In the first chapter of, Of MIce and Men, it starts off with our main characters George and Lennie arriving at a river. Here Lennie begins to gulp down the water, while George tells him not to drink too much as the water may not be clean and it could make Lennie sick, like it had before. After George drank some himself he determined that the water seemed safe. George would then go on to complain about the bus driver being lazy and not dropping them off at the gate of the ranch.
Lennie then asks George where they are going, and this angers George and makes him go on a bit of a rant because of Lennie always forgetting things but always seems to remember about rabbits. So since Lennie forgot George explained to Lennie why and where they were going. Once George started talking about the work cards Lennie checked his pockets for it because he had forgotten that George had them. While doing this Lennie revealed the dead mouse that he had been petting while they walked. So George tossed the mouse.
After George tossed the mouse he asked Lennie if he now remembered where they were going, but Lennie once again forgot. So George just told him they were going to work on a ranch, like one they had worked on before in Weed, and that when they would talk to the boss Lennie would not speak so that the boss wouldn't know Lennie had a mental disability. But like many things Lennie had forgotten what had happened in Weed, so George explained that they were run out of it and that they were looking for them. George would then go on to explain how much better his life would be without Lennie.
George then began to get ready to sleep when Lennie asked why they weren't going to the ranch to get some supper. George told him that they were going to be bucking barley so that tomorrow they were going to go and work. But Lennie still wanted supper so George told him to go and get some wood so they could make a fire and heat some cans of beans he had. Lennie got up and went to go get the wood, and came back with only one small branch.
George knew that Lennnie had gone back for the mouse so he once again had to force Lennie to hand it over, which caused Lennie to begin to cry. So George tried to comfort him by saying that he wasn't taking the mouse away to be mean but because the mouse wasn't fresh and that he could get another one later on. This made Lennie remember about a woman that would give him mice to pet, but he had forgotten that the women was his aunt Clara. George would then tell Lennie to go and get the wood he had asked for.
Once they got the fire going and began to heat the beans Lennie said he liked ketchup with his beans, which caused George to rant about how Lennie always wants what they don't have and how much better and easier his life would be if he didn't have to deal with him. This caused Lennie to ask George if he wanted him to leave and go live up in a cave, and George responded by saying that he was only fooling around. So Lennie asked George to tell him about the rabbits, and George did in order to make him feel better. George sang a song about how they were different from other farm workers and that they cared about each other, and would get a place of their own with animals and of course rabbits. As they ate their supper George told Lennie that if anything bad were to happen to come back to that same spot and hide in the brush near there.