5-6 began coming down.

It was a terrible winter. The deer were all killed in their stamping
grounds in the timber, where they trod down the snow and struggled to
get at the brush and twigs for forage. The settlers went in on snowshoes
and killed them with clubs and axes. We never could have preserved the
deer in a country like this, where almost every acre was destined to go
under plow--but they ought to have been given a chance for their lives.
I remember once when I was cussing[12] the men who butchered the pretty
little things while Magnus Thorkelson was staying all night with me to
help me get my stock through a bad storm--it was a blizzard, but we had
never heard the word then--and as I got hot in my blasting and
bedarning of them (though they needed the venison) he got up and grasped
my hand, and made as if to kiss me.

[12] "Cussing" and "cursing" are quite different things, insists the
author. He would never have cursed any one, he protests; but a man is
always justified in cussing when a proper case for it is
presented.--G.v.d.M.

"It is murder," said he, and backed off.

I felt warmed toward him for wanting to kiss me, though I should have
knocked him down if he had. He told me it was customary for men to kiss
each other sometimes, in Norway. The Dunkards--like the Bohns and
Bemisdarfers--were the only Americans I ever knew anything about (if
they really were Americans, talking Pennsylvania Dutch as they did) who
ever practised it. They greeted each other with a "holy kiss" and washed
each other's feet at their great communion meeting every year. I never
went but once. The men kissed the men and the women the women. So I
never went but once; though they "fed the multitude" as a religious
function--and if there are any women who can cook bread and meat so it
will melt in your mouth, it is the Pennsylvania Dutch women. And the
Bohn and Bemisdarfer women seem to me the best cooks among them, they
and the Stricklers. They taught most of our wives the best cookery
they know.

I was disappointed when we started from Monterey Centre, with Judge
Horace Stone and me in the front seat, and Virginia in the back. As I
started to say a while back, I had not been singing in the choir during
the winter. The storms kept me looking out for my stock until the snow
went off in the February thaw that covered Vandemark's Folly with water
from bluff to bluff; and by that time I had stayed out so long that I
thought I ought t