Tsuga's Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

children, who had been cold and even colder because they were a little hungry all the time. Jen hadn’t been to the barn to see Oka for several days, so she put on her waterproof boots—the ones with the spruce pitch on the seams—and waded out between the walls of snow in the mud and slush of the path to the barn. She opened the door upon the barn’s cold air, glad she was bringing in the warmth to the animals.
    “Oka?” she said, her eyes just beginning after a minute to get used to the hay-smelling dimness. She felt her way along a wooden railing until she could see again. “Oka?”
    She was at Oka and Brin’s stall. She heard the heavy movements of the large animals. The floor creaked, the warm smells surrounded her, stronger as the summery air poured into the barn. There was Oka’s broad wet nose, her wide cow face and bent-over ears, her brown eyes that seemed so kind. Oka gave a deep sigh and a low humming sound in her throat to let Jen know that she was welcome in the dim dusty winter home of the animals. Brin, who was always calmer and quieter than Oka, gave a smooth moo that was half breath, half voice, but he remained back in the square stall, lying down in the hay with his thick forelegs bent in front of his great broad brisket.
    Sometimes Jen thought she could talk to Oka, but sometimes she wondered if they ever really understood each other. Maybe she made up Oka’s words in her own mind and Oka hadn’t really said them at all. As for Brin, he never really felt like saying much. She never heard the thoughts of the goats. They seemed so quick and neat and clever, but she never could understand them.
    But Oka did say things to her, answered her questions in ways that seemed too strange for her to have thought up all by herself. They were cow thoughts, ruminant deep slow answers, as heavy in themselves as Oka’s great body and bones. “Oka knows how butter grows,” the butter song went, and those seemed to be Oka’s words too.
    “My father’s sick, Oka,” Jen said. “And you didn’t give much milk this morning. Are you sick too? I hope you aren’t.
    As Oka moved her head slowly, sighing, her jaw sliding slowly from side to side, Jen seemed to hear deep, echoing words. They were about a calf, a brown and white calf with long awkward legs and a handsome bony head, and how her milk was rich with cream then as she turned the warm air and sweet clover grass into richness and sustenance, the giver of life. But now she was sad, sad down through the hollow four-chambered depths of her cow-ness, heavy, heavy with sadness for a place she had once been long ago, a wide meadow and a bony calf, sweet water and the green heat of the grass.
    Jen was filled with sadness to hear of the deep yearning of her friend. She had always been so grateful for the milk and butter and cheese that Oka gave them. Oka was the giver of life, and now her sadness made Jen sorrow for the beautiful rich meadow and the bony long-legged calf, as if she, too, had been happy and calm there once long ago.
    Even before Jen could get back from the barn to the cabin another change in the weather came moving inexorably down from Cascom Mountain. The warm air passed through the small openings of the farm, slid wetly across the cabin and the outbuildings to be followed by a deep cold, not a wind but a change as palpable as a moving wall. On her way back to the cabin Jen’s boot soles wanted to stick frozen to the slush that was turning to clear ice. She almost had to leave one of them on the doorstep. It wanted to stay there, as if it were a tree with roots deep into the sudden ice.
    In the cabin they all felt it too. The wet snow on the roof creaked like a great fist as it turned into ice. Tim Hemlock, shivering by the lire in the bear robe, said, “Now everything will freeze solid. Everything will be as hard as iron.”
    “Iron,” Arn said. He seemed to remember something about iron, ice as hard as iron.
    “We’ll have to chop the wood