Game was plentiful, fish seemed to be begging for the hook. Every day,
without going too far away from camp, she found new foods; watercress,
mustard greens, wild turnips, wild onions, occasionally a turkey nest
with eggs still edible, hollow trees where wild bees had stored honey,
persimmons still astringent, but promising incredibly sweet and
delicious flavor when frost struck them, chinquapin, a kind of chestnut,
black walnuts. There was no end to what the country provided. Yet the
men, instead of laying in winter stores, spent their time with the warp
motor.
* * * * *
Without meaning to, Miss Kitty interrupted an explanation of Lt.
Harper's on how they were calibrating the torquing degrees. She told him
that he and Sam simply must help her harvest a hillside patch of wild
maise she had found, before the rains came and ruined all the grain with
mold, or the migrating birds ate it all.
The cabin they were erecting would contain only two rooms--a large
general room for cooking, eating, visiting, such as an old-fashioned
farm kitchen had once been. A little room, opening off it, would be her
sleeping room. She raised her eyebrows questioningly, and Sam explained
they would build a small, separate bunkhouse for himself and Lt. Harper.
She had a curious sense of displeasure at the arrangement. She knew she
should be pleased at their understanding of the need for privacy. There
was no point in becoming primitive savages. She should be grateful that
they shared her determination to preserve the civilized codes. She told
herself, rather severely, that the preservation of civilized mores was
extremely important. And she brought herself up short with a shocking
question, equal to a slap in the face.
_Why?_
She realized then she had intuitively known from the first that they
would never get back to Old Earth. Her instincts had been functioning,
insuring their lives, where intellect had failed them completely. She
tried to laugh scornfully at herself, in feminist tradition. Imagine!
Katheryn Kittredge, Career Woman, devoted to the intellectual
advancement of Man, thinking that mere cooking and cleaning and mending
was the supremely important thing.
But she failed in her efforts to deride herself. The intellectual
discussions among the small groups of intelligent girls back on Old
Earth were far away and meaningless. She discovered she was a little
proud and strangely contented that she could prepare edible food.
Certainly the two men were not talented; and someone had to accept the
responsibility for a halfway decent domestic standard and comfort.
As, for example, with the walls of the cabin halfway up, it was
necessary to point out that while they may be going to put the little
cookstove--welded together out of metal scrap--in the cabin, there was
no provision for a fireplace. How would they keep warm through the long
winter months this year, and in the years to come?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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