Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/231

Rh being finally permanently fastened down, made the modern bureau. High-backed wooden chairs and an immense oaken table with folding ladder legs, furnished the living-room, settles being on either side of the wide chimney, where, as the children roasted apples or chestnuts, they listened to stories of the wolves, whose howl even then might still be heard about the village. There are various references to "wolf-hooks" in Governor Bradstreet's accounts, these being described by Josselyn as follows:

"Four mackerel hooks are bound with brown thread and wool wrapped around them, and they are dipped into melted tallow till they be as big and round as an egg. This thing thus prepared is laid by some dead carcase which toles the wolves. It is swallowed by them and is the means of their being taken."

Every settler believed that "the fangs of a wolf hung about children's necks keep them from frightning, and are very good to rub their gums with when they are breeding of teeth." It was not at all out of character to look on complacently while dogs worried an unhappy wolf, the same Josselyn writing of one taken in a trap: "A great mastiff held the wolf. . . . Tying him to a stake we bated him with smaller doggs and had excellent sport; but his hinder leg being broken, they knocked out his brains."

To these hunts every man and boy turned out, welcoming the break in the monotonous life, and foxes and wolves were shot by the dozen, their method being to "lay a sledg-load of cods-heads on the other side of a paled fence when the moon shines, and about nine or ten of the clock, the foxes come to it; sometimes two or three or half a dozen and more;