“Dad, you say the same thing year after year: that we need rain. We’re in a drought, and our land’s so messed up the rain we do get causes as much harm as good. Between drought and outdated practices—”

“Nate!” Mrs. Lundgren’s voice was sharp. “That’s enough!”

Mr. Lundgren looked hard at his son. “When this place is yours, you can experiment all you want. Meanwhile, my job’s seeing that it produces enough to keep this family afloat.

“And if you want to do something meanwhile, you might try letting Moss teach you a thing or two. He seems to have his head on his shoulders a lot more solid than you ever have.”

Chapter 18

As soon as we were outside, I told Nate, “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to get between you and your pa.”

“I’m just sorry you got dragged into one of our arguments.” Nate slammed his hand against a post. “He is the most bullheaded man!”

“Wait up, you two,” Maggie called, pulling on her coat as she ran down from the house. “Mom says you can take the truck in. I’ll drive it back.”

Nate slid behind the steering wheel, and I followed Maggie in the other side. She said, “I didn’t think Mom would let me go since I didn’t go to school, but then she said okay. I wasn’t all that sick anyway.”

“You stay home to help Dad finish up that fence section he was working on?” Nate asked.

“We’d be crazy not to get it done before snow piles up. So, Nate, why were you beating on that post just now? Are you still upset from supper?”

“I was telling Moss I wish Dad weren’t so afraid to try something new.”

“The trees?” Maggie said. “That’s just rumor.”

“To try anything. Maybe even moving off our place and going where he wouldn’t always have two strikes against him.”

“Nate! You don’t mean that! This is our home. I love it more than I could ever love anyplace else in the whole world.”

Nate’s voice softened. “I know you do, sis. But we’ve gone round about this before. I don’t want a lifetime of worries from trying to make this land be something it’s not.”

“The last I heard, you weren’t planning one,” she said stiffly. “You were planning a college career, so you could study farming instead of doing it.”

“The last I heard,” he told her, “planning and doing were two different things.”

They sounded more angry for than at each other.

Then Nate said, “Moss, if you get the chance, you ought to read how this part of the country once was. And not that long ago. Short-grass prairie stretching hundreds of miles, feeding herds of bison and antelope, and then open-range cattle after that. Homesteaders went elsewhere, where farming made sense.