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Oregon Authors Project |
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| The following piece is a narrative short story. Read carefully, then respond to the questions that follow. As you read, take time to make notes in the right-hand column of any thoughts, reactions, or conclusions you have. (All written notes will help us score your paper by showing us how you think while you read.) Father brought them to live on a dry mountain, Steens Mountain. Town was forty miles away. They came too late for the bunchgrass. On Steens Mountain the grass used to grow so tall that all you could see of a man riding through it was the man's hat and the horse's ears. But the bunchgrass had all been turned into mat and wool and money. Not much grew on the mountain now but thin, poor cheatgrass. It cheated the stomachs of the cattle that ate it, and they grew thin and poor. The cattle grazed on cheatgrass because there was nothing else, and the family gathered sagebrush to burn because there was nothing else. Sagebrush burns fast. To have enough to keep the kitchen cookfire going, they had to stack up a pile of sagebrush higher than the house. When they had a hired hand, he spent a lot of time cutting and stacking sagebrush. After a while he left. Mother and father had to drive into town for seed and flour and sugar and shoes. They would have to stay the night in that town, forty miles across the desert and past the lake. Father harnessed the mule to the buckboard, and the three boys ran around trying to help. The oldest child was a girl, twelve years old, named Phebe. Mother said, "Phebe, look after the boys. See that the chickens are fed, and milk the cow. George can water her. Don't let Lafe and Homer run wild, now." The mother and father drove away down the long road in the buckboard. Phebe got the boys to building a play fort with rocks and dirt out by the sagebrush pile. She played with them a while. She was about to go in and light the stove so she could bake biscuits for supper, when the man came by. He walked by on the dirt road, looking across the barbed wire fence at the house and yard, looking at the boys, looking at her. He wasn't a man she knew. She'd never seen him. He looked at them a long time with dark, sad eyes, saying nothing. He went on up the mountain. Nobody lived up there. She went in and got the kitchen fire going. It took a while. George, the oldest boy, who was ten, came in. "Phebe," he said, "there's three men at the fence. Indians." She went to the front window and looked out. The man who had walked by was back with two others. They were all strangers. She knew the Paiute families who came up on the mountain to hunt and get camas roots every year. She and her mother had gone berry-picking with the women and children. These men weren't Paiutes. She thought maybe they were Cayuse or Modoc men. A lot of Indian men and women had been coming by, driven out of their home lands, their hunting grounds and gathering places by white settlers. Sometimes they stopped at the farm and asked for work. Sometimes they just went by, looking for a place to live, looking for their people. There had been fighting between soldiers and Indians down in the lava country, southwest of Steens Mountain. There was a lot of grief and anger among the Indians, a lot of fear and anger among the whites. Two of the men standing out in the road had guns. "They keep standing around there," George said. "Where's Homer and Lafayette?" Phebe asked. "Round back by the woodpile." "Did they see those men?" George shook his head. "Bring them inside. Tell them we're going to play a game." "What game?" said George. "Soldiers, " Phebe said. "I'm going to lock the doors. Don't say anything about those men, George. Just tell the boys to come in." She locked the front door while George brought the two little boys in the back, and then she locked the back door and pulled the curtain across the kitchen window. "I want to go out," Homer said. He was six years old. Phebe looked at him in a way that made him stop talking. "You are a soldier," she said. "You're Private First Class Homer Johnston. And Lafe, you're Private First Class Lafayette Johnston. And George is Lieutenant George Johnston. And I am the Captain." She looked at George and said, "Lieutenant George!" "Sir!" said George, coming to attention and saluting. "Please train the troops while I check the security of the fort." "Is it a fort? Is the house a fort?" Homer said, excited, and Lafayette said, "Is it, is it? Is it a fort? Is it?" "Troops! Attention!" George said sternly. "Lafe, 'attention' is when your feet are side by side and you stand up real straight, like this." Homer and Lafayette put their feet side by side and stood as stiff as wooden soldiers. Phebe took her father's hunting rifle down from the rack near the front door. She went to the window in the front room and sat down on her mother's small wooden rocking chair, the one that had come west in a ship round the Horn. It was a sewer-rocker, the kind with a drawer under the seat for needles and scissors and spools of thread. She sat there with the gun on her lap, right at the window where the men standing out in the road could see her. She rocked a little. She polished the wooden stock of the gun with her hands. The men stood around for a while, not talking. Then they walked away, down the road this time. The little boys liked being soldiers so much that when Phebe unlocked the door, they marched out to water the cow and marched back into the house, swinging their arms. George gave them sticks for guns, but when they shouted "Bang! Bang!" he told them that soldiers never shoot guns inside their fort. Phebe fed the chickens and milked the cow. As she came back from the barn with the milk bucket she saw the men coming back up the road, four of them this time. They stopped in front of the house outside the gate. She went in, locked the door, went to the front window, and opened it. "We don't need any hands," she said to the men standing in the road in front of the house. "We have enough men here. You'd better be going on." The men stood watching her. They said nothing. "If one of you wants to come to the door, I've got a loaf of bread to spare," she said. "Just one of you come." They said nothing. None of them moved. Maybe they didn't understand. She closed the window and sat down in the rocking chair with the gun in her lap. The sagebrush fire in the stove had gone out. "The troops are getting hungry," George said, looking in from the kitchen. "Bread and cheese and milk. That's what soldiers in forts eat," Phebe said. The men were sitting down on the bank of the road, watching the house, watching her sitting in the rocking chair with the gun. Now and then they said a word or two to one another. Their faces were thin and tired and serious. Two of them got up and started to go around the fence towards the barn. Phebe stood up, right in the window where they could see her, and checked to see that the gun was loaded. The two men stopped. One said something to the other, and after a minute they turned and walked away, going down the road. But the two men with guns still sat across from the gate, watching the house, watching her. She sat down again in the rocker. George fed the little boys and marched them to bed. They were good troops. He came to keep watch with Phebe in the front room. He curled up on the horsehair sofa the family had brought from California, and fell asleep pretty soon. The men left as it was getting dark, drifting off down the road in the twilight. As they went, one of them turned and raised his hand silently to Phebe. She did not see anything move in the starlight or hear anything except a coyote a long way away, but she spent all night awake at the window, watching the stars and the shadows, with the gun across her knees. The mother and father came back next day. They had heard a rumor that a hired man at a farm down by the lake had been killed by some strange Indians, just last night. Later on a hunter passing by said that it was an Indian that had been killed, shot by a cowboy who worked at the lake farm. And some people in my family who tell this story say that a hired man out with cattle at the Steens mountain farm was killed that night. But I have told you the story, as well as I can remember it, as I heard it from my mother, who was the daughter of Phebe, who sat all night in the window watching the stars go over the mountain while her brothers slept. And Phebe's great-great-granddaughter rocked her baby daughter in that rocking chair. About the Author Ursula K. Le Guin's mother's family lived all over the West, trying to ranch in hard places like Wyoming and southeastern Oregon. Ursula grew up in California and has lived in western Oregon for nearly forty years. She has written many novels and short stories for children, for young adults, and for adults. Among her stories for children, the Catwings books, about a family of flying cats, are the favorites. For young adults and adults, the four books of Earthsea spin a well-loved tale of wizards among fantasy islands. Her best-known work of science fiction is probably The Left Hand of Darkness. Oregon readers of high-school age or older might be specially interested in her science-fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven, set in Portland, about a man whose dreams come all too true, and her collections of stories about a town on the Oregon coast, Searoad. Le Guin says: "Sometimes I put imaginary people in a real place; sometimes I put real people in an imaginary place; sometimes I leave the real and the imaginary as one inseparable thing. After all, how could we know anything, really, about what's real, if we didn't have and use our imagination." |
Reading Level: 4 Benchmark 2
Notes on my thoughts, |
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©1983 by Ursula K. Le Guin. All rights reserved.
No replication or republication in any printed or electronic format is
permitted without permission from the author or her agent:
Virginia Kidd, PO Box 278, Milford, PA 18337.
Permission granted for use by OPEN and Oregon Reading Assessment purposes.