Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and
gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of
cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me they were very good. We had to
walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.



VI

ONE AFTERNOON WE WERE having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank
where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a
shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little horsepond
that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the tall
asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy
green.

Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was
comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full
blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the
badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of
dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down
into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle
underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog
dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and
petted by his master. She knew a dog who had a star on his collar for
every badger he had killed.

The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all