Wide winds shake the bare world now, and there is a great sound of doors going to. The ocean is growing too dark and cold for seagoing farming.
The small farm that was so wide in summer is shrinking in and in on itself every day, and every hour. Tin's last little green gully is lost to the gray of ruin, this last running vine to white frost. The fields are stripped and empty. The crows are leaving the woods and have not much more to say for this year. Work goes indoors mostly, and many windows shine in the house after four o'clock. All the high windows in the barn light up like windows in a cathedral. Summer is gone indoors into (his vast house. The cows chew their cud in this house's fragrance. The fisherman-farmer's lantern takes the place of the son. The cows take a tall man doling out grain as some kind of a god left over from summer, and they stand quiet and give down their milk through his cupping and stroking hands.
The boats have all come home to the cove, save for the reach-boat that still goes out daily to the forests of lobster buoys. The boats huddle together out of the wind under the lee of the fishhouse and boathouse. There is a light in the fishhouse nightly, where things are being stowed away for the winter.
The light on Uncle Cephus' schooner is as lonely and distant as a star on the darkening sea. For even Uncle Cephus has shrunken, and neither he nor his tall schooner stems to fill as much space in the world, A big uncle grows small in a boy's mind. Peter sees his uncle so seldom he almost forgets he is there, and his uncle's light of an evening is more like one of the smaller stars than any sign of life.
And Peter shrinks up, too. For one bitter day on his way home from school he climbs a tree to get his lady of the long curls a hornet's nest the fall winds have exposed there, to go over her mantel, and he snags his breeches on a dead limb there and lays himself open to the cold world. Long-Curls thinks it is funny, and titters. Peter doesn't think it is funny at all, and he has hard work walking more than side to her the rest of the way home, crablike, to conceal his rearward wound. Emily thinks this is still funnier, and titters all the more. She cannot get over her titters,and so she drops Peter's Geography she has been carrying for him ever since he climbed the tree of disaster, right in the middle of a puddle, open at South America, Peter's favorite place, and doesn't seem sorry one bit.
Peter feels the book swell, and be knows be will have to get his mother to iron out the pages with her flatiron. Hut he also knows his mother will never be able to make. The book look the same again. It will look like Uncle Timothy in his winter fat. The book swells and swells, and Peter suddenly falls out of love completely, and walks off and leaves the tittering girl.
The boy walks home all by his lonesome next afternoon. And ii doesn't help him any to notice that Lucy is walking home by herself, too, Inn keeping a good ways behind him. For Lucy has shrunk also. And the bare world is too wide for Peter or Lucy or anybody to make any impression on it at all. And on top of everything else, it rains. Peter gets home with sloshing feet.
So Peter buries himself in a book of bitterness and reads Gulliver's Travels to all hours of the night in the cold kitchen after everyone has gone to bed. He stops reading now and then and listens to the rats that have taken over life now in the house and run in the walls on errands he cannot understand. And the low wind that has come up out of nowhere sounds like the whinnings of the silly Houyhnhums and the squealings of the sillier Yahoos. It is a bitter, bitter night.
But the bitterness lifts and blows all away next week when his father lets Peter go with him after his winter deer. Peter walks to bis father's port, bis sixteen gauge at the ready. He walks even lighter than his father does, without rustling so much as a birch leaf or snapping the smallest spruce twig in woods that are all fallen birch leaves and all dry spruce twigs. He holds his breath in so that he feels as if he were going to burst. His gun is loaded with buckshot, and his mind is loaded with excitement.
Peter and his father walk into the wind. It is growing dusky all over the world. though it is only around three o'clock. For the day, like everything else on the sea-going farm, has shrunken too. The two hunters come along a lost stone wall to a lost clearing where a house once stood. The cellar of the house is only a pit fringed with junipers now, and the two skirt the junipers quietly. Beyond the heap of bricks chat were once a huge chimney and fireplace, they can see the top boughs of old apple trees with a few withered yellow apples still clinging to the leafless boughs.
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