ISBN: 2940013708723

Night entered the clearing from the scrub. The low tangled growthof young oak and pine and palmetto fell suddenly black and silent,seeming to move closer in one shadowy spring. The man … Mehr…

Night entered the clearing from the scrub. The low tangled growthof young oak and pine and palmetto fell suddenly black and silent,seeming to move closer in one shadowy spring. The man told himselfthere was nothing to fear. Yet as he walked towards his cabin,naked and new on the raw sand, darkness in this place seemed to himunfriendly.He thought, Time I get me a fence raised tomorrow, maybe 'twon'tseem so wild, like.Light still hung raggedly above the hammock west of the clearedacres. Here and there a palm shook its head against the faintorange of the sky, or the varnished small leaves of a live oak werefor a moment luminous. There was an instant when the hammockreared back against the west; when the outline of each tree-top wasdistinct; when the clearing gathered about it the shreds oftwilight. Then there was no longer scrub or clearing or hammock.Blackness obliterated them with a great velvet paw and crouchedlike a panther on the cabin doorstep.The man tested the security of the split rails that formed atemporary pen about his hogs. The grey mule was hobbled and thescrub milch cow tethered. The chickens clacked and fluttered inthe coop that must hold them until a proper roost was built. Afterthe fence was raised, they could all run free. He stood by thecoop a moment. His thoughts stirred uneasily in his mind, millinglike the fowls. He could not be sure that he had done well to movehis family here, across the river. He had not made a good livingin the piney-woods. Only the knowledge of his native Florida wifeand of his neighbours, her kin, had kept him to the few crops thatwould yield on that grey shifting land. His family of five was ofan age now to help with the crops. He had exchanged pine-land forscrub, with a precarious fringe of hammock.The Florida scrub was unique. The man Lantry recognized itsquality as well as its remoteness. There was perhaps no similarregion anywhere. It was a vast dry rectangular plateau, bounded onthree sides by two rivers. The Ocklawaha, flowing towards thenorth, bounded it on the west. At the north-west corner of therectangle the Ocklawaha turned sharply at right angles and floweddue east, joining, at the north-east corner, the St. Johns Riverwhich formed the eastern demarcation.Within these deep watery lines the scrub stood aloof, uninhabitedthrough its wider reaches. The growth repelled all human living.The soil was a tawny sand, from whose parched infertility therereared, indifferent to water, so dense a growth of scrub pine--theSouthern spruce--that the effect of the massed thin trunks was of alimitless, canopied stockade. It seemed impenetrable, for a man-high growth of scrub oak, myrtle, sparkleberry and ti-ti filled theinterstices. Wide areas, indeed, admitted of no human passage.In places the pines grew more openly, the sunlight filtered throughand patches of ground showed bald and lichened. The scrub wassparingly dotted with small lakes and springs. Around these grew adamp-loving hammock vegetation. Or a random patch of moistureproduced, alien in the dryness, a fine stand of slash pine or long-leaf yellow. These were known as pine islands. To any onestanding on a rise, they were visible from a great distance. Digital Content>E-books>Literature>Literature>Literature, WDS Publishing Digital >16<

ISBN: 2940013708723

South Moon Under South-Moon-Under~~Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings Literature>Literature>Literature NOOK Book (eBook), WDS Publishing