"Cather, Willa - O Pioneers!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

They had left the lagoons and the red grass
behind them. In Crazy Ivar's country the
grass was short and gray, the draws deeper
than they were in the Bergsons' neighborhood,
and the land was all broken up into hillocks
and clay ridges. The wild flowers disappeared,
and only in the bottom of the draws and gullies
grew a few of the very toughest and hardiest:
shoestring, and ironweed, and snow-on-the-
mountain.

"Look, look, Emil, there's Ivar's big pond!"
Alexandra pointed to a shining sheet of water
that lay at the bottom of a shallow draw.
At one end of the pond was an earthen dam,
planted with green willow bushes, and above it
a door and a single window were set into the
hillside. You would not have seen them at all
but for the reflection of the sunlight upon the
four panes of window-glass. And that was all
you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well,
not even a path broken in the curly grass. But
for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up
through the sod, you could have walked over
the roof of Ivar's dwelling without dreaming
that you were near a human habitation. Ivar
had lived for three years in the clay bank, with-
out defiling the face of nature any more than the
coyote that had lived there before him had done.

When the Bergsons drove over the hill, Ivar
was sitting in the doorway of his house, reading
the Norwegian Bible. He was a queerly shaped
old man, with a thick, powerful body set on
short bow-legs. His shaggy white hair, falling in
a thick mane about his ruddy cheeks, made him
look older than he was. He was barefoot, but he
wore a clean shirt of unbleached cotton, open at
the neck. He always put on a clean shirt when
Sunday morning came round, though he never
went to church. He had a peculiar religion of
his own and could not get on with any of the
denominations. Often he did not see anybody
from one week's end to another. He kept a
calendar, and every morning he checked off a
day, so that he was never in any doubt as to
which day of the week it was. Ivar hired him-
self out in threshing and corn-husking time,
and he doctored sick animals when he was sent
for. When he was at home, he made ham-