Lula woke from a dream of monsters pounding on the door - to find her father banging the wagon's side. "Up and at 'em, young'uns," he ordered. "Got a long ways to go today."

Lula stretched. Chill morning air knifed into the cocoon she shared with little Sadie, nestling atop boxes and crates in the back corner of the covered wagon. She snuggled deeper into the comforter.

"Make room for bedding," Mama said.

Lula groaned. "Come on, Sadie." She pried her three-year-old sister out of bed.

The boys rolled out from under the wagon, all five of them from little George, only five, up to Raymond, a whopping twenty-two.

Lula's three older sisters crept out of their small tent, hair already combed and braided.

Fourteen-year-old Oscar, the last to crawl out from under the wagon, reached back and hauled at the stack of blankets. "Yow!" he yelped, dropping the bedding and stumbling away. "A rattler!"

Papa and Mama leaped into motion, grabbing spade and club, poking the blankets until an arc of snake writhed into view. From the depths came a warning rattle.

"Head must be here!" Papa growled as he whomped.

Mama pounded another heaving spot. Before long the quilts fell still.

Papa used the fire tongs to fish out the dangling bloody body.

"How long was that critter in with the boys?" Mama cried out.

"Good thing none of 'em rolled over on it," Papa said as he carried the five-foot-long carcass away.

Lula ran to Oscar and hugged him. "You coulda got bit!" she sobbed.

He mussed her hair. "Always roll over slowly when you wake," he told her, "and never forget to check in your boot before you stick your foot in!"

"I don't wear boots!" Lula protested.

That was in 1909 on the family's meandering way to a homestead in Nebraska.

In 1910, when Lula turned ten, the family finally changed lodging from their two old covered wagons to one new sod shanty.

Lula had watched Papa and the boys guide a team of horses to plow up prairie sod into strips four inches thick, twelve inches wide, and as long as a fellow could handle. The boys stacked them into walls, marking out a rectangle twelve by sixteen feet.

Lula had taken the measuring pole around, finding spots lower than the rest, for the boys to fill in.

At last the walls loomed just higher than Papa's head, which was too high for Lula to reach no matter how she jumped. Pure Norwegian stock, he towered over most folks and especially over petite auburn-haired Mama. Mama said there was no telling what height any of her brood would attain! And that brood now included newborn Jesse.

Next the menfolk had laid poles from wall to wall. Across those they spread a thick mat of hay, and then another layer of sod.

Papa built a door frame into one side of the sod shanty, and cut two windows. Even with dirt for a floor, the shoddy felt to Lula like a mansion, almost as fine as her dimming memories of the sturdy wood-framed house they'd left in Minnesota so long ago.

On blazing hot days, Lula loved reaching home after school and plunging into the cool of the soddy. That first winter, the earthen insulation kept the family snug and warm around their pot-bellied stove, no matter how deep the snowdrifts outside. Lula and her younger brothers and sister sat at the table making figures and houses and whatever out of paper, by the light of a kerosene stove.

Rainy days were the worst. The sod roof always leaked, and they had to keep moving the bed or table to find a dry spot.

One summer night, as Papa was taking off his boots, he saw a rattlesnake coming through a hole which a gopher had made through one sod wall. He took a couple passes at it with his boot, and the snake slithered back through the wall to the quiet outdoors.

"Lula," Papa barked, "fetch me that bucket, quick!"

She leaped to fetched from beside the stove.

Papa plugged the hole with dried corn cobs, a handy firestarter, and that was that. The family all went to bed, safe and snug.

Lula curled up in her quilt and fell into silly dreams about boots and spades and poor shivering rattlesnakes fleeing for their lives.

.

After four years in the sod shanty, Lula's father and brothers built the family a new home: a framework of two-by-fours, with heavy tin or red sheet iron nailed on the outside. "It was wonderful to hear the rain on it, but the noise made by hail was beyond description. In the winter we almost froze to death in it, but everything bad has some good points."

Story recounted by Lulu's younger brother Jesse in "50 Years in the Sandhills and the Forest," 1971, pages 1-16 and 23