Chewing the Cud Read Free Page A

in the iron seat as we swept up the rakings in a roadside field. The sun was shining, the mare plodded along sensibly, and I had learned to make her stop and start and turn and towork the machine, leaving neat rollers of hay at regular intervals. But though there were no pigs on Tytherington Farm, there was a herd of Saddlebacks on the land beyond the road, and as we made a turn at the headland nearest to it, there they were, dozens of them, big ones and small ones, staring through the fence at us with malevolent little eyes.
    “Pi-i-i-i-i-igs!” screamed Foxianna, or that's what it sounded like. And in one violent crashing movement she lunged backwards, digging the long, curved tines into the ground and sending me shooting out over the back, and then she was gone like the wind with the hay rake bouncing and clanging behind her flying ginger tail.
    So I was run away from, but it was Billy Ball who was run away with. We had been picking up a field of wheat. The combine, or harvester-thresher as it was at first called, was beginning to be used in English cornfields, but the old reaper-and-binder was still the principal machine at work. The cut corn stood in shocks, or stooks, each of ten sheaves, stacked four against four with one to close each end off, their butts to the ground, their heads upright to catch the air and dry the moisture in the grain. Then, in time, they were loaded onto wagons and carried to the corn mow, built on a layer of brushwood — a “stavel” by name — to keep the bottom layers from the ground.And there the wheat or barley or oats stayed, secure under a roof of thatch, until threshing time after the turn of the year.
    This particular piece, of twenty or thirty acres I think, was of level downland and the spot chosen for the mow convenient; ideal therefore for the big four-wheeled horse-drawn wagons with their wooden “ladders” at either end, and in particular for the biggest of them all, that we called the Queen Mary, so enormous that no one but Flower was ever put to it, and even she could pull it only part-loaded. For a full load a trace horse was needed as well, and that day Albie was certainly building them full. With set weather, a dry flat ground, two of us pitching up on either side, and Billy up on the load to feed him, I wouldn't like to guess how many layings of long-strawed, heavy-headed wheat sheaves Albie built on the deck of the Queen Mary.

    At last, from the top of the mountain, he said, “That'll do.” Tom stuck his prong into the side of the load forAlbie to grasp in his descent, and down he slid.
    “Bist coming down, Uncle Billy?”
    “I'll ride in to the mow, my dear, I'll ride in to the mow,” piped Billy, perched almost out of sight on the summit. But there was a fly in the ointment, or rather in the hot August air, that changed the whole idyllic scene in a flash. One moment the horses were standing quietly, waiting for the order to move on — Flower in the shafts and in the traces a much smaller but very strong and muscular animal, a bay horse called Mac — and the next they were all of a fidget, for though we could not, they could hear the gadfly's thin metallic whine. And then it struck.
    It must have stung Mac, for before anyone could get to his head, he shot forward in one great galvanic bound, dragging Flower into her collar. And in terror she began to trundle, and immediately, it seemed, they were at the gallop, the Queen Mary sailing behind them, and on top of her, little Billy, flat on his belly, hanging on with every finger and toe.
    If the field had been even bigger, it might have all ended happily as the horses tired. As it was, Mac ran slap into a five-strand barbed-wire fence and burst it. The pain of it brought him up short, and Flower executed an elephantine sort of swerve to miss him, and the Queen tipped up onto two wheels. Over went Albie's enormous load and down came Billy.
    It could have been worse. Flower was all right, and Mac, though he was