Editor's note: The following excerpt is from Louise Wagenknecht's new book, "White Poplar, Black Locust," adapted by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Available at bookstores and at nebraskapress.unl.edu. Information: 800-755-1105.

(Grandmother) was born Martha Kristiane Vilhelmine Dittmar, a mouthful of a name that I used to recite to myself, enchanted by its rhythms. She came from Denmark to Iowa with her parents at the age of two and grew up in Clinton, a Mississippi River town full of immigrants - Germans, Swedes, Danes. She left school after the eighth grade and went to work in a Danish bakery, where on delivery days the men who drove the freight wagons unloaded hundred-pound sacks of flour onto her shoulders. She learned to mix and knead and bake pastries and to wait on customers. She worked ten hours a day for ten cents an hour.

Forty years later, as she pounded and chopped and kneaded food for us, the patter of the bakery counter seemed to come back to her, as she told us stories of Jule Nisse, who left presents in the shoes of good ~ i children on Christmas Eve

and received in turn a dish of clabbered milk sweetened with cinnamon and sugar, set out beside the hearth. She sang little songs in Danish to us, taught to her by her own mother Anna, an orphan who had been farmed out to a series of grudging relatives, then put to work as a goosegirl at the age of four. She told fewer stories about Niels, her father, a hot-tempered man who once horsewhipped a barber for shaving off his prized handlebar mustache as he slumbered in the barber's chair.

In Iowa, Niels was a carpenter and bricklayer in the summer. In winter he worked for an ice company, cutting great blocks of ice from the Mississippi, loading them onto sledges, and stacking them between layers of sawdust in insulated sheds. Anna raised chickens and geese, sold goose down and eggs and dressed birds, and had two more children - Sophie and Andrew.

Our grandmother Martha grew up in a world where safety razors and sanitary pads were miracles. Books were expensive and cherished. As she began the work of raising us, the flood of postwar consumer goods, rising higher and higher year by year, worried her. Everything had a price, she believed, and must be paid for in the end.

Sometimes, as she built the morning fires with wads of newspaper and kindling and slabs of rough firewood, she mused about her mother's life.

"The people Mama lived with," she said once, "used to send her into the woods with a big basket, to pick up branches and bring them home. We waste so much wood in this country, but sometimes it took her a long time to fill up the basket. All the poor people went into the woods in those days, picking up everything that fell, even little twigs. Someday we'll have to do that, too."

Grandfather came into the room and laughed, waving his arm as if to encompass all the vast forest outside, all around us. "Right, Martha, right," he said, drawling out the words sarcastically. Grandmother stared at him for a moment, then turned away, struck a wooden match on the rough surface of the stove door, and lit the fire.

Hilt Creek was a seasonal stream, born in a draw far up the steep slope we called Skunk's Peak. Swollen by winter rains, it hurried across a dry, eroded flat, slid under a fence and through a galvanized culvert, and emerged into a meadow below the new school, where it meandered through sedges and grasses, past a few scrubby willows and swathes of red curly dock, and relaxed for a little while.

Here, the creek could meander thanks to a buildup of sediment washed down from the soft shale hills. Twenty inches of rain a year were not enough to flush the sediment off the flat, and so deep soil built up here. Above the fence on the steeper ground, twenty inches of rain a year were just enough to ensure continued gullying, for throughout the spring, until the annual grasses dried up, the cattle of the SS Bar Ranch grazed there, trampling and denuding the streamsides.

The foothills and valleys around Hilt are an ecological extension of the great Central Valley - a savanna, in effect. Since the 1860s, the dominant plant communities have been based on introduced grasses and forbs from the Mediterranean basin-wild oats, filaree, cheatgrass, annual bromes and fescues. During that decade, a years-long drought coupled with the unrelenting assault of millions of cattle, horses and sheep completed what the early colonists from Spain and Mexico had begun.

By midsummer, Hilt Creek was a dying series of stagnant pools, but in the first warm days of April, it was still a stream, and long strands of black toad eggs, strung together by lengths of transparent jelly, appeared along its banks. Clinging to rushes beneath the overhanging banks, blobs of Pacific tree frog eggs floated. Western toads clasped each other in catatonic affection in the shallows; gravid female tree frogs hopped through the wet grass, pursued by much smaller males. Meadowlarks rocketed up from the dead grass or trilled from fence posts; red-winged blackbirds celebrated their territory on every willow. Water skippers fled across the quiet waters, and riffles gurgled, the color of rum pudding sauce, in the wet and fecund California spring. In the plunge pool below the culvert, foothill yellow-legged frogs hid on the muddy bottom, perfect became a cacophony of peeping and croaking, which grew silent as I passed up the creek, then resumed behind me. I caught the singers, picked them up, let them go again. I scooped up their eggs and tadpoles in coffee cans and took them home and attempted to raise them, with varying degrees of success. The best way was to empty them into an old dishpan sunk in the mud below the faucet on the east side of the house. Algae colonized the sides; the toad eggs became little black commas, then tadpoles with quickly flicking tails, growing larger, and finally sprouting legs in August. Their mouths widened and their eyes popped up, until finally one morning they sat on the big rock in the middle of the pan, absorbing their own tails. The tree frog tadpoles turned green, the toads a mottled brown, before they climbed out and hopped away into the iris beds.

Below the meadow, Hilt Creek flowed across the alley and slid into a long series of cedar culverts that carried it through the middle of town and under the railroad tracks, disgorging it on the west side of town, into a deep sluggish swamp of cattails that eventually drained into Cottonwood Creek. Here, in an  inaccessible morass of mud and algae, bullfrogs lived, squeaking and leaping away into the safety of teh deep slime at the first sign of movement along shore. Bullfrogs are not native to the West Coast states, but they adapted happily to the ponds left by gold dredging along the Klamath River and migrated up creeks in the wet season.

The gold miners who followed Cottonwood Creek to its sources in the 1850s found little gold. The richer deposits lay beyond the granite peaks that separated Cottonwood Creek from the vast Beaver Creek drainage. The soil of Hilt was not disturbed, for it had no gold or mercury or copper like that of the serpentine formations of Red Mountain or the folded blue schists of Condrey Mountain. Here there were only shale and sandstone. In Hilt, we looked up at the alpine slopes below Mount Ashland, where rich meadows and groves of timber waited for the spring and its onslaught of range cattle and chainsaws. In our arid little valley, spring brought cattle to roam the streets and vacant lots for a few days, before they were driven past the barbed-wire fences at the edge of town. So the little meadow was mostly undisturbed by hooves and teeth, and the frogs flourished.

Daddy always packed his .44 revolver in the car or truck, in the glove compartment or under a coat on a seat. One Sunday morning as we drove along a logging road west of Hilt on our way to a patch of blackcap raspberries that Daddy had found, the car stopped suddenly, and I found myself looking into the eyes of a coyote pup standing by the side of the road. Perhaps three months old, it still had the big paws and silly expression of babyhood, and its mouth was stained red from the thimbleberries it had been pulling down and eating, one at a time. Slowly, Daddy reached over and opened the glove box, pulled the revolver out, and slid it free of the holster. Slowly, he extended it forward, until it rested on the frame of the lowered window. The pup was staring at me and seemed not to notice the movement. I had been riding with my window down and my chin resting on my crossed arms. Now, as I heard the hammer clicking back and realized what Daddy was about to do, I slapped my palms hard against the car body. "Shoo!" I shouted. The pup melted into the thimbleberry stalks and was gone. Daddy let teh hammer back down. Without a word, he put the revolver away and drove on.

Later that day, sated with blackcaps, the trunk loaded with buckets of them, we picnicked on the West Fork of Beaver Creek. Chipmunks peered at us around enormous tree trunks, and as I held out a crust of bread, one of them made a dash for me and stood up on his hind legs to snatch it out of my fingers. Daddy made a mock lunge at the little rodent, and it squeaked in fright and retreated. "Shoo," he said, looking at me.

I felt my face getting hot, but I stared back at him. "He was just a pup," I muttered, my heart hammering. "He wasn't hurting anything."

I knew he was displeased, but I also knew, somehow, that even Daddy wouldn't hit me for scaring the pup away from his gun. Now he only shook his head. "You have got to get over this complete sympathy for animals," he said, and turned his attention to the fried chicken.

My appetite was gone. I was learning, at the age of nine, just how inconvenient a thing a conscience could be.

Louise Wagenknecht is a WWP Board Member. She lives in Leadore, Idaho.