Her father's gun hung over the door and good old Jack, the brindle bulldog, lay on guard before it. But she was safe inside the solid log walls. Laura knew that wolves would eat little girls. Sometimes, far away in the night, a wolf howled. In those days and in that place, children did not say Father and Mother, nor Mamma and Papa, as they do now.Īt night, when Laura lay awake in the trundle bed, she listened and could not hear anything at all but the sound of the trees whispering together. The little girl was named Laura and she called her father, Pa, and her mother, Ma.
A wagon track ran before the house, turning and twisting out of sight in the woods where the wild animals lived, but the little girl did not know where it went, nor what might be at the end of it.
So far as the little girl could see, there was only the one little house where she lived with her Father and Mother, her sister Mary and baby sister Carrie. To the east of the little log house, and to the west, there were miles upon miles of trees, and only a few little log houses scattered far apart in the edge of the Big Woods. Foxes had dens in the hills and deer roamed everywhere. Muskrats and mink and otter lived by the streams. Wolves lived in the Big Woods, and bears, and huge wild cats. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. Then the garden produce is harvested: potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, cabbages, onions, red peppers, pumpkins and squashes.Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs. Then Pa catches a wagonload of fish from Lake Pepin, which are salted away in barrels. But once we’ve got past the opening scene-setting, we get straight to business with Laura seeing dead deer in the trees, and the lesson in how to hickory smoke them (because you can’t beat hickory cured meat). We learn how little the house is – little! – though it’s comfortable, and positively palatial compared to some of the dwellings in store for the Ingalls family. We learn how big the Big Woods are – big! – and the animals that live in them. We learn that Laura calls her parents, Ma and Pa (a detail that unthinkably nearly got dropped at the request of the publisher as too ‘colloquial’, but luckily there was a change of heart. We are introduced to the family, and to Jack the dog. The opening paragraphs do have a slightly odd feel to them to me, like going back and watching the pilot episode of a favourite TV show while the characters we know and love are still finding their feet.
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