Many of these days lately I have spent much of my time hoeing among the corn hills in the field outside the fort. Not long ago, while I was bent to my task, I gradually grew aware that someone was watching me. I straightened up slowly (in negotiation with my arthritis), and turned to discover that I was being closely observed by a small boy.
“Howdy,” I said. He continued to study me with a serious face. At length he seemed to gather himself up. I could see a question coming.
“Isn’t that.., what you’re doing.., isn’t it like.., you know.., just really boring?”
I stood pondering for a few moments. It was a serious question and deserved a serious answer.
“Well,” I said, “that’s a pretty good question. A lot of people watching me hoe this corn every day must wonder the same thing, but you’re the first one who’s ever asked me.
So let’s think about it. — If you were here in this field hoeing corn some two hundred and thirty years ago, when everything for a hundred miles in every direction was a howling wilderness and you were all alone out here with just your young wife and a baby waiting for you back in the cabin, and you were working hard to bring on a crop of corn and beans and squash, somehow I really doubt that the question of whether or not you were bored would even occur to you.
The only question you’d be asking yourself is whether, come the first heavy snows of November, you would have enough food laid by to see you through the next five or six months, or whether this would turn out to the winter that you and your family would starve.”
The abrupt ending, landing emphatically on the verb starve, and just stopping there, made his eyes grow wider.
“Oh,” he said.
