mitted extraction of surpluses of many commodities for trade for others’
surpluses. Humans also have always used the best weapons they could
contrive to kill wild and domesticated animals for meat, and they have
used traps and poisons (arsenic, most commonly) as well as their weapons
to control animals that civilization turned into pests and predators upon
crops. Making shelter, tool and gun handles, plow frames, wagons, boats,
and bridges in wooded landscapes necessitated more violence to forests, re-
duction of habitat, and alterations of drainage. Humans will manage land-
scapes as best (or worst) they can. Sometimes—and this hubris helps define
what is called modernity—humans aspire to orchestrate utter security and
predictability. This is but a dream, of course.^2
tMarjorie Rawlings’s crackers understood this well. InThe Yearlingher
wise spokesman-practitioner of human-‘‘natural’’ environmental relation-
ships is Ezra Baxter, who is called ‘‘Penny.’’ (He is so named because in the
novel Ezra is runty, yet in the film version, starring tall, broad-shouldered
Gregory Peck, he is also called Penny as well as Ezra.) The story is set
mainly in , and Penny, his dour wife, and their only son, twelve-year-
old Jodie, were inspired by hammock swamp families Marjorie knew dur-
ing the s. The Baxters live on Baxter’s Island, a sandy pine ridge among
watery marshes. They keep a horse for plowing, a cow for milk, a few hogs
for meat (if they can), chickens for eggs, and dogs for hunting, home secu-
rity (especially from snakes), and companionship. Penny shoots the occa-
sional alligator—these were still plentiful then—so he may keep tail meat
in his smokehouse for the dogs, since the Baxters seldom have leftovers
from their own larder. Penny’s crops, too, are seldom adequate for sur-
pluses to trade for other things his family needs or craves—cloth, for ex-
ample, or powder and shot, or candy. So he hunts deer, bear, and other
wild animals for their meat and hides. Penny is an expert reader of forest
signs, a relentless tracker, and a crack shot with an old, sometimes unreli-
able gun, probably the same one he carried for four years as a Confeder-
ate soldier. The gun problem is solved in a marvelous scene wherein Penny
cleverly trades a dog of little utility for a fine shotgun—this with one of
the brothers Forrester, rowdy neighbors who do not farm but range horses,
drive them to distant trading places, and return with barrels of whiskey to
swill while they saw fiddles, strum guitars, and sing uproariously in unself-
conscious nakedness. They are one well-named and charming clan, except
for the mean brother tricked in the dog-gun bargain, of course.
Unlike the Forresters, Penny is essentially a one-horse farmer without a