After breakfast they piled their
implements on a mudboat, which Dannie drove, while Jimmy rode one
of his team, and led the other, and opened the gates. They began on
Dannie's field, because it was closest, and for the next two weeks,
unless it were too rainy to work, they plowed, harrowed, lined off,
and planted the seed.
The blackbirds followed along the furrows picking up grubs, the
crows cawed from high tree tops, the bluebirds twittered about
hollow stumps and fence rails, the wood thrushes sang out their
souls in the thickets across the river, and the King Cardinal of
Rainbow Bottom whistled to split his throat from the giant
sycamore. Tender greens were showing along the river and in the
fields, and the purple of red-bud mingled with the white of wild
plum all along the Wabash.
The sunny side of the hill that sloped down to Rainbow Bottom was
a mass of spring beauties, anemones, and violets; thread-like ramps
rose rank to the scent among them, and round ginger leaves were
thrusting their folded heads through the mold. The Kingfisher was
cleaning his house and fishing from his favorite stump in the
river, while near him, at the fall of every luckless worm that
missed its hold on a blossom-whitened thorn tree, came the splash
of the great Black Bass. Every morning the Bass took a trip around
Horseshoe Bend food hunting, and the small fry raced for life
before his big, shear-like jaws. During the heat of noon he lay in
the deep pool below the stump, and rested; but when evening came he
set out in search of supper, and frequently he felt so good that he
leaped clear of the water, and fell back with a splash that threw
shining spray about him, or lashed out with his tail and sent
widening circles of waves rolling from his lurking place.
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