they were forbidden to pause—and the occasional big and bossy Wisconsin clouds that drifted lazily across. Grasshoppers droned a steady, reedy accompaniment to the chink-chinking of the hoes. The friable soil was so hot the children scratched for cooler holds with their bare toes. When the breeze rustled the broad leaves of the corn, a heavy, milky smell engulfed the young toilers and seemed to intensify the heat.
If there was still enough light left after the evening chores, Muir and his brothers might have the luxury of fishing in the plank boat their father had made for them. Bullfrogs bellowed from the reeds, mosquitoes sang in their ears, and the placid lake was delicately laced with the zigzagged lines of the water bugs. The boys trailed their blistered, swollen feet in the darkening waters and trolled for pickerel and sunfish, black bass and perch.
Harvest was the hardest part of this hardest season. Wheat shatters quickly on the stalk, and it was watched anxiously as it ripened toward fullness, first the roots turning gold, then the necks, and at last the matured heads. Now there was a furious haste to cut and bind and store it, so Muir and the others were called from their beds at four in the morning and were in the fields at first light. All the long forenoon they relentlessly cut and bound, the oldest boy bent in cruel posture above the crooked snath, pulling the blade toward him through the bright stalks while the August sun crawled to the heaven of the noon dinner, perhaps announced to anxious eyes by the flutter of an apron from an upper window. Coming in to dinner, they would greedily seize upon the watermelons and muskmelons left cooling in the spring since morning. The sweet and juicy meats of these, Muir said, “were a glorious luxury that only weary barefooted farm boys can ever know.”
At such times they worked the fields until dusk and sometimes even after and went to bed utterly drained. “In the harvest dog-days and dog-nights and dog-mornings,” Muir recalled, “when we arose from our clammy beds, our cotton shirts clung to our backs as wet with sweat as the bathing-suits of swimmers, and remained so all the long, sweltering days” that were loaded with as much as seventeen hours of heavy labor.
Sunday afternoons were the only times they could call their own. After the Bible lessons, the Sunday school lessons, and the church services through which they struggled to stay awake, they could fish or swim in the lake or wander the nearby countryside in company with neighboring farm kids. In the early summer they might go strawberry picking or go after the dewberries or huckleberries whose hearts, as Muir remembered them, were colored like little sunsets. They might roam as far as the wild-rice marshes on the Fox to get a shot at the fat mallards that feasted there in flocks of thousands. They might climb Observatory Hill, the highest point around, and gaze off at the blue Baraboo Hills to the west; or climb the loose, glacial slopes of Wolf Hill, up through the oaks and red cedars to the high fields cleared long ago by the Indians, inhabited now only by crows and red-tailed hawks whose sailing cries seemed to add distance and dimension to the increasingly cultivated landscape that unrolled beneath them.
But best of all was the lake on the homestead. Ringed around with marsh grass and jeweled with white water lilies, its brown waters were so clear you could see bottom even at considerable depths, the sun rays filtering down through it in long, angled shafts. They drifted over it in their plank boat, watching the skittering of the water bugs, feeling the sun hot on their backs and luxuriating in the sense that they could cool off at any moment by simply dropping over the side. They fished lazily and learned to swim in a southern cove bordered with purple swamp thistle, cattail rushes, and tamaracks. Wading in here, their feet sank quickly and softly into the lime ooze. Then they pushed off, feeling the reeds trail the lengths of their bodies, tickling at last their toes until they were free of them and into deeper water.
When the wheat had been harvested and the hay as well, the pace of work slackened a bit and the weather too began to mellow toward fall as if in sympathy. John Muir now had to plow for winter wheat, chop wood, and shuck Indian corn. There was also the drudgery of stump grubbing, a task that fell to him as the eldest boy. Some days he spent more on his knees than on his feet, bent in the furrows over the tough old oak and hickory stumps, digging and chopping at the huge, gnarled roots. Splitting rails for fencing was another of his special chores, his father having tried it briefly and failed. Muir said he used to cut and split as many as a hundred logs a day of knotty oak, “swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night.” Meanwhile, the colors came out in the woods, pumpkins turned bright against the slow fading of the grasses, and asters, goldenrod, sunflowers, and daisies put forth their special glows. In the shady portions of the meadows, ferns—to which Muir was especially sensitive all his life—unfurled their lacy banners.
Sometimes, too, more than these autumnal flowers glowed on the land, for in the early years of the Muirs’ settlement great grass fires were a common feature of this season, as predictable as the turning of the leaves and the flowering of the late plants: huge expanses of prairie were swept up and the night skies reddened like an angry sunset. An English immigrant to Wisconsin in 1847 wrote excitedly back to the Old World about the sight of these prairie fires, which he described as burning “day and night for months together.” As more and more of the country came under cultivation, the fires were confined, and the narrowing spaces between the plowed fields grew dense with woody growths that the fires had once checked.
On Sunday afternoons in the fall, John Muir and the others might go nutting in the leaf-showering woods where they especially delighted in hickory nuts. In the trees the birds began to gather on the stripped branches. The bobolink, whose song had been so fine a feature of spring’s glad greening, now departed for southern rice fields. Muir noted that some species might hold convocations in the neighborhood for weeks at a time, and then one morning he would awaken to find them gone.
Few species stayed through the winter, but Muir knew those that did and cheered himself with their examples of fortitude. On winter mornings, many of which might be well below zero, his father’s voice would sound in summons at six, and Muir would awaken to find frost on the coverlets. Hobbling down the cold stairs of the fireless house he would face his first task of the day: getting his aching, chilblained feet into shrunken, half-frozen cowhide boots. No fire was allowed at this hour where it might have lessened this agony. Stumping out on his morning chores, his feet in iron-like prisons, he would have to endure the pain until the temperature of his feet and that of the boots became adjusted and the leather grudgingly thawed and stretched.
In the fields or woods it was often bitter, but Muir warmed to his work of chopping or fencing, though the ax might rebound from the frozen wood as if he had swung it against iron. He remembered of these days not only the hard and “shivery” work but also the stark beauties of the season: “the wonderful radiance of the snow when it was starry with crystals, and the dawns and sunsets and white noons, and the cheery, enlivening company of the brave chickadees and nuthatches.” Sometimes they would see Indian hunters running on the tracks of a deer or spearing muskrats at the edges of the lake. He might also occasionally accompany his father to Portage or Kingston or elsewhere in the immediate vicinity, for winter as a “slack” season was the preferred time for revival meetings, and Daniel Muir was much abroad in the snowy land, preaching his wintry doctrines and being preached at. On stormy days there was always work in the barn—shelling corn, making ax handles or ox yokes, mending harnesses—or they would sort potatoes in the cellar.
At last the ice that had boomed all winter above the surges of the waters beneath would begin to boom in a new and insistent way, then begin to crack, and at last to break up. Skies softened once again, and the voice of the loon was heard. Spring came to the oak openings and the cleared fields, and the old cycle rose again into its ascendant arc. Muir went on with it, captive to his seasonal chores but captivated, too, by the natural life of those seasons.
“After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake Farm,” John Muir recalled with a bitter asperity,
fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses,—after all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we
