses plunged and sleighs floated. With the freeze, the snow turned to the texture of bread dough, the rivers and lakes to glass-hard sheets of ice that would “pick” from the sharp corks of horseshoes, and the sleighs would slew and side-haul at the horses.
    And there were scenes of harshness, too: of horses fighting their way through cold, blasting ground drifts while the drivers, their heads ducked into their collars, one-handed the reins and school children huddled under buffalos fighting off a numbing chill.

Winter on Hook Road
CHAPTER 4
    There were three major happenings that winter. The first, according to the old timers, was what qualified as an old-fashioned winter. It was not in league with the storm of ’26, when they could see only the rooftops of the houses in town and they had to bring in food by toboggan. But by the standards of the day, it was a hair-raiser.
    It came just after the January thaw, and we were pretty much confined to base for about a week. Outside, the wind went raving mad and the old house creaked and groaned as if in the throes of a nightmare. Aside from the day’s threshing, we only left the house to hack junks of beef off the carcass hanging in the shop, feed and water the stock, milk the farr cow and keep the manure accumulation to some kind of toleration by piling it outside the cow-stable door.
    Going to the barn in itself was a venture. When you opened the back door the wind would try to snap it out of your grasp and fight your closing it, then belt you, suck at your breath and lash your eyes with fine snow. You’d lean against the house for a breather and catch glimpses of the barn peak flashing through the white blast.
    Then you would have to have to fight your way, sometimes held to a standstill, finally stumbling from the sudden release, into the lee of the barn.
    The cold was never far away in the house. The water and milk buckets skimmed heavy with ice. Snow snuffed through the crack under the front door, and through the spaces at the window sashes. The windowpanes were blanked white with thick, furry, fancy frost patterns. The lamp would flicker and smoke from drafts coming from several directions. Some nights we didn’t go to bed at all. It was too cold, even with all your clothes on, heated bricks at your feet and a stack of bedclothes supplemented with an overcoat. We huddled around the kitchen stove with our feet on the oven door, listening to the radio, playing twenty questions or listening to The Boss tell his tales of yesterday.
    He could do a pretty good job when he got his pipe tucked into his cheek and the muse came into his eyes. He was almost as good as Tom Dougal, and like Tom, he didn’t just tell stories, he painted pictures. When he talked about the time he fell asleep driving the stumper at five years old, I saw the small bare feet, tanned and clay-speckled, dangling from the capstan top, the small head nodding at times, the reins beginning to slither through the small hands; saw the heavy plug horse hitched to the arm extending from the capstan top, his tail lazily sweeping at droning flies, a sifter bowl guarding him from nose flies, an empty feed bag hanging on one of