Grasshopper weather

Plunk!

Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen. Then huge brown grasshoppers were hitting the ground all around her, hitting her head and her face and her arms. They came thudding down like hail.

The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hit the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.

Laura tried to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes, turning their heads this way and that. Mary ran streaming into the house. Grasshoppers covered the ground, there was not one bare bit to step on. Laura had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed squirming and slimy under her feet.

Ma was slamming the windows shut, all around the house. Pa came and stood just inside the front door, looking out. Laura and Jack stood close beside him. Grasshoppers beat down from the sky and swarmed thick over the ground. Their long wings were folded and their strong legs took them hopping everywhere. The air whirred and the roof went on sounding like a roof in a hailstorm.

Then Laura heard another sound, one big sound made of tiny nips and snips and gnawing.

The wheat! Pa shouted. He dashed out the back door and ran toward the wheat field.

The grasshoppers were eating. You could not hear one grasshopper eat, unless you listened very carefully while you held him and fed him grass. Millions and millions of grasshoppers were eating now. You could hear the millions of jaws biting and chewing.

Pa drove around the field, throwing out little piles of stuff as he went. Ma stooped over one, then a thread of smoke rose from it and spread. Ma lighted pile after pile. Laura watched till a smudge of smoke hit the field and Ma and Pa and wagon.

Grasshoppers were still falling from the sky. The light was still dim because grasshoppers covered the sun.

Ma lighted fires all around the wheat field. Perhaps smoke would keep the grasshoppers from eating the wheat.

Ma and Mary and Laura were quiet in the house. Carrie was so little that she cried, even in Ma’s arms. She cried herself to sleep. Through the walls came the sound of grasshoppers eating.

The darkness went away. The sun shone again. All over the ground was a crawling, hopping mass of grasshoppers. They were eating all the soft, short grass off the knoll. The tall prairie grasses swayed and bent and fell.

They were eating the willow tops.

The hens were eating grasshoppers.

Grasshoppers went into the house with them. Their clothes were full of grasshoppers. Some jumped onto the hot stove where Mary was starting supper. Ma covered the food till they had chased and smashed every grasshopper. She swept them up and shoveled them into the stove.

The next morning

The whole prairie was changed. The grasses did not wave. They had fallen into ridges.

The willow trees were bare.

Pa’s face was black with smoke and his eyeballs were red.

It is no use. Smoke won’t stop them.

Day after day the grasshoppers kept on eating.

They ate all the wheat and the oats. They ate all the green thing.

The rabbits had all gone away. The little birds on the grass tops were gone. The birds that were left were eating grasshoppers.

The whole prairie was bare and brown. Millions of brown grasshoppers whirred low over it. Not a green thing was in sight anywhere.

The dry earth was hot, the sunshine was scorching, and the sky was a brassy color. The whirring of grasshoppers sounded like heat. All over the knoll the grasshoppers were sitting still with their tails down in the ground. They did not stir, even when Laura poked them.

With a stick she dug out of the hole a gray thing. It was shaped like a fat worm, but it was not alive. She did not know what it was.

The grasshoppers are laying their eggs. The ground’s honeycombed with them. See the pits where the eggs are buried a couple of inches deep. All over the wheat field. Everywhere. You can’t put your finger down between them.

He took one of those gray things from his pocket and held it out on his hand.

That is one of them. A pod of grasshopper eggs. I have been cutting them open. There’s thirty five or forty eggs in every pod. There is a pod in every hole. There is eight or ten holes to the square foot. All over this whole country.

Ma dropped down in a chair and let her hands fall helpless at her sides.

We have got no more chance of making a crop next year than we have of flying. Said Pa. When those eggs hatch, there won’t be a green thing left in this part of the world.

Pa will go to the east. Get a job there.

A few days later, the winds blew cooler and the sun was not so hot at noon. The grasshoppers hopped feebly.

A thick frost covered the ground. It coated every twig and chip with a white fuzz and it burned Laura’s bare feet. She saw millions of grasshoppers sitting perfectly stiff.

In a few days there was not one grasshopper left anywhere.