Sunday afternoon salting is Vermont custom: the narrator carries salt through brook and sugar-bush, past ruined rose-fringed cellars and Lost Orchard, into the Back Pasture where pines, hemlock, grey rock, and brake alternate. Dave and Pete, the red oxen, take salt first in the home meadow; then cows, Pan the calf who should have been veal but survived on manners, and finally horses scattered across seventy acres. Most people walk the rough route; the narrator often uses a five-dollar coupe born as a buckboard, improved when its seat flew off on a corner and nothing remained to catch falling passengers. On this broiling Sunday the herd is late to find until voices carry from hemlock shade above the ravine.
There the farm's working horses have gathered around a yellow frame-house of a horse called Boney, boarding from a livery stable where they named him The Lamb and only let him out at night to strangers. He speaks of the noblest horses abiding among Kansas sunflowers and claims fawning for one's inalienable right is humiliating. The Deacon tells him to go downhill and find grain; Boney stays to preach. He asks if men and horses are free and equal; Muldoon, who worked the Belt Line stables in New York, answers that freedom waits until they are dead and even then depends on buttons and mucilage. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, cautiously philosophical, and Rick, who can cover forty-two miles to Keene in an afternoon with a mate, press practical questions: loaded buggy miles, cars hauled from tracks, emergencies met without wrecking passengers.
The route for salting ran along the brook through the sugar-bush, past two or three overgrown cellar holes whose lilac clumps and rose briars marked where families had given up on the hill farms, and up through Lost Orchard to the Back Pasture where pine and hemlock crowded the grey ledge outcroppings. Dave and Pete took their salt first in the home meadow, standing patient in the yoke while the narrator pressed the block against their tongues. The cows came next in rough order of seniority, then Pan, the calf who had survived on good manners when the household lost the will to slaughter him for veal, and finally the horses scattered across seventy acres of mixed field and wood.
Getting to the horses sometimes required the five-dollar coupe, which had started life as a buckboard and changed character the morning the seat launched itself off a corner at speed, leaving a vehicle with no mechanism for catching passengers who slipped. On a broiling Sunday afternoon with the herd missing from its usual field, the narrator followed voices carrying out of hemlock shade above the ravine and found an unusual gathering.
