It was Fiebold Fieboldson who first started a farm in Nebraska.
At first he had no intention of settling there at all. The accident forced him. Fiebold came to America from his native Sweden to start a farm in California. In his covered wagon heading West, besides him, were three of his nephews: Bergstrom Stromberg, Hjalmar Hjalmarson and Ilded Johnson. And Ilded Johnson's grandfather.
And the summer that year was unusually hot. No one had ever remembered such heat. On the Great Plain - Great Valley - all the streams, reservoirs and rivers dried up. Fibold and his nephews and Ilded Johnson's grandfather were simply dying of thirst when they suddenly came across what was once called a river, but now only one memory remains of it. A thin, barely alive trickle in the middle of a wide bed of marshy mud.
Ilded Johnson's grandfather was so happy to finally see water that he quickly jumped off the wagon, overtook the oxen pulling the wagon, and dived headfirst into the river. Or rather, what was left of it.
Alas, his head was firmly stuck in the muddy mud, and his legs remained sticking out in the air.
Fiebold hurried to pull him out, but grandfather injured his neck, and therefore they could no longer continue the journey. Fibold and his nephews had to stay put until Ilded Johnson's grandfather recovered completely.
In memory of such an unpleasant incident, this river was named - Dull River.
First of all, Fiebold looked around and became convinced that this region was completely unsuitable for farming. Hills and mountains rose from all sides. But since they had to be stuck here for a long time, Fiebold still decided to adapt this land for a farm. True, the only thing he could do was move mountains up
feet. So he did. And it turned out to be a smooth flat plateau.
Go to Nebraska and see for yourself how smooth and level the land is.
All that remained was to plow this land, which is what Fiebold did. At first he couldn’t get straight furrows. Fiebold and his plow will reach the end of the furrow, look back, and the furrow is crooked, twisting back and forth, like a mountain gorge. Well, Fibold her - once! - picks it up by the tip and straightens it. Otherwise, he couldn’t get straight furrows.
While Fiebold plowed and sowed, his nephews built a house. In Febodd's opinion, since they were stuck in Nebraska and had to sit here until Grandpa Ilded got better, why would they be homeless? And when they built the house, they decided: why rush from here, since the house has already been built?
Eh, if Fiebold knew what Nebraska was, he would probably still think about whether to stay there.
The first year they settled in Nebraska, the snow fell so deep that getting to the nearest town, which was about a hundred miles away, was out of the question. And they would have had to sit without any supplies if Fiebold had not immediately invented the snowman plow. Yes, so huge that you could harness even a herd of bison to it. A miracle, not a plow! He cleared all the snow drifts and even captured a little land. So in the spring, a deep and wide ditch was discovered in this very place.
The Platte River now flows through it.
When summer came, the heat came again. But Fiebold had already foreseen this. True, he could not foresee the Nebraska wind. One fine day he started blowing! And it blew and blew... With such force that it blew all the earth out from under the house. And of course, the house fell into this hole. Only the roof remained visible.
But Fiebold, without wasting any time, immediately built a new house on it, and called the one below it the world’s first basement.
This time Fiebold decided not only to sow the land with different seeds, but also to embellish the local landscape. Therefore, he planted groves of cotton trees everywhere. And then he decided to plant the whole land with these trees. He reasoned logically: if small bushes produce a good cotton harvest, then large trees will produce a hundred times more.
Everything was going great until it was time to harvest. This is where it turned out that it was not so easy for cotton pickers to climb tall trees. But Fiebold hastened to their aid. He grabbed cotton trees by the tops and bent them down to the ground. However, his idea was successful only in the first year, and the next season he had no cotton trees left.
Why? Yes, because he forgot to straighten them! And they continued to grow, resting their crowns on the ground. They grew and grew and grew into the ground. You still won't see a single cotton plantation in Nebraska.
After an unsuccessful experience with cotton trees, Fiebold had to start an ordinary farm. He became the best farmer in all of Nebraska. He had such a harvest that he didn’t mind sharing the wheat and corn with the local grasshoppers.
But one day, out of nowhere, locusts swooped down. Swarms of locusts, those insatiable relatives of the innocent grasshoppers of the field. There were so many of them that they covered the sun with a dark cloud, and night fell in broad daylight. They began to devour everything. Their jaws clanged and clattered louder than a rock avalanche flying from a mountain.
But Fibold Fiboldson was not the kind of man to sit back and watch his crops perish. He thought a little and went east for turkeys, because the favorite delicacy of turkeys was grasshoppers, and since grasshoppers, that means their closest relatives are locusts. And Fiebold really hoped that the turkeys would quickly deal with her.
But that was not the case. Not the turkeys - the locusts, but the locusts devoured the turkeys - all of them, whole, with feathers and bones.
kami. She didn’t even leave anything for Fiebold and his nephews for dinner.
So the entire harvest was lost, down to the grain. Moreover, Fiebold was afraid that the same thing would happen next year. And he didn’t want that at all. However, since he had nothing to plant that year, he decided to become a fisherman - to hunt sharks. He had his own way of catching them: he taught the sharks to swim to the shore when they whistled, it turned out to be more convenient.
When he had whistled enough sharks to last him and his nephews and Ilded Johnson's grandfather for a week, he suddenly remembered something. Very important.
He remembered that fishermen attract sharks... who do you think? Grasshoppers! So, maybe the sharks will save him from the locust invasion next year? But how to arrange all this? After all, locusts sit on the ground, and sharks prefer water. Eh, if sharks were transplanted from water to land, then they would deal with locusts in no time!
Yes, but then the sharks would need wings to catch the locusts. If only sharks had wings, locusts would never escape them!
Just as Fiebold was pondering this problem, a flock of wild geese flew overhead. And he immediately decided to marry geese and sharks. He had a huge network. He threw it into the air and caught a hundred geese at once. Then he cast the net again and again and sent all the geese to the bank of the Dull River, where he prepared a field for them, fenced on all sides. All that remained was to whistle to the shore as many sharks as there were geese, which he did.
By the next summer season, when the locusts began to flock, his goose farm was already full of flying fish. Fibold released them and set them on the locusts. How pleasant it was for him to watch how the whole flock of flying fish attacked these voracious jumpers.
A flock of flying fish made a circle or two over his field and ate all the locusts that came their way. But then, instead of landing and calmly
To begin with, she suddenly lined up at an acute angle, as wild geese usually line up during the autumn flight, soared up and disappeared over the horizon.
So Fibold Fiboldson never saw them again. Only much later did one sailor tell Bergstrom Stromberg that it was at that time that flying fish first appeared in the Pacific Ocean.
Can you imagine what it was like for Fibold Fiboldson to see his school of flying fish hiding in the clouds? However, it was not too late to save the harvest. And Fiebold took two days of respite and went to Canada. There he captured three packs of wolves and brought them alive to Nebraska.
He believed that of all animals, wolves are the most fearless. Only they will decide to attack the locusts. He let them run around the farm lands near Dismal River, and they did their job. Within a few years, the locusts in Nebraska were completely gone.
Yes, but now the wolves were left without food and began to lose weight. They grew thinner and thinner, becoming smaller and smaller, until they turned into steppe dogs - coyotes. And they also ask, where did coyotes come from on the prairies? Now it’s clear where?
But then, in one successful harvest year, the coyotes began to gain weight again and soon became almost as pot-bellied as locusts. It turned out that they got into the habit of stealing Fiebold’s grain right on the stand, and even dug up all his land, digging holes for themselves in which they made cozy holes. It was a real disaster! Cows and horses fell into these holes and injured their legs. In a word, Fibold again found himself on the brink of ruin; I remembered the sad times when locusts swooped down on his crops.
While Fiebold was deciding what to do, a merchant somehow wandered into those places and told Fiebold about one innovation - a barbed wire fence.
But I must tell you, Fiebold has always kept pace with the times. He bought hundreds of miles of this barbed wire
for testing. But then he discovered that there weren't enough trees in all of Nebraska to make that many posts for a thorn fence. And even if it were enough, he could imagine how much time it would take!
Just then the rainy season began. The rain poured and poured and flooded all the coyote holes. And then suddenly frost hit, and the water in these holes froze. Fibold was delighted! He immediately realized that a lucky chance had finally come his way. He called to his nephews, they quickly dug frozen water out of the coyote holes and got as many even, smooth pillars as they needed.
The young people coated these pillars with varnish so that they would not melt, and with the first thaw, when it became easier to dig, they drove them into the ground. There were enough poles for the entire wire, there was even a little left. Now the farm was equipped quite modernly.
But Fiebold could not fully appreciate what a wonderful thing he had done. It was only in the summer that he realized this, when the coyotes, finding that he had deprived them of their home, left Nebraska and moved to Kansas.
There were so many coyotes that they completely trampled the border between the states of Kansas and Nebraska. And Fiebold felt very awkward, he understood how important this border was, and believed that it was spoiled to some extent through his fault. So he decided to fix the matter.
But how? Luckily, Fiebold had several hives of bees on his farm. He looked after them so well that they were plump and plump. And he managed to select sixteen, or even all seventeen, of them and harness them to the plow. Then he took them and the plow to the southernmost point of Nebraska and there he whispered in the bees’ ears that Utah had the best nectar that bees could dream of. And the bees flew straight to the West and dragged the plow behind them. So they laid out a new direct border between the states of Nebraska and Kansas.
Since then, people have said when they want to indicate to a traveler
the shortest and most direct road: “Follow the bee path!”
For some time, life on the Fiebold farm was quiet, calm, except, of course, for one or two hurricanes that destroyed his grain barns and carried away his house. Then Fibold realized that it was necessary to lasso these brawlers and tie them tightly so that they would waste all their strength fighting with the ropes. Then they won’t have enough gunpowder to destroy houses and create other outrages. Well, it helped, only one hurricane did not fizzle out after such treatment. He still had enough strength to return again at night and tie up Fibold himself. But it was some kind of crazy hurricane.
And one day there was a drought. Week after week passed without rain, and week after week passed without rain. The corn shriveled and dried out before it could rise. It couldn't even be mowed down.
And the poor cows became so emaciated that Fiebold was afraid that the wind would carry them away. We had to tie weights to their tails to prevent them from flying away.
It was so dry and hot that even Fibold's house shriveled and shrank, and he was forced to cut a new door, otherwise he would never have gotten out of it.
The only way out was to install an irrigation system. The Dull River has long since dried up; there is no water left there. But Fiebold knew where the water was. He took his beloved bull out of the stall and went with him to the deep Platte River. He grabbed the river by the narrow end and, together with the bull, dragged it to the house. There was no way he could have handled such a thing alone. Then he lined all the ground on the farm with ditches and poured Platte water into them. That year he harvested the richest of all, from the swamps of New Jersey to the Sacramento valleys in California.
That same fall, he returned Platt to its place because a visiting merchant sold him something better. Fiebold bought a dozen windmills from him to extract water from underground. Imagine, the mill is spinning, the pump is working and pumping out water!
He assigned Ilded Johnson's grandfather to the mills. And all this happened in the year of the Strong Wind. And one day a gust of wind blew grandfather off his feet and blew his last breath out of him.
Fiebold and his nephews were very sad that their grandfather had given up the ghost, and they gave him a magnificent funeral. But when they brought him to the cemetery, a new gust of hurricane wind came, only from the other side, and again blew life into grandfather. Grandfather immediately got up and began looking for his glasses.
That's how the wind blew that year!
Soon after this incident, Fibold Fiboldson received an interesting guest. One morning he looked out the window to take a gloomy look at the mountains of sand caused by the hurricane, and suddenly on the horizon he saw the light outlines of sails. He could have sworn it was sails. “I’m probably dreaming, it’s a mirage,” he thought and went to have breakfast.
Having swallowed the last pancake, Fiebold looked out the window again and again saw sails in the distance. But now they were closer. For half an hour he stood and watched the sails, filled with wind, float across the prairie, just like in his native Sweden, when the schooners of fishermen return home.
And now the sails are already fluttering at the very fibold barns, and from under them a man emerges, throws a heavy anchor near the pigsty, trims the sails and shouts:
- Hello, buddy!
Only then did Fibold see what kind of vessel had washed up on his shore. It was an ordinary wagon, but, instead of horses or oxen, it was equipped with sails.
“My name is Smith Wind-Driven,” the uninvited guest introduced himself. - Well, I swallowed dust in your Nebraska! I don’t know if I can fit in breakfast as well. But I'm ready to try!
Fiebold invited the stranger into the house. Having finished the first two dozen pancakes, Winddriven Smith was already able to answer Fiebold Fieboldson's questions.
- What are you doing with that van of yours? — Fiebold asked.
- Do I? - Smith Wind Driven was surprised. - I’m not doing anything. I'm just moving from place to place. There is only one thing that spoils my trip - your barbed wire. Yes, sometimes seasickness happens if the terrain is uneven, too hilly.
Smith showed Fiebold the harpoon with which he hunts buffalo without leaving the wagon. And an even bigger, stronger net to catch rabbits.
The day passed quickly in these fascinating conversations. They didn’t even notice how the sun had set and it was time to go to bed, but they were still sitting at breakfast. Fibold, apparently, decided in one day to find out everything that Wind Driven could boast of. And he himself tried to keep up with him and boast about something.
The youngest of the nephews, Hjalmar Hjalmarson, offered the guest his bed, and he himself went to sleep in the hayloft.
“Don’t be shy, make yourself comfortable,” said Fiebold and blew out the candle.
Before the candle had time to go out, he dived into bed and pulled the blanket up to his ears. Only Ilded Johnson's grandfather was awake and quietly talking to himself.
About two days after Wind-Driven Smith set sail from Feebold Feeboldson's barns, heading for Albuquerque, Feebold had a small skirmish with his neighbors.
I must tell you, everyone was damn tired from the strong wind. Nothing like this had ever happened before Fiebold put up his windmills, and the neighbors decided that they were what caused the wind. They demanded that Fiebold stop the mills, and were hot on his heels, in the most literal sense of the word. But Fiebold eluded them every time.
One day, having reached the Dismal River, Fiebold decided to jump over it in one fell swoop. He had no doubt that the neighbors would need at least three or four
jump, which means he will leave them behind again. However, this time Fiebold miscalculated. The wind was blowing against him. And he barely made it to the other side. Plop! — he plopped down on the sandy bottom of a dry river.
And immediately got stuck in the sand. The neighbors left him floundering there alone. Let it disappear. But they didn’t know that a year earlier, in this very place, a covered wagon tried to ford the Dull River. Having fallen into quicksand, Fibold fell precisely on top of him. And every van, you know, has a folding top at the back. So it was easy for Fiebold to fold back the canvas top and climb inside.
Fibold was simply lucky: this van turned out to be an excellent hiding place, which he later used more than once, escaping from grandfather Ilded Johnson, who was always complaining that he was tired of cooking or that Arabella was haunting him.
That was the name of Fibold's favorite rattlesnake.
Well, she was huge, this Arabella! And so tender and devoted. Sometimes he would crawl up to Fiebold and poke his leg, offering his head for him to stroke. Every morning at the same hour she woke him up by crawling into his bed and clapping her rattles. Fiebold found her very useful in other ways: she had a habit of crawling out to meet them when Fiebold had guests from the eastern states. You understand, after that the guests did not stay with him for long.
During the entire time that Arabella lived with Fibold, she never bit anyone. But this did not mean that she was completely harmless. She had a habit of sharpening her teeth on a whetstone. One day Fiebold sharpened his knife right after her. And that day they had beans for lunch. Fiebold, as usual, was eating from the knife, and a drop of snake venom got into his mouth. He felt unwell and went for a walk along the banks of the Dull River. There were apparently no mosquitoes in those places. They surrounded Fibold from all sides and, no matter how he fought back, drank his blood.
But, having returned home, Fibold already felt
a little better. Why be surprised? The mosquitoes sucked all the snake venom out of him. Bergstrom Stromberg himself told how the next morning the entire river bank was strewn with dead mosquitoes. Mosquitoes do not tolerate snake venom well.
Of the pets, Fiebold had another favorite - the sea horse. He started it in the year of the Great Flood. It rained so much all season in South America that the Gulf of Mexico overflowed its banks and drove back the full-flowing Mississippi, and that, in turn, the Missouri and the Platte River. Along with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a lot of ocean fish, as well as seals, were brought there.
Fiebold caught one and mounted it, and then rode it down the river and lassoed sharks that also came into the Platte from the Gulf of Mexico. Ilded Johnson's grandfather didn't mind when Fibold brought him sea sharks for dinner, but he couldn't see his wet horse, even if it was a seal seahorse. Grandfather cooked sharks with curry sauce. This was Fiebold's favorite gravy made from turmeric root, garlic and various spices.
But most of all of his pets, Fibold loved the cat with a wooden paw. At the very beginning, when Fibold first picked up this cat, he was very afraid that she would not be able to catch mice. Judge for yourself, her piece of wood clattered on the floor so much that any mouse, unless it was deaf from birth, could easily escape from it. But it turned out that the cat was in no way inferior to its owner in terms of intelligence. She figured out how to catch mice.
Usually cats chase a mouse, and - catch it! But Fibold's cat couldn't do that. So, it was necessary to come up with something else. She noticed that mice were entering the house through a hole in the wall near the large grandfather clock. All that was left was to hide near this hole and keep the wooden paw at the ready. As soon as the mouse stuck its head into the hole, and - click! - everything is ready. So from its wooden
With her paw, Fibold Fiboldson's beloved cat caught mice no worse than anyone else on all fours.
Fiebold was very proud of his cat. And a grandfather clock too. But this watch caused a lot of trouble. In all the years that Fiebold lived in Nebraska, he never moved this clock. As he placed them, they stood there, and the pendulum kept swinging - tick-tock, tick-tock. And the shadow of the pendulum, of course, swayed after it - tick-tock, tick-tock. And in the end, the shadow from the pendulum rubbed a hole in the wall. The wall fell, and behind it the house itself fell.
Then Fiebold decided: he’d had enough of Nebraska. And he moved to California, where he had intended to go from the very beginning. Judging by rumors, he never left there.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru