The Egg and I Read Free Page A

born out of people's stomach holes." I can still taste the heart medicine.
    Gammy used to walk us downtown but as she made us close our eyes every time we passed a saloon the walks were valuable to us more for the fresh air than for the sights we saw. Once she had us open our eyes to see a hat in Hennessy's store window which cost $105. We could not get over it. One hundred and five dollars for a hat! We made three trips to see that hat but I haven't the faintest recollection of what it looked like, no doubt because I kept my eyes glued to the price mark. We had heard from Mother that Hennessy's, the company store, also sold Paris gowns but they didn't put these in the window so we never saw one.
    Often cowboys in chaps and ten-gallon hats rode cayuses down Main Street and several times Indian braves on ponies, followed by squaws on foot with papooses on their backs, filed slowly past the one-hundred-and-five-dollar hat window. These were the Blackfeet Indians and they wore beautifully beaded dresses and chaps and terrific feather headdresses, and had long noses and cold Indian eyes. As Gammy had read us the stories of Hiawatha, Pocahontas and Sitting Bull and told us many hair-raising tales of massacres, scalpings and running the gantlet, we thought these Indians were simply wonderful, so strong and brave, and would run for blocks to see them. I still harbored these romantic notions about Indians when I moved to the chicken ranch, and it was a bitter blow when I learned that today's little red brother, or at least the Pacific Coast variety which I saw, is not a tall copper-colored brave, who, clad only in beads and feathers and brandishing a bow and arrow, bounds around in the deep woods. Instead, our Indian, squat and mud-colored, was more apt to be found slouched in a Model T, a toothpick clenched between his yellow teeth, a drunken leer on his flat face. On the reservation he was orderly and well behaved and, we were told, used to engage in dangerous pursuits like whaling and seal hunting; but in appearance, at any rate, he resembled the story-book variety and my childhood Blackfeet Indian, about as much as a mud shark resembles a Beardsley trout.
    Our summers were spent camping in the mountains. Usually we had a camp man and slept in tents and followed Daddy about while he examined mines, but other times we had cabins on a lake and stayed with Gammy while Mother and Daddy did the travelling. My still-smoldering hatred for and distrust of wild animals were implanted on these camping trips. Once we almost fell on a large bear, placidly eating huckleberries on the other side of a log. Another time Daddy pointed out a mountain lion lying in the sun on a ledge above our heads. Bears were always knocking down our tents and eating our supplies and at night the coyotes and timber wolves howled dismally.
    Mother and Daddy fished incessantly and we had Rainbow trout, which we children loathed, three times a day. Sometimes Gammy came camping with us but only when we had cabins and didn't spend our days "traipsing" through the mountains. Gammy stayed with us while Mother and Daddy took trips and fished and although they were considerate and always asked if we cared to come along, we always refused because Mother and Daddy loved danger and were always walking logs over deep terrible ravines; walking into black dangerous mine tunnels; wading into swift turbulent streams and doing other scary things. Gammy, on the other hand, carefully avoided danger and was constantly on the alert for it.
    Summer days with Gammy were spent in her cabin with the doors and windows shut tight against the dangers of mountain air. We would all crouch around her rocking chair while she read to us out of Pilgrim's Progress and fed us licorice drops out of her black bag. This routine was varied occasionally by a thunderstorm, whose first clap of thunder sent us hurtling under the bed clutching feather pillows and praying, or by very short walks during which