Aunt Elizabeth surprises a snake, and Uncle Henry has to conic and drive it away, and so Amu Elizabeth discovers from bis purpled mouth his defection from duty, and she gives him a tongue-lashing for his sins. The portly picker's pail still rattles. He can Stand no mute. When his wife is bent over, head down on her third pail of blue-berries, Uncle Henry waddles to the stone wall and dives over. He falls farther than he expected to and brings up in a juniper patch, barbed with hundreds of little daggers. and in many other kinds of thorns. He finds his pants fishhooked with beggar lice and bristled with burdocks. He finds walking is an agony and sitting a torture. The next half hour Uncle Henry spends picking thorns out of his person.
Aunt Elizabeth hallos to her husband. Uncle Henry hears her just over the wall. But he sits tight, free of thorns now. and smiles. A mother partridge and her pretty brood come upon him and wink at him with round, friendly eyes. Uncle Henry winks back at them. They keep his secret and melt away into the spruces. But a saucy red squirrel discovers him. begins to scold and criticize his appearance, and threatens to give him away with his chattering. And so Uncle Henry walks quickly away with tobacco and sleep and peace in his mind. He will tell his wife he got lost in the woods. He starts for the clearing, and he does get good and lost in the woods.
Peter is on his third pail in his own private huckleberry patch when he hears what he takes for a bear. It is Uncle Henry, though. Lost and confounded, he has taken a good nap and now wakes and wonders which way is home. Having stumbled by accident into Peter's berries, he starts to fill himself with the highly spiced huckle-berries. Peter hails him. And Peter saves him a lot of grief by giving him a whole quart of his berries, and makes a friend for life.
Uncle Henry unslings his twenty-two and disgorges boxes of cartridges. Peter leaves his uncle with his berries and turns into Daniel Bonne. He fills the woods with whistling lead and falling squirrels, red and gray. The sound he makes attracts Andrew and James and John, who have been hard at berries till now, to him. They join their brother and demand their share of the ammunition. 'Peter gives it to them. But he has pretty well scared all he chipmunks and woodchucks into the next county. So the rest of the boys have to pick on the crows. Andrew wings one down, but all the others leave the state screaming blue murder. After that they have to use up the rest of the cartridges in the five boxes cutting off oak leaves and the fungi on birch trees. Uncle Henry gets in another nap on a bank of moss. The boys have to prod him with he twenty-two's muzzle to wake him up and get him moving again.
The hunters come upon Uncle Timothy curled up round a bottle of their fathers bourbon under a hack-matack tree. Their uncle is drowning his sorrow over the lost quahaugs. He has about a quart of blackberries and blueberries, assorted, all mixed in with twigs, leaves, and inlelible bunchberries. And he is piucushtnned with thistle cads, beggar lice, and rose apples. He hires the smaller toys to pick them out of him at a nickel apiece. Uncle Henry, dry from so much sleep, helps Uncle Timothy finish the last of the bourbon. The two uncles then burst into song. The day is a good day after all.
The dish of the month is Mother's blueberry pudding, a stout concoction of a quart of flour, two teaspoons of cream of tartar and one of baking soda, sifted, and two teaspoons of lard worked with the hands into the (lour, the whole mass made into a heavy liquid with milk, a pint of the blueberries, dampened and rolled in dry Hour first to keep them from sinking in the pudding, added to the mixture with a teaspoonful of salt. Having greased her biggest lard pail, Mother pours the makings of her pudding into it, sets the pail in a big kettle filled with boiling water, and cooks it for two hours. When the pudding is turned out on the platter, Father cuts it horizontally with a looping codline, and Mother hands out the slices, wetting each down with thick vanilla cream sauce.
At the roundup of the day's take of berries, it is found that Aunt Elizabeth, with no scout to guide her but her fine nose for berries, has come home with twelve quarts of blueberries, six of blackberries, and two of huckleberries. The uncles are a total loss, but very songful and happy. Each of the girls has gathered about ten quarts of berries, Andrew, James, and John together muster seven. But Peter, for all the nine squirrel pelts on his belt, pours out thirty quarts of perfect blackberries, blueberries, and huckle-berries. He wins applause for upholding the family's honor on the berry fields and saving a lot of sweetness for their own winter. But Aunt Elizabeth sets her lips in a thin line and declares that she will tie that boy to her apron strings tomorrow, and then she will know where to go for berries.
But next day ten yoke of oxen could not drag Peter berrying, let alone the apron strings of an aunt. For word has spread up and down the coast like wildfire that the tuna have arrived. Peter is for the new reach boat, with the pulpit erected on its prow against this day. The menfolks get up at crack of day and load in stout hawsvrs of fishlines with hooks the size of Peter's hand, long coils of rope with kegs at the ends of them and poles stuck up in them carrying the family colors on gay gonfalons, and pies and cakes entire and stacks of sandwiches Mother has got up ahead of the morning star to put up.
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