Chapter One

I always feel a little apologetic about not wanting to be a girl. This could be because ours was a five-girl family, and I had an only brother, two years older than I. With two girls on each side, it seemed only right that there should be two boys in the middle. In my adolescence, girls were supposed to grow gracefully into womanhood. To grow up gracefully was fine, but not for me, because I was not graceful. For this reason, I seemed to fit better with boys. I wanted to go swimming with the gang; I wanted to play marbles with the gang. I was always reminded, "Oh, no. You are a girl." I began to think that it was bad to be a girl; what was wrong with me watching a little old marble game? And suppose I did steal a shot now and then? I was probably not too bad, because finally I seemed to be playing marbles, though I never got to go swimming with the gang; oh, yes, I remember I am a girl, but I was willing to wear a bathing suit.

By the time I was ten years old, Mother and Dad probably realized that it was impossible to keep up in town with a gang the size of theirs, because we moved to the country. There, my brother accepted me; we were inseparable. We practically lived out of doors. We fished by day, and at night, we went raccoon hunting—at first with our small colored neighbors and later alone.

After much dickering, we acquired two hound dogs and a lantern, and we were in business. What we did not know was that raccoon hounds had to first grow up, and then they had to be trained to hunt; instead of our raccoon hounds chasing the raccoon, the raccoon chased our hounds