Aunt Hat says it was. God's will. So it was when Peter stuck a tine of the dung fork into his foot digging for angleworms in the dark where James had dug before him and had left the dung fork there and forgotten to tell Peter about it. She also said it would be God's will if Peter got a case of lockjaw out of the mishap. It was God's will, too, when Uncle Timothy broke his log on the ice cake running wild at Sam Linscott's ice house two years ago. The one thing Uncle Timothy begged them to do for him, so his leg would knit and be some use to him again, was to get Aunt Harriet out of the house before he had to use poison on her.
Sure enough. Aunt Hattie is her cheerful old self right at the start. She is quite calm and sings as she puts the lard on Mother's arm where she has scalded it with fat that splashed up from the skillet when she was frying a batch of donuts for Aunt Hattie. In spite of burns, blows, stabbings, and broken limbs, Hat always looks on the cheerful side of things.
Peter has to keep an eye on his hazelnuts in the lower swamp. The red squirrels are keeping an eye on them also. But Uncle Cephus feels the first frost in his bones and cells Peter so, and Peter gets up under the morning Star, lakes the lantern and goes through the silver powder of the first white frost to his trees. He finds the burrs sprung open and the twin nuts ready to pop out at dawn, and he pops them all into his pockets. Uncle Cephus is wiser than the squirrels at weather.
But the squirrels get most of the beechnuts in the upper pasture. Peter goes up there a few dawns later, with his feet white with frost, and finds only the hairy open burrs. And all the farm's squirrels set up a great laughter at Peter as he stands there shivering in the thin dawn's light. Tit for tat. and even-Stephen! Peter wishes he had his twenty-two along to add to his store of pelts.
When he comes from the spring with the family's drinking water in his pails—so full that he has to put two white birch chips in them to keep them from slopping over—Peter takes off his shoes, his feet are so cold with the frosty morning. He finds a place in the pasture where a heifer has spent the night and just risen, and he warms his feet with her warmth.
In spite of the powder of the early frosts, some huckleberries are still hanging on the bushes, and they are much sweeter for the touch of the hoar frost. Peter knows of a ledge overhanging the sea, covered with huckleberry bushes. He takes Ann and Molly there and turns them loose in the makings of good huckleberry pies. He lets them gather the berries that were his. Keeping an eye on them to be sure they don't eat too many for their own good and so don't get enough for three pics. Peter busies himself at more exciting work. With a fishline from his pocket he lands a mess of purple-finned dinners for a chowder by his mother. The fish bite so well, he soon has a long string of them hung on a huckleberry bush beside the working girls.
As the three farm children concentrate on their coming dinner, a tall buck deer clears the three of them and the huckleberries in a sudden amazing are across the turquoise September sky. This is such a picture as only a seagoing farm can supply: a rapt boy taking thorny fish from the sea. girls with hair like upset honey, heaping pails from bushes that arch over the nibbling fish, and going over them all, a white-bottomed deer, with horns like the ghost of a dead spruce tree on him, like a slim forest god.
And now the stubble in the mown hayfield glitters with new tar. The tar kettles are boiling over hot and fragrant in the sun. Uncle Cephus and Father and Uncle Timothy are running the gray seines through the pitchy liquid and spreading them out on the Ileitis to harden black in the autumn air. The black seines run across the morning and the whole world. The aftermath of red clover is flattened by the nets, but the last single, wistful frostflowers are standing slender up through the meshes.
There is the smell of death on the morning, but there is the strong smell of life, too, for the seines mean smelts are running in the tides of another year, and a seashore family has life and happiness for their taking in the tides. So the chain of life on a seaside farm is never quite broken by death and the fall of the leaf. The golden leaves of maple trees on the water mean silver fish swarming beneath the water. The ends of some things spell the beginning of others. And Peter is sad to see the leaves fall, but is glad to know that the smelts are luck again on his shore.
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