They cleaned the cabin and swept out the splintery plank floor. They knew it was a rough and homely place compared to the farmhouses along the road and the ample mansions around the village green. But their father, the seventh son of a poor Connecticut Valley farmer, had bought the land and built the cabin with his own hands before their birth, promising every year to sell enough maple sugar, or oats, or potash to build a larger, proper house with a real barn attached instead of a shed which must be found through rain or blizzard. His sugar bush was scraggly and his oat crop barely enough to feed his growing family. There were stumps to burn aplenty as he cleared the land, but suddenly there was no need for potash in England and hardly any demand in Vermont. He borrowed heavily to buy himself three sheep, and the bottom dropped out of the wool market the very year he had had enough wool to think of it as a cash crop. He was an unlucky man. Even his children sensed that, but he loved them and worked hard for them, and they loved him fiercely in return.

Pulling shut the door, which, despite all Charles’s efforts, still did not close quite flush, they remembered the bear and wondered how they could keep the wild creatures from destroying the cabin in their absence. Finally, Charles suggested that they take all the wood left in the woodpile and stack it in front of the door. It took them close to an hour to accomplish the move, but, sweating and breathing hard, they admired their fortress effect.

That made it a little easier for them to go. Charlie rode bareback astride the plow horse, his brown heels dug into the horse’s wide flanks. Lyddie, leading the cow, followed close by. She carried a gunnysack, which held her other dress and night shift. Her outgrown boots were joined by the laces and slung over her shoulder. The long walk would be more easily done with her feet free and bare. There was no need to tie the calf. It danced around its mother’s backside, bleating constantly for her to stand still long enough for a meal.

It was the end of May. The mud was drying in the deeply rutted roadway, but Lyddie did not watch her feet. Birds were playing in and out of the tall trees on either side of the road, calling and singing in the pale lacy greens and rusts of the new growth and the deep green of the pines and firs. Here and there wildflowers dared to dance in full summer dress, forgetting that any night might bring a killing frost.

Lyddie breathed in the sweet air. “It’s spring,” she said. Charles nodded.

“Do you mind too much going to the mill?” she asked.