By the Shores of Silver Lake

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

  She gave one look around the little hollow while she helped Grace climb the bank.

  Grace walked so slowly that for a little while Laura carried her. Then she let her walk, for Grace was nearly three years old, and heavy. Then she lifted her again. So, carrying Grace and helping her walk, Laura brought her to the shanty and gave her to Mary.

  Then she ran toward the Big Slough, calling as she ran. “Pa! Ma! She’s here!” She kept on calling until Pa heard her and shouted to Ma, far in the tall grass. Slowly, together, they fought their way out of Big Slough and slowly came up to the shanty, draggled and muddy and very tired and thankful.

  “Where did you find her, Laura?” Ma asked, taking Grace in her arms and sinking into her chair.

  “In a—” Laura hesitated, and said, “Pa, could it really be a fairy ring? It is perfectly round. The bottom is perfectly flat. The bank around it is the same height all the way. You can’t see a sign of that place till you stand on the bank. It is very large, and the whole bottom of it is covered solidly thick with violets. A place like that couldn’t just happen, Pa. Something made it.”

  “You are too old to be believing in fairies, Laura,” Ma said gently. “Charles, you must not encourage such fancies.”

  “But it isn’t—it isn’t like a real place, truly,” Laura protested. “And smell how sweet the violets are. They aren’t like ordinary violets.”

  “They do make the whole house sweet,” Ma admitted. “But they are real violets, and there are no fairies.”

  “You are right, Laura; human hands didn’t make that place,” Pa said. “But your fairies were big, ugly brutes, with horns on their heads and humps on their backs. That place is an old buffalo wallow. You know buffaloes are wild cattle. They paw up the ground and wallow in the dust, just as cattle do.

  “For ages the buffalo herds had these wallowing places. They pawed up the ground and the wind blew the dust away. Then another herd came along and pawed up more dust in the same place. They went always to the same places, and—”

  “Why did they, Pa?” Laura asked.

  “I don’t know,” Pa said. “Maybe because the ground was mellowed there. Now the buffalo are gone, and grass grows over their wallows. Grass and violets.”

  “Well,” Ma said. “All’s well that ends well, and here it is long past dinnertime. I hope you and Carrie didn’t let the biscuits burn, Mary.”

  “No, Ma,” Mary said, and Carrie showed her the biscuits wrapped in a clean cloth to keep warm, and the potatoes drained and mealy-dry in their pot. And Laura said, “Sit still, Ma, and rest. I’ll fry the salt pork and make the gravy.”

  No one but Grace was hungry. They ate slowly, and then Pa finished planting the windbreak. Ma helped Grace hold her own little tree while Pa set it firmly. When all the trees were planted, Carrie and Laura gave them each a full pail of water from the well. Before they finished, it was time to help get supper.

  “Well,” Pa said at the table. “We’re settled at last on our homestead claim.”

  “Yes,” said Ma. “All but one thing. Mercy, what a day this has been. I didn’t get time to drive the nail for the bracket.”

  “I’ll tend to it, Caroline, as soon as I drink my tea,” Pa said.

  He took the hammer from his toolbox under the bed, and drove a nail into the wall between the table and the whatnot. “Now bring on your bracket and the china shepherdess!” he said.

  Ma brought them to him. He hung the bracket on the nail and stood the china shepherdess on its shelf. Her little china shoes, her tight china bodice and her golden hair were as bright as they had been so long ago in the Big Woods. Her china skirts were as wide and white; her cheeks as pink and her blue eyes as sweet as ever. And the bracket that Pa had carved for Ma’s Christmas present so long ago was still without a scratch, and even more glossily polished than when it was new.

  Over the door Pa hung his rifle and his shotgun, and then he hung on a nail above them a bright, new horseshoe.

  “Well,” he said, looking around at the snugly crowded shanty. “A short horse is soon curried. This is our tightest squeeze yet, Caroline, but it’s only a beginning.” Ma’s eyes smiled into his eyes, and he said to Laura, “I could sing you a song about that horseshoe.”

  She brought him the fiddle box, and he sat down in the doorway and tuned the fiddle. Ma settled in her chair to rock Grace to sleep. Softly Laura washed the dishes and Carrie wiped them while Pa played the fiddle and sang.

  “We journey along quite contented in life

  And try to live peaceful with all.

  We keep ourselves free from all trouble and strife

  And we’re glad when our friends on us call.

  Our home it is happy and cheerful and bright,

  We’re content and we ask nothing more.

  And the reason we prosper, I’ll tell to you now,

  There’s a horseshoe hung over the door.

  “Keep the horseshoe hung over the door!

  It will bring you good luck evermore.

  If you would be happy and free from all care,

  Keep the horseshoe hung over the door!”

  “It sounds rather heathenish to me, Charles,” Ma said.

  “Well, anyway,” Pa replied, “I wouldn’t wonder if we do pretty well here, Caroline. In time we’ll build more rooms on this house, and maybe have a driving team and buggy. I’m not going to plow up much grass. We’ll have a garden and a little field, but mostly raise hay and cattle. Where so many buffalo ranged, must be a good country for cattle.”

  The dishes were done. Laura carried the dishpan some distance from the back door and flung the water far over the grass where tomorrow’s sun would dry it. The first stars were pricking through the pale sky. A few lights twinkled yellow in the little town, but the whole great plain of the earth was shadowy. There was hardly a wind, but the air moved and whispered to itself in the grasses. Laura almost knew what it said. Lonely and wild and eternal were land and water and sky and the air blowing.

  “The buffalo are gone,” Laura thought. “And now we’re homesteaders.”

  Chapter 31

  Mosquitoes

  “We must build a stable for the horses,” Pa said. “It won’t always be warm enough for them to stay outdoors and a bad storm might come even in summer. They must have shelter.”

  “Ellen too, Pa?” Laura asked.

  “Cattle are better off outdoors in the summer,” Pa told her. “But I like to have horses in a stable at night.”

  Laura held boards for Pa. She handed him tools and brought nails while he built the stable, at the west of the house against the little hill. It would be sheltered there on the west and the north, when the cold winter winds were blowing.

  The days were warm. Mosquitoes came out of the Big Slough at sundown and sang their high, keen song all night as they swarmed around Ellen, biting her and sucking the blood until she ran around and around on her picket rope. They went into the stable and bit the horses until they pulled at their halters and stamped. They came into the claim shanty and bit everyone there until great blotches raised on faces and hands.

  Their singing and the sting of their bites made night a torment.

  “This will never do,” Pa said. “We must have mosquito bar on the windows and door.”

  “It’s the Big Slough,” Ma complained. “The mosquitoes come from there. I wish we were farther away from it.”

  But Pa liked the Big Slough. “There are acres and acres of hay there, that anyone can have for the cutting,” he told Ma. “No one will ever take up homesteads in the Big Slough. There is only upland hay on our place, but with the Big Slough so near, we can always cut hay there and have all we need.

  “Besides, all the prairie grass is full of mosquitoes too. I’ll go to town today and get some mosquito bar.”

  Pa brought yards of pink mosquito bar from town and strips of lumber to make a frame for a screen door.

  While he made the door, Ma tacked mosquito bar over the windows. Th
en she tacked it to the door frame and Pa hung the screen door.

  That night he built a smudge of old, damp grass, so the smoke would drift before the stable door. Mosquitoes would not go through the smoke.

  Pa made another smudge so Ellen could stand in its smoke and she went at once and stayed there.

  Pa made sure there was no dry grass near the smudges and built them up so they would last all night.

  “There!” he said, “I guess that fixes the mosquitoes.”

  Chapter 32

  Evening Shadows Fall

  Sam and David stood quietly, resting in the stable, with the smoke screen before the door. Ellen, on her picket rope, lay comfortably in the smoke from the smudge. No mosquitoes could get at them.

  There was not one of the singing pests inside the claim shanty. They could not come through the mosquito bar over the door and windows.

  “Now we are all snug,” Pa said, “settled at last on our homestead. Bring me the fiddle, Laura, and we’ll have a little music!”

  Grace was safely in her bed with Carrie beside her. Ma and Mary sat rocking gently in the shadows. But moonlight shone through the southern window and touched Pa’s face and hands and the fiddle as the bow moved smoothly over the strings.

  Laura sat near Mary and watched it as she thought how the moonlight would be shining in the fairy ring where the violets grew. It was just the night for fairies to be dancing there.

  Pa was singing with the fiddle:

  In Scarlet town where I was born,

  There was a fair maid dwellin’;

  And every youth cried ‘Well-a-wa.’

  Her name was Barbary Allen.

  All in the merry month of May,

  When green buds they were swellin’

  Young Johnnie Grove on his death bed lay

  For love of Barbary Allen.”

  Laura drew the curtain as she and Mary joined Carrie and Grace in their tiny bedroom.

  And, as she fell asleep still thinking of violets and fairy rings and moonlight over the wide, wide land, where their very own homestead lay, Pa and the fiddle were softly singing:

  “Home! Home! Sweet, sweet home,

  Be it ever so humble

  There is no place like home.”

  The End