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 to be coaxed back into the choir by Virginia or Grandma Thorndyke in order to preserve my self-respect.  But neither of them said anything about it.  In fact, I thought that Grandma Thorndyke was not so friendly in the spring as she had been in the fall—­and, of course, I could not put myself forward.  I had the pure lunkhead pride.

So I had not seen Virginia for months.  We early Iowa settlers, the men and women who opened up the country to its great career of development, shivered through that winter and many like it, in hovels that only broke the force of the tempest but could not keep it back.  The storms swept across without a break in their fury as we cowered there, with no such shelters as now make our winters seemingly so much milder.  Now it is hard to convince a man from the East that our state was once bare prairie.