Dad continued to bring Daniel over to work from time to time. Things went so much more quickly with him there and we didn't get yelled at when he was around, even though we worked a lot. He didn't act like he was 35; it was like having another kid around, except that his opinion and presence had weight with our parents because he was an adult, so we felt protected. He and I often pulled the wooden sled together and joked about being a well matched team of draft horses. The sled would be loaded high with rounds to be split as we hauled it from the woods. One the rope that we pulled with broke suddenly and we fell into the snow, laughing.

Another time, we were carrying longer, smaller diameter logs out on a path that was too narrow for the sled. It was getting dark and the path was hard to see. After a while, we couldn't see it at all, and were in the forest when we realized we'd gone off the path. Daniel and Raphah were worrying about where the path was. I felt for it with my feet and quickly found it. He was surprised, and I told him that I was used to relying on senses other than sight, because I had gone so long without glasses. When we got back to the house, Sarah and I talked to him (out of earshot of our parents) about how even with our glasses, we really could not see that well. We detailed what we could and couldn't see. I tried putting on both my and Sarah's glasses together, and was amazed at the clarity and detail. I turned towards Daniel, hoping to finally see his face clearly for once. He was frowning and looked upset, so I quickly took the double set of glasses off. I figured he was frowning because I looked stupid that way.

As for Daniel working for us, I think Dad had agreed to pay or barter with him, but am not sure if he ever actually got paid. Maybe Dad was trying to barter me off like Laban did with his daughters Rachel and Leah in the bible. We always fed him well, and he was definitely hungry, even though he ate the meat reluctantly. I turned out that he was a Seventh Day Adventist and vegetarian, and only ate meat at our house so as not to offend us by refusing. He also didn't like cooked tomatoes, only raw, no sugar...I wondered how on earth I would feed this man, because most of what Mom had taught me to cook so far relied rather heavily on cooked tomatoes! Clearly, I would have to learn some new recipes.Dad brought home a lot of smelt one day and put us all to the task of gutting them before being fried. I didn't know about this, not having much of an appetite for fish in the first place, but Daniel, who was of Norwegian extraction, seemed enthusiastic about it, so I guessed I would at least try them. Once they were all cooked, whole except for the guts, he and Dennis crunched right into them, bones, head, and all! I just could not eat the heads, remembering the dead eyes of the fish staring up at me as I gutted them.

The thing about Daniel is that he was really, really poor. He told of us how destitute he'd been when he first came to Idaho from Minnesota, how he'd cooked and eaten the horse's sweet feed as cereal to survive. How, more recently, he'd been so hungry for fresh green vegetables that he'd attempted to cook and eat some alfalfa hay, but it didn't agree with his digestive system. He showed us his lunch one day, about 25 small apples that like us, he had picked for free. This was what he generally ate for a lunch when he worked as a farm hand for his old farmer friends. I didn't mind that he was poor; I knew that there were far more important things in life, small beauties that couldn't be purchased for any amount of money. Besides, I'd seen my father's family. Despite all the money they had, they didn't seem particularly happy, and they didn't seem to enjoy life half as much as Daniel did. His brown Carharrts were ripped and patched, his favorite sky blue shirt was torn at the armpit, and he had only one hand-sewn sheepskin mitten because he was still working on the other one, but none of these things mattered to me. He lived in a house that was even smaller than our own and also without electricity or running water. He had an artesian well that he carried water from by buckets. All of this sounded heavenly to me. I had long since concluded that a person could be rich and dissatisfied, or poor and happy, and decided that the latter group was for me. I didn't want any of the rich old men Dad was always talking about. A poor farmer was just fine by me.