There is no flour nor cornmeal to make into bread,
‘There is no coffee that my mother could boil for us to drink.

There is no food.
The corn my father planted in his field is gone.

We ate it.
There was so little.
The corn pile in the storehouse was not high enough to last for long.
It is gone.
Now all of it is gone.
There is no food.
There is food at the Trading Post in sacks and in boxes, in bins and in cans on the shelf.

There is food at the Trading Post, but the Trading Post is far away and snowdrifts and snow clouds are heavy between

There is food at the Trading Post but my father has nothing leftof the hard, round money that he must give to the Trader for the food:
There is no food here in my mother’s hogan.

Then it is time to eat, we talk of other things, . but not of hunger.
This thing called hunger is a pain that sits inside me.
At first it was little, but now it grows bigger and bigger.’
It hurts me to be hungry.

Source : “Little Herder in the Winter” by Ann Clark 1940

Illustrated by:
Hoke Denetsosie

Linguistics by:
John P. Harrington
Robert W. Young

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