They kept going mostly south and a bit east while the sun kept climbing up into the sky, and Anna watched everything going on around her with complete fascination. These were all things she had heard about, but never seen. The only cows and goats she had ever seen were in pictures; the only geese and ducks were the ones she spotted flying overhead when she was weeding.

Some few people in Soddy kept chickens, so of course she’d seen those, but her family had never been able to afford to do so.

So many animals out here! And wild ones! Rabbits froze beside the road as they passed, and squirrels ran across it, and she’d never seen either alive, only skinned and gutted and ready for the pot when Ma could trade potions for them. The same with ’possums; she was not prepared for how ugly and odd they were, and she only knew what they were by the bare tail. They were good in stew; some people said they were greasy, but in winter she positively craved the taste of fat.

As for the farms themselves, the more she saw, the more she envied the children out there in the fields, helping their Mas and Pas. Ma scrutinized every weed that got pulled up, on the chance it might be added to the poke salad she kept stewing on the back of the stove, the food of last resort when even the Company store wouldn’t give you a speck of flour on credit. And when Ma was watching, Heaven forbid you sneak so much as a single pea for yourself. As she squinted to see what was going on at them farmhouses, there was at least one girl younger than her, shelling peas on the porch as they passed, and Anna could tell that for every pea that made it into the pan, at least two were going into the little girl’s mouth. The freedom to eat as many peas as you wanted . . . she’d never had that. Every bit of food had to be accounted for and shared, with the lion’s share always going to Pa.

Every time they crossed a crick, there was at least one boy fishing it, or hunting for crawdads. Every farm, if it didn’t have a cow, at least had a goat, which meant milk and butter and maybe cheese. And all of them had chickens, which meant eggs, and when a hen got too old to lay—stewed chicken! She hadn’t had an egg in—forever. And she’d never tasted chicken. Well, maybe having to pull a plow your own self instead of having a mule or ox to do it was cruel hard . . . but wasn’t it made up for in all the good things you got to eat?

They passed a tangle of wild blackberry bushes standing between the road and a field of tall, leafy plants she didn’t recognize; she spotted the red and purple berries growing there, and it was all she could do not to beg Jeb to stop—