She ends up sick in bed, then confined to her house through Christmas. Before the term is well under way, Caddie slips through thin ice while skating. It ends with the teacher reconfirming her authority over the classroom and Obediah. Winter school term begins with a confrontation between Caddie and the biggest boy in school, Obediah Jones. When Edmund returns home, he takes Caddie’s dog, Nero, with him, to train as a bird dog. Uncle Edmund rescues her and the raft, and gives Caddie a silver dollar for her trouble. The children like his practical jokes, but Caddie is not too happy when one of the jokes results in her raft coming apart in the middle of the lake. Uncle Edmund, Caddie’s mother’s younger brother, visits as well. John has a large house and farm he fixes all sorts of mechanical devices, including clocks. John is the master mechanic of the mill at Eau Galle, a town a short distance from Dunnville. The circuit rider, an itinerant preacher who also brings outside news to the frontier, pays a visit leaving a broken clock for Caddie’s father, John, to repair.

They watch the Indians working on a birchbark canoe, then head home, stopping to forage for hazelnuts. Although they cannot swim, they cross the river - the other two clinging to Tom’s shoulders as he tiptoes along the riverbed.

Caddie, her dog Nero, and her brothers Tom and Warren do not share that nervousness. Only two years earlier in Minnesota the Indians had killed a thousand settlers, and their own vulnerability makes the settlers in Wisconsin nervous. It is 1864, and the settlers near Dunnville, Wisconsin, on the Menomonie River, are nervous and isolated.

Caddie woodlawn book