I recently had a relative send me this old story published over 50 years ago. Since it’s reached its 50 year limit, I thought I’d share it with you over the next few days. It’s quite the story!
Lost among the wolves by Mary E. Witherup in Wyoming Magazine, Vol VIII No. 2 June-July 1975, pages 36-39.
“To hear announced over the radio about children being lost or to read about it in the papers always alerts me to anxiously listen and await the outcome. Somehow I feel a peculiar involvement, as thoughts come flooding my mind concerning the eventful day my little brother was lost.
That day has stamped itself [for] indelibly on my mind that the smallest details are vivid after more than seventy years have passed, And, for some inexplicable reason, as I grow older, I relive the occasion more often and suffer again, the same emotions of fear and suspense, I had as a child of four years. Why does a distressing experience leave a deeper mark on a child’s mind than a more pleasant one?
Is there a relationship from this incident I connect with my lifelong fear of large dogs?
Now we have search planes, ‘copters, ears-intercommunication that comes quickly to give a then only kindness and good will of good neighbors.
Here is my story.
My father had lately filed on a homestead in an isolated district out in the wilds of Wyoming. The land was located where the little stream, called Crooked Creek joins the Nowood river at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains in Johnson County. Our post office address was Big Trails, a wide spot on that Indian Trail.
There were four of us children. We must have been a planned family as we were almost exactly two years apart. Esther was the oldest, six years five months at the time of my story. I was next, then brother and baby Gladys.
We lived in a log-sod cabin or dugout built partly back in a red clay bank. It was one fairly large room with windows and a wide door in the front part and bunk beds built in the back. There was an old style cook stove with a wide hearth an ash tray beneath, where we often baked potatoes in the hot coals. A long pine table with benches set off center to one side and pine cupboards lined the walls. Here we lived while my father and a hired man got out logs on the mountain to build our new home.
Our nearest neighbors, the Ainsworths, were three miles away and there was a log school house a little farther on. My mother’s sister was teaching the school then. Part of the time she stayed with us and part with other ranchers.
When she was with us she drove to and from school in a rickety old race-like cart. Her driving horse was our gentle mare, named Nellie. Nellie had a fine colt, a pesky pet we all loved. When the colt tabbed along it caused my aunt lots of trouble. It was time the colt was weaned so Auntie took to tieing it up when she left and giving instructions to Mother to turn it loose after she had been gone for about an hour.
On this memorable morning, mother went to untie the colt and found it dead. It had fallen on a patch of ice and hung itself or broke its neck with the rope somehow. Wherefore there was weeping as the day opened and the date was not Friday the thirteenth.
(I know… this is very sad, but hang in there… to be continued.)
Find me here!
