In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown(3)

The hunt master readied his horn and blew for the hunt to begin. The crowd followed the hounds at a rapid clip across the road and onto a newly plowed field. The beagles were of the shorter variety, only fourteen inches at their withers, so runners could keep up. They ran far behind the dogs to avoid contaminating the trail. They picked their way around bushes, fences, and thick forests, hoping to be the first to the site of the kill and earn the trophy from that day’s hunt—a coveted mask or pad of the rabbit. The group followed the dogs over a hill and into a valley.

Margaret Wise Brown drove up in her yellow convertible after the field had crested the horizon. She liked to arrive late and knew she would have no trouble catching up to the group. This one day of the week away from the city and her busy life of telephone calls and deadlines was her favorite time. She might walk alone, or run behind the group in silence. Most of the time, though, she found herself chatting effortlessly for six or seven miles with someone who owned a stable of Thoroughbred racehorses—or the person who mucked the stalls of those same horses. A shared desire to run with the hounds was the common bond.

She parked her car near the kennel and walked down the road. A man near a barn pointed, and she took off running in that direction. She soon heard the crooning release of the hounds as they spotted a hare and the cry of “Tallyho!” to her right. They were beyond the woods, past a furrowed field. She adjusted her course to intersect with the dogs, leaping over the small, even rises of dark dirt that were littered with frozen pink and white turnips too small to harvest. She liked the popping sound they made under her sneakers and timed her pace to land on the little bulbs as she made her way to the trees.

Her stamina and agility often placed her at the front of the throng. She was known to plunge fearlessly through a thicket rather than around it, as most of the hunters opted to do. Those scratchy shortcuts won her more than a few rabbits’ feet. As she approached the woods, she realized she would have to skirt this patch of trees. Horse brier vines covered the ground, and even she was no match for their fierce stickers. She passed the woods and looked for a path in the valley beyond. A trail would eventually appear, she was sure. It always did.

She ran lightly, pulling herself up by her shoulders as she sprinted through the green and red grasses of the valley. The past few months had taken a toll on her body and spirit. She desperately wanted to lose the twenty pounds she had gained since her lover had left her. Most evenings, wine seemed a better remedy for her loneliness than exercise.

Running in these fields, though, Margaret once again felt young. She had grown up here, and she had spent many afternoons of her youth riding her horse through these same pastures. She had swum in the nearby ocean and built houses of sticks and leaves in these forests.

She saw a trail of trampled grass and broken sticks and instantly knew it was a path the dogs had made. She followed it up the hill and on the next rise saw one of the whips coaxing a dog back on course with the snap of his whip while at a full run, something she had yet to conquer. She caught up to him as the pack circled a dead hare in the grass. The dogs were particularly excited; they hadn’t hunted for a few days, and it would be hard to pull them back. The master called the dogs down and then reached in to grasp the body of the bunny. He held it high above his head, an indication to the dogs that this prize was no longer theirs. The pack reluctantly obeyed.

It was clear this rabbit was dead before the dogs had found it, shot by a frustrated farmer, no doubt. As the rest of the runners drew close, two gunshots were fired in the distance. Margaret quipped that two more rabbits had just been killed, which drew a round of chuckles from the field. In reality, she always felt sorry for the death of the rabbit, especially if it were one that had escaped before.

Suddenly, there was a stir among the hounds. Then they went still. Their quickening sniffs meant another hare was close by. The master shouted to the field to hold hard, and all the hunters froze, allowing the dogs to pick up the new scent. The dogs flushed a hare from a patch of grass, and once again the hunt was on. The jack bounded across the field, then darted sideways. Margaret knew the poor bunnies often circled back in desperation. Sometimes this tactic worked, but if the rabbit ran straight, the hounds could seldom keep pace. Sooner or later, though, it would run for home or cover, and the attempted escape often sent the bunny straight into people or hounds instead of an open field.

This one, though, burst onto a grassy road and sped away from the dogs and humans. He held his ears high and straight as he bounced out of sight. That, Margaret thought, was a beautiful thing to see.





One

1910–1914

Once upon a summertime

A bug was crawling on a vine

A butterfly lit on a daisy

While a little bee

Buzzed himself crazy in a wild pink rose

And a child ran through the wet green grass

In his bare feet and wiggled his toes

“ONCE UPON A SUMMERTIME”

The Unpublished Works of Margaret Wise Brown


The moon and sky over Brooklyn, New York, was bathed in the golden hue of an aurora borealis in the early morning hours of May 23. Sheet lightning to the south and east illuminated the shifting rays in a staccato dance of light. As the rising sun diminished the auroral lights, panic rose in the house of Bruce and Maude Brown. The baby they had been expecting more than two weeks earlier was now arriving in a rush. But the doctor was nowhere to be found.