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Updated: May 12, 2025
She wore a short cotton homespun petticoat and a dingy waist; while a limp pink cotton sunbonnet, pushed far back from her perspiring forehead, released unmanageable tufts of her stiff, iron-grey hair. "What be you awantin' of a gun, Mrs. Gammit?" inquired the backwoodsman, looking up without surprise. He had not seen Mrs.
Gammit, working in her garden behind the house, with the hot, sweet scent of the flowering buckwheat-field in her nostrils and the drowsy hum of bees in her ears, would throw down her hoe about once in every half-hour and run into the barn to look hopefully at the traps. But nothing came to disturb them.
Gammit knew that her victory had been final, and she felt so elated that she was even able to enjoy her continuing diet of cold turkey. Then, one pleasant morning when a fresh, sweet-smelling wind made tumult in the forest, she took the gun home to Joe Barren. "What luck did ye hev, Mrs. Gammit?" inquired the woodsman with interest. "I settled them bears, Mr. Barren!" she replied.
But at the same moment she lost her balance. With an indignant yell she plunged downward into the pen. It was like Mrs. Gammit, however, that even in this dark moment her luck should serve her. She landed squarely on the back of the pig. This broke her fall, and, strangely enough, did not break the pig.
"Porkypines!" propounded Mrs. Gammit, with a sudden smile of triumph. Joe Barron neither spoke nor smiled. But in his silence there was something that made Mrs. Gammit uneasy. "Why not porkypines?" she demanded, her face once more growing severe. "It might be porkypines as took them aigs o' yourn, Mrs. Gammit, an' it might be bumbly-bees!" responded Barron. "But 'tain't likely!" Mrs.
That, as they all knew by inheritance from the "shooings" which their forefathers had suffered, meant that they would no longer be allowed in the kitchen to pick up crumbs. At last Mrs. Gammit spoke but with difficulty, for it came hard to her to ask advice of any one. "I sp'ose now, mebbe, Mr. Barron, you know more about the woods critters'n what I do?" she inquired, hopefully but doubtfully.
He was wandering restlessly up and down the pen, when, through the cracks, he saw an awful black shadow darken the stable door. He lost not a second, but lifted his voice at once in one of those ear-piercing appeals which had now twice proved themselves so effective. The bear paused but for a moment, to cast his solitary eye over the situation. Mrs. Gammit fairly held her breath.
Of course she surprised nothing which Nature had endowed with even the merest apology for eyes and ears; and a cat-bird in the choke-cherry bushes squawked at her derisively. Stealth was one of the things which Mrs. Gammit did not easily achieve. Staring defiantly about her, her eyes fell upon a dark, bunchy creature in the top of an old hemlock at the other side of the fence.
An' here's caps," he added, producing a small, brown tin box of percussion caps from his trousers pocket. Mrs. Gammit felt abashed at her ignorance, but gratified, at the same time, by the reproach of metropolitanism. This implication of town-bred incompetency was most flattering to the seven frame houses and one corner store of Burd Settlement, whence she hailed.
Then, late in the morning, when the green world among the willows and rushes was still and warm and sweet, she led her fluffy, sturdy brood straight down to the water, and taught them to feed on the insects that clung to the bulrush stalks. Mrs. Gammit and the Porcupines "I hain't come to borry yer gun, Mr. Barron, but to ax yer advice." Mrs.
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