But the mother was bitter with her weariness and she answered, “Who can eat such meat except a rich man?” Nevertheless when the feast was over she went to the littered table where the men had sat and she picked up a bone left from her fowl and a little skin was hanging to it and a shred of meat and she took it and gave it to the lad to suck and she said, “Hasten and grow big, my son, and you can eat at table with them too.” Then the boy asked innocently, “Do you think my father will let me?” The mother answered bitterly, “If he is not here you shall eat in his place, that I swear.” * * * * * Thus the year wore on to late autumn. Almost the children had forgotten that there had ever been another in the bed except themselves and their mother, and even the old woman seldom thought to ask of her son, because the chill winds set her old bones aching, and she had enough to do to search for this warm spot and that out of wind and in the sun, and she complained incessantly because the winds shifted so, and because every year the sun seemed cooler than the year before. The boy worked daily now in small ways and took it as his duty. Every day when there was no other task he led the buffalo to the hill lands and let it feed on the short grass, lying upon its back the whole day through, or coming down to leap upon some grave and sit there catching crickets in the grass and weaving little cages for them out of stems of grass. When he came home at night he hung the cages by the door, and the crickets chirped and the sound pleased the babe and his sister. But soon the wild grass on the hills browned with coming winter and the summer flowers among the grass bore seed and the byways were gay with purple asters and with small yellow wild chrysanthemums, which are the flowers of autumn, and it was time to cut the grass for winter’s fuel. Then the boy went with his mother and all day she cut the dried grass with her short-handled sickle and the boy twisted rope of grass and bound what she cut into sheaves. Everywhere over all the mountain sides there were spots of blue and these were people like themselves cutting and binding the brown grass into sheaves. In the evening when the sun set and the night air came down chill from the hill tops the people all went winding homeward through the narrow hilly paths, each loaded with two great sheaves upon a pole across the shoulder, and so did the mother also, and the boy with two little sheaves.