Prologue

Time has made it difficult to remember if everything in this book is accurate. I know that most of it is true and there may be some truth in the rest too. It is hard to distinguish the correct events with the right people and so I do not claim this to be an accurate account of events. My friend Dennis Remington was listening to one of my stories and said to himself, “That sounds like a wonderful adventure; I wish I could have been there.” Then he later realized he had been there it just hadn’t showed up to him the same way it showed up to me. Therefore there may be some poetic license exercised in this writing.

I don’t remember much about my early childhood. Mostly what I have are stories that were told to me later. One of these stories is when Jane Payne, the bishop’s wife looked at me the first time my mother brought me to church and said, “Belva, that’s an odd looking duck.” I reached right up out of my mother’s arms and slapped her. It’s not like she was some beauty queen herself. She had more wrinkles than a lava flow.

Payback came a few years later. Jane’s husband, Billy, was showing some sheep buyers his fine purebred Suffolk Rams. Suffolk is a breed of sheep that are white with black faces. They are indigenous to hell. They never stay in fences and are always crawling underneath and running away. However, Billy raised purebred Suffolk rams and thought they were the pride of Southern Alberta. He had just bought a brand new 1948 shiny black Ford car. Billy, his wife Jane and some potential sheep buyers drove out into the field to view and inspect the rams. They got out of the car and were admiring the big old rams, when one of them spied his reflection in the shiny black of the new car. Thinking it was a competitive ram, he backed up about twenty feet and accelerated from zero to ramming speed and smashed in the side of the front door. Jane was in the car and started screaming. The ram reared back shaking his head and spotted his reflection in the back door and attacked again. Billy yelled and hollered, Jane screamed that the ram was trying to kill her so he jumped in his new car and sped across the field leaving the two potential buyers chasing after him on foot. Billy and his wife never really made the connection, but it was clear to me. It was pay back for the rude thing she said to me after I was born. What goes around comes around, Janey Babe! Mother tried to breast feed me but ran out of milk. I screamed for two weeks and almost starved to death before anyone in the family figured out I was very, very hungry. They just thought I was a cranky baby. Darn right I was cranky. Two weeks without anything to eat.

I had an older brother who died of pneumonia before I was born. I think his death was so hard on my mom that she was reluctant to put much hope in the survival of another baby boy. That is probably why she ran out of milk. I used to wish I had an older brother but then I realized how I was treating my younger brother and decided I sure didn’t want an older brother if he were anything like me. When I was just learning to walk, the family went to Cameron Lake. I wandered out on the dock and since nobody had told me I couldn’t walk on water, I promptly disappeared beneath it. I quickly found out that swimming was harder than walking. After awhile I was missed and they found me floating underneath a dock. After a short discussion, they pulled me out but I fooled them by commencing to breath. There were a number of near-death experiences when I was younger but I surprised everyone by surviving.

I remember climbing a tree up to Uncle Oakley’s house. “Up to” meant west, “over” meant south, “down” meant north and “back” meant east. That quick digression was just so the reader can get his directions right and stay oriented through the rest of my ramblings. Anyway, I climbed this tree and as I was nearing the top a branch broke and I plummeted all the way to the bottom bouncing off branches scaring birds and panicking the monkeys. Come to think of it I never saw a monkey in that tree ever again. By the time I reached the ground I was unconscious. I came to later at my house with my dad putting cold compresses (actually a wet towel) on my face.

At this point the reader might be thinking, “hmmm, malnourished, oxygen starvation from near drowning, possible brain damage from head trauma. I wonder if...” Don’t even think of going there. However, you might just tuck it away in your mind as the story continues. It may just account for a wee portion of what follows. But then you will have to be the judge of that. And speaking of “wee”, I have a Norwegian friend who speaks English well except for the letter V. He came to visit me once and rented a brand new Cadillac and he told me it had a “wee- eight engine under the hood”. Apparently Norwegians don’t have the V sound in their language.

I am sorry for that small diversion. You will find many such wanderings in my book. I don’t believe it is because of any brain damage. Rather I choose to think of it as the creative wanderings of an inquisitive mind. Others might not agree and you might not either. But if you will follow me through these small deviations, I will always come back to where I left off and finish the story. Let’s see now, where was I? Oh yes, the story...

Introduction

I was visiting at my son’s home the day after he had returned from a High Adventure with the youth from his Ward. I was interested in what had happened and invited him to tell me about his trip. He just gotten started and almost as though he were a magnet, all of his children immediately rushed over and arranged themselves in front of him as an eager audience. I watched their rapt attention and happy faces. It wasn’t but a few minutes before they were injecting their own comments. In very short order it became a two-way experience with my son telling parts of the story and having to wait while his children made their own comments and had their own reactions. There was laughing at what was humorous, and there were groans and moans when he forgot to put the rain fly on his tent and in the middle of the night was soaked by a deluge of rain. Soon it was clear that they were living the experience through the story telling of their father.

As I watched my grandchildren enjoying the storytelling experience with their father, I had cause to reflect back on how many ‘Pilling stories’ I had listened to growing up. I realized that together they had broadened my life experience and bonded me to the family. Many cultures have maintained their history, values and traditions through storytelling. When cultures either lost or never acquired the ability to write their histories, storytelling was the only vehicle to keep history alive and influential in the lives of its members. Storytelling is how we hang on to each other.

Not every story has to teach a principle or have a moral. By just the telling and listening, the stories have a positive effect on families. During the storytelling of my son, his oldest child said, “I wish I could have grown up in Canada with you guys, it sounds so awesome.” I have heard my own children tell their stories of growing up in Canada and although they are usually embellished, exaggerated and in some cases completely fabricated, they have never failed to be entertaining.

This book of mine is just a recollection of happenings that constitute a story. I am a good storyteller in person but when it has come to writing them down, it has proven much more challenging and I am left with a sense that what I have written here, is not exactly the same story as if I had told it in person. But it is the next best thing.

WHY MY LITTLE FINGER IS CLEF IN TWO

When I was four or five years old I was playing around while dad was fixing an old horse-drawn mowing machine. To this very day I love the smell of newly mown hay. (Whoa! My spell checker just told me there is no such word as “mown”. What do these modern spell checkers know anyway?) I can see already that my spell checker and I are going to have some differences of opinion and I will always win because I own the mouse. Maybe the word is mowed. I like mown better.

My father was turning the gear set and I wondered if I could put my finger between the ring and pinion gear and get it out before I got caught. (I wonder now, upon reflection, if that behavior were a harbinger of a life pattern. If I ever engage in self-examination I’ll let the reader know… or not.) A few moments later, alerted by my screaming and hollering, my dad reversed the gears and rolled my little pinky back out to freedom. I stuck my finger up in the air to show him what had happened and also had my first look at it. There were three pieces. There was finger on the left, a half inch of bare white bone in the middle and finger on the right. It was still connected further down the finger.

Even at my young age I knew this was not right. All the little pain neurons in my finger were shouting, “Ouch! ouCH! OUCH! YEOWWWWW!” At that early age I hadn’t learned to cuss yet. Without that extra vocabulary I was pretty much limited to “ouch!”

Later in my life I learned to be much more expressive. There are some words that exactly describe the pain I was experiencing but my education hadn’t yet progressed that far. It came later from herding sheep.

Father scooped me into his arms and rushed me to the house. He was very calm and knew exactly what to do. He went immediately to the cupboard pulled out a bottle of my sister’s brown hair dye and poured it all over my finger. Next he wrapped it in a towel, put me in his arms and was rocking me in our family rocking chair when into the house came my mother. She asked my dad what he had done and he told her that he had poured iodine on my finger to disinfect it, pulled the three finger pieces together, wrapped a bandage around it and that if I would just quit crying and screaming ouch everything would be fine. My mother looked at the bottle on the cupboard and informed my dad that he had disinfected

my finger with brown hair dye. So, off came the towel, off came the bandage, under the tap went my finger, up went the volume of my screaming and my finger was thoroughly washed again and again. However, by that time the hair dye had stained my finger. Even when the real iodine was poured on the wound the color remained. To this very day if you were to peel the skin off my little finger it would be brown inside. I have a wonderful scar on the little finger to remind me of this early experience with pain. Some people wonder, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Perhaps not, but if something is to be suffered it is far better done out loud. If kids have screams inside them, then they must be designated for expression at some point in time. I discovered that point in time!

Many, many years later I was floating down Hell’s Canyon on the Snake River in Idaho when we pulled ashore for a rest and to look at some ruins from earlier settlers. I wandered up across a meadow and there I saw an old rusting mower exactly like the horse-drawn one that had injured my finger. I looked at the very gearbox that had been responsible for my pain and, low and behold, my little finger started to throb. You would think that after 52 years the memory in my finger would have faded. But not so!

There is actually a theory in psychology that claims that all intelligence is not centralized in the brain and that different parts of our body contain localized intelligence. I know that my finger does and also my tongue. My finger remembered the day it was mown.

My tongue is capable of pushing food around in my mouth, poking it out between my teeth as they move up and down crushing my food and if it chooses can also produce words at the same time and only very seldom does it forget about the teeth or become confused and get bitten. I have some friends who must have really dumb tongues because they are forever forgetting about their teeth and often bite their cheek or tongue. I think that is what they mean when they say that you should “train your tongue when you are young.” That is probably why breast fed babies have fewer problems when they get older, even nearly starved breast-fed babies.

HENNA, THE COLOR OF RED

My older sisters were always messing with their hair color. (Here I am picking up on the story thread from earlier when my father poured my sisters hair dye on my finger). Stay with me. The worst smell I remember (and I grew up around a barnyard) was that of henna. It was a gooey substance that my older sisters would work into their hair. It was originally used to help embalm ancient Egyptians—Egyptian mummies. Incidentally, did you know that a mummy is an Egyptian that was pressed for time? Ha! Ha! As you will no doubt remember from your Archaeology 101 classes, most of the Egyptian mummies that were discovered entombed had used a red henna to preserve their hair. It had the consistency of peanut butter and my sisters would work it around in their hair with plastic bags on their hands. If they used bare hands it would stain them for days and other people would confuse them with red Indians.

I think there was some magical period of time that they left it on. They never knew exactly how long that was and so after about 10 minutes they would begin to worry if they had left it on too long or not long enough. Too long and the hair looked like a red headed hooker. Too short and it looked like an auburn baboon. Finally when they couldn’t stand it any longer they would rush to the sink and rinse it out. Afterwards their hair would have this reddish cast to it. I never understood nor questioned this behavior. I think it might have had something to do with Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

THE ANXIETIES OF CHILDHOOD

Actually, Gone with the Wind happened a lot in Southern Alberta. If it weren’t tied down it was gone with the wind. I remember waking up in the middle of the night helping my dad tighten the guy-wires on the barn for fear it was going to blow down. I was often afraid of the wind because I thought, “If it could blow 60 mph what would stop it from blowing 160 mph?” I always thought in terms of the worst-case scenario. Later in my life when I learned to fly an airplane I was always anxious when I got off the ground. I knew there had been plane accidents where the engines conked out or the wings tore off or the carburetor iced up or the struts came loose or the rudder fell off or the ailerons stuck. I reasoned, “If it’s happened to others then what’s stopping it from happening to me?” I always figured that the worst disaster could target me at any time. Even low probability risk factors worried me. If it only happened one in a million times, I just knew that I could be the one in a million who was going to get creamed.

Did I mention that I had lots of childhood fears? If it were dark, I was afraid, and in Canada it was dark a lot and therefore—you get it. At least half to three quarters of every day I carried fear around with me. When I got older I told fear to go away and leave me alone and that I was tired of carrying it. It said, “No.” Actually, it was my older sister Darlene that said, “No.” Frightening my little brother and me had developed into an art form for her. Telling us ghost stories, clanking chains at night, hiding under the basement stairs with a candle and butcher knife and jumping out at us in the dark were tools of the trade for the Wizard of Scare. She was so good at it that turn-about was never possible. We finally got revenge by scaring the daylights out of her children so they wouldn’t sleep at night. But it was pretty hard to terrorize her children because they had already been scared by the best, their mother.

There was a traveling play called Crupt and Blue Beard that was being performed in the gymnasium of our old stone church. Nobody told my brother and me that illusions could be created that weren’t real. Everything thus far in our lives had been real. We sat on a row near the front and when the curtain opened there were two heads sticking through the back curtain that appeared to be decapitated but still alive. Well it went downhill from there. Darlene kept trying to coax us out from under the bench where we were shaking and moaning.

She actually wanted us to continue watching the play even though we had already been rendered nearly unconscious from the fear. It was terrible. Those chopped off heads were still talking and Blue Beard was killing and cutting heads off and Noel (my brother) and I were absolutely convinced that it was all real. Darlene thought it was so funny that we were terrified but we feared for our very lives. The trauma of that evening was permanently imprinted in both our minds and we were never really able to fully recover. Just say the words Crupt and Bluebeard and not only the visual images, but the mind-bending, heart-stopping terror can return. I learned later that trauma learning (which this absolutely was) requires no additional reinforcement for the learning to be permanent.

SENTENCED TO HARD LABOR

The ranch where I was raised required hard, hard work. I’ll just name of few of the laborious chores. There are others that, mercifully, I have forgotten: cutting hay, raking hay, driving horses and tractors, shoveling manure, feeding hay in the winter when it was 45 below zero, irrigating, weeding gardens, shoveling manure, milking cows, herding sheep, lambing, calving, irrigating, shoveling manure, branding and vaccinating calves and cows, building sheds, feeding chickens, shoveling manure, cutting hay, raking hay, sweeping hay, stacking hay, gathering eggs, killing chickens, picking chickens, shearing sheep, butchering sheep, skinning sheep, eating sheep (yech!), fixing fences, shoveling manure, docking lambs and shoveling manure just to mention a fewer of the more exciting jobs.

You might say to yourself, “my goodness that sounds like a fun childhood!” If you find yourself thinking this, you are a very sick person. You need to see somebody. I guess it depends on where you are coming from and it is for sure different for different people. One day, years later when I was practicing psychology, I left my office and walked into the pharmacy in our building for a break between patients. There was a psychiatrist that practiced down the hall from me that was the most obsessive, anal-retentive person I had ever known. Allen (the Shrink) came into the pharmacy about the same time I did and said, “Hi, Kent, what did you do this last weekend?” I had been hunting deer so I thought I would shock him into awful abhorrence. I said, “I went hunting this weekend with a 30-06 phallic symbol. I sneaked up on this big buck and shot him right through the lungs. Then I slit him from his throat to his genitals and reached my arms into his stomach cavity and lifted his entrails out onto the ground. Then I took my knife and slit his peritoneal cavity and let the blood pour over my hands onto the ground.” By this time I was sure he was getting horrified. But did I stop there? Nope! “Then I reached into his chest cavity with my knife and cut his heart out. Then I cut his liver out. Then grabbed his lungs and my fingers tore through them like Jello. After I got him home I ripped his hide off and hung him up in the barn to age.”

What happened next could have knocked me over with a feather. He looked at me and said in all sincerity, “Kent, that sounds so fun. Could you take me out with you next weekend?” I was so disgusted. What a loser.

Of course being the oldest son, it seemed to me that a disproportionate amount of the outside work fell on my shoulders. I hated milking cows and shoveling manure. The other activities had some redeeming value, but those two activities did not. To this day I try to eat lots of beef so that more cows die. If they are allowed to live they will have you milking them and shoveling their manure. I say, “kill them all and let’s eat them!” A good rib-eye steak or a thick slice of primerib from a bovine almost makes me forget what great nuisances they were.

My mother tried to rescue me from outside work by enrolling me in piano lessons, ballet lessons (yes ballet) and tap dancing lessons. I quickly figured out that those things were slightly better than milking cows and shoveling manure, so I pretended to enjoy them so I didn’t have to do the alternative. However, the ballet and tap dancing lessons came to an abrupt cessation when I got old enough to realize that was not the “cowboy way” and of course since I wanted to be a real man, I quit unmanly behaviors.

However, even to this day when an old soft shoe song comes on the stereo you might see me on the floor doing a brush, brush, ball change. For you non tap dancers—that is a sophisticated tap dancing move that causes some people to mistake me for Fred Astaire. If you don’t know who Fred Astaire is, I can’t help you.

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF RANCH LIFE

Ranch life was not all work—at least not quite. We lived close to the mountains. My horse, my gun, my fishing pole and my dog became my four best friends. All of us went everywhere together. People used to see us coming and say, “Look, here comes Kent with his horse, gun, fishing pole and dog.” We became quite close. Almost inseparable you might say. But it did cause some problems later. Mother wouldn’t let us all in the house, and the school and church also had objections.

At every opportunity I would mount my horse and ride to Miami creek to fish. I was the best fisherman in the family and almost always was able to bring home a mess of fish for supper. A “mess” of fish is a term that is used to refer to any number of fish that exceeds the legal limit by at least three times. To this very day, whenever I get into a hot fishing spot, I find it almost impossible to stop at the limit. So you now understand what I mean when I say I went fishing and got “into a mess”. Which reminds me of a story about a fellow who every day came in with a limit of fish in his boat. The game warden suspected him of doing something illegal but couldn’t figure out what it was. One day he disguised himself, went down to the dock and asked the guy if he could go out with him and fish. The fisherman agreed and they motored out into the lake and up in a narrow little canyon. The fisherman opened his tackle box and there were a number of half-sticks of dynamite with very short one-inch fuses. He lit one and threw it over board. It exploded and some fish floated to the surface stunned. He quickly netted them and put them in his fishing creel. The game warden had seen enough. He opened his shirt, showed the fisherman his badge and told him that he was going to arrest him because he was fishing illegally. The fisherman pulled out another stick of dynamite, lit the fuse, handed it to the game warden and said, “you gonna talk or are ya gonna fish?” With a one inch of fuse, I bet he chose the latter.

THE NIGHT ATTACK OF A RABID WOLF

Before this story can be told there is some antecedent information that must be provided for the reader. My father loved to attend auction sales. Actually, everyone I knew loved attending those auctions. There was a friendly association and spirited bidding. Items that were virtually worthless, sold for significant prices just because everyone was caught-up in the spirit of the event. The auctioneers were wonderfully entertaining even though we could scarcely understand a word they said. They made a lot of noise amplified by a microphone and somehow got the folks stirred up and bidding against each other. Often the bidding competition between two friendly rivals forced the price of an item much higher than if it had been purchased new.

Most auctions occurred because someone was losing their farm or some establishment was going out of business. I have since reflected on these gatherings and realized that paying higher prices for used and in some cases useless items was a way for the community to financially help the people losing their stuff without having to give them an actual hand out. They seemed, however, on the surface a wonderful excuse to get away from our own farms and ranches and have fun.

Now the reason for this preamble; my father got caught up in the frenzy of bidding one day and before he knew it he was the proud or not so proud owner of a ladies muskrat coat. However, on closer inspection it was apparent that the muskrat coat had fallen victim to a rat or two that had gnawed several holes in the coat in fairly conspicuous places. When the acquired coat was presented to my mother, she politely declined to ever wear it and it hung for years on a hook in the garage.

Now keep the hanging muskrat coat in mind as I digress to another seemingly unimportant but necessary element to the story.

We had a wood burning stove in our kitchen. Beside the stove was a wood box. My brother and I had the responsibility to keep the wood box full of the correct sized wood that would fit into the cook stove. There was also a part of the wood box where we kept kindling which were small pieces of wood and bark used to start the fire in the morning. Once or twice daily we would sort through the wood pile outside and bring in the right sized wood for the kitchen stove.

I was wandering through the garage one evening and for some reason, my eyes fell upon the ratty muskrat coat that had really gone unnoticed for many years. Almost immediately my mind began to conjure up possibilities. “Let’s see... It is big enough to completely cover me. It is hairy and at first glimpse might look like a wolf. It lacks movement but with me under it, I could create the motion and fool someone into thinking it was alive. Hmm!” Suddenly the plan took form in my mind.

I waited until it was just getting dark. I retrieved the old muskrat coat and shook all the spiders and other insects that had been calling it home for years out onto the ground. When it seemed that all the little varmints were gone, I silently crept up to the outside door leading into the kitchen. I hunkered down onto all fours, covered myself with the muskrat coat and tapped lightly on the door to summon my mother.

My intent was that as soon as she opened the door, she would be looking at eye level for who had knocked. I would wait for just a brief second so she could be puzzled and then I would attack.

My carefully orchestrated plan was to growl, lunge forward, reach out from under the coat with both hands and grab her by the ankles before she could move. My mother was easily frightened by such things and a wonderful candidate for what I had in mind. It was hoped that she would assume that she had been attacked by a rabid wolf and I would give her a good scare. Afterwards we would all laugh and think it was really funny.

I think it was Robby Burns who once said, “The best laid plans of man and beast oft go astray for all that.” He said it with a Scottish brogue that I am unable to imitate so you’ll just have to accept my translation. Anyway, that phrase explains what happened next.

At that exact moment my knock on the door sounded, my mother was preparing to insert one of the pieces of wood into the kitchen stove that I had dutifully provided for her in the wood box. I think the phrase, “hoisted on my own petard” also helps describe what happened next.

Rather than complete her action of inserting the wood piece into the stove, she chose instead to keep it in her right hand while she went to answer the door. She swung the door wide expecting to greet the visitor. Nobody there! “I wonder what...?” At that precise moment of wonderment, I struck. I lunged against her legs, growled and grabbed her by the ankles from under the hide of the rabid wolf.

There was no hesitation, no exclamation of alarm, and no shout of surprise, only a vicious and deadly reflex. The chunk of wood accelerated downward at a terrifying speed and clocked me square on the back of my head. My last conscious thought just before I succumbed to the unconsciousness was, “Where did all those stars come from?”

Sometime later when I reentered my body and became conscious, I was being rocked in the old family rocking chair by my father and my mother was putting wet towels on my head. There was a goose egg of alarming size on the back of my head and my nose was bleeding from the impact of my face into the porch. Not only had the blow from the block of wood smacked the back of my head but the force of the strike had driven my face into the wood planks on the porch.

When I opened my eyes, the pain hadn’t really started yet and the first thing I said to my mother was, “Did it scare you?” I don’t think I can adequately describe the return look I received from my mother. I do know that the muskrat coat disappeared from its place in the garage and was never seen or heard from again.

SPRING CASTRATION

You would think that in the grand scheme of things that a little better organization might have occurred. I mean, why weren’t lambs born with short tails? Why weren’t most male lambs and calves born without testicles? Why weren’t little bull calves born without horns? I don’t know why but if I ever get to heaven, those are some of the question I want answers to.

As a result of that oversight a lot of hard and unpleasant work had to happen that easily could have been eliminated with a little better planning. As soon as little lambs and calves were a few days they underwent some pretty unpleasant experiences. For the little lambs, their tails had to be cut off and their testicles removed. Imagine that as an introduction to mortality. I guess maybe human circumcision would be a pale comparison. Anyway, this procedure was quite unpleasant for three entities: the lamb, the lamb holder and the surgeon. The procedure went as follows: first of all, the ewes and the lambs had to be separated. The ewes were in one pen and we would capture the lambs and put them into another separate pen. The noise was deafening. Then the lamb, also referred to as the patient, would be captured by the lamb holder and placed on the operating table. The back legs of the patient were put between the front legs and spread apart and then the patient would be set on his butt on the table with his tail hanging down and his scrotum exposed. It went downhill from there.

The surgical instruments consisted of a set of burdizzos, which was really a double action clamp that would create enough pressure to crush all the bones in the tail and crimp all the blood vessels, a sharp knife and a set of teeth. “A set of teeth?” You ask. “Why a set of teeth?” I’ll explain in a minute.

After the patient was set on the table with the lamb holder (that would be me) the surgeon (that would be my dad) would clamp the tail with the burdizzos and crush the bone and blood vessels. The patient at this point would open his mouth and scream bloody murder. Remember, this operation is occurring without any anesthetic. Then the surgeon would cut the tail off immediately behind the clamped burdizzos. The pain from the clamp was so bad that the patient never even felt the surgical removal of his tail. Next, the burdizzos would be left attached while the surgeon cut off the end of the scrotum. Then the surgeon would press the scrotum and the two testicles would protrude. Now comes the tricky part. The surgeon would grasp both testicles in his teeth, rip them out and spit them on the ground. Oh I forgot there was one other participant, the dog. As soon as the testicles would hit the ground, the dog would run over and gulp them down.

Are you still with me? Then the clamps would be released and the severed tail and scrotum would get a liberal splash of iodine and the operation was over. The patient was set back down of his feet and encouraged to move along. It took a moment or two for the patient to come out of shock and then he would gingerly walk a short distance and either lie down or just stand there. However, almost without exception, the patient was fully recovered by the day after and seemed to suffer no ill effects.

My father left to Lethbridge one day and Noel and I decided that since we had seen Dad do it so many times there was no reason why we couldn’t get some lambs docked and castrated before he got home. We ran the sheep in and separated the patients from their mothers. Noel became the holder and I was to be the surgeon. He got the patient to assume the position, I clamped the tail and cut it off and proceeded to the next phase. I cut the top of the scrotum off but was having trouble mustering the courage to grasp the bloody testicles in my teeth. I twice got close but then backed off. Noel began to make fun of me so I determined to do it. I clasped the testicles, closed my eyes, clamped down and began to tug.

The poor patient had enough. He also had postponed going to the bathroom until after his operation. But when he felt those testicles leaving he decided, “Why wait to go to the bathroom?” Oh did I happen to mention that he also had diarrhea? Well he let loose and it sprayed all over my neck and chest. The testicles came loose and when I tried to spit them on the ground one of them caught between my teeth and wouldn’t leave. At that moment the queasiness I felt from pulling the testicles in the first place and the smell of lamb diarrhea was more than I could bear. I fell to my knees and threw up again and again, but still the testicle hung-up on one of my teeth. I finally had to use my hand to get it unstuck and fling to the ground. It was so bad, even the dog left the shed.

Needless to say that was the last patient I ever attempted to castrate and I don’t believe Noel ever tried it either. We decided to leave the surgery up to the old surgeon. It was a great impetus for furthering our education so we didn’t have to ever do it again. If ever I felt lazy in University and didn’t want to attend a class or turn in an assignment, I would remember that if I didn’t I could be biting testicles and docking tails the rest of my life. I missed very few classes and assignments.

With calves there was, in addition to castrating, dehorning, branding and vaccinating. We would catch a calf by grabbing a hind foot and then someone else would grab his tail and pull sideways until he fell on his side. Then the one pulling the tail would grab a front leg and pull it back while the guys holding the back leg would sit on the ground and hold one leg back with his hands and push forward on the other hind leg with his feet. I hope that is clear enough for you to imagine. It was designed to keep the calf from getting up during all the painful procedures which were to follow. First of all the castration took place. The calf would struggle and believe me they were much stronger than a lamb. If all went well and the calf remained on the ground the next thing that happened was the vaccination. Then the little nubby horns were cut off with a pocket-knife until they were bleeding a little. Then caustic dehorning paste was applied to the horn stub, which slowly burned into the calf ’s skull until the horns were killed.

By that time the calf was thinking, “Oh, thank heavens the worst is over.” Surprise! There were three branding irons heated red hot in a wood fire. One was a seven, one was the letter C and the last one was a big letter V that was really a half diamond. So our brand was seven, C, half-diamond. One after another the brands were burned on the rib side of the calf. You would burn them deep enough to cause a permanent, visible scar called “the brand”. That was how you identified your own cattle. By this time the poor calf had his tongue out and was screaming bloody murder. Then we let the calf up and he hobbled off and pretty much didn’t move for 12 hours.

When I was twelve years old I had numerous warts on my right hand. I was embarrassed when I passed the sacrament but didn’t know what to do about them. One day Inez Davidson was reading the book Tom Sawyer to us in sixth grade. Tom and Huckleberry Finn got rid of their warts by throwing a dead cat over their shoulders at midnight in a graveyard. I wasn’t the only one with warts and when the day’s story was over we got together and decided we would try the same thing. Roger Nelson had numerous stray, wild cats that lived around Mercer’s old barns.

We went home, got our .22’s and each shot a cat. There were five of us altogether. We deposited the dead cats underneath a street light post; the only one in town, agreeing to meet back at 11:00 pm to then walk up to the cemetery. We all met as scheduled, each picked up a dead cat by the tail and together went down the road, across a foot bridge and up the hill to the cemetery. It was about a quarter of a mile distance. Where the footbridge crossed the creek there was also a wagon crossing on a gravel bed with about two feet of water flowing over it.

To be honest, we were scared to death but unwilling to admit it to each other. Two of the boys, Kenny Davidson and Fats Spencer were quite overweight. They couldn’t run fast and didn’t participate in any sports. This is important information that you will appreciate later in the story. Kenny Mckenzie threw his cat first. As I recall you had to look over your left shoulder at the moon and throw the cat over your right shoulder. Next, Fats threw his. We hadn’t actually gone into the graveyard, but instead were standing right on the outside. Kenny Davidson next threw his cat. What happened next I am sure has a very logical explanation. Probably the cat had set in the evening sun long enough to build up some gas inside him. Who knows for sure but when that cat hit the ground or a gravestone a terrible sound resulted. It was like when you run over a cat’s tail and it snarls and screams. That was the sound. I never got a turn to toss my cat. There was an instant sprint back to the light post. Kenny Mckenzie was by far the fastest runner and I remember being quite surprised to realize that he was unable to pull away from me. But the most amazing thing was that when we hit the foot bridge which was only wide enough for two a breast, (that would be Kenny and me) Fats and Davidson were right beside us and ran through the creek the same time we were crossing the bridge. I was amazed that they ran as fast as we did.

When we arrived at the street light we were all so exhausted that we didn’t say a word to each other we just went our separate ways back to our homes. The subject never came up again. All I know is that because I didn’t get to pitch my cat into the graveyard my warts didn’t go away.

That next spring when we were dehorning calves etc. My father took out his castrating knife and carved the top off each of my warts until they were bleeding and then smeared dehorning past on them. Within about thirty seconds the burning began. I ran to the water trough and put my hands under the water and scrubbed the dehorning past off until it quit hurting. Although the burning sensation quit, the dehorning paste continued to burn down through the wart until it was below skin level and then all my warts fell off. Ta da!

THE CEMETERY QUICK SALE

When we would journey to our cabin on weekends we always attended church in the little town close to our cabin location. It was the same Ward that I grew up in and it was always wonderful to renew old acquaintances and to observe how people that seemed so young when I was growing up looked as they got older.

One early Sabbath morning we were meeting in our first gathering, known as priesthood meeting. It consisted of all the men and boys in the ward. The women were gathered in their own meeting. Before we separated into age appropriate subgroups for religious instruction there was an opening meeting with all of us together. The intent of this was to attend to administrative concerns and any business that needed to take place.

The town has recently been to the local cemetery and had cleaned the grounds and had the whole cemetery surveyed into individual plots. The cemetery was located on a hill just south of town with a beautiful view of the mountains. However, I’m not sure the view was ever observed or appreciated by the hill top residents. Nevertheless it was a beautiful site for the final resting place (whoa, wait a minute! I don’t think that is true. Hopefully, it isn’t the final resting place but just a temporary spot to park our bodies on the way to something better). Let me start that last sentence over again. Nevertheless it was a beautiful site to park our temporal remains while our spirits got the heck out of there and moved on to a lovelier and holier sphere. There, I like that notion much better than thinking of spending even one more frigid Canadian winter trapped in a wooden box in the frozen ground of the Mountain View Cemetery without even an electrical plug-in to keep warm.

We had to park the bodies of our recently deceased somewhere and there weren’t a lot of other options. One option was cremation but somehow it didn’t seem very appealing to build a big camp fire, gather the town’s people around, toss the body on the burning wood and then stand around and watch. It would be pretty hard to carry on any kind of meaningful or entertaining conversation while standing there watching someone fry. Some members of the community argued in favor of it saying, “We could combine the cremation with a wiener and marshmallow roast for the whole ward.” I think that suggestion came from the Ward Activities Chairperson. But the suggestion was voted down after an hour of very interesting discussion.

Another option that was discussed was one that had a certain appeal if the deceased needed disposal in the winter. If someone passed on during the winter it was darn hard to dig a grave. The frost often extended deep into the ground and it was very difficult to get to the required six feet deep. That is why come resurrection day there are a lot of people in the Mountain View cemetery coming forth in the first resurrection. Which means they will be the first out because they will only have about two feet of dirt to get through. Sometimes we were just too tired to plant them any deeper in the winter.

However, there was a reservoir located near the town and it was much faster to cut a hole in the ice and then stuff the corpse through and into the water. There were pros and cons to this option but after much discussion the fishermen carried the vote in the negative. I think the most compelling argument against it was, “What if I am trolling along in my boat after the ice is out and I hook on to this huge lunker. I know it’s a big one because it takes me along while to get him to my net. I notice that he doesn’t fight much but that only makes me think he is just that much bigger and as soon as he gets close to the boat is when the real fight will begin. I keep reeling and reeling. And then up pops Uncle Fred or Aunt Minnie. Why, that might make me want to never go fishing again. If I ever did hook onto a real big fish I wouldn’t even enjoy the fight because I would always be afraid that when it surfaced it might be somebody I recognized.” Well, after a few thoughtful moments the members finally voted against that option.

The only other option that was presented was one favored by the aboriginal native Indians in the community. They suggested that we just take the elderly by the hand and transport them far into the back country, drop them off and tell them we will be back for them in a couple of hours and then just never show back up. Problem solved! The back country hikers were very much opposed to this option suggesting that it would be very hard when they were camping to get any rest listening to all the hollering and yelling that might be going on by the recently deserted, soon to be recently departed.

So after all the discussion and democratic process came to an end, it was decided to go with the traditional burial plan and stick with the cemetery. The community hired a surveyor to come and divide the cemetery into individual lots. Then the decision was made to sell the individual lots ahead of time so that the cost of the surveying could be covered. Now we are back to the original story.

At the beginning of priesthood meeting the Elder’s Quorum President stood and informed the members that the cemetery had been surveyed and there were two hundred plots available for sale at ten dollars each. He then asked for those who wanted to purchase any of the lots to raise their hands and the secretary would take their orders. Complete silence! Not a hand was raised. In a rural community you usually don’t buy anything until there is a necessity. Since all present were alive and kicking, why buy a plot until you needed it? No hands went up. The Elder’s Quorum President was getting uncomfortable. He had the invoice for the surveying and no means to pay for it unless he collected some money. I finally held up my hand and said, “I will buy all two hundred of them today and give you a check for two thousand dollars at the end of the meeting.” Every head in the congregation turned to stare at me. One of the members raised his hand and said, “Why would you want to do that?” I replied, “I am going to buy all the lots available for the asking price of ten dollars. Then when I have the whole cemetery locked up and any of you want in, the price of the lots will be two hundred dollars for a standard lot and three hundred dollars for a lot with a good view.”

There was a moment or two of silence while the notion sunk in. Suddenly hands began to shoot up. The secretary could hardly get the orders recorded, they were coming so fast. In a record seven minutes all the lots were sold. I only ended up with eighteen lots myself and I had to fight and argue to even get those. The Elders Quorum President gave me nod of gratitude and the problem had been solved.

THE TURKEY TERRORIST

Growing up on a ranch that wasn’t exactly prosperous by worldly standards required certain sacrifices. Most of our clothes were homemade. All of our vegetables were grown in our own garden. Eggs were obtained from our own hens. Mouton, beef and pork were raised specifically for our own consumption. Chickens were raised for both eggs and meat. The following story concerns the raising of turkeys that provided the main course for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. You know that turkeys have light meat and dark meat but they also have a dark side that you probably don’t know about.

Each spring we would order twelve baby turkey’s from a farm catalogue. For the first few weeks they needed to be under a lighted and heated shelter so they didn’t get cold and die. Usually the mortality rate was approximately one-fourth so we would end up with about eight surviving turkeys. When they were ordered it was impossible to detect which were hens and which were gobblers. When they were a few weeks of age we would turn them out into the barnyard to fend for themselves. They would eat bugs, grasshoppers, grass and seeds. They were pretty self-sufficient and didn’t require additional feeding. In October when they had reached full maturity they would be harvested, plucked and put in the deep freeze to be thawed, cooked and eaten later when Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled around.

One spring, of the eight that survived, seven were hens and one was a gobbler. The hens grew large during the summer but this gobbler grew much faster. As he grew, surpassing the normal size of a gobbler, he finally stopped when he was twice the size of any gobbler we had ever seen. People would often stop in just to get a look at “Huge Herman.” That is what we named him.

He was very protective of his hens and became quite aggressive if anything seemed to threaten or upset his little harem. His aggressiveness extended to sheep, cows, horses and to my brother and me. He never chased Dad but would send Noel and I fleeing for our lives. I guess we should have quit pestering his flock but it was just too tempting to play the game and see if we could out-run his attacks.

October finally came and the hens were rounded up for harvesting. That is a polite word for slaughtering. We took care of the hens first and Herman, seeing the fate of his flocks fled. We searched for him two days but never located him. Finally on day three, he showed up mean, angry and bitter with a big chip on his shoulder. Father decided not to harvest Herman and instead left him loose for the winter.

Humans naturally tend to attack and pester the things they fear. Noel and I were no exception. We were frightened to death of Herman but somehow could not leave him alone. He grew to hate us and attacked at every opportunity. Now I must admit that he had a pretty strong case against us. We would mount our horses, unlimber our lariats and wait in the field until Herman ventured out into the barnyard. Then we would come galloping through the gate twirling our ropes. Herman would race for the shelter of the trees and usually make it just-in-time, but not always. On other occasions we would cast our lariats and drop a noose over his head. When the rope came tight we would turn our horses and race back out into the field with Herman half flying and half dragging behind. It was a turkey rodeo. After a few hundred yards the rope would slip off his neck and he would streak back into the safety of the trees.

Other times we would sneak around the corner from where he was feeding, light a fire cracker and toss it in underneath him. When the blast when off he would shriek, gobble and jump high into the air. As soon as his feet hit the ground we had to be running for safety because he would be hot on our tails.

Herman survived winter and husbanded a new flock of hens the next spring. This went on for a many years with Herman being a lone bachelor turkey during the winter and his own harem in the summer. The war between him and Noel and I continued. I would be embarrassed to confess all of the dirty tricks that we played on him. His hatred for us expanded to include any person or animal that ventured into his barnyard kingdom. Herman ruled. He believed and behaved as though he were king of the barnyard. The only exception continued to be my father. Everyone and everything else was fair game.

In the early autumn on a warm and sunny afternoon, a group of my friends came to play cops and robbers. We divided up sides, chose improvised rifles and pistols, went to different sides of the barnyard and commenced to stock each other with the intent of taking prisoners or shooting dead members of the opposite faction. My weapon happened to be a M 1 Garand Automatic Browning Machine Gun. However, if you were to take closer look, it might more closely resemble a golfing 3-iron. We had to use our imagination a little bit, but hey, boys have plenty of that.

I was hunkered down behind a small pine tree anticipating that the robbers were going to come around the corner of the barn. I was camouflaged and inconspicuous. I knew I would have the drop on them before they realized it and force them all to surrender or face the fury of my automatic rifle. All was still and quiet. For once in Southern Alberta there was no wind and I could hear the grass crunching as they drew nearer the corner. I raised the gun (golf club) to my shoulder ready to fire. Bam, Bam, Bam! But at that same moment I heard the dry grass rustle immediately behind me. “Oh no,” I thought. “One of the robbers had sneaked up behind me and I am a goner.” I glanced over my shoulder and much to my great fear and surprise, there was Herman all ready to pounce on me with feet, wings and beak to really beat me up and injure me.

I instinctively whirled around to face my nemesis. In doing so the golf club (no longer a rifle) came swinging around in a vicious arc, all unplanned and fortunately or unfortunately struck Herman right on the side of the head. Down he dropped; deader than a doornail. He was upside down with his wings spread out and his feet straight up in the air. My first reaction was joy and relief. I had slain the beast. But my joy was short lived. Around the corner came the other kids and Noel announced, “Dad is going to kill you.” I knew he was right and the relief quickly changed to anxiety.

We had a short counsel of war and together decided the best thing to do was to drag Herman down to the coulee that ran through the field below the barn and stuff him under the bridge. Dad would simply miss him and we, of course, would know nothing. By the time Herman was located coyotes and foxes would have eaten him and spread the feathers all over. Dad would naturally assume that some animal killed him. It was a great plan conceived in desperation. Actually we had lots of plans for cover-ups in our unused repertoire for the ‘just-in-case’ situations that often showed up. So we didn’t have to really think too hard to come up with this plan and we immediately set out to execute it.

Two of us got a grip on his wings and one other grabbed his head. He was too heavy to carry so we took turns pulling and tugging and dragged him all the way through the field and down to the bridge. We sat down on the grass to get our breath back and rest for a few minutes before stuffing him under the bridge and out of sight. Suddenly one of the kids leaped to his feet and screamed, “LOOK AT HERMAN!” We watched in absolute amazement. First one foot and then the other started to twitch. Then there was a slight quiver in his wings. Next his head started bobbing up and down. We were frozen in wonderment watching old Herman come back to life. We were so immobilized by what we were witnessing that not one of us considered our own vulnerable situation.

Here we were in the middle of the field with nowhere to hide and Herman was coming out of a coma caused by us. There was a good chance that the blow to his head wouldn’t affect his memory and he would know darn-well the crime committed against him. Of course, none of this occurred to us until Herman raised his head and looked around. We had been completely preoccupied with his resurrection and return to life.

As soon as his eyes came into focus and he saw us, he flapped his wings, lifted up into the air and landed on his feet. No sooner had those clawed feet hit the ground than he stretched out his ugly neck, raised his wings into speed mode and attacked. It was every boy for himself. We all sprinted for the barn as fast as we could run with him pecking and scratching whomever he could get close enough to hurt. It was a dead heat right to the corral. He had inflicted scratches and cuts on all of us from his feet and wings.

We raced into the barn and slammed the door so he couldn’t get in. He paced back and forth out in front of the barn and called us bad names and dared any of us to come out. We climbed up into the hayloft and taunted him back with some bad words and threats of our own. We threw hay down at him which infuriated him even more. He attempted to fly up into the hayloft but he was too big and heavy for his wings to carry him that far. Finally, he got tired and hungry and wandered off in search of food. We sneaked out of the barn and made it to the house without him seeing us.

If anyone ever tells you that turkeys are forgiving creatures, don’t you believe it! Turkey’s hold big grudges and continually search for methods of vengeance. Old Herman became very bitter and even more aggressive after his neardeath experience. But little did he know that his days were numbered. Father never seemed very concerned that Herman attacked us at every opportunity. Maybe he thought we deserved it. But a month later my three year old niece Sandra wandered out into the barn yard to see her Grandpa. Herman made a fatal mistake. He attacked Sandra. Dad happened around the shed just as Herman was racing toward his granddaughter. Dad immediately dispatched him in a manner that I will not recount. But this time he was really dead and there was no resurrection. He stayed dead.

Noel and I treated his death with mixed feelings. It was true that our greatest threat no longer existed but on the other hand, something seemed to be missing in our lives. The excitement was gone from the barnyard. Our vigilant and wary trips to the barn no longer occurred. The object of our torment was gone and a certain excitement and danger eliminated.

Our terrorist turkey was no more. But we belatedly realized that having enemies keeps one sharp and on his toes. Perhaps an opposition is required in all things to keep us from getting lax and too comfortable. Old Herman was missed. The barnyard was just not the same without him. The horses and cows kept watching over their shoulders for months. They expected Herman to come racing around the barn at any second and drive them back out into the field. Eventually, the fear left us all and the barnyard settled down but something was always missing.

ACTION AT THE HAYSTACK

My brother and I were married on the same day. We spent the summer after our weddings in Canada working before returning to University. We helped Dad put up hay for the winter. There was a large stack of bales that we had stacked down at one of Dad’s lower fields about three miles from the ranch. The scene is now set for the remainder of the story.

About midnight my dad got a call from Ted McKenzie who lived about a half a mile away from the haystack. “Melvin, I just saw some lights up by your haystack and they seemed suspicious. It might be some Indians stealing your hay.” Melvin hung up the phone and rousted Noel and I out of bed. He quickly rehearsed Ted’s story and we both grabbed our rifles and jumped in the truck. I’m not sure what we intended to do with the rifles but they certainly came along without any discussion or argument from anyone.

There was a full moon so we drove without any headlights three miles down the road to where the stack of bales was located. Just as we turned off the road and headed toward the bales, Dad turned on the lights. What I remember seeing was a car with two people in the front seat and one of them didn’t have a top on and we could see breasts that were way too white to be Indian.

Because of the breast exposure and the resultant distraction we didn’t get a chance to look at any faces, at least Noel and I didn’t. Dad slammed on the brakes in front of their car and shut off his headlights. He got out of the truck and said, “Boys, I don’t want you out of the truck, you stay here. Shut up and don’t do anything.” We thought that was pretty strange advice and also unfair. However, he sounded so stern that we obeyed. We had already assumed that they weren’t Indians intent on stealing hay. Instead, it looked like a couple trying to make some hay. Ha, ha.

We heard Dad talking and then some other person talking and a few minutes later Dad came back and got into the truck. He started it, turned it around, drove out on the road, turned on the lights and we started back home. “Well, Dad, what was that all about?” We asked.

“It’s none of your business and I don’t want to talk about it. Just shut-up and let it go.” Well there wasn’t much chance of us doing that. We knew something important had transpired and so we bugged him until he finally talked. “Those were your neighbors (names with held).”

“Well what were they doing there together at midnight?” Noel asked. By that time realization was slowly settling into our innocent minds.

“You’re kidding; (names with held)? I can’t believe it.” I exclaimed. Dad threatened that if we told anyone he would tan our britches. By that time we were old enough and fast enough to outrun him so the threat didn’t carry much weight.

The next day the story was all over Mt. View. (Names with held) were looked at in awe. Affairs were unheard of in our town so this event caused quite a stir. Later that summer I was raking hay in a field next to (name with held). It was late in the evening and one of the headlights on the tractor had a loose connection. It kept blinking on and off. Noel rode over on his horse and told me I better get it fixed because she might think it was a signal and come over to visit me.

I fear that both of them became the butt of many and exaggerated jokes. But it was appreciated by most of us as really good entertainment and a great diversion. There were not a lot of new and exciting things to talk about in our community but that kept the tongues wagging for years.

THE APPARENT STOLEN WAGON

A few years later, Noel had finished University and returned to live on the ranch. He had built a garage he was living in while he finished building his home. I was there visiting when the following happened. I was helping him move some bales of hay and we went to pick up his trailer that he thought was down beside one of his haystacks. We jumped in his pick-up truck and went to hook on. When we got there the trailer was gone. “Those damn Indians have stolen my hay trailer,” Noel exclaimed. We went back to the ranch grabbed a 30-30 rifle and we both headed for the reservation. In hindsight I realize that a lot of actions we took were not clearly thought out beforehand. Most reactions were to just grab a rifle and go for it. We never had to use the rifle and I’m not sure what we would have done if the situation had called for it. But maybe since we had a rifle we didn’t need a rifle. I remember after the Iron Curtain came down and a lot of Russian records became available, there was one politburo tape that showed Premier Khrushchev speaking. He said, “We will never be able to take over that country because every man, woman and child has a damn gun.” I think at the time he was speaking about United States. So maybe just having the gun solved part of the problem to start with.

Anyway, we jumped in the truck with the 30-30 and headed for the Indian reservation. We first of all went to Clarence Weaselfat’s house. He was out in the yard and we both jumped out of the truck with me carrying the rifle. Noel immediately accused Clarence of stealing his wagon. Clarence vehemently denied it and said that the Indian we should be talking to was Ben Scout. He said that Ben was a thieving Indian and that he probably had the wagon. We drove to Ben’s house and Noel told him that someone had told us that he had stolen his trailer. “Who the hell told you that?”

“Clarence Weaselfat told us that you had stolen it,” Noel said.

“That lying son-of-a-bitch couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it. ’ll bet he stole it himself and has sold it to Jimmy Shot-both-sides who is putting up hay right over there in that canyon. I’m going to go over and beat the $#!* out of Clarence for accusing me.”

We jumped in the truck and sped off up the canyon to see if Jimmy had the trailer up where he was haying. Jimmy was on a tractor and we pulled in front of him and got out of the truck again with me holding the rifle.

“Where is my trailer, Jimmy? Either you tell us where it is or there is going to be some shooting,” Noel threatened. I shifted the rifle to my other hand to emphasis his threat. Jimmy climbed down off the trailer, put his hands in the air and asked, “What in the hell are talking about? What trailer?”

“You know damn well what trailer I’m talking about. It’s the one you took from my bale stack.” Noel clarified.

“Who told you I stole it?” Asked Jimmy.

Noel said, “Both Clarence Weaselfat and Ben Scout said that you had it up here haying. They said they saw you pulling it behind your truck.”

“Those blind sons-a-bitches wouldn’t know a wagon from a train. They are both two of the worst liars on the reservation. If you loan me your rifle I’ll go down there right now and shoot the sons-a-bitches,” offered Jimmy.

Noel continued to question him, “Jimmy if you don’t have it, who do you think could have stolen it?”

“It could have been any damn Indian on the reservation. They are all lazy, thieving sons-a-bitches. You can’t trust any of them. I gave Billy Tailfeathers twenty-five bucks to get me a couple of bottles of whiskey on Saturday and Monday he told me he had lost my money. But his wife told me that on Sunday he was drunker than a skunk. You can’t trust any of those sons-a-bitches.” They used that word a lot.

Well, Noel and I decided that we weren’t going to find the trailer. On our way out of the reservation we told Jimmy, Clarence and Ben that if that trailer didn’t magically reappear back at the bale stack that night, we were going to get some friends and their rifles and we were coming back. We drove on back to the ranch and just as we were driving into the barnyard, Noel slapped his leg and said, “I know where that trailer is! I used it to haul some tree branches out of the tree strip and it’s sitting right out there in the trees.” Sure enough, there was the trailer. When my dad heard about our threatening trip to the reservation, he demanded that we go down and straighten it out and apologize to the Indians we had accused unjustly.

We reluctantly got back in the truck and started back, but we had some reservations about apologizing to the reservation. We figured that if we told them it would make them mad and they would seek some kind of revenge. If we didn’t tell them they would think that some Indian other than them had stolen the wagon and that they just suffered some collateral damage because they were Indians too. So instead of proceeding to the reservation we circled around to the town store, bought a chocolate bar and a pop and called it a day. We never told dad that we didn’t carry out his demand. A pop and a chocolate bar were the drugs of choice when we didn’t know what to do next.

FISH AND GAME LAWS

The game laws were not very respected nor rigorously enforced in our community. Mostly, we assumed that fish, birds and game were there for the taking to whomever (or maybe it’s whoever) was a good-enough hunter to bring home the meat. I brought home lots of meat. We raised and fed the wild game on our land and our neighbor’s land so naturally we assumed it belonged to us. We certainly never considered that the game belonged to the Queen. Actually, that philosophy was an important part of Canada’s ultimate break with the British Empire. Everyone thinks that it was Prime Minister Trudeau who finally brought the Canadian Constitution home to Canada. And yes, it is true that he did make the trip to England and physically signed it and transported it to Ottawa. But very few people know that the final break actually began with a few of us rebelling against the Queen’s ownership of the game animals and taking it into our own hands to defy her presumptuous rule. It was a Canadian variation of the American Boston Tea Party. We have not really boasted (we’re not really sure when the statute of limitations runs out) about our part in this important constitutional referendum, but it may never have happened if we hadn’t got the ball rolling. It was the first Canadian record of civil disobedience. It was a classic case of the “reign being called because of the game”. How did you like that little play on words?

If you really wanted to get picky and apply today’s criteria you might say we were poachers. Whew! Choke! Choke! That wasn’t a bad word back then. In fact, it was rather like some of the board games of today. There were a number of players. There was the game warden, a set of game rules, a horse, a gun, a fishing pole, a dog and a Pilling. The point of the game was to see how many fish you could catch, how many elk you could shoot, how many deer you could kill, and how many game birds you could bag without getting caught by the game warden. There were all kinds of different strategies.

For example, a favorite one was to call Gene McCarthy’s wife. Her husband was the game warden. We would visit with her for a while and then ask to speak to Gene. She would tell us he wasn’t there and was out trying to catch poachers. We would ask her what part of the county he was going to be working in today and she would always tell us and then we would go hunt somewhere else where he wasn’t. He was always so frustrated because he could never catch us. We would pass him while walking down the street in Cardston and he would shake his fist at us and tells us he knew what we were doing and that one of these days he was going to catch us. We would smile and tell him to say hello to his wife. He never figured it out. Or then again maybe he did. I never thought of that. Do you think that maybe he didn’t really want to catch us because he was young once? My goodness isn’t that a thought? That is the first thing I am going to ask him when I see him in heaven. Now you might ask yourself, Who does he think he is? Poachers won’t go to heaven? Of course they do. Don’t you remember when Jesus taught the disciples how to poach fish? He told them to cast their nets on the other side and they could catch many times more than their limit and they did. Jesus never got after them for it, never called them to repentance nor did he give them a ticket. I rest my case! I too have enjoyed that great spiritual experience of catching many times my limit. It is a difficult feeling to explain unless you have experienced it yourself. I would encourage the reader to seriously search for that feeling. It can bring a wonderful measure of reel (sic) happiness into your life.

It reminds me of the little Christian girl that was attending school. The agnostic teacher was telling the class about whales. She told them that whale, even though they are very large, have very small throats and can only swallow small things like little fish and krill. The little girl lifted her hand and objected. She cited the story of Jonah saying that he was swallowed by a whale, thus disproving her teacher’s story. The agnostic teacher in a very condescending way told the little girl that the story of Jonah was fictional because whales really couldn’t swallow someone that big. Not to be daunted (or is it undaunted) the little girl said, “Well I’ll just ask Jonah when I get to heaven.” The teacher smugly said, “Well, maybe Jonah didn’t go to heaven, maybe he went to hell.” To which the little student replied, “Well, then you ask him.”

Actually “poaching” and “hunting” were interchangeable words. Poachers and woodsmen were breathed in the same sentence. Kind of like snow and hail. They are different forms of the same thing. But poaching—I mean hunting—had different ethical standards. Even though poaching was disrespectful of hunting laws, never would we kill an animal for its skin, or its horns or its head. Wild game was food. When you looked to shoot an animal you would not check to see the size of his horns, but rather you would check to see if the animal were fat and in good physical shape. The land belonged to us and therefore we assumed that we owned the game animals. We resented the intrusion of fish and game laws along with fish and game officers. We felt that they had no right to infringe upon our livelihood. How is that for a rationalized, provincial, ethical position? Anyway, that is how it seemed to us. Even though we raised sheep and cattle for a living we really couldn’t afford to eat them. They were for market and income so the wildlife was there to feed us. Added to that was the fact that hunting and fishing was an area where young, prepubescent boys could prove themselves. How does that happen today? There is no such activity for young men to pass from childhood to adolescence.

It was very reinforcing and validating to our self-image to bring home fish or game and have the whole family appreciate that you had furnished food for the table. On top of that there was even more praise if you could bring home enough for other people’s needs in the community. I don’t know if it was the early ballet lessons or not but I was very good at creeping through the woods and shooting game.

Sometimes in school I could sneak out of class and go to the bathroom and ghost back into my seat and the teacher would not even notice. The awful rule that had to be followed in order to go to the bathroom was to hold up one finger if you had to pee and two fingers if you had poop. How humiliating! One day I held up three fingers and the teacher finally asked me why I had three fingers in the air and I told her I had to do both. One plus two equals three. So I decided, rather than announce my anal intentions, that I would just put my old woodsman skill to work and drift out and back in without her noticing. After a while she started suspecting. Her ears were almost as big as a mule deer’s and she starting hearing sounds. But she never caught me. One day I decided to wear my camo clothes to class and after school was over she called my mother and asked why I hadn’t been to school that day. I was really good.

On one occasion, four of us intercepted an elk herd that had wandered out of Waterton Park to ravage our haystacks in the night. Amongst the four of us we shot eleven elk. We let all the big bulls go by and chose yearlings and dry cows, which were much better eating. We had enough meat for many families in the town. All the neighbors came with their horses and sleighs to help transport the meat back to town. We were pretty big guys in the community for a while. Even the game warden smiled at us one day on the street in a knowing way.

RURAL RECREATION

There was a limited amount of entertainment in a ranching community. Hunting and fishing also became favorite forms of recreation, catharsis and fun. It was a way of proving for oneself, validating our manhood and avoiding school attendance. It could be a source of praise and acknowledgment and it was most of all a source of food. For the first many years of my life I never purchased hunting or fishing licenses. They didn’t have any meaning. There were few game wardens to enforce consequences and it didn’t seem morally wrong to hunt without one. But there were hard and fast rules, self-imposed: You did not hunt birds or game animals in the spring. You never wasted any meat.

Come to think of it, those were just about the only rules. There were no limits or quantitative rules. You would naturally think there would be more rules than that wouldn’t you? Maybe that is why I have such a hard time with all the rules in today’s world. I don’t like rules unless self-imposed. I don’t like having a boss. I like being my own boss. I had my own private professional practice so I didn’t have to have a boss. Working in a hospital was always frustrating for me because I couldn’t stand the bureaucracy or all the rules. Even “No Trespassing” signs made me want to tear them down or ignore them. Learning to live by rules was a hard learned lesson later in my life. Every “No Trespassing” sign was shot full of holes. An Old Norwegian named Pete Peterson, who’s English wasn’t so good, put a sign on his gate that said, “Fisherman, you are not to trans pass”. We didn’t really know what “trans pass” meant so we never shot the sign. We decided it must mean, “Fisherman you are welcome to come through this gate and either close it or not, but before you come out you must first of all catch two or three limits of trout.” We were happy to oblige on many occasions and thought it was real thoughtful of Pete to put up such an encouraging sign. Later on he put a chain and a lock around the gate which we thought was very inconsiderate of him so we shot into the lock where the key goes with our 22’s and then he couldn’t open his lock either because there was lead where the key was supposed to go. After a time or two of this game he decided that discretion was the better part of valor and took the chain and lock off.

During the summer, if we were cutting and stacking hay and an elk or errant moose came wandering through the hay field it was just like magic. They would end up in our deep freeze. Imagine that. There was something magic about - 31 - that. Wherever I went, I carried a .22 rifle. It was unusual not to come home with prairie chickens, grouse or fool hens whenever I rode into the mountains. When I was younger the game was not as spooky as they were later. Some insensitive people have suggested that I had something to do with that. In fact, after my brother and I left University in Utah and moved back to Canada, we received a personal letter from the Utah Fish & Game Department thanking us for leaving so the Utah deer herds could start to make a come-back.

Occasionally I have dreams about eating ruffed grouse. They are the only creatures that I have actually had an urge to chase on all fours and sink my teeth into their breast. Whoa, that was quite an admission. So don’t tell me that you haven’t had thoughts that were embarrassing. If you were to just taste a fried or roasted ruff grouse you would understand completely. Back then they were the treat to end all treats. If I came home with some ruffed grouse hanging on my belt I could name my favorite dessert. That didn’t necessarily mean mother would fix it for me but I was at least allowed to name it.

Limits were never observed. Whenever I had the chance I shot until they flew, ran away or I ran out of bullets. I read a western novel about settlers and Indians and learned for the first time about an old Indian practice. So for a while I tried scalping the ruffed grouse and hanging the head and ruffed neck on my belt when I went to school. Some of the other guys thought it was pretty cool, but not the girls or the teacher. My mother got another call from the teacher and that was the end of my “counting coup” on ruffed grouse.

On a very cold 40-below day I was hunting deer and discovered 8 prairie chickens sitting on a branch side by side. They had their feathers all fluffed up because it was so cold. I pulled sideways in the truck, rolled down my window and pulled out my trusty .22. I started from the left side and shot them one by one. As each bird tumbled off the branch to the snow below the others would crane their necks and chastise them for leaving the branch and jumping down into the snow and fluttering around. The very last bird finally figured out that the descent to the ground by all his other family members was not voluntary so just before I got lined up on him he flew away. But by that time I had 7 plump prairie chickens.

THE ORIGINAL SIN (IN THE BEGINNING)

My father was the irrigation master for the community. That meant, among other things, he was responsible for releasing water from Belly River down into a large irrigation reservoir. After the water had been flowing for several weeks we would go to the head gates. With very large cranks we would close the head gates, shutting off the water from the river into the canal. Down in the spillway would be large concentrations of big rainbow trout that had migrated up the canal to spawn. John J. West lived near the head gates and when the fish arrived in sufficient numbers he would call my dad (we were on a party line) and ask him if he would come up and help him break a horse. That was code for, “get your big net and get up here as fast as you can!” We would scoop out nets full of suckers and big trout. Sucker fish would be thrown on the bank to die because they were considered lower than snakes. One day when we were throwing suckers away, a truckload of Hutterites came by. They jumped out and filled the back of their truck with the suckers and took them home to eat. Hutterites never ranked really high with me before this incident but afterwards, they sunk even lower. I always thought that any self-respecting creature that called himself human would sooner go through the agonies of starvation or torture before they would even considering eating a sucker. In fact the standing metaphor was this: If you were given a choice of having your finger nails ripped out and bamboo slivers inserted in the ends of your fingers and burning pine pitch poured onto your hands, and baboon saliva splashed in your face or eat a sucker it would be a no-brainer. You would choose the torture. But those Hutterites chose the sucker-cuisine. I never, ever got too close to a Hutterite after that. “Unclean! Unclean!” Was the word that fit the deed. Yeeech! Kind of gives you the heebie-jeebies just to think about it. We cut some suckers open once and they were laced with tapeworms.

The reason this story is called the “original sin” is because it was. All rule breaking behavior began here. As we would leave the house on our illegal fishnetting escapade, my mother would holler, “Melvin, if you take those boys up to net those fish they will grow-up with no respect for the law.” There you have it! Not our fault. The responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of Melvin. I don’t know how many generations it is going to take to extinguish this behavior but all I know is that no matter how hard I have worked to change, it hasn’t happened in my lifetime or the lifetime of my kids. They are afflicted with the same law-breaking, rationalizing, excusing and avoiding behavior. I hope my dad feels sorry for all the trouble he caused by dragging us up there to the illegal fish imprinting experience.

THE MONSTER MUSKIE FROM MASKINONGE LAKE

My father was one of the first persons in the community to get a boat. It was a lovely 16 footer with a covered bow. It was made of wood with three seats and a 35 horsepower Evinrude motor. It also had a set of paddles. We enjoyed many fishing adventures in that boat.

Near our ranch was a lake referred to as “The Maskinonge”. I don’t think anyone else called it that but later in life I saw a sign with the same name on it so it must have caught on. It was the last lake in the series of Waterton Lakes, just before it turned into a river and left the park. It wasn’t very deep and you could see the bottom anywhere you boated. In fact, it was too shallow for a motor so we always used the oars.

The only fish that lived there were pike or their bigger version called muskies. One afternoon we were boating on this lake. The water was crystal clear and you could easily see the bottom. Suddenly my sister Darlene said, “Look Dad, aren’t those fish laying over there?” Well, we looked over the side of the boat and at first thought they were just two logs lying on the bottom. However, I heard a sharp intake of breath from my dad and he said, “Everybody stop talking, don’t anyone move”. I realized then that they weren’t logs.

Dad attached a big Len Thompson spinner to the end of his steel fishing rod and jigged it up and down in front of the muskies. They wouldn’t bite. Not to be deterred he reeled in his line and attached a three-prong bare hook about the size of a bale hook. He carefully positioned the hook under the jaw of the largest fish and gave a great jerk and the fun began. The fish took off towing the boat with all of us in it. I looked over the side and even detected a sizable wake.

He was making for a large weed bed where he could hide and possibly dislodge the hook. My dad was having none of that and steered him back into open water. The time between hooking a fish and landing him are some of the most exciting and tense moments in a person’s life. Always present is the anxiety that he will “get off”. Some of the saddest words in the English language are, “I lost him” (this is true for women too). But those were not words that had to be uttered on this day.

Finally the big fish tired of towing us around and Father reeled him up to the boat. What next? We had no net big enough, no gaff hook and from the look in that fish’s eye and the size of his mouth and the length of his teeth, nobody considered grabbing him by hand. If you never have seen a big pike or muskie just imagine a barracuda. A muskie is the fresh water equivalent of a barracuda. They have a mouth lined with rows of very sharp teeth that angle backwards so their prey can never wiggle out once they are bitten. On top of that they are very aggressive and will attack almost anything that moves.

One day I was standing in a pair of old sneakers with the toes worn through, up to my waist in water, fishing in this same lake. I was casting time after time out into the lake. I happened to look down and there was a big pike about four feet away looking at my toes that were sticking out of my tennis shoes. I quickly reeled in my line and dropped the spinner under his jaw and set the hook. Instead of darting away out into the lake he charged straight between my legs. My pole bent double and I almost flipped over forwards. I was hanging on so tight to my reel that the line popped and, I lost him. However, I saved my toes.

Anyway, here we were with a monster subdued but no way of getting him in the boat. Dad said to Darlene, “I am going to raise him up to the surface of the water and when I do, you hit him over the head with the paddle as hard as you can.” Dad slowly raised the tired fish up to the surface and Darlene swung with all her might. Can you even begin to imagine how exciting this was to a small boy who had never caught or even seen a fish of this size? It was like capturing a whale.

When Darlene smacked him it momentarily stunned the fish but it also knocked him off the hook. The fish rolled a couple of times and settled to the bottom of the lake. My heart sunk. Were we to lose him now after all this excitement? Dad reeled the hook to the end of his pole, reached down, hooked the fish under the jaw and raised him to the surface. Then he reached over the side and heaved the fish into the boat.

About this same time the fish regained consciousness and went berserk. He was flopping and trying to bite us. We all fled to the front covered bow and almost capsized the ship. We stood on the bow where he couldn’t get us and marveled at what we had done. When the fish finally succumbed and settled down we returned to our seats and now, full of excitement, and went hunting for the other one.

This same scenario was repeated a short time later and we landed another smaller version. When we arrived home almost the entire town and even people from Cardston heard about the fish and came to see. The largest one was fortyeight inches long and its mouth was large enough to fit over a fence post. My dad was a hero and of course I was a hero too by association. Especially when I had a little time to alter the story just a bit in my favor when I told and retold it to my friends. In my story I wasn’t frozen, immobilized on the bow of the boat with anxiety and fear. Instead I was actively involved and helping the whole time.

LELAND’S SUPER POND

We had a distant relative named Leland Neilsen that lived halfway between Mountain View and Leavitt. I really didn’t know him very well except he had a daughter that was really cute, but older than me. She ended up marrying my cousin Bryce. Leland and his wife were called away on a mission for the church and were absent when the following theft occurred.

Noel and I were driving cattle from Mountain View to another pasture in Leavitt. It was an all-day cattle drive and not down the main highway. We had to take an old abandoned road with no fences. The cattle were always trying to escape the drive so it wasn’t long before we and both our horses were tiring. The good news was that the cows were getting tired as well and were less inclined to keep straying off.

About lunchtime we came to a pond that was just a little smaller than a lake. I don’t really know when a pond becomes a lake or a lake becomes a pond, but this was a very large pond that was not quite a lake. We decided to stop, rest our horses, let the cattle either graze or rest and we would sit on the shore and eat our lunch. As we were munching our sandwiches we heard a loud splash in the pond. Now that is unusual. What would make a splash like that? It certainly caught our attention enough to stop us from munching. Right in the middle of that hesitation a fish of magnificent proportions jumped out of the water and splashed back in.

All thoughts of eating and driving cattle instantly disappeared. “Holy Cow! Did you see that? That was a trout,” I said.

“No it couldn’t be a trout; it must have been a sucker. There couldn’t be any trout in this pond. There is no stream coming in or out so there is no fresh water. If it were a trout it would die,” Noel countered.

Just a moment later a huge trout surface right in front of us and sucked in a fly sitting on the water. We both almost fainted. It was unbelievable but true. We had seen with our own eyes.

We leaped on our horses and virtually stampeded the herd of cattle to Leavitt. We drove them in their new pasture, shut that gate and spurred for home.

Our poor horses were ridden hard and put away wet. We rushed in to tell Dad what we had seen and loaded up our fishing gear and headed for the lake. That evening we caught massive, fat rainbow trout that would boggle your mind. We couldn’t believe our good fortune. We had an undiscovered fishing lake (it had already grown into the size of a lake) all to ourselves. It became our greatest secret and protected space. My oldest sister’s kids were great fishermen and of course we told them of our secret but gave no directions to the lake. They begged and begged and you know how hard it is to keep good fortune to yourself. They saw only the fish that we caught and finally we relented. However, we knew if we told them they would tell all their friends and soon our secret would be public.

We blindfolded them and made them lay down in the back of the truck. I sat in the back of the truck and warned them that if they even peeked we would turn around and they would never get to fish there. They promised and were true to their word. When we arrived at the lake they took off their blindfolds and tried to orient themselves so they could find their way back again, but the lure of fishing quickly distracted them and they baited up their lines.

They fished until their arms were tired from hauling in fish. Later we blindfolded them again and trucked them and their fish back to the ranch. Try as they might, they were never able to find their way back to the lake, and I know they tried.

That wonderful fishing continued for the rest of Leland’s mission. We learned after he returned that it was his private fish pond and that he had planted it with fish, waited until they were large enough to catch and then got called away on his mission before he had caught any. When he arrived home he went to fish in his pond and the fish were almost all gone. We got very silent on the subject and never returned to the lake. Somehow we thought that the Lord would punish us if we caught any more fish out of his pond because we did it while he was serving the Lord on his mission. He might excuse us when we didn’t know they were his fish but would take a dim view of us stealing his private fish after we had “perfect knowledge”. However, I don’t believe a confession was ever given to Leland. We learned that the reason the trout could survive in the pond was because it had some natural springs that flowed into it from the bottom and kept the water fresh and cold. I admit, however, that the temptation remained for many years. I was prepared to go back and poach had it been just a game law but I was afraid that it also might be a “Lord’s Law” because of the mission thing so I never went back. I was sure that the Lord was understanding of poaching, but I don’t think He would have approved of poaching from one of his former missionaries.

THE POACHING OF A TAME LAKE TROUT

When I was a junior in High School my dad decided that since he and I didn’t get along so well that I might want to find a job off the ranch. Most of our conflicts arose because I always thought that I knew a quicker and better way of doing things. That led to lots of arguments and conflicts because we would fight over those differences. Rather than wreck our relationship, he suggested the “work away from home for the summer” program.

I got a job working as a bus boy at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton National Park. I would work the breakfast, lunch and dinner shift with time off in between to water-ski, fish and chase girls.

Right at the park entrance there was a fish hatchery that was used to stock many of the streams and lakes in the Park. In one of the holding ponds they had a Lake Trout of gigantic proportions. It must have weighed 30 pounds and was just enormous. Nothing would content us until we captured that big trout. The cook at the hotel said if we could get him he would cook him for us. We reconnoitered the joint for a full week before devising a plan. The entire hatchery was surrounded by an 8 foot tall chain link fence with concertina wire around the top. It was like a prison camp. We asked one of the attendants why the high fence and barbwire and he informed us that it was to keep the bears out. Hmmm.

The holding pond for the monster trout was only about 20 feet from the outside perimeter fence. So this was our plan: We would sneak in at night when everything was closed and locked up. We would throw a very strong cord with a three-prong hook on it (baited with a piece of meat) over the fence and into the holding pond. Then when the fish bit it we would drag him out of the pond, back over the fence and race down to the road where we had a car hidden.

Late one night three of us implemented the plan. We drove down near the hatchery and hid our car in the trees on a park service road. We had purchased 100 yards of very strong cord and tied it to a huge hook. Earlier we had caught a small trout in Lake Linnet just below the hotel and we hooked the little trout through the head on one of the prongs.

We sneaked through the trees up to the chain link fence. The warden’s house, which was located further down by the hatchery entrance, was dark. Two of us had experience in roping calves and knew the theory of casting a rope. I twirled the hooked fish around my head just like I was roping a calf and let it fly. The hook and bait sailed over the fence, over the barbed wired, across the intervening space and landed almost dead center in the holding pond.

A breathless silence followed while we waited to see if our plan was going to work. A few minutes later we saw the end of the cord, which we still had in our hands, begin to be pulled. Rather than jerking the line immediately, we waited until we felt sure the lake trout had the bait fish swallowed and then we all three jerked on the rope.

You would have thought we had hooked a whale. There was splashing and water flying everywhere. We knew that this was a critical stage of our plan and that it had to be executed quickly. We tugged the fish out of the pond and across the lawn to the fence. Then we got a fresh grip on the cord and pulled him up and over the barbwire until he fell at our feet. I grabbed his head and Ross grabbed his tail and we sprinted through the trees to the car. Ron opened up the trunk, we threw the fish in and jumped in the car. We sat for a few minutes watching to see if a light came on in the warden’s house. No light appeared so we started the car and drove away with our lights off, careful not to touch the brake. Once we were down the road a ways we flipped on the lights and drove to the hotel. We woke the cook up and took the fish into the hotel kitchen. We cleaned it and prepared it for cooking. The cook promised to cook it for breakfast for us.

We got back to the dorms and woke all our friends up and told them that we had caught a lake trout in Waterton Lake and they were all invited to a fish feast at breakfast.

True to his word, the cook had prepared the trout in one piece with the head still on and he looked delicious. Everyone took a healthy portion of fish and we sat down to eat. The first bite that everyone took was immediately spit back in the plate. It was awful! Apparently, they had been feeding the lake trout a liver trout food and that is exactly how the fish tasted when it was cooked. We were so disappointed; all that work and excitement with no spoils of war.

Needless to say, the wardens were very upset that the lake trout had disappeared out of the fish hatchery. A small reward was offered and posted but nobody squealed and nobody talked until later on in the summer.

At the hotel, there was an elevator operator at the hotel named Bill Beatty. He was extremely obnoxious and exercised mean authority of us busboys. He would come into the dining room and order a coke and ice for a room service order and then he would take it up the elevator to the tower and drink it himself. One day when he was pulling this dishonest trick, we secretly poured about a half a cup of Tabasco sauce in the coke, and put in on a tray with a linen napkin and a container of ice. He walked across the lobby and into the elevator. We watched and saw that it went all the way up to the tower and stopped. We waited a few minutes and then heard a yell and screech from the tower direction. The elevator came speeding back down, the door was thrown open and he sprinted out and down the stairs to the bathroom. His face was red and his mouth was open and he made quite a sight.

At this point we began to get a little nervous because he was bigger, older and stronger than any of us. We ran and hid in the freezer room until we got so cold we couldn’t stand it any longer. He was ready and waiting for us and threatening grave consequences.

One of those consequences was that he phoned the wardens and turned us in. The wardens came and took us downtown to the police station to question us. Of course, we knew nothing and feigned innocence. By then some time had passed and I think they weren’t so inclined to pursue it further. They tried to get us to tell them the whole story and even promised that they wouldn’t prosecute us or fine us. However, we didn’t believe them and stuck to our story of innocence. They finally dismissed us and just as we were going out the door one of the wardens said, “How did it taste?” And before we could stop him, Ron replied, “Just like liver.” The warden just smiled and said, “Serves you right.”

THE PARTY LINE

I liked the party-line telephone we had because on a slow Saturday night my brother and I would pick up the phone receiver and listen to what the neighbors were saying. I thought for years the reason it was called a party line was because that was where we went to party on Saturday night. For some reason the other party-liners didn’t especially like me. We would listen as quietly as we could and then burp, followed by giggling. Iris Marshal would say: “You damn Pilling kids get off the phone. I know it’s you and I’m going to tell your parents and they will whip the hide right off you.” So then we would be quiet for a while and then invent some other noise. It was, like I said, a party-line. Reva Mckenzie was especially unreasonable about our listening. She was our first cousin but betrayed us time and again to our parents, misrepresenting us and getting us into trouble. It was a great place to catch up on the community gossip and irritate the neighbors. I don’t know just why it was such a pleasure being a torment and an irritation to the neighbors but it was.

MUSKRATS BETWEEN THE SHEETS

In the spring there was lots of water sitting on top of the ground. The snow would thaw before the ground became unfrozen so it would either run off or just puddle and wait for the ground to thaw before sinking in. Noel and I were walking through some of the water in our gumboots when we happened upon a dead muskrat. The cause of death was unknown but an idea came to both of us at the same time.

Our oldest sister Donna was dating Bruce Steed, whom she later married. On the weekend she would go out on dates with him and arrive home late. We both decided that to put the muskrat in her bed would be a fun thing to do. Now you might ask yourself, “Where did those boys come up with such a notion?” You may not believe this but those types of fun ideas just sprang spontaneously to our minds. I think it was just part of being very creative. We didn’t even have to think about it.

Donna always made her bed carefully so we had to take it apart, put the muskrat down near the bottom and then remake the bed so that she couldn’t tell. One thing led to another and we both forgot about what we had done. Our minds just got busy with other projects. About midnight, the entire family was awakened by hysterical screams coming from Donna’s bedroom. The whole family rushed to the room suspecting Bruce of having taken some liberties with our dear sister. Noel and I were intent upon rescuing her. However, as soon as we burst through her door she was standing on her dresser pointing at her bed wherein laid the naked muskrat uncovered for all to see.

Noel and I immediately turned to flee but our father’s hand was upon us. In response to his question about how the muskrat got there we suggested that it had just probably crawled in there to get warm and fallen asleep and then died in its sleep. Not a good answer! We had just added lying to our list of crimes. We both spent the rest of the night in the chicken coop with the chickens. It was cold, smelly and chickens never go completely to sleep. They mutter, cackle, push and shove each other on the roost and pretty much make it impossible for any guests to sleep. It was a long, cold night.

CHURCH BASKETBALL EXPOSED

One of the few but important community entertainments was church basketball. I think it was called M-Men Basketball. I first remember it being played in the upstairs of an old stone church. The kids would crawl up into one of the window wells to watch the game. Later it was played in the gymnasium in our new church. The Mckenzie boys were the best players because they had a basketball hoop in the top of their barn where they could practice. We always loved to see them play because it helped Mountain View win a lot more games. There was a fierce rivalry amongst the small towns in all shared sports; basketball, softball, track and field and baseball. I don’t know why the rivalry was so spirited. It was as if the citizens contained all their frustration and rage at life until game time. Then it was “kill the ref, abuse the fans on the opposing team and shout at the players.” Threats were made, fights occurred, bad words were said and fists were raised. It was amazing entertainment. Whenever we played Pincher Creek it didn’t matter who won or lost there was always a fight outside afterwards. We loved it.

The most entertaining evening of church basketball occurred when Lamon Webster streaked. Lamon was the town psychosomatic. He had every bodily complaint in the world. It prevented him from working, from helping on church welfare projects, from ward teaching and helping anyone in need. In fact, he ruined it for everyone else in the community that ever had a legitimate complaint or illness. If you ever happened to mention that you were sick or that a wagon had run over your leg and it was broken in four places, others would just scoff and say, “Oh, you’re just being a Lamon.” If you were tired and worn out and just couldn’t do any more this is what you would hear, “Oh come on, Lamon.” His name was used to shame anyone who was tired or hurt into leaping to their feet and getting back to work. I’ll bet it would really have helped the pioneers who came across the plains pushing handcarts to have had a Lamon in their troop. Then whenever anyone became exhausted or their feet were bleeding or they were freezing to death in a blizzard, the rallying cry could be, “Oh, don’t be a Lamon”. Then the tired, the bleeding and the frozen could have leaped to their feet and pushed on. They probably would have arrived in the valley way ahead of schedule.

Now that I have introduced you to Lamon, let me continue with my basketball story. The crowd would be all ready for the game to start and the teams - 44 - would come running out of their dressing rooms in single file and go the full length of the floor and begin doing lay-ups to warm up for the opening tip off. On one particular evening Lamon put on his basketball shirt and jock strap but forgot to put on his basketball shorts. Nobody in the dressing room noticed because the space was small and nobody was at a visual level to notice. When the team first emerged onto the basketball floor and ran the full length, the crowd of fans would clap and shout their support. The lead man would have the basketball and make the first lay-up. Of course you can guess who the lead man was that night. Sure enough it was Lamon in his jock strap. As soon as they emerged on the floor, the next man behind him Ted Mckenzie saw the spectacle running immediately in front of him. He increased his speed to sprint levels to stop Lamon and get him back to the dressing room. However, Lamon was having none of it. He only lengthened his stride down the floor. The cheering crowd went silent. Gasps were heard and some of the sisters fainted. For the rest of us it was simply too amazing to respond. Ted never did catch Lamon and he reached up for the basketball hoop for the first lay-up exposing even more. My Uncle Oakley was the first to recover. He removed his coat and ran out onto the floor and wrapped it around the still unknowing Lamon. He didn’t know what the heck Oakley was doing and pushed him away and ran to the other side of the gym where the rebounder’s were. Finally two of the players grabbed him by the arms and started him back down the floor to the dressing room. In that same moment Lamon looked down and realized his over-exposure

If there were ever any doubts about Lamon’s debilitating illnesses and injuries they were dispelled in that moment. He cast aside the helping arms of his teammates and actually left some rubber streaks on the floor from his basketball shoes as he accelerated down the length of the gym floor and into the dressing room. The slamming of the door shook the whole gym. The spectators started breathing again and the evening continued. However, to Lamon’s credit he donned his shorts and returned to the game as though nothing had happened. But it didn’t matter to the rest of us that he had his shorts on. Whenever we looked at him the image of him in his jock strap always overlaid anything else.

Those kinds of events were wonderful for our community for they were discussed and laughed about for months and months. Here I am many years later and still remembering. If Lamon had worn his shorts that evening do you think I would remember that game? I don’t think so. The other thing that Lamon was famous for was picking his nose. An entire index finger could disappear up his nose searching for a booger. One time he was riding to Waterton and Uncle Oakley - 45 - was sitting beside him in the car. When Lamon’s finger disappeared up his nose Oakley accidentally bumped hard into him as though the car had hit a bump. He shoved Lamon’s finger so far up his nose that it almost got stuck. He screamed and hollered and when he pulled his finger out his nose bled all over his coat. But do you think he learned his lesson? No. He picked boogers in public until the old Booger died.

CLOSE CALL

One day we called Mrs. McCarthy to see where Gene, the game warden, was going that day. He was going east of Cardston so naturally we went west. My brother and I were sneaking up on this lake covered with Canada geese. Sneaking up on a Canada goose is like trying to sneak up on someone that has twelve power telescopic eyes, ears that can hear a mouse squeak two hundred yards away and posts actual sentry birds. Those sentries never put their heads down to eat until they are relieved by another rotation of goose-necked spotters. We crawled on our bellies for about 350 miles. Every 50 or so miles we would slowly raise our heads to see if they were still there and if we were getting within range. I’m sure the geese spotted us the moment we began our stalk. But hope springs eternal for a hunter. The conversation probably went like this:

“Oh, oh, here come those Pilling boys again. Better eat fast everybody they’ll be here in an hour or so. All we have to do is watch for them each time they raise their heads and we can keep track of their progress. Hey, let’s pretend we don’t see them. Let’s just go on eating as though we don’t know they are coming. That way they will have to crawl on their bellies through that wet spot and by the time they get close, they’ll be half frozen to death. You can hear them whispering to each other about being so quiet that we won’t hear them. Okay, everybody listen up. They are getting pretty close. The next time they look up, I’ll let out the ‘old startle honk’ and we’ll all start honking and squawking so they know they have been had. Then we’ll all take off in the opposite direction laughing and giggling. We’ll be a gaggle of giggling geese. They’ll jump to their feet, blast off a few shots that will never come close and then say, ‘man that was close. We almost got them.”

We immediately bid a hasty retreat across the field toward our home.We kept watching over our shoulder and sure enough, he mounted up and was galloping toward us. We lost sight of him as we sped over a hill. Even though he had to find a gate to get through the fence into the field we were in, it was apparent we would never make it to cover before he and his horse were upon us.

We came to a pile of hay and we slid our guns underneath it and out of view. In hindsight we should have crawled in the hay pile but it would only have provided marginal cover and would probably be the first place Gene looked or even worse he might have ridden his horse over the hay pile. There was an irrigation canal in front of us with long grass on both sides of it that the rancher was unable to cut when putting up his hay. Now the reader needs to know that it was late October in Alberta, Canada. Any stagnant or stationary water was frozen over. The only reason the irrigation canal wasn’t frozen was because it was moving. Even so, there was ice along the edge. My brother and I (with all our clothes and boots on) waded out into the canal and then went to the near edge and submerged ourselves in the water with just our heads covered by the grass on the bank. The cold of the water was somewhat mitigated by the fear and adrenaline flowing through our veins. We felt, through the ground, Gene’s horse trotting along the canal bank. He rode back and forth several times trying to locate us. Finally, the cold surpassed the fear and Noel and I agreed to give ourselves up rather than freeze to death. We figured a cold cell would be better than the cold of that irrigation canal. We stood up with our hands in the air prepared to surrender when, to our surprise we spotted the back side of Gene and his horse disappearing over the hill back. We retrieved our shotguns and began to run for home.

I am sure that my mind has forgotten how cold we were. By the time we hit the house our clothes were frozen and only the constant churning of our legs kept the knees of our pants from freezing solid. My mother exclaimed, “What in the world happened? Heavens to Betsy you are frozen solid!” That was about as exclamatory as my mother ever got. I never heard her say a swear word in her whole life except maybe “hell’s bells”.

We were so cold we were unable to get our clothes off. My dad pried the guns from our hands and mother stripped us down to our underwear and then we huddled behind the wood-burning stove to warm up. In response to their questions we said we slipped and fell in the canal. Dad let it go at that, although I heard him later talking to mother about, “crazy damn kids.” I don’t know for sure but he might have been talking about Noel and me instead of our older sisters.

There is one final perplexing sequel to this story. The next time we saw Gene McCarthy on the street in Cardston, he gave us a big smile and said, “Glad to see you boys are dry and warm.” Go figure!

THE PARK MOOSE

One year late in August we were getting ready to go back to University. We had been trying to trap a bear up in Lee Nelson’s land that was adjacent to the Waterton National Park Boundary. We took an old sheep that had died of natural causes (if you can call a slug to the head a natural cause), tied a lasso rope around her back legs and drug her around behind our horses on some trails in the mountains to leave a good scent-trail. Our hope was that a wandering bear would pick up the scent of the dead sheep and follow it to its end. At the end we built a small corral of poles and put the dead sheep inside. Then we exposed one opening and set some bear traps at the entrance and inside.

One night I worked too late to go up with Noel and Lee to check the trap. That evening after checking the bear trap, they spotted some moose across the Park line on the mountainside. Noel pulled out his rifle and dropped a big cow. Because it was in the Park and still daylight they couldn’t retrieve the carcass right then so he and Lee ran over, cut her throat, opened her stomach so the entrails could expand and begin to cool and then jumped on their horses and rode back to the ranch. When I arrived home from work, I was greeted with, “We have a little job to take care of tonight.” Because the shooting had taken place just over the ridge from the Warden’s cabin, we waited until after dark to haul the moose back to the ranch.

We loaded Old Paint, a very large workhorse, into the back of Lee’s ton truck and set off into the night. Old Paint was a great old horse but had one fatal flaw: Whenever he was tied up with his bridle reins, he would pull back and break the reins. Consequently, a halter with a strong nylon rope was always used to tie him up. I don’t know why he was always referred to as “old”. That was a prefix we used on lots of descriptions, i.e. old Earnest Jones, old Bud Sloan, old Bossy, old Payne. Actually none of them were old so it must have referenced something else.

Two years following the current story, Lee was hunting elk on Old Paint. He came upon the fresh track of a grizzly bear. The tracks were in new snow, easy to see and disappeared into dense trees. Lee got off his horse, (that would be Old Paint) tied him up to a tree with the strong halter and rope and began trailing the bear hoping for a shot. As he continued on the track he noticed that it was taking a slow turn back toward where Old Paint was tied to the tree. He hurried along the track trying to overtake the bear. Before he was able to do so, he heard his horse neighing and screaming. By the time he had caught up with the bear, it had already killed Old Paint and was sitting on him getting ready for lunch. Old Paint wasn’t about to get any older. I would like to tell the reader at this point that Lee fought the bear to a standstill and finally took the saddle off Paint and rode the grizzly home, but I know that would be stretching it too far. Lee did shoot the bear but unfortunately Old Paint was dead. I guess the moral of the story is that small bad habits can be pretty fatal later on. If Old Paint hadn’t required that heavy halter and rope, he could have broken the reins and escaped the bear. Oh well, back to the moose story when Old Paint was still with us.

We drove as close to the dead moose as we could, unloaded Paint and continued on foot the last quarter of a mile to where the moose had died. We had left our rifles at home and only had a couple of .22 pistols with us. As we got nearer to the moose, Old Paint became very nervous and hard to control. We had no flashlights and it was quite dark. As we approached the moose it appeared to move and even raise-up. We panicked and ran into each other and then into the horse. After we got straighten around we realized that a bear was on top of the moose. Lee whipped out his .22 pistol and started firing at the bear. We grabbed his arm and tried to get him stopped for fear he would wound the bear and it would charge us. But the bear had decided that discretion was the better part of valor and lumbered off into the trees.

We spent the next three hours gutting the moose, watching for the bear to return and trying to get it loaded on the horse for transport back to the truck. We finally had to cut the hind-quarters off and set them astride the saddle. Then we cut holes between the ribs on the front quarters and hung them on each side of the horn. Poor Old Paint could hardly stand up. We led him slowly back to the truck and loaded the moose parts into the back. We then turned Old Paint loose knowing that he would find his way back home by morning. Finally, we got in the truck and started back out of the mountains to the ranch.

Meanwhile, my father had gotten wind of what we were doing and drove his car up the road with my brother’s wife and hid in the trees to scare us and teach us a lesson. He secreted himself just up the lane where we had to go through a gate. Just as we were approaching the gate and all the adrenaline had started to ebb, we began to have doubts about what we had done. I said to Noel and Lee, “If we get caught we won’t have enough money to go back to University this fall and they might even put us in the hoosegow,” (that was the cowboy word for jail).

I got out of the truck to open the gate, Lee drove through and just then some lights came on and a horn started blowing. I dropped the gate, leaped into the cab and hollered, “Hit it!” We were sure it was the game warden and we were goners. We careened down the mountain road as fast we could with the imagined game warden in hot pursuit. We didn’t want to get caught with our pistols (it was against the law to own a pistol in Canada—that is another story) so we wrapped them in their holsters and belts and threw them out the window by a tree where we would remember to return to and recover them. Then Noel and I crawled back over the stock racks of the truck at 60 miles per hour and threw the meat over the side into a grassy ditch. Our intention was to get rid of the evidence then hopefully to return later and retrieve the spoils. We later found out why they are called spoils.

As the chase continued we were kicking up great clouds of dust. I remember coming around one corner and Lee putting the truck into a four wheel skid and barely getting it straightened in time to make it across a bridge with Noel and I hanging on the stock racks for dear life. We began to gain on our pursuer and so we shut off our lights and turned down a side road and hid the truck in some trees. When he went thundering past we saw who it was and were much relieved and returned for our meat and guns. My father thought that was so funny and laughed and laughed. We found it difficult to see the humor in it. For us it was a near-death experience.

We butchered the moose but must have let the meat hang too long. Later we were back at university and thawed some of the meat to eat. The cooking smell was so bad we couldn’t even stay in the kitchen. It really was spoiled. The first bite almost gagged us so we took it outside to feed to the neighbors big Rottweiler. He took one sniff, stuck his nose in the air and wandered away. Ever after he would look at us suspiciously. I know he thought we were trying to poison him. Actually, we would like to have poisoned the dog because he was always threatening to bite us. Finally, one afternoon we opened the trunk of our car and threw some meat in it (not moose meat). He immediately jumped in to grab the meat and we slammed the trunk lid. We drove far up Provo, Canyon and opened the trunk and let him out and he was never seen nor heard from again.

PRACTICAL JOKES

We had a favorite trick that we often played on others. When we learned of someone who had killed something illegally we would pretend to be the game warden. One of my friends could imitate Gene McCarthy’s Scottish accent almost perfectly. He would call them on the phone and tell them that he knew what they had done and he wanted them to come into the fish and game office and give themselves up or else he was coming out to arrest them. We actually know of a couple of guys who left home and lived in the bush for two or three days before they realized Gene wasn’t coming for them. I don’t know how many went in and confessed their poaching crimes. Gene must have wondered why men would come in and confess their transgressions when he didn’t even know a violation had occurred. I learned once that Don Shaw and his friend had ridden their Honda 90 motorcycles across the U.S. border into Montana and all the way up into Belly River lakes. That was like trespassing on sacred ground. They had gone late in the fall when all the tourists were out and the Belly River Ranger Station was closed for the year. My friend called Don, imitating Gene McCarthy’s voice, and told him that he had some caster prints of the tires on his motorcycle and was coming to compare them with his the next day. Don hung up the phone and promptly jumped in his pickup, drove to Lethbridge and got brand new tires for his Honda 90. He burned the others in his garbage barrel that night. I’ll bet he wondered why Gene never came to check his tire prints.

HUNTING TAGS

As we got older (by that I mean 23 years old) we thought maybe we should start buying licenses. However, we would never lock the tags. We would wrap them either around the horn or a leg tendon, but never lock them closed. If we thought the game warden was going to check us we would jump out and click our tags closed. But once the tag was clicked shut you could never open it again without destroying the tag. Dissecting and experimenting with how to click the tag and open it again became a four-month obsession. At the end of the season we collected all the unused tags from other hunters in the community and carefully took them apart with pliers, and screwdrivers. No matter how hard we tried, we were never successful at unlocking them after they had been clicked. It was one of the few mechanical problems that ever stumped us.

Whoever designed those tags was an engineering genius. It later became the single strongest motivation for us to go to college because we realized someone who had gone to college had invented the deer tag and was therefore smart beyond belief.

If we could get back to the ranch without clicking the tag, we would just take it off and continue to hunt later. If you tagged your deer or elk on the first day and clicked your tag—that was the end of the hunting. We hunted from the first to the last day of every big game hunting season.

At the end of the season, we would find all kinds of interesting things to do with the unlocked tags. One Sunday during church services we were seated in the recreation hall because the chapel was full. Brother Frank Smith was seated directly in front of us. He took off his suit coat and there were his belt loops staring us in the face—an invitation too inviting to resist. We took an elk tag, slipped it through his belt loop and around the back support of the chair and clicked it shut. We were expecting that when the service was over he would stand up and pull the chair up with him, creating a mild and amusing disturbance. However it quickly became a bit more complicated.

At the end of the service the bishop got up and invited Brother Smith to close with prayer. We immediately got up and fled to the foyer. Frank stood up to go to the pulpit and of course the chair rose with him. Confused, he turned to see what had happened and the chair swung to the side and hit his wife in the head. She gasped and he swung back the other way to see what had caused her exclamation and the chair swung the other way and clipped his mother-in-law on the shoulder almost toppling her off her chair. Poor Frank was slow to figure out what was going on. We were terrified. It had escalated into an incident of frightening proportions. There was nowhere to run so we froze in the foyer trying to feign innocence while every soul in the church and all the angels in heaven knew exactly who was at fault. Finally, the bishop stood up and asked someone else to come forward to prayer. You can bet it wasn’t one of us.

Both the bishop and our fathers took a dim view of what we had done. We were counseled by the bishop to never do that again. We dissected on numerous occasions old tags to see if there wasn’t a way we could open one after it was snapped close. We were never successful at breaking the code and by the next hunting season had forgotten our promise not to do anything like that again.

HALLOWEEN MISCHIEF

Most mechanical things we could take apart and reassemble in short order except for hunting tags. Once, on Halloween night, we dismantled an entire four wheeled, horse drawn wagon, hoisted it to the top of the school and reassembled it in the dead of night without a flashlight.

Halloween night was absolutely the most important and splendid night of the year even better than Christmas. I don’t really remember where the perception came from, but on that night mischief was legitimized. It was like a night that no matter what we did there was no guilt and no punishment. Our absolutely favorite activity was to push over people’s outdoor toilets. I don’t know where this tradition began, but it certainly was there long before my time. It may have gone back to the time when outhouses were first invented.

We would gather at the edge of someone’s yard, rush forward in mass and push the toilet over and then escape into the night. It was a dangerous activity because the owner often stayed up all night with a shotgun to protect his toilet. We went to Walter West’s house one night and could see him sitting on the step of his house with a lantern and a gun across his lap. So we left and returned much later after we had virtually rendered the rest of Mountain View toilet less. We looked everywhere and could not see Walter. We assumed he had gone to bed. We assembled silently in a line of eight guys and rushed across the yard, hitting the toilet at about the same time and tipped it over on its front door. Just as it started to topple we heard yelling and cursing from inside the toilet and realized Walter was in there going to the bathroom. By that time it was too late to stop and the deed was done. He was yelling at us to come back because he couldn’t get out since the outhouse was lying on the door. We didn’t know what to do. To go back and help would mean that we would have to reveal our identities and suffer horrible consequences. So we did the honorable thing and immediately left for parts unknown. We heard later that he had yelled and yelled to wake up his wife and when that was unsuccessful he began discharging his shotgun through the bum holes in the outhouse. Finally, she awakened and came out to see what the ruckus was all about. When she discovered Walt’s predicament, she had to call some of the neighbors to come and get him out. With that much exposure the story was told and retold around the town. Poor Walt was the butt (no pun intended) of a lot of jokes for many moons.

Meanwhile, back to Halloween. I guess I wasn’t quite finished. Perhaps the reader is unacquainted with the design of an outdoor toilet. You first of all, you would dig a hole about eight feet deep, six feet long and five feet wide. Then you would build an outhouse whose width and length were about one foot bigger than the hole. The outhouse was built of wood with one door and a bench inside to sit on with one or two holes. You may not believe this, but back in those days, going to the bathroom in the night was pretty scary. There were no lights and the outhouse was always situated some distance from the house. Hence, you almost always didn’t dare go unless someone went with you. Hence, the necessity for two holes in the bench. It was an accepted social experience back then.

The same thing happened with Clarence Brunsdale. He had an outhouse that had never been tipped over on Halloween night. The reason being that he sat up all night on the porch of his house with a shotgun loaded with rock salt. On one particular Halloween, eight of us made a secret oath that we were not going home that night unless we tipped it over. We devised many plans of distraction but none of them worked. So we just kept dropping by his place to see if he was still up and awake. At about 12:30 a.m. we checked and he wasn’t on his porch. We did some quick reconnoitering but couldn’t see him anywhere. We assumed that he had finally given up and gone to bed. We formed two waves of troops and charged the rear of the outhouse, intending to topple it on our first rush and escape without being apprehended and bearing no holes in our hides. As we hit the rear of the outhouse and it began to tip over we heard a yell of anger and threat from inside the outhouse. Actually, I learned a couple of words I had never heard before that later on proved effective on sheep and other misbehaving animals. So over it went, right on the door. Clarence had slipped in earlier to use his outhouse and it was just at that moment that we happened along. Coincidence, you might say. I think not. Providence was teaching Clarence one of the basic rules of life: you win some you lose some. It was just his turn to lose. There was no way out for him. He couldn’t crawl out either of the holes and the outhouse was resting on the door. We knew he was fair and truly trapped. When he got through swearing and threatening us, he realized that he needed our help to get out. However, that, of course, put us in a dilemma. It was rather like the problem of letting a grizzly bear out of a trap in which we had put him. Clarence pleaded and promised that if we would tip the outhouse back up he wouldn’t shoot us or tell our parents; both equally frightening. We realized that since he hadn’t seen us he really didn’t know who we were and thus who our parents were. He, of course, had a good idea who we were, but nothing concrete, put you in jail, hang you from the yardarm, tell your parents kind of evidence. Later we learned that his yelling finally woke his wife who, when she quit laughing, called a couple of neighbors who came and set him free. He swore all the neighbors to secrecy because of his great embarrassment but by Sunday it was all over the church.

On the same Halloween night, fused with enthusiasm from our outhouse successes, we finally tackled the most difficult one of all: Orson Webber. Before disbanding and going home and calling it a night we decided to have one last look at Orson’s outhouse. Orson was one mean, bad-mouthed, scary person. He was always grumpy and short-tempered. He was just the sort of person kids love to play a joke on. When we arrived at the scene of the crime it seemed all was quiet and that Orson had retired to bed. Again, we formed a double line and rushed the rear of the outhouse.

Fortunately, I was in the second wave and thereby spared the awful experience of the first line. As we approached the building at full speed, the entire front line disappeared into the ground. I slammed on the brakes just in time to prevent joining them. Orson had hooked onto his outhouse with a tractor and dragged it three feet forward exposing the hole that was filled with…. All four members of the forward attack line fell up to their armpits in the…. Yelling and hollering ensued. They yelled for us to help pull them out because there was nothing to step on or grab hold of to get out. By this time their arms and hands were also covered with the…. We four survivors were reluctant to grab hold of the extended arms because of the…. We looked around and found a 2x4, which we extended to them and hung on to the other end. We pulled and pulled and finally got them all extracted without getting… all over us. The yard light turned on just as we were getting the last one out and we heard snickering, then boisterous laughter coming from inside the house. We didn’t think it was that funny but I guess he did. We trekked down to the creek and the guys with… on them swam around until they felt cleaner. But the smell followed them home.

One Halloween in High School I was invited to go to Cardston with Barry Steed. I thought that might be cool because Mountain View was getting a little boring. That was the first time I learned that you could trick OR treat. Until then I didn’t know that there was a treat option. Everywhere we went in Cardston, if we yelled “trick or treat” people would give us treats. In Mountain View if you yelled “trick or treat” all it did was give away your position so people could start shooting. I came back to Mountain View with enough treats to last until Christmas.

BORDER CROSSING PIKE

Just across the border from Alberta into Montana is a lake named Pike Lake. Bet you can’t guess what was in it. Pike, pike and more pike. The problem was that it was in Montana and in order to get there we had to drive a truck or jeep to the border and then sneak across and down to the lake, which was about ¼ of a mile from the Montana-Alberta borderline. Sometimes we would catch so many pike that we had to bring a trailer to get them all home. The Game Warden from Browning was always trying to capture us. But his only approach was from the far side of the lake. We would wear ice skates so we could easily outdistance him and then we would run up the last hill with our hockey skates on and cross back into Alberta. There was a large steel marker designating the border so we always knew when we were in safe territory.

Once he came on a snowmobile and it was a dead heat right to the last 50 yards. Once we were across the borderline we would stop and visit with him for a while. Once we even shared our lunch with him but we tossed it across the line. We didn’t even dare reach across it for fear he would grab us. He kept threatening that he was going to eventually catch us and haul us off to the hoosegow in Browning, but he never succeeded.

When we would pull the pike out of the holes in the ice, they would freeze solid. To catch them we would dangle a homemade wooden fish down the hole in the ice. We would lift it up and down and then suddenly a pike would rush up to the decoy, slam on his brakes and take a moment to decide whether to attack or not. In that brief interval we would slip a loop of copper wire over his head, pull it tight and haul him up through the hole in the ice. Within a half hour they would be frozen solid enough that you could snap them in two. After we got them home we would put them in a big tub and fill it with water. Even though they had been out of the water for almost eight hours, they would all come back to life. We thought that was pretty exciting. When I first learned about the resurrection, I thought it was kind of like the pike coming back to life. I figured the Lord just froze us and when it was time to wake up he would throw us in the bathtub and we’d wake-up and just flop around. I learned later that isn’t exactly how it happens but hey, a kid’s got to start somewhere.

MY ONE AND ONLY ATTEMPT AT SMOKING

I really don’t know why things (ideas) just pop into kids heads. Often they are just there without any forethought or planning. I had never considered smoking so you would have thought the matter was over and done with. Not so. One day Ross Uibel and I and Ross’s mother Kathleen and some other people that I can’t remember were hiking into Twin Lakes one lovely September morning. There is a flower indigenous to Waterton-Glacier National Parks called Bear Grass. It had a long stem and flower on top with a nipple that we always thought looked like a breast. Of course that perception ruined any true appreciation of the actual flower. In the fall after the flower had ripened, the stem became hard like bamboo. However, if you bent it, it would snap and the inside was hollow. Ross and I were hiking ahead of the others and they were out of sight. It occurred to us that we could try smoking the bear grass. We both broke off a stem about the length of a cigarette and stuck them in our mouths and pretended inhaling and puffing out smoke. Then we decided to light the end of the bear grass and try inhaling some real smoke. So we pulled out some matches and lit the ends. We both took a big drag down into our lungs. Oh my goodness! To this day I can still remember the acrid, burning sensation of the smoke. We thought we were going to choke. We coughed and spit and gagged and threw the bear grass stems down onto the trail. When we finally could breathe again, I think the determination to never try smoking again was imprinted on both our minds and we never did.

Kathleen and her friends came hiking along behind us and sure enough, Kathleen spotted the bear grass stems with one burnt end. She picked them up and when they finally caught up to us she presented the stems in our faces and asked for an explanation. The earful that we got next only reinforced our already determination to never smoke again. Lesson learned!!

THE COW MOOSE CAPER

One of the closest calls we ever had was during regular hunting season. We were up in Ben Olsen’s land, just adjacent to Waterton National Park. My dad and Uncle Oakley had dropped us off with a couple of motorcycles and then they continued down the road into the Park. We were really hunting elk and deer but certainly not moose because that season wasn’t officially open yet. We were about a half a mile from the main highway that runs between Cardston and Waterton Lakes National Park. As we were sneaking through the trees we jumped a cow moose and her yearling calf. To this day nobody admits to firing the first shot. I have my suspicions about who it was but it wasn’t me. Whoever it was wounded the cow on their first shot but not enough to bring her down. She and her calf broke from the cover of the trees and struck off for the highway headed for the protection of the National Park. It was all open ground to the highway. Well, we were in a dilemma. Here was a cow moose, out of season that someone (I won’t mention his name) had wounded and the cow and her calf were headed for the highway. We had a few problems. Should we let her go and hope she wasn’t wounded too badly? Should we ignore her and just go back to hunting? What if someone sees her and comes looking for us? What if someone saw us hunting in Ben’s land and put two and two together and knew it was us? Should we try to shoot her and get her down before she goes any further out into the open? Although nobody said anything out loud, all of these thoughts and considerations were running through our heads. However, great minds all think alike and two seconds later we all opened up on her to try to bring her down before she got any closer to the highway and incriminate us.

However, desperation always interferes with your shooting aim whether it’s basketball, football, hockey or hunting. Not only did we fail to bring her down, but we ended up wounding her worse, and someone accidentally hit the calf. They kept running until they were out of range and we stood helplessly by and watched a terrible scene unfold. It is important at this point to also add that my father and Uncle Oakley had dropped us off to hunt and all we had were two motorcycles and there were four of us. The plan being that Dad and Oakley were going to come back later to pick us up.

We watched the cow and calf arrive at the highway. The cow barely managed to clear the fence, staggered onto the highway and fell down right on the centerline. We were all yelling and telling her to get up and keep going but she just laid down and quit. I’m sure she couldn’t hear us anyway. And if that weren’t terrible enough, the wounded calf tried to jump the fence and became entangled in it and was caught. We were trying to decide what in the world we were going to do when suddenly the matter was taken out of our hands. Around the curve in the highway came a highway patrol car with a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman driving. Mounties, as we called them, were noted for “always getting their man”. We had all listened to the radio program called Sergeant Preston of the North, who always, always got his man. My young nephew, Donald Ady (who I suspect fired that first shot that had us all in trouble and then also wounded the calf) said, “If that’s Sergeant Preston we’re dead.”

Well, Sergeant Preston, although we learned later it was really Constable Fenner, got out of his patrol car, pulled out his service revolver and shot the mother moose to death in the middle of the road to put her out of her misery. Then he went over and administered the same rough justice to the wounded calf. We were standing back in the trees watching in horror the awful proceedings and knowing we were getting in deeper and deeper. The good constable went back to his patrol car and radioed for a wrecker to come to pull mother moose off the highway. This we learned later. We were watching him through our binoculars, wondering what he was going to do next. He got out of his car with a pair of binoculars and began looking up on the side of the mountain where we were staring back at him. We immediately dropped on our stomachs and crawled back over the ridge to our motorbikes.

Shortly thereafter, Dad and Uncle Oakley came driving up the road intending to come over and pick us up. Rather than turning off the highway and going through the gate that led to where we were, they saw the cruiser lights up the road and decided to investigate. They drove up and saw the carnage. The Mountie came over to talk to them. He asked them if they knew of anyone hunting up in Ben Olsen’s that morning.

Now, my father and Uncle Oakley were not stupid. They realized that anything their progeny had been up to would most likely reflect badly on them. I’m sure they could see our handwriting all over this fiasco. They looked at each other and then stared at the Mountie with blank faces. “Well, we better be going. Is there anything we can do to help,” they asked.

“No,” the Mountie replied, “I’ve got a wrecker on the way but when I catch the men who did this they’re going to need a wrecker to get them out of the hoosegow.”

In the meantime we had piled double on our motorbikes and taken the back road to freedom. As Aristotle said, “He who runs away, lives to run away another day” or was that Benedict Arnold? We drove about 15 miles through backcountry roads and fields until we reached one of our hay fields. We went to a stack of hay bales and hid all our rifles in the holes between the bales. Then we got on our bikes and rode the back way home. Father and Oakley met us at the barn and said, “Just get in the truck and go to Cardston and walk up and down the streets and don’t come home until its dark.” We did immediately as we were told, without any questions asked. They never even asked us if we had done it. Why do you think they knew? That always puzzled us.

We arrived home after dark and went straight to bed. Next day was Sunday and we all went to church. We had no sooner arrived home after church than into our ranch pulled two highway patrol cars and the game warden’s truck. All of them had their red lights flashing and drove straight up to the house. My mother was horrified because all the people driving home from church saw the police raid. The game warden came to the door and announced that he had finally caught the little sons-a-bitches that had wounded the moose and its calf. He said, “as soon as I heard of this, I knew it had your hand writing all over it and now I have finally got you for sure.” He had a search warrant and came into the house and confiscated two rifles that he assumed were the weapons used in the crime. Needless to say they took the wrong guns. He asked us if we had anything to confess which was our cue to go temporarily deaf and dumb.

“Never mind,” he said, “we’ve recovered the bullets from the moose and we are going to do ballistic tests on these guns and when the bullets and the guns match I’m coming back to arrest you.”

They sent the guns all the way to Ottawa, Ontario to be tested. Of course the ballistic tests showed that the guns and the bullets didn’t match because they had confiscated the wrong guns. The game warden had to return the guns finally, but he wasn’t happy about it. Again, he promised that “one of these days I’m going to catch you little hooligans and when I do I’m going to throw away the key.” However, little did he know that our guardian angels liked to hunt as well as we did? They agreed to keep us from getting caught if we took them to where there was game and good hunting. We both kept our ends of the bargain.

RABBITS UNLIMITED

When I was attending University in Provo, Utah there was a plague of jack-rabbits eating all the forage in farmer’s fields. Hunters were encouraged to destroy as many rabbits as they could. We didn’t need much encouragement. I was working at the Sears Automotive Shop at the time. There were a group of us at the shop that liked to hunt. I found a 28-volt aircraft landing light at an old wrecking yard for planes and helicopters. I bought it for three dollars. Then I wired it so we could hook it up to batteries. We would borrow six brand new Die-Hard batteries from where we were working, charge them all the way up and then take two at a time and hook them in series so the spotlight would be 24 volts. I emphasis “borrow” because we always returned them the next day and slipped them back on the shelf none the worse for wear. The spotlight was incredible. It would shine brighter than any normal spotlight. With six batteries it would run for almost three hours. Then we would take the batteries back to the shop and recharge them or change them for new ones. Little did the Sears customers who purchased batteries know that their new batteries had been broken-in west of Utah Lake in Skull Valley.

We would hunt from about 10:00pm until 2:00am. We loaded our own ammunition and hunted with our deer rifles and pistols. The smell of sage brush as it hit the radiator and wafted up past out faces was almost intoxicating. Perhaps it was that smell of sage that turned us into blood thirsty rabbit eliminators. Even today if I smell the odor of fresh or wet sage, my right index finger begins to twitch.

One late night we were around behind Utah Lake in a valley where the army used to experiment with chemical weapons. It was called Skull Valley. Maybe in hindsight we should not have chosen to hunt there. But the rabbits were so plentiful and big. Maybe that was because they had been radiated from a radioactive dumping site that was located out there. I was running the spotlight and a rabbit was running straight toward us. Les Southam had a big 357 magnum caliber pistol and was firing at the rabbit. It ran under the front of the truck and Les fired the last round too low and it went through the hood of the truck and clear through the radiator.

We started back for civilization but only got about ¼ of a mile and lost all our anti-freeze. There were no lights, only the stars and we argued for twenty minutes about which one was the north-star. Was it at the end of the dipper or was it the handle. I knew for sure which it was, since I had been lost before and started east toward the highway. Finally, they followed me and we spent four hours getting out of the desert and back to the highway where we caught a ride back into town. Later we went out with another radiator, installed it, filled it with water and drove it back.

One night my neighbor Ed Rolf and I decided that it would be a great experience to take our wives with us. Shortly after leaving the highway a rabbit was running toward us and we shot and wounded it. It started to scream and cry. Our wives were horrified. They began crying and whining about what barbarians we were and it went downhill from there. About 4 miles further into the desert we hit a rock and popped the bead off one of the front tires. It went immediately flat and we had no spare. Hours later we limped out of the desert on the flat tire and once on the highway we still had to drive 15 miles to get to a ranch house for help. By that time we were running on the rim. The tire had long since chewed up and come off. Our wives were furious with us and couldn’t understand what was fun about rabbit hunting. Needless to say they never went again and we never invited them. I guess it’s a guy thing.

One night we had exhausted our supply of reloaded ammunition and were out of the desert and on our way back on the deserted highway. A lone car behind us slowly gained on us and pretty soon was tail gating us and showing no inclination to pass. The five guys down in the back of the truck surreptitiously reached over and plugged the spot light into the two remaining batteries. They suddenly lifted up the spot light and shone 24 volts of high intensity light right through the trailing car’s windshield. The scream of tires locking up and the smell of burning rubber even caught up with us. He must have been completely blinded and just locked up his wheels and skidded to a stop to stay on the highway. He never came within a half mile of us after that. Thankfully, cellular phones were not invented yet so he couldn’t call and complain to the cops.

MY DAD’S ACCIDENT AND MY SUBSEQUENT ROLE

When I was in the seventh grade, my father had a serious accident. He fell off the top of a haystack that we were building. I was driving the team of horses that was pulling the hay up onto the haystack. They were pulling so hard I couldn’t get them to stop and they pushed him off the haystack. Even though I was never blamed for it, I blamed myself. My father was laid up with casts and operations for almost a year. I took over lots of additional responsibilities, including hunting for meat.

Today it is sporting to shoot ducks while flying, but not back when I started hunting them. They were a good source of food and when food is the issue, rules change. I would sneak up to a lake where there were ducks and then wait until as many as possible would line-up and then I would shoot them while they were sitting on the lake. My record take in one shot was eight.

I remember that a roast duck was one of my favorite foods. I don’t know if it was because my mother had a wonderful means of preparing a duck or what, but today I couldn’t eat a duck unless a china man had prepared it and masked its taste with a strong sauce. They taste terrible. I shot a swan once but it was so terrible eating that I was never tempted to shoot another one. To cook a swan you put it in the oven with a brick and slowly cook it for six hours. Then you throw away the swan and eat the brick, it being more tender than the swan.

There was a Chinese restaurant in Calgary called the Red Dragon. We had an agreement with the owner that if we brought him all our geese and ducks he would exchange them for Chinese Meals whenever we came to the restaurant. He promised that he wouldn’t serve any of the geese or ducks back to us because he said they were a real Chinese delicacy and he wanted to keep them just for his friends and family. We ate a lot of Chinese meals there and none of them tasted like goose or duck. We also periodically dropped some off to a Hutterite colony because they really like them as well.

MERRILL’S FIRST DEER

Early one fall morning my older sister Donna brought her son Merrill to go hunting with us. She arrived late which meant we had left without him. There are few things in life you can wait for, but hunting is not one of them. When she got there she decided to drive up the highway to see if she could catch us. As they approached Belly River Bridge a small two-point buck leaped the fence and ran across the road. Donna slammed on the brakes. Merrill jumped out and dropped the deer right on the side of the road. Since you really weren’t supposed to shoot on the highway, Merrill grabbed the little buck and threw it into the trunk of the car and headed back to the ranch. After having gone a short distance, the deer, who was only stunned, regained consciousness and was kicking and struggling to get out. They pulled into the yard with Donna screaming at the top of her lungs for Dad. My poor father was out in the barnyard and thought there had been a serious accident. By the time he arrived at the car and heard the real story, his adrenaline was so high that he jerked out his hunting knife, opened the trunk, yanked the deer out with his bare hands, wrestled it to the ground and cut its throat. Merrill was quite proud of himself and Donna was a nervous wreck for days.

MY CHILDHOOD NEMESIS

Bears are classified differently depending on your point of view. Walt Disney classified them as cute. Theodore Roosevelt classified them as cuddly and so teddy bears were named after him. The Sierra Club has classified them as valuable and having a right to be protected. Park Wardens have classified them as more important than humans. Biologists have classified them as an important part of the ecosystem. Zoologists have classified them as endangered and put them in zoos to preserve the species. We, however, classified them differently. Bears were Ursulus Horribilus. They were the enemy. We were scared of them. The only good bear was a dead bear. They were predators. We were part of their potential food chain. They killed our sheep and cattle and, at least in our imaginations, spent all their free time thinking of making a meal of us. My older sister Darlene told us horrible stories of little children that had been eaten by bears. They were the source of our very worst fears. Nothing was more frightening to us than bears. It is human tendency to destroy the things that we fear. Bears frightened us and we were VERY human. Therefore, the way the formula worked is that we attempted to kill every bear we could.

Even today if I find myself under unusual levels of stress I begin to have bear dreams. In these dreams I am not standing on the bank of some salmon river watching grizzly bears cavorting in the water and gorging on salmon. No, Sir-ee! In my dreams I am being pursued by big grizzly bears intent on making me their next meal. As they draw closer I try to run faster but the bear continues to gain on me. I begin to scream and flail my arms in a desperate attempt to escape. I don’t wake up yet. I wish I could, but no. The bear reaches up and sinks his teeth into my arm. I look down and my bicep muscle has torn loose from the bone and the bear has it in his mouth. I scream some more and the bear begins to shake me back and forth. Finally, in desperation I hear a voice saying, “Kent! Kent, wake up” and gratefully realize that Janice is shaking my arm exactly where the bear was hanging on a few moments before. Finally, I am awake. Whew! Once, I told her when I am having those awful dreams not to grab my arm and shake it because I thought that there might be some connection between her grabbing me by the arm and the bear grabbing me in the same place. Next time she grabbed me around the neck to wake me up and I can tell you, a bear biting your neck is even worse than one biting your arm. So now when that recurring dream returns to torment me she throws a glass of water on me. In the dream, instead of biting me and ripping my arm off, the bear pees on me. I know that is not a pleasant thought, but it is better than being chewed on.

When I would hike in the National Parks, the law said I was not allowed to carry a gun. That seemed so unfair. It wasn’t like I was going to hunt them, but certainly I needed some protection. I didn’t think it was fair for the forest service to maintain a trail into the back country, stock a lake with lovely trout to lure me back there and then expect me to contend with a population of bears that had been reinforced to be aggressive. At night it was even worse. I had to wear glasses and when I took them off everything was blurry. My worst fear was that a bear would attack me and I would be up and running before I got my glasses on. Then if the bear didn’t kill me, banging into trees and rocks certainly would.

Once I had a fantasy that I was attacked by a soft-hearted bear and when he was chasing me he noticed that I couldn’t see very well and was running into tree trunks. So he caught up to me and said, “Hey! Even with my poor bear eyesight I can see that your vision is worse than mine and it’s no fun chasing someone who can’t see to run away. How would you like to have me for a seeingeye bear?”

“A seeing-eye bear”, I exclaimed in astonishment, “that is an awesome idea.” Then I put a leash around his neck and lead him to school and around the baseball diamond.

Everyone one stared and said, “Look, look everyone, there goes Kent and his famous seeing-eye bear.” They would ask for my autograph. If anyone were mean to me or made fun of me I would unsnap the leash and say, “Sic-em Clancy” (that is what I named him). Clancy would roar, bear his teeth and charge. He would catch and eat all the other kids who didn’t like me. Pretty soon the only kids around were the ones who wanted my autograph and thought I was cool. Even the teachers were nice to me with Clancy sitting on the floor by my side during class.

If a teacher dared ask me, “Kent, why didn’t you do your homework?” Clancy would glare at her and wrinkle his lip to show his big teeth. The teacher would quickly change the subject and I would pat Clancy on the head and say, “easy big fella, easy, she’s just doing her job.” Other kids would stare at me but only with envy and admiration. Hey! I said it was a daydream didn’t I? Don’t be thinking that is weird. It just lets you know how clever and imaginative I was as a kid. But now that I’m an adult I wish that darn fantasy would go away.

BULLDOGGING COYOTES

Noel and I were riding our snowmobile up around Miami Reservoir. There was 2-3 feet of new snow. We looked out on the reservoir toward an island that was situated in the middle of the lake. We could see a coyote that was trying to get from the island to the shore. It was very hard going for him because he could only take leaps to navigate the new snow. I jumped off my snowmobile leaped behind Noel and said “let’s bull-dog him.” As we raced across the frozen lake this was our plan. We were both dressed with heavy coats, scarves and mittens. Noel was going to pull up beside the coyote just like his was on a roping horse and I was going to roll off the side, grab the coyote around his neck and hold him until Noel could get stopped and turned around. Then Noel would grab him by his hind legs, I would let go and Noel would swing him around his head and smack the coyotes head on the ice and that would be the end of him. All went exactly as planned. We swept up beside the coyote, I rolled off and wrapped my arm around his neck and took him to the ice. In the meantime Noel was trying to get the snowmobile stopped and turned back to rescue me. However, the coyote, perhaps sensing our intent refused to just remain locked in my grip. He began biting my arm. But my arm was in such a thick coat he couldn’t get his teeth into me. But he kept traveling up my arm further with each bite. I was yelling at Noel to get his back legs quick. However, by the time the coyote’s head had traveled far enough up that he was biting into my scarf, I figured my throat was just a bite away. I finally let go and rolled away from his just before Noel got hold of his back feet. The coyote jumped up and started for the trees on shore. We jumped back on the snow mobile but the coyote barely beat us to the trees before we could tackle him again.

A SPRING BEAR ADVENTURE

In the early spring we would take every opportunity we could to escape school and ride our horses up into the mountain. Five of us decided one spring day to play hooky (not to be confused with hockey). Hooky was when you just flat-out decided to skip going to school and instead find something else more important to accomplish. It had to be important enough to risk the wrath of parents and teachers. This particular day was too good to waste sitting in a classroom. We went to Fanny’s store and bought a chocolate bar for five cents and an Orange Crush in a dark gold bottle. We packed a lunch from home, met at the corner going to Beaver Dam and away we went. We ran our horses fast the first mile just to put some distance between the school and us. We didn’t want anyone catching us and making us return only to abandon our adventure. We rode until we came to the first cold mountain spring and deposited our Orange Crush in the water to get it mountain fresh cold, cold, cold. Then we rode on into the mountains. We came to a small meadow right in the midst of dense forest and, lo and behold, there was a black bear right in the middle of the meadow. We let out a yell and charged the bear. He turned and fled for the trees. Rather than running into the trees and escaping he did what most bears do when they see something on foot closing in on them. He climbed the first tree he saw. We surrounded the tree with our trapped bear trying to think of what to do next. We hadn’t brought any guns with us so we couldn’t shoot him.

“What shall we do now?” Someone asked.

Roger Nelson spoke up with, “John J. West found a bear last year in his cows so he roped it and then Norris got off his horse and got a big stick. Every time the bear made a round on the lasso rope, Norris would whack him with the stick and he finally killed the bear.”

The story sounded feasible, so that became our plan of action. We went and tied the horses to some trees and came back with our lasso ropes to rope the bear. Then we were going to get one of the horses, hook the rope to the horn, jerk the bear out of the tree and then the rest of us were going to beat him to death with sticks and stones (remember “sticks and stone may break my bones”) or whatever else we could use. Now that may sound rather barbaric to some of my readers. For us it was just part of the code of the west: the only good bear is a dead bear.

Well, there were too many branches to be able to rope the bear while standing on the ground. It was decided that one of us would climb an adjacent tree, get a loop over the bears head, drop the rope to the guys on the ground, hook it to the saddle horn and the fun described earlier would begin.

We drew straws using available grass. Whoever got the short end was the designated climber. Jack Thompson got the grass and broke them in different lengths. I drew the second to last piece of grass, and Jack threw his away and said I got the shortest straw. I don’t think so but there was no proof. So I took my dad’s lasso rope and up the tree I went. I got above him and tried casting a loop over his head. He kept swatting the rope away so I was consistently unsuccessful. Finally, he got angry and started down the tree. The guys below began yelling and throwing rocks at him so he turned around and started back up his tree. He was paying attention to the guys below so when I threw my loop when he was coming back up he never noticed until the loop went over his head and behind one front leg.

I had my feet firmly set on two branches with my back against the tree trunk. I pulled hard on the rope to make sure the loop was tight before throwing the rope down. However, to my great fear and consternation, when I pulled the rope tight I unseated the bear and since he was suspended from my rope, he swung over onto my tree. It happened so fast that I hadn’t the good sense to let go of the rope but instead hung on tight enough to support the weight of the bear until he swung onto my tree. Panic! PANIC! The bear was climbing up my tree right toward me as fast as he could. One kid hollered, “Jump Kent! Jump!” That seemed as good an idea as anything I was considering so I let go of the branch that was supporting me and plummeted toward the ground.

I had forgotten that gravity pulls in a straight line and that there was something directly between me and the ground: an angry bear. The resultant collision dislodged him from the tree and we both headed toward mother earth. He hit first and I landed on top of him, fortunately, breaking my fall so that I was unhurt. However, the bear recovered quickly and charged off into the trees as fast as he could run dragging my father’s lasso rope with him. The only redeeming fact to his escaping with my father’s rope was that it was no longer available to whip me with. The guys that were supposed to be gathered at the bottom of the tree to grab the rope were long gone. The minute the bear started up my tree they sensed a wreck and had run to their horses to make a quick get-away. Some friends.

CLIFF JUMPING ON A SNOWMOBILE

One cold and wintery day Noel and I and his dog Pups, went down to a lower field to feed his cattle. We attached a ski-boose to the back of the snow mobile. A ski-boose was a trailer on skis with a windshield and seats for two people. After feeding his cattle we decided to take a trip down on the creek bottom. By that time the snow was coming down thick and visibility was poor. On top of that the light was so flat that you couldn’t see very far in front of you.

Getting down into the creek bottom involved going down a rather steep hill. Unbeknownst to us the wind had drifted a huge bank (cliff) of snow at the top of the hill and created a vertical drop of about 20 feet. I was driving the snow mobile and Noel and Pups were sitting behind in the ski-boose. We were clipping along at a pretty good speed when suddenly we found ourselves sailing through mid air. We were first alerted because apparently the dog could see it coming better than we could and commenced a mournful howl. A few seconds later Noel and I joined him. However the howling abruptly stopped when we hit the slope. The trailer with Noel and the dog flipped forward and smacked me in the back of the head and knocked me off the snow mobile and threw Noel and Pups out into the snow. My nose was bloody and my head hurt. Noel was none the worse for wear but the dog got up, dusted himself off and immediately deserted us and headed for home. When we finally got back home ourselves the dog was so mad at us that he wouldn’t look at us the rest of the day.

THE ATTACK OF THE COMMUNITY PASTURE BEAR

In the summer we herded our cattle, along with others, to a community pasture up in the mountains. I was just looking at that last sentence and wondering if the reader is interpreting it to mean that we and others (people) kept our cattle in a community pasture, or that we kept our cattle and other cattle in a community pasture. I guess you could read it either way. I thought maybe I should go back and clarify that first sentence but I really don’t care how you hear it. It doesn’t have an important bearing on my story so it can be either other people or other cattle. So choose. I’m not going on until you choose.

Ah, now that you have chosen let me tell you what it means. If you chose “others” to mean people, it means that you are good at relationships and will ultimately grow up and mate with a person of the opposite sex. However, if you chose “others” to mean cows, it means that you are not good at relationships. It means that interpersonally you are clumsy and inept. You are more comfortable around animals than in a relationship with others of your same race. You will probably never marry and will ultimately become a dairy farmer. Just a little free psychological analysis for the reader.

Anyway, back to the cattle in the community pasture. We (meaning people) took turns riding our horses up in the pasture to check on fences, the cattle and if there were bears marauding. One Saturday, my father, uncle and I rode around a bend in the trail and there before our eyes was a recently murdered yearling heifer. You may have suspected rustlers, but no, not with her back broken, her throat torn out and her stomach intestines on the ground. You might try to defend your initial suspicion and say, “but it might have been a really hungry rustler”, but if you said that it would be really stupid.

After examining the corpus delicti, and definitely ruling out rustlers and strongly suspecting a grizzly, we continued on up the trail. Since, I was in the lead I was the first to make contact.

“Look,” I shouted “there he is.”
“Shut-up,” my dad said “or he’ll hear us.”
I was hoping he would hear us and sprint on up over the mountain. We - 73 - were all carrying hunting rifles but I wasn’t the best shot in the world and didn’t relish the thought of getting off my horse and abandoning my fastest means of retreat. When it came to bears I was like a French tank; one forward gear and seven reverse. “Get off your horse and tie him up to a tree,” my dad commanded. I reluctantly obeyed.

Just as I was pulling my rifle out of the scabbard I heard the crack of my dad’s rifle. The bear had been working his way up through some new timber growth that was just beginning to grow back after an avalanche had flattened it a few years previous. I whirled to see if my dad had hit the bear and killed him. Instead, he was only wounded (that is the bear) and was descending the mountainside in full charge.

I don’t suppose there are many folks reading this that know what a grizzly bear looks like in full charge. I do, of course, because I had seen it many times in my dream. It was also instantly clear to me that this was not my seeing-eye bear. I was almost paralyzed with fear. “Start shooting, for hell’s sake!” Yelled my dad, jarring me from my paralysis. By that time, my Uncle had unlimbered his rifle blasting away with his .270. I levered a shell into my old Winchester 95, aimed at the charging bear, closed my eyes, jerked the trigger and hit it dead center… that is the mountain. I never came close to hitting the bear.

I decided that maybe I needed to shoot faster and establish a flak pattern and maybe the bear would accidentally run into it. In the meantime, my father and Uncle were succeeding in hitting the bear repeatedly but he refused to stop charging. By this time I had emptied the five shells in my rifle and had made a decision to mount my trusty steed and depart. But my untrusting steed by this time had spotted the bear. He was busy making decisions of his own, none of which included me, and wasn’t about to wait to see what I had decided. Finally, I got my horse slowed down enough, caught a stirrup and straddled the beast. “Whoa, you stupid critter.” I said. “Whoa!” He was having none of it and said that if I didn’t let him get out of there he was going to buck me off and leave me for bear bait. You might ask yourself how I knew that is what he said. What a silly question! When a boy and his horse are as close as we were, we could read each other’s thoughts. Scoff if you wish, but I knew exactly what that horse was thinking.

While my horse and I were having our telepathic conversation, my Uncle had untied his horse and my father’s as well in preparation for flight. My father was shoving more shells into his rifle and had no intention of abandoning the fight. My Uncle who was considered quite religious said with uncharacteristic excitement. “Melvin, mount-up, let’s get the hell out of here.” Instead, my father raised his now fully loaded rifle and began once again to hurl artillery in the direction of the bear that by now was almost upon us.

Three shots later the bear plowed into the forest floor and called it quits. I wasn’t getting off my horse yet. He had not only seen the bear but by now it was close enough he could smell it. Boy, there is nothing like a good whiff of bear smell to clear the snot out of a horse’s nose. He snorted and slobbered. Two breaths and then snort, two breaths and then snort. There were more intake breaths than snorts so in order to equalize the inside air pressure he also began to fart. He didn’t like the smell of that bear.

I was hunting elk one fall and the snow was deep. There were four of us on horseback. We came upon Tom Walburger who had just shot a moose. He was gutting in when we rode up. Old Blackbird (the horse I was riding) seemed unconcerned and I put my leg around the horn of the saddle and we were all visiting with Tom about his dead moose. Apparently the sight of the dead moose in the deep snow did not register in Blackbird’s brain (if he had one), but the wind must have shifted and blew the smell of the dead moose and the blood and guts up into his nostrils.

A wreck immediately developed. He snorted, farted, whirled and bolted. I barely got my leg down in time to catch a stirrup and by that time we were speeding through a grove of trees. Two jumps into the trees and a branch caught me across the middle and swept me from the saddle and into the snow. The wind was knocked out of me and I gasped and gasped and thought I was dying. My friends raced after Blackbird and returned him to me and by that time I had got some breathing going and calmed down enough that I didn’t follow through on my wish to shoot him and leave him for the timber wolves.

Anyway, I now return to the bear story. This was just a story within a story. Cool huh? A story within a story. Finally, after father had gone over and poked the grizzly with his gun and determined that he wasn’t just playing possum, but was indeed dead, I got off my horse, led him away from the bear and tied him to a tree. We then proceeded with the task of skinning the hide off the bear. About an hour later, with the skin off, we examined the carcass. There were 9 bullet holes in his chest and not a piece of his heart left bigger than a silver dollar. There were five bullets in the limbs that were mine, but not in the limbs of the bear. They were in the limbs of some trees off to the side. Okay, so I missed every shot. How can you expect a 12 year old kid to hunker down, aim carefully and squeeze off a - 75 - steady shot when a grizzly bear the size of a locomotive is bearing down on him with intent to swat his head off or bite into the triceps of his arm and shake the bejeebers right out of him?

Now that the bear was dead and skinned you would think the excitement would be over. Not quite. We rolled the bear skin up and tied it with a rope like a sleeping bag. We went down to the creek and washed all the blood and gore off us and then tried to decide whose horse we were going to tie the bear skin onto. It was obvious that my horse was not the first choice. He was just a three-year-old and not very well broken. We decided that Uncle Oakley’s horse was the oldest and the calmest. We first of all made sure that his head (that is, the horse’s head) was facing into the wind. He turned around to look at us but of course was not able to distinguish a rolled up bear skin from a rolled up tent or sleeping bag. We slung the hide across his back side and tied it to the back of the saddle. Then we all mounted up and started down the trail for home. Oakley was riding in the rear because the wind was in our faces and we didn’t want any of the horses to smell the bear skin.

All went well for about a mile. Then some devil from hell with a weird sense of humor decided to change the direction of the west wind to east. Suddenly, without any warning the wind blew the smell of the bear skin from behind us right into the noses of all three horses. Well, talk about a rodeo! There was more bucking and farting going on than ever you will see at the Calgary Stampede. We couldn’t calm them down so we just let them run. You have never seen old ranch horses run so fast. They were convinced that the bear smell meant that old Grizz was hot on their trail. Speed and more speed were called for. Uncle Oakley’s horse passed me, then dad, next my horse passed dad and Oakley and then dad’s horse passed us all. The lead kept changing hands back and forth, back and forth, for about a mile. Sweat was streaming off their flanks. Their breathing became slower and labored. Speed diminished. Finally, we broke out of the trees and one horse looked behind and couldn’t see a bear. He telepathically communicated to the rest of the horses and said, “Hey, you bunch of stupid beasts of burden, there is no bear chasing us.” So they slowed down and we finally gained control of our transportation and rode on home. We nailed the bear’s hide to a wall of the barn. It extended the full eight feet of the wall and stretch about another four feet across the ceiling. Big Bear!

BELLY RIVER BEARS

There was a river close to home named Belly River. It had its headwaters in Montana from a series of lakes: Elizabeth, Crosley, Glen’s and Mokawantis. It flowed out of Montana’s Glacier Park and into Alberta. I have no idea where it got the name of Belly River. The headwaters were a favorite place for us to ride on our horse to camp and fish. However, it was at least a four day trip. Where it flowed past our ranch it was great for fishing and hunting. One time when I was sixteen years old I caught my horse, Black Bird, and rode over to the Belly River to fish. As always I carried my .22 rifle for shooting prairie chicken and grouse. Actually, to be right honest I carried my .22 rifle for shooting anything that moved. I know that sounds so offensive viewed through today’s glasses and when you consider them as all God’s little creatures. But hey, you couldn’t get any better at shooting if you didn’t practice. When it came time for a critical shot on a game animal, the time for practicing had better be over. The Lord made a limited number of elk and deer but he created an almost unlimited supply of gophers and rabbits. So it’s easy to figure that one out. The gophers and rabbits were for target practice and the big game animals were for shooting after you had practiced and knew how to hit where you were aiming at. (Whoa! There I have ended a sentence with a preposition.) Let’s try it again... The gophers and rabbits were for practicing and the big game animals were reserved for those who could hit where they were aiming. That’s better, I hate to end sentences in prepositions.

Anyway, I rode to the river, tied my horse to a tree, crossed the river on a small bridge and began fishing downstream. I had fished about 400 yards downstream when I saw movement up the river on the same side that I was fishing. It appeared to be sniffing along the river where I had just come. Alarm! Alarm! Bear coming my way, sniffing my trail, probably hungry, probably hasn’t eaten for days, more likely ravenous, maybe sick and desperate for food, looks like a grizzly, not afraid of my scent, probably has eaten other people and find them to be a delicacy, probably in a bad temper, mean, aggressive, looking for dessert!

All of this went through my head in less than a nanosecond. Endocrine glands pumped (secreted sounds way too slow) massive amounts of adrenaline into my “fight or flight” system. Fear and anxiety reached massive proportions. I quickly considered the fight option but just as quickly discounted it since I am not really good at hand-to-hand combat with bears. All the red lights were flashing and the siren in my head was recommending immediate flight. My fishing lure was still - 77 - out in the river. I wound the reel handle so fast retrieving my lure that the bearings on the reel were smoking and hot to the touch.

Now just for a moment in the middle of this story let me take a break to illustrate for the reader the difference between a city kid and a ranch kid. Since you the reader might be from the city, you are probably saying to yourself, “Geez, this story sounds fishy. If he were that scared wouldn’t he have dropped his pole and not taken the time to reel in his lure and then take his fishing pole with him as he fled from almost certain death?” Listen and learn! My tackle box consisted of five lures, one Len Thompson spinner, two Mepps, two Panther Martins and one Rooster Tail. Each one of them had been purchased with my own money. I had, on occasion, gotten a snag where my hook caught on a submerged log or a rock. Rather than lose the hook I would strip off naked and wade or swim into ice cold water and dive under the water to free the spinner. You never lost a hook. So even in the face of possible injury and death I paused to reel in my hook and then fled with my fishing pole, spinners and a .22 rifle. There, now do you understand why I had to reel in the lure before leaving?

Bear eyesight is supposedly notoriously poor, but the second I moved he spotted me. A little digital monitor in his brain began flashing: food, mmmn, good food, easy food, slow-footed food, get him, catch him, and eat him. As soon as I could see that he had me spotted, I abandoned any attempt at stealth or quiet. I broke into a gait that might be described as “running pell-mell”. If you don’t know how fast that is, imagine driving down the road at 40 mph enjoying the scenery. You are visiting with your wife about this and that, and then suddenly you catch a glimpse of movement out of your left window. You turn to look and there is a half-grown kid with a fishing box, a fishing pole and a .22 rifle passing you. That is roughly the speed of pell-mell.

That reminds me of the story of a guy who was driving down the road and saw a chicken running behind him. He looked at his speedometer in amazement. He was going forty miles an hour and the chicken was matching his speed. He sped up to sixty miles an hour and the chicken passed him and continued to accelerate up the highway. The man noticed that the chicken had three legs. The guy sped up and the chicken turned off and went into a farmer’s yard. The guy followed him in and to his amazement saw that there was a whole yard of three legged chickens. He got out of his car and walked over to the farmer that was sitting on the porch whittling. He asked the farmer, “How come your chickens have three legs?”

“Well,” he said, “I was always partial to drumsticks and so I got in touch with a scientist at the University and we genetically altered a couple of chickens and got them to grow three legs. All these chickens that you see have come from those two parents.”

“Really?” Said the guy, “that is amazing. Three drumsticks you say? How do they taste?”

“I don’t know,” said the farmer, “they run so damn fast I haven’t been able to catch one and see.”

Back to my story… The bear, sensing that his anticipated meal was just a little faster on wheels that he first imagined, increased his speed as well. Because he wasn’t packing a fishing pole in one paw, a box of lures around his neck and a .22 rifle in the other paw, he began to gain on me. (Did you hear about the three legged dog that walked into a bar and said, “Listen up everybody, I’m looking for the guy who shot my paw”? Sorry for that little interruption.) Otherwise, if all things had been equal, my adrenaline infusion may have resulted in my leaving the bear in the dust. Who knows? But at this juncture in the story it is a moot point. I was encumbered by my worldly possessions, unwilling to part with them and prepared to have in my possession those items when the end came so I could be sure to take them with me.

It was great surprise years later when I learned from my Sunday school teacher that I couldn’t have taken them with me anyway. “Whoa,” I said to her, “then I’m not going, if I can’t hunt and fish in the next world.” It was a pretty defining moment for me. However, she reassured me that they had lots of fishing lure and poles in the hereafter and that I didn’t need to take any of that with me. I had heard of choirs of angels and other wonderful things about the next life, but I never imagined there would be free fishing poles and all the lures that you wanted. I immediately asked her what I had to do to earn that great blessing. She suggested that I needed to change my ways. I knew there was a catch.

My steel-trap mind quickly measured the distance between me and the bear, doing a running calculation of his speed versus my speed. It was instantly clear that it was only a matter of time, actually a very short time, before a fatal confrontation was to occur. I hated confrontation of any kind but especially fatal ones. Even a confrontation with my elementary school teacher, Aunt Ireta, was preferable to a confrontation with a bear. In desperation I looked down the river and, wonder of wonders, I saw a gravel bar in the river where the water was shallow enough for me to wade across.

You have probably seen movies where the cowboys are chasing the Indians and they ride their horses into the river at full speed and the water sprays into the air and almost obscures the horse and rider. And so it was with me. I ran into the water at full speed (that was pell-mell remember). Everything went into slow motion. If you had been watching you would have seen me skimming across with more spray coming out either side than a water skier in a shoulder-dipping turn. My speed was such that when I stepped down into the water my feet didn’t even go all the way to the gravel before coming out and reaching for the next step. The bear momentarily hesitated. He had never seen anything in high speed, slowmotion before.

By the time he had overcome his amazement, I was standing on dry land on the other side. It wasn’t quite as spectacular as when Moses parted the Red Sea, and there weren’t quite as many witnesses, but years later it was talked about in hushed and reverential tones as, “Do you remember the time Kent parted the Belly River?”

You have probably already jumped to a silly notion. You might well be saying to yourself or even out loud to others, “The dolt. He had a gun. Why didn’t he just shoot the bear?” Well if you were thinking that to yourself or even more embarrassingly if you have wondered out loud to others, then you have just exposed your ignorance. If you are Republican or a member of the National Rifle Association, you would know exactly why I had not attempted to shoot the bear with my gun. For you others I will give you some clues: It wasn’t because bear season was two months away. It wasn’t because I was afraid of the game warden. It wasn’t because I have a fondness for bears. It wasn’t because a bear is one of God’s creatures and has as much right to life as I. It wasn’t because of my respect for the beauty and majesty of the creature. It wasn’t because I was a poor shot. (Remember, I had been practicing on all those gophers and rabbits). In the language of the west, I was a dead shot with a .22 rifle.

You are probably still asking yourself, “If those weren’t the reasons, then why didn’t he shoot the bear? It would have been self-defense.” Well I’m going to tell you why I hadn’t shot at the bear up to that point in the story. This will be a little lesson in ballistic physics for you. I might also tell you that every kid in my community understood these physics before they were in the third grade. Here you are learning it at your age.

The number .22 has significance. A .22 rifle means that the diameter of the bullet is 220/1000th of an inch in diameter. That is less than half the width of your little fingernail. Now that might not have been such a problem if I had a big shell casing behind it with about 40 grains of 4895 black power to project it. Then the velocity would be about 3800 feet per second and even with a very small size of bullet the foot/ lb. of torque would be such to cause massive muscle and bone trauma and probably be enough to cause death to the bear. It is rather like the difference between a mini-car hitting a wall at 10 miles an hour and the car hitting the wall at 130 mph. The killing power of a cartridge is a function of bullet mass and muzzle velocity. My problem was I had a very small sized bullet mass, probably about 21 grains of powder and a very small shell casing so that there wasn’t much powder exploding and projecting the bullet. Muzzle velocity was only about 800 feet per second, the bullet mass was small.

800 feet per second, the bullet mass was small. Of course, the advantage to that was when you shot grouse or prairie chickens, death resulted but with very little carcass damage. That was pretty darned important if you were planning on eating said birds. Otherwise there would be very little edible meat left for the frying pan.

“Hi Mom, I’m home and I shot a couple of grouse for dinner.”
“Great, where are they?”
“Well all that’s left are the head and feet.”
“Where is the meat, son?”
“Well, when I shot them, they blew-up and this is all I could find.”
“That’s just great, son, what are we going to eat now? Your little brother and older sisters have been crying all afternoon waiting for you to bring home some meat to eat. They are so hungry. What am I going to tell them? Shame on you! It’s your fault that we are going to starve to death. I hope you can live with that on your conscience.”

So in order to avoid that very uncomfortable situation, I would carry a small caliber gun with very limited foot/ lb. of killing energy but very easy on the meat. That was all well and good and took care of grouse and prairie chickens, but was woefully wanting (Whoa! That was spontaneous alliteration. Woefully wanting. Very nice).

When it came to using the gun in the situation at hand, in all likelihood, if I had shot at the bear I would have caused a minor flesh wound that would have made him not just hungry but also angry. Then when he caught me he would not have mercifully dispatched me immediately and then eaten me, which would have been the best alternative. Instead, he would maul me without finishing me off. He would bite my extremities without giving me a fatal bite. He might decide to play with his food for a while and just swat me around. He might let me get up and attempt an escape, but just before I reached safety he would leap to his feet, knock me ass-end over tea kettle and swat me around the head with just enough force to not quite render me unconscious.

I had seen our barn cats do that repeatedly with mice they had captured. That way the bear could prolong my pain. He might even let me reach a tree and attempt to climb to safety, but then saunter over, shake the tree until I lost my grip and crashed to the ground. Finally, he might run over, open his cavernous mouth and blow his fetid breath upon me.

Now, you might scoff and say, “How come he knows that would happen? That is just the fantasies of a highly imaginative child.” Well, once again that would expose your lack of knowledge if that is what you thought. Every one of the kids in my town had observed on many occasions the behavior of a barn cat after it had caught a mouse. We knew predatory animals had a cruel and vicious streak and often would prolong the death of their prey just for the fun of it. That important bit of knowledge had prevented me from making an already untenable situation worse. By not shooting him with such a small bullet and angering him, I at least had the hope of a quick death at the hands of just a hungry bear. If he were both hungry and angry then I was in for a lot of pain before I became dinner.

But it was also true that the situation was pretty desperate regardless of how I looked at it. I was on one side of the river, the bear was on the other side and it was decision time. I chambered a shell in my .22, decided that if the bear were determined enough to cross the river after me I would take one shot at him and then run as fast as I could and try to get back to my horse before he caught me. It was the desperate plan of a desperate kid. Later I thought of myself as the “desperado kid”, but kept that pretty much to myself. Just my luck, the bear was not hydrophobic when it came to water. He stepped both front paws and legs (they go together) into the river. I held my breath, aimed directly at his head and pulled the trigger. To my utter amazement the bear dropped face first into the river and never moved.

There was no time for lengthy amazement because I was rapidly pursuing phase two of my plan which was to gum-boot it back upstream to my horse as fast as my legs would take me. I arrived at my horse at the same time as my legs, thrust my gun into the scabbard, untied his reins, sprang into the saddle and spurred for home. Actually, “spurred for home” is an idiom. It doesn’t mean I actually spurred him, for if I had I would be on my butt in the pasture and afoot faster than you could say Jack Robinson. It just means that by the time I reached home he was lathered with sweat and breathing like an overloaded locomotive.

“Dad. Dad,” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

He came around the corner of the barn and said, “All right, what have you done now?”

I couldn’t imagine why he would have said that. It might have something to do with historical events, it might have something to do with precedence or maybe even some recent events. Even though I was a bit offended by his question, I blurted out, “I was just chased by a huge grizzly bear and he almost caught me and ate me and I barely escaped with my life, and I shot him with my .22 and I think I killed him.”

“Yea right,” he said. “If you don’t quit making up these stories, pretty soon you are not going to be able to tell the difference between fact and fantasy. I know just what you need to get you back into reality. Go get me the bull-whip and I’ll teach you how to tell the truth.”

Now, in my father’s defense he may have had some slight grounds for disbelieving my story. I think there was a time or two when I had stretched the truth. Maybe like the time when I told him I had seen Santa Clause in his sleigh with all the reindeer in the field between Uncle Oakley’s house and ours. He told me I was lying because there wasn’t any Santa Claus. I took him up in the field to show him the marks in the snow made by the reindeer hoofs and sleigh and someone had rubbed them out and covered them with brand new snow without a mark in it. He argued that it hadn’t snowed in a week so how could the tracks be covered with new snow? I stuck to my story but I don’t think he believed me.

Oh! And then there was the time when I told him that the reason I wasn’t able to get a certain cow back into the field was because a pack of timber wolves took after her while I was trying to drive her back and ran her off so far into the trees that I couldn’t find her and that is why I didn’t have her back in the field as he had told me to do and that the only reason I stopped to fish is because she was hopelessly lost. How was I to know that there hadn’t been a wolf sighting in our community in 50 years? They could have slipped up from Yellowstone.

Perhaps it was the time that I accidentally left the shed door open and a cow sauntered in and crapped all over his new saddle. I cleaned it off as fast as I could but it left a dark stain on the new leather. When he asked me what happened I said that a very large eagle had been flying overhead and pooped on his saddle and luckily I had seen it and cleaned it off or it could have been a lot worse. He muttered something about the eagle would have to weigh 800 pounds and eat grass. How would he know? There could have been that big an eagle that nobody had seen before.

And then there was the time that I left a gate open and the cows got in the alfalfa and darn near bloated to death. The reason I gave was that while Dad was gone a hurricane “just came up out of nowhere” and tore the gate open. And now that I think about it there may have been another time or two when he doubted the truthfulness of my stories.

“No, Dad. Really! Come with me. I’ll show you.”

“Like the reindeer tracks that you showed me right?”

“No really, this happened, I can show you.”

“Alright, but if I get up there and this is another one of your stories I’m going to tan your britches.”

The threat to “tan my britches” didn’t have anything to do with my britches. We got in the truck and drove up to Belly River and on the way I started getting really nervous. What if I had only wounded the bear and since I’d left it had gotten up and wandered off? If that were the case then I was hoping it would hide in the bushes and attack my dad while he was standing there so he would know I wasn’t just telling a story. I realized that if the bear had gotten up and left there wasn’t one bit of evidence that would lend credibility to my story. So I said to my dad, “Maybe I just wounded the bear and by the time we get there he might be gone.” I figured I better start covering my bases just in case. However, he took it to mean that I was rethinking my story and realizing I was about to be exposed and that it was an early manipulation to change the story. My dad had a suspicious mind.

He stopped the truck and looked at me with a very stern look of reprimand and said, “Kent, if this is another one of your stories I don’t want to drive down to the river and find out that it was a lie.” So there I was on the horns of dilemma. I knew I hadn’t fantasized what had happened, but I knew if we got there and the bear was gone my britches were going to be tanned. Man, talk about having your chickens come home to roost. The story of the little boy who cried wolf came to mind with instant relevance.

Then something became very clear. I was screwed either way. If we turned around and went back now he would think it was a lie and if we went all the way up there and the bear was gone my britches were going to get tanned. My only hope was that the bear was still there, so I stuck to my story and told him to keep going. As we drew nearer my eyes searched frantically, hopefully, desperately for a sign of the bear. I just knew that my britches were going to get tanned when I was really, really for sure telling the truth. Imagine my enormous relief and excitement when I spotted him.

“There, there it is. I told you I wasn’t lying.” My dad drove close to the bear. It hadn’t seemed to move since I had bid my hasty retreat. He got his rifle and went over and poked the bear. It didn’t move. He dragged him out of the river by his hind legs and looked at me kind of funny. I interpreted that look to mean, “Wow, son. This is incredible. You have shot a grizzly bear. What a guy! You are the finest, bravest son a father could have. I am so glad you survived and I am so proud of you. Wait until I go home and brag about you to the family and then I’ll brag about you to all the people at church and in the community and when you walk down the street there will be whispered comments, ‘there goes Kent, the brave grizzly killer.’ You’ll be known far and wide. You will be famous.”

I think, however, that what the look really meant was, “Well, for once you told the truth you little bugger.”

We loaded the bear in the back of the truck and took him home. We skinned him and there wasn’t a bullet hole anywhere in his hide. He looked at me and asked, “Are you sure you didn’t just find him dead and make up this story about shooting him?” Oh, that hurt. It hurt a lot. He still wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth. “Where were you aiming when you shot at him?” He said.

“I aimed right at his ear,” I replied. So my father skinned the bear’s ear and sure enough, the bullet had gone in the bear’s ear and into his brain and killed him instantly. There were a lot of gophers and squirrels that had sacrificed their lives for that shot. I was vindicated. My father believed me. I was king of the castle. A slayer of bears. A paragon of truth-telling. Just plain lucky.

YELLOWSTONE BLACK BEAR

When I was very young our family decided to go on a trip from Alberta to Utah. My mother’s family lived there and infrequently we journeyed down to visit. This was my first trip that I can remember and it was decided that we would travel through Yellowstone Park on our way down. We were driving a nineteen middle forties Chevy coup. That means it was a two-door with a small back seat. Whenever we traveled, Mother would always fix a traveling lunch that consisted of wonderful homemade rolls and fried chicken. Even today the smell of [fried chicken causes my appetite to cry for satisfaction. I love fried chicken.

We arrived at Old Faithful and because it was a hot day, father left one of the front windows down to cool the interior of the car. After we had watched the impressive geyser spray water intp the air we started back to our car. There was quite a crowd of people gathered around the car talking excitedly and pointing at the car. When we got closer we saw that a black bear had crawled in the open window and was eating our fried chicken. I don’t think we would have been any more alarmed than if the bear had been eating one of the family members. There was a new lodge being built right beside the parking lot and Dad ran over and grabbed a five foot long two-by-four. He jerked open the car door and began to prod the bear viciously with the stick. The bear snarled and struck back at my dad but he continued to poke him repeatedly. Hey! Remember it was fried chicken.

Finally, the bear couldn’t stand it any longer. He couldn’t continue eating our chicken because of the prodding stick. By this time the crowd had grown very quiet. One person had gone to get the park ranger because this man was hurting one of the protected bears. The bear bolted out of the door that my dad had opened. Just as he came out my dad smote him across the back with all his strength. It was so hard that it flattened the bear and paralyzed his rear end. He continued to try and escape by pulling himself along with his front legs. However, my dad was pissed (about the chicken) and continued to belabor the bear about his head and neck with the two-by-four. The crowd finally came to life and began to shout discouraging words at my dad. He completely ignored them and took another massive swing at the bear, breaking the two-by-four. In the few moments that it took for my dad to turn back to get another club, the bear somehow got his legs under him and hobbled off into the trees. Dad said, “Get in the car children we are leaving.” Without another word we piled in the car and drove away. I was so proud of my dad. Dad had tackled a bear with a two-by-four and come out on top.

PARK ELK

I lived close to Waterton Lakes National Park. It contained one of the largest resident elk herds in North America. Of course, we were not allowed to hunt inside the park boundaries and the elk knew it. They were the smartest elk I have ever known. Not that I have really personally come to know that many elk but these elk were world famous for being smart. All the adults in the herd could read. The amazing thing is that they could read in both French and English. As you may know, all public signs in Canada are required to be printed in both English and French. We are known as a bi-lingual country. Eh! Having two official languages was the work of some early political rocket scientist that thought it was a good idea. Good idea? It was the dumbest idea ever. It split the country apart. It allowed separatist movements to develop. It caused the country to have multiple national entities. If Canada were a patient she would have to be institutionalized and treated for multiple personalities. Sick and crazy she is. But what does that have to do with this story? Almost nothing, except it verifies that the elk in Waterton could read both French and English. You’ve heard of Tule elk, Roosevelt Elk and Rocky Mountain Elk but I’ll wager this is the first time that you have heard of Bi-lingual Elk.

There were signs all along the National Park boundary. The elk would wander about the Park, eating, drinking, swimming, cavorting, mountain climbing, fighting and other things that elk do. When the baby elk were four days old the parental elk would teach them to read. They would take them to the park boundary and this is how the teaching session would go.

“Children, this is the park boundary. Freddy, how do we know this is the Park boundary?”

“I don’t know Dad, I was only born yesterday.”

“Well, listen very carefully and I will tell you. You see that sign right there and another just like it further down in the trees? Does anyone know what the sign says?”

“I know, I know,” said one little smart-Alec female, know-it-all elk. She was waving her front hoof in the air and shaking it back and forth.

“Oh good grief,” said a little boy elk, “Doesn’t she ever shut-up? I ought to go over there and stuff her mouth full of skunk cabbage.”

“What does it say Tammy?” Asked the teacher.

“It says, ‘Arête, Stop, Park Boundary. Boundary de la Park National’”

“That is the correct answer. How did you know it?”

“My parents were bilingual,” she quipped, “They spoke both languages in our forest home.”

A little boy bull elk turned to another little bull and said, “Just wait until I get some horns and the rutting seasons begins, she’ll be speaking French out of both sides her mouth.”

“Why don’t we want to venture out of the park past these signs?” Asked the wise old herd bull. Nobody knew the answer. “Now, listen carefully” said the elk. “Outside of this elk boundary lays danger and possible wounding or death. There is a two legged creature that walks on his hind legs and carries a fire stick.” No elk had ever lived to examine a fire stick and realize that it was a .270 Winchester or a 30.06 Remington. So they called it a fire stick. In French they called it “le ba-boom” stick. “They are known as the Pilling boys and they are wanton killers of elk. If you venture outside of this boundary you will lose the protection of the park rules. You will be on your own and vulnerable to the evils of hunters. They will shoot you with their fire sticks, cut your throat, rip out your intestines, pull out your liver and heart, tear the hide off your body, cut it into parts and then devour it.”

By this time the old patriarch of the herd had their attention. They were listening with all their might and her words sank deep into their little elk brains. They resolved and promised never to leave the safety of the park but to always stay within the boundaries of safety.

Now that would be the end of the story and the ruination of all hunting except that little bulls grow into big bulls and big bulls go through puberty and rut. Now rutting isn’t bad and wouldn’t get them into trouble if they were content to rut in the park with park cows. But some bulls, like Olaf Davidson, have a wandering eye and think that the grass is greener on the other side of the park boundary. There are some elk that live outside the park all the time but they have learned how to avoid hunters and to hide during hunting season. On the other hand, or should I say on the other hoof, park elk don’t have that knowledge.

When some of the big bulls get into the rut they don’t always think with their heads. Their horns get big and powerful and they become horny. So they start rationalizing that it would be okay to cross the park boundary in search of cow elk that don’t belong to the park herd. Even though their parents and herd leaders have taught them and warned them about thinking with their heads instead of their horns they still give in to the temptation to leave the sanctuary of the national park and go lusting after cows outside the park boundaries.

This seems an appropriate place to interject another related small story. When my son Brek was old enough to hunt he partnered with his friend Adam Schow from Calgary and I took them deer hunting. Brek managed to shoot a white tail buck and we took it back to the cabin to skin and to gut. After we removed the tag for later use I made those two boys cut the head off and then begin to gut the deer. After they had extracted the lungs, heart, liver, stomach and intestines, they came to a lower part of the animal and discovered a long white organ. “What is this?” They asked. I explained to them that was the deer’s penis. Then in a moment of clarity, I realized that here was one of those “teaching moments” that behavioral scientist tell about. Both of the boys had just gone through puberty and were experiencing feelings they hadn’t had before.

I had a meat saw with me and instructed them to cut it off and lay the penis on the table. Then to take the meat saw and cut the horns and the top of the deer’s skull off and extract the animal’s brain. With a fair bit of squeamishness they got the brain out and put it on the cutting table beside the deer’s penis.

“Now,” I said, “I want you to take your hunting knives and slice the brain in two and then cut the penis into three sections. They did so.

“Now boys, I am going to teach you a lesson of profound implications,” I said. “Pick up the brain sections and examine the tissue carefully. Pull the hemispheres apart and see what the inside of the brain looks like. Feel it with your hands.” They obediently followed my instructions. Next I asked them, “What is a brain used for?”

“Well, it’s for thinking, making decisions and evaluating” they replied. Next I told them to pick up a piece of the penis. I asked them to feel it then I asked them to cut it longitudinally and look closely at the tissue. Then I asked the $64,000 question.

“Do you see any brain tissue in the penis?” I instructed them to look closely again and compare it to the brain tissue. “Does it look the same?”

“No” they both replied.

“Then,” said I, “what conclusion would you draw?”

It only took a moment and they said, “Since there is no brain tissue in the penis you don’t let your penis do any thinking for you. That is what your brain is for.” Hooray! Hooray! They got it. Adam Schow’s father called me a week later to thank me for that great lesson I had taught his son. I don’t believe either of those boys forgot the lesson. Some of you might be bothered by this story but hey, a dad has to use the tools at hand for teaching moments!

Anyway, that story must have come to mind when I began to tell of rutting elk. I’m ready now to continue the story that began earlier. One frosty September morning I had skipped school.

“Dear Mr. Shields, please excuse Kent from school. His help is needed at home. Signed, Melvin Pilling”. Never mind that it was in my handwriting.

I was riding Black Bird; the stupidest horse ever broke to ride. Everything about him was bad and objectionable except… except, he could run like an antelope if he were frightened or racing. I was riding a short distance outside of the park looking for the tracks of a big bull elk with the wander-lust. There were about four inches of snow so any tracks would be very apparent. I had my 30- 30 rifle across my lap and was intent on looking at the ground for tracks. There was so much country that you almost had to locate a track and then follow it in attempt to catch-up with the animal. Otherwise, the likelihood of just accidentally finding an elk was slim to none. It wasn’t long before I crossed one such track. I could tell from the track that it was a very large bull. However, the beast was headed back to the park instead of away from it. He had probably had his night of wild abandonment with some innocent herd of cows and was now hot-footing it back for the safety of the park before he got caught.

I reined in old Black Bird and started to follow the track, hoping to catch the bull before he got back to safety. The track crossed a meadow and reentered the trees. I was hot on his trail, watching the track when suddenly Black Bird stopped and got very tense. I kicked him with my heels thinking he was just being stubborn, but he refused to budge. Finally, I looked up and saw that his eyes were wide, his ears were radaring straight ahead and his head was very high and he was building up to a snort and fart. I followed his gaze and wow!!! About 40 yards in front of us was Ursulus Horribilus. For those of you that might have been skimming earlier in the book instead of reading for meaning, that means a GRIZZLY BEAR OF GIGANTIC PROPORTIONS. I hope that the capitalization helps convey to you that things had gotten really frightening in a hurry. It was big time trouble. “Houston, we have a problem.”

The grizzly had been coming through the trees from the north and had just hit the elk track that I was intent upon following. I don’t know what was going through his head at the time but mine was very busy with, “oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.” Apparently, the bear was thinking something like, “Oh my gosh, there is my lunch, I like meat, oh goody, CHARGE.” I heard once that the way to stop a bear from charging is by taking away his credit card. It’s funny that never even crossed my mind at the time. I was close enough that I could see the hair on the nape of his neck and clear back between his shoulder blades stand straight-up. I knew that didn’t mean he was looking for a haircut. My hair on my head did exactly the same and had I had hair all the way down my back it would have been standing tall as well.

The second the bear began his charge, Black Bird made a quick decision. “I’m going to do a very fast 180 degree turn and run for my life and I could care less about what’s on my back.”

I wasn’t reading his mind but the second I felt his body tense I knew the rodeo had begun. Later, I said that I dropped my gun because I needed both hands to control the horse. However, that is not quite true. When Black Bird began his whirling turn, I felt myself leaving the saddle. I lost one stirrup and both reins. In utter desperation and wild panic I grabbed the horn with both hands to prevent the horse from leaving me sitting on my butt in the trail. Of course it was at this point that the rifle went flying off into the snow.

Somehow I managed to pull myself back into the saddle. By this time Black Bird and completed his 180 turn and was running for his life back down the trail. I had no reins or way to control him. I just hung on for dear life. Just as we left the trees and entered the meadow, I felt my trusty steed (stupid horse) stumble with his back legs. I thought, “Oh no, we’re going down and I’m a dead man.”

Somehow Blackbird kept his back legs under him and then we were away and he was running like a Triple Crown Champion. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the bear had stopped and was staring at us from the edge of the clearing. I reached down along Black Bird’s neck and retrieved one of the reins. “Whoa, horse, Whoa,” but Black Bird was having nothing to do with stopping. He hadn’t noticed that the bear was no longer in hot pursuit.

Finally I got the other rein, got my errant stirrup and began sawing on the reins with both hands. Gradually, the horse slowed. Then he began dancing and turning in circles. I couldn’t understand what he was doing and what the matter was with him. I called him a few names to try and calm him down, but just then happened to look down into the snow. There were splotches of blood in the snow where he had been turning circles. I whipped my head around and right from where the saddle blanket ended to the beginning of his tail were slashes in his hide and blood was pouring out on his rump and onto the ground.

Apparently, the stumble that I felt just as we entered the clearing was the bear coming up over the rear end of the horse and almost pulling him down. It was a good thing that I didn’t turn around to look at the very moment. One can only imagine what I would have done. Most likely I would have cleared the horse’s head with room to spare, but then the horse would have run over me and the bear would have had me for sure.

When the horse settled down, I got off and threw some cold snow on his rump and he finally quit bleeding. I had seen the bear turn and follow the elk trail on up toward the Park, so I retrieved my rifle from the snow and went home. I don’t know if the bear ever caught the elk or not. When the hair grew back in Blackbird’s rump it was white in color. He looked like an Indian horse that was painted for war.

Speaking of Indians, I had an Indian patient once who wanted to take me hunting on some Indian land. Natives could hunt anytime they wanted; anywhere they wanted, kind of like me. The only difference was that he could do it without always having to watch for the game warden. For him it was called aboriginal rights but for me it was called poaching; same thing, different name. But if you went with the Indian as a guide it was called, “aboriginal right to screw the white man”. However, this particular Indian knew that if he screwed me I could screw him back in therapy and so we came to a kind of agreement. We called it a treaty. That way it could be broken anytime one of us decided we’d had enough.

After the treaty was signed we got in his truck and took off for the mountains. Along the way I began to tell him some of my bear stories. He slammed on his brakes, stopped his truck, turned around and started back to the city.

“Why are you turning around?” I said. “Surely you aren’t going to break the treaty already.”

“Yep,” he said, “I’m not going hunting with you until you get yourself reconciled with the spirits of the bears.”

I thought to myself, “Maybe it was a little early to get him out on a weekend pass.” “What the heck are you talking about?” I said. “I thought we were going hunting. What’s hunting got to do with bear spirits.”

He explained to me that there were bad feelings between bears and me (like that was news), but then he said that I was dangerous to hunt around because of the enmity between the bears and me. About that time there was some enmity developing between the Indian and me. He said that the feelings I had toward bears created an atmosphere that made the bears want to attack me. If he went hunting with me, he said it would put him at risk as well. Little did he understand the risk he was taking for me to be upset with him. Somehow this whole bear thing was becoming my fault. All along I thought it was their aggressiveness toward me that had created my bad feelings and here he was suggesting that their bad feelings toward me were created by my feelings about them.

He went on to explain to me that he knew a way that I could reconcile those feelings between the bears and me. I smelled a deal coming my way where he would reconcile the spirits and I would then have to buy him some expensive spirits (whiskey) of a different kind. However, my prejudices were false.

He explained to me that an offering was required from me to the bears. “You mean if he offers to walk out of the trees, I will offer to shoot his head off?” I asked. He said, “See, there you go again. Just listen to yourself. That is what I am talking about; those bad feelings you have toward the bears.”

“Doesn’t everyone feel that way toward bears? I thought it was just normal.”

“No,” he said, “Bears have a right to live as much as you do and we all have to learn to respect each other and not kill unless it’s for food.”

He said I needed to get a hindquarter of meat from a deer or elk, a pouch of tobacco and take it out into the woods and leave it as an offering to the bear. Next I was to get down on my knees in the forest and beg the Great Spirit to speak to the bear’s spirit and tell him about my offering and ask the bear to forgive me for my mean feelings. That way the bear would no longer want to rip me to pieces and eat me and I would no longer be filled with fear and anger toward him.

Maybe it was just my suspicious nature, but what came to mind was that as soon as the offering had been made and I was out of sight, that Indian would be eating steaks and smoking the tobacco and thinking how dumb and gullible the white man was. I was surprised that he hadn’t also required a gallon of whiskey in the offering.

I actually, seriously considered doing what he suggested, because it was true that I feared and hated bears and it did seem to be true that bears wanted to do damage to me any time they got the chance. I thought that I didn’t have anything to lose and who knows? Indians had a lot of woodsy lore that might work. But alas, before I was able to attempt the reconciliation, my brother and I discovered a den with hibernating bears in it, when we were deer hunting. I’m afraid that what happened next really, really, offended the bears and that it would probably take more than a pouch of tobacco and a hindquarter of meat to appease them. To date, that needed reconciliation has not taken place. I don’t lose any sleep over it and guilt doesn’t torment my nights. I fear than the penance required for a settling of accounts would be far too expensive for me.

I don’t want anyone to think I am sociopath and that I don’t have a functioning conscience. I will admit that from time to time my conscience takes a little rest or a short vacation, but it always comes home; except for one area. I remember my mother saying to Dad as we would go out of the house headed for the irrigation head gates to net rainbow trout out of the spillways, “Melvin, (loud voice) Melvin those boys will never grow up with any respect for the game laws if you don’t learn to obey them yourself.”

Lo and behold, my mother was right. So it’s entirely my dad’s fault. That is one of the wonderful things about psychology. All you have to do in order to feel better is find out whose fault it is and then blame him. That way you don’t have to take responsibility for it yourself. As Flip Wilson said, “The devil made me do it.” That way you can misbehave and act out all your life and all the time be assured that your dad or mom are taking a licking for it up in heaven. Isn’t psychology wonderful?

Oops, I just thought of something. If you are doing that, you are setting a bad example for your kids and they are going to end up blaming it on you and then you are going to have to take the licking for what they do. Wait, WAIT! A doggone minute. That’s not going to work is it? Maybe psychology didn’t think it through far enough. It’s a good short term solution, but in the long run it sucks. Maybe we need to look for the correct answer somewhere else. NO! I don’t think Dr. Seuss has the answers either. As I have grown older I am more respectful of game laws but probably because I am not in a good position to violate them as much. I guess getting older has its merits. Old men like to give advice to console them for no longer being in a position to set a bad example.

HORSES

Horses were an important part of my growing-up. We would never walk if we could ride. We’d chase a horse for two miles trying to catch him so we could ride a quarter of a mile to drive the cows in for milking. We had riding horses and workhorses and then we had a third category: a working-riding horse that worked both sides. Workhorses were huge enormous creatures. We used them for everything we later used tractors for on the ranch. We used them for cutting hay, for raking hay, for sweeping hay, for feeding hay, for hauling wood, for fixing fence, for pulling wagons, for cultivating, for plowing and other things I can’t think of right now. Before you could use them for anything you first off had to catch them and put their harnesses on. That was no small task for a kid way shorter than the horses were tall.

First of all we would put their collars on. They were really important because if you didn’t get the collar pad on correctly, while they were working it would wear a hole in their hair and then in their hide and before the day was over you could have a big bloody sore that would then take days to heal. Then we would get a hole worn through our britches by Dad. So getting the collar just right was important.

Next you had to throw the harness up on the back of the horse. That involved standing on a tall something or other, anything tall would do as long as it was sure to tip over just as you were putting the harness on the horse and cause you to fall down under his hoofs. There seemed to be an abundance of those kinds of standing devices. You had to get the harness somehow draped over you and then throw it on the back of the horse and hope that it didn’t shy away or move. This was a tricky maneuver that more times than not ended up in a circus or a wreck.

Next, you had to put one horse on each side of the tongue of the wagon. You’d lift the tongue up to chest level and hook it on the bottom of the horse’s collars. Then came the really scary part. You had to walk around behind the horses’ hind legs and hook the tugs up to the double trees. I bet you don’t know what those things are. Not important. It just meant that you had to get within kicking range of those back hoofs. A horse could kick you clear into the next county. That is a long way. We had one kid that got kicked when he was hitching up a team of horses and that’s when we found him in the middle of next week. He missed a whole weekend. My mother often threatened to do the same to me. “Kent, (loud voice) if I ever catch you doing that again I’ll knock you into the middle of next week.” I didn’t really know where the middle of next week was but I did know that it was going to be painful getting there. When that kid got kicked by a horse into the middle of next week we realized that was a bad place to be kicked.

When I was ten years old my father gave me a palomino colt for my very own. I’m not sure how that made him different than the rest of the horses. He lived with them, ate with them, slept with them and cavorted with them. But still, he was my very own horse. He was my first piece of actual real estate that belonged to me. That meant I could forbid anyone else to ride him. That was cool.

“Kent, can I ride your horse?”

“No.”

Man that was a lot of power for a kid. I named him Pal. I named him that because the Lone Ranger had already taken the name Silver for his horse. Pal was the next best. We went together everywhere. I rode him to school. I rode him to chase cattle and sheep. I rode him into the mountains. He was mine to command. Lots of times I would sit on his back and just daydream while he munched on clover and grass.

Two years later I was sitting in sixth grade listening to Inez Davidson read Tom Sawyer. My imagination was hiking up and down the Mississippi with Tom and Huck Finn, when there was a knock on the classroom door that ended my reverie. A man came to the door and talked in hushed tones to Mrs. Davidson. Then he left and she said, “Kent, that man says that Pilling’s horses are out on the highway and one of them has been hit by a car.” Well, my heart stopped beating and I stopped breathing. Oh please let it be Blackbird that got hit and not my horse. Please! Please! Please!

I’ve thought back since about that announcement in front of the whole class. You would have thought she could have called me out into the hall and told me instead of with the whole class listening. If I had been alone and she told me that I would have started yelling and crying as would be fitting for any twelve-yearold kid. Instead there I was in front of all those kids, some of the girls in whom I was showing some interest since I was just starting into puberty, and I had to just keep a stiff upper lip and walk out of the class room as though I were just going to the store.

I leaped on my bike and peddled the mile up the road to where I could see the horses. As I rode up to them, my worst fear was confirmed. My pal Pal was standing on three legs, the fourth of which was broken right off at the hock. My father and mother were in Lethbridge for the day but I knew what I had to do. I opened the gate into the field and drove the horses into it. Pal was hopping along on three legs with his coat soaked with sweat because of the pain. I knew there was nothing that could be done to fix that broken leg. I knew he was in awful pain. I knew I loved him. Therefore I knew that I had to get him out of his misery. I pedaled back over to the house and got my dad’s 30.30 off the wall. I walked back over to the horses and shot my old pal in the head. After making sure that he was really dead, I stumbled back to the house, hung up my father’s gun and pedaled back to school. I walked into class and sat down and the teacher asked me if everything was okay. I said, “Yes, I drove them back into the field and shut the gate.” That’s all I said.

After school I went home and my father had returned and learned of what happened. He put his arm around me and I cried for a few minutes and then life went on. Death was such a part of ranch life. Cats died, dogs died, horses died, pet lambs died, minnows died, little pet ducks died, gophers died, mice died, chickens died, turkeys died. Hell, it was like a pet cemetery. That’s really troubling stuff for a kid especially when nobody talks about it. I guess it was viewed as something natural that didn’t deserve any extra explanation. Nobody explained to me why the sun came up or why it rained and I guess nobody thought it was important to explain death to me. It just happened. I guess it was no different than birth.

My father took the tractor and hooked onto Pal and dragged him down into the field where there was a slough of water. He pulled him into the middle of it and left him there. I hated ever having to go past that area. Sometimes I would have to go past it to chase some cows or horses into the corral. One time when I went past, I looked and all I could see were millions of maggots crawling all over him. Then the wind changed and the smell blew into my nose. It was horrible. I had nightmares and night sweats for a week. I was afraid of the dark and afraid to be alone. But I never said a word to my parents. But when I woke up in the middle of the night screaming and crying and went racing into their bed, they let me stay.

HOISTED ON MY OWN PETARD

My brother used to have bad dreams and ran to sleep with my parents whenever he was having one of his nightmares. One night I decided that I would cure him. I mean, what are brothers for if it’s not to help cure what’s wrong with them? I got some gopher traps and armed them and set them in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. He had to go that way in order to get to their bedroom. I went to sleep and forgot about the traps. Sometime around midnight, I was in the midst of a terrible dream. I had gone down to look at Pal’s burial place and when I looked a wolf crawled out of his body cavity with blood and intestines hanging from his mouth. I could tell by the look on his face that he wanted fresh meat and I was first on the menu. I whirled and ran for the barn as fast as I could. For some reason I was in bare feet and frightened that the wolf would grab me by the foot and pull me down and then go for my throat.

Somewhere during the course of that awful nightmare, I left my bed at full speed headed for my parent’s bedroom. Mother said later, that she and Dad woke to this awful screaming and me shouting, “The wolf, (very loud voice) the wolf has got me by the foot! Help! HELP! He’s ripping my foot off!” They turned the light on and rushed out of their bedroom and there I was rolling around on the floor with not a wolf but a gopher trap on each foot and I was screaming for help. Dad rushed over and had to hold me down with one hand while he attempted to get the traps off my feet. I was still ensnared in the dream and when he put his arm around my neck to contain me, I thought the wolf now had me by the throat so I bit him. He cuffed me so hard on the side of the head that I came fully awake.

Even though I was still shaken by the dream etc., I also realized that I was about to get a question, the answer to which could quickly incriminate me. “How the hell did these gopher traps get here?” He demanded. There it was. My nightmare was forgotten and the real nightmare about to begin. That was the question I knew was coming. Rather than attempt an answer I began to cry again, even louder. Oh, OH my toes are broken. Ouch, OUCH, it hurts, it hurts. By this time he had the traps off and was examining my feet. I thought to myself, “I’ve got to keep him distracted so that he doesn’t go back to that question.” However, it was not to be the case. “Kent, how did those traps get here?”

I was well and truly cornered and the moment of truth was at hand. “Noel must have put them there”, I lied. I figured by morning I could come up with a better story so I was trying to buy some time.

“Why would he want to do that?” Dad asked.

“Oh it’s nothing dad, he was probably just playing a joke. I’m sure he didn’t mean to really catch me”.

I thought maybe I had successfully pulled it off and offered to go back to my bed. Even though nothing more was ever said or done about it, I think maybe my lie wasn’t believed because when Dad and Mom were walking back to their bedroom, I heard Dad say something about me being hoisted on my own petard, whatever the heck that meant. At the time I thought that was pretty weird. What does being hoisted on your own petard have to do with being caught in your own snare? Go figure.

TRAPPING FOR FUR

Cash was in short supply for me as a child. One of the ways to earn a little extra money was to run a trap line. I would trap weasels, mink and muskrats. Occasionally I would get a beaver or a coyote, but not very often. We had a coulee and a creek that ran by our house and in the winter I would check each day to see if there were any mink or weasel tracks. If I found a set of tracks going up the coulee or creek, I knew that in a few days he or she as the case may be, would be returning. They had a certain route but would always return the same way.

When I found tracks I would get a Japanese orange crate and cut a hole in one end. Then I would get some chicken guts and put them inside the orange crate, position it alongside the tracks and set a trap in front of the hole. Then I would check the trap every day to see if I had caught anything. Quite often I caught the neighbor’s barn cats. You haven’t seen anything like trying to get a wild barn cat out of a trap without killing him. They would snarl and scratch and attack at every opportunity. If you put your foot over to step on the trap to release it, the cat would grab your leg and try to tear your boot off to get at your flesh. I heard that cats have nine lives so if the situation got too tough, I would just smack the cat on the head with a club and when it rolled over unconscious I would release its leg and toss it over in the snow. Some of the cats that I did that to must have already used up eight lives because the ninth loss killed them dead.

If I caught a mink or weasel, I would bonk them on the head and take them home to skin them. I couldn’t leave them in a trap more than a day or they would chew their own leg off and escape. After skinning them I would stretch their hide on a wooden frame until it dried and then sell it for ready cool cash; a scarce commodity.

The other method for collecting pelts occurred in the early spring when the ice had just gone out of the lakes. We would make a long pole with a small platform on the end. We would push the pole out onto a lake after having set a trap on the platform. The whole contraption would float. Sometimes we would put a carrot on the platform but mostly just the platform itself was an attractive resting place for a muskrat. We would construct many of these platforms and put them out around the lake. Then in the evening we would just keep making the rounds and pulling the muskrats in that were caught in the traps. Some evenings we would get 15 to 20 muskrats and they sold for about $1.00/pelt. We also had a little dog that would swim out and retrieve a rat if we shot it. So we collected a lot that way as well. I had to be careful to hit them in the head because the pelts would be discounted if there was a hole in the pelt.

One morning I came up over a hill driving our old 1948 Fargo Truck. I looked down the road at the bottom of the hill and my friend, Carl Wehrharn, was walking in the opposite direction so had not seen me. The wind was blowing hard and making lots of noise. I put the truck in neutral and planned to coast down the hill until I was exactly behind him and then rev the engine and blow my horn. Great ideas like that just came naturally to us Pilling’s. It didn’t even require planning ahead. We thought of them as spontaneous flashes of inspiration. Others questioned the source of the inspiration.

Unbeknownst to me Carl had been checking his trap line and had caught an enormous mink. He didn’t have a trapping license (surprise) and was worried that he might get caught by the game warden before he got the mink home and skinned. He had the mink hidden in an inside pocket of his coat. All these anxious worries were going through his mind at the time so he was pretty keyed up anyway, when I got four feet behind, revved my engine and blew my horn.

It was wondrous to see. Not only did he do a vertical standing leap of about four feet but he also leaped horizontally about 10 feet. It was like a longjump and high-jump combined. Now that would be an excellent jump for a track and field event. But the most amazing thing was that he left one of his gumboots sitting straight up on the ground where he took-off.

Gumboots were hard to put on in the first place and how he was able to extract his foot without even tipping the boot over was a feat to be told and retold. Later, at school, we tried to get him to repeat it but he couldn’t. We tried to do the same thing without gumboots but were never able to replicate it. The other thing that happened that he only confessed too much later was that he had peed his pants also. What more could a man ask for from one of his practical jokes than a huge leap, a gumboot left standing and peed pants? It just doesn’t get much better than that. Carl later recovered.

Speaking of Carl, there is another story that bears telling. One of our favorite activities at noon and recess at school in the spring was to drown- out gophers. You may not have heard of this before because it hasn’t yet become an Olympic event but this is how it happens. In the spring gophers come out of hibernation and leave their burrows to eat, breed and have babies. Once a gopher is down his hole it is difficult to attack him. So here was the plan. We would run from the canal with buckets of water and pour it down the gopher hole until the gopher had to choose between drowning and busting out of the hole. While the water brigade was pouring water down the hole it would be ringed with kids wielding hoes, rakes, ball bats, sticks, axes, shovels, picks or just whatever was handy. If the gopher emerged and stopped to have a look around he was almost instantly squashed with multiple wounds to his body. However, most of the time the gopher exited the hole at full speed. What followed next has a flurry of chopping, slicing, smacking, hitting, swinging, hacking and whacking. The instrument of death you were wielding dictated the particular action. Needless to say, there were a number of foot and lower leg injuries.

Carl came to school one day wearing a pair of steel-toed boots. We had never heard of such a thing. He bragged that he would no longer injure his foot while drowning-out gophers. He boasted that you could hit his toe with a large hammer and it wouldn’t work. Well, of course that had to be tested before it was believed. One of the kids had a medium sized post maul that was used to drive fence posts into the ground. We decided that should be the instrument to test the steel-toed boot.

So Carl willingly extended his foot, sure that his steel toe would protect his foot. Jack Thompson swung the maul at the toe while we all stared and waited for the result. As Jack’s maul was descending I was in a position to see that it was going to miss the toe and impact his foot further up. I opened my mouth to shout a warning but by that time it was too late. Carl screamed in agony and began to hop around in circles. Most of the kids walked away muttering about how useless steel toed boots were not realizing that Jack had missed the toe and smashed Carl’s foot breaking three metatarsals. Carl wore a cast for about three months and the steeltoed boot test was never repeated.

HUMILIATING A HORSE

Ranch horses were partially wild animals. You couldn’t just walk out in the field and yell, “Oh horsey, horsey, come down here. I want to get up on your back and run you until you are exhausted.” Well actually, you could yell that but nothing would happen. The horses would look at you, toss their heads and run to the far corner of the field. Then the chase began. We would try to corner them and they would run to another corner and on and on. Finally we would get some oats and try to get them to come close and snare them with a rope. If not, we would belabor their ears with bad words and call into question their heritage. Sometimes we would take a bow and arrow with a blunt point and if they broke and ran out of the corner and raced away we would try to punish them with a shot in the rump. Finally, the horses would tire of the misery we were inflicting on them and give up the chase. Then we would crawl up on the fence, jump on their backs and away we would go. When we were finished with them we’d take their bridles off and turn them loose. That is the limit of the care and attention that a ranch horse got.

When I was older and living in Calgary, I would often drive out in the surrounding country and see folks wearing funny looking black hats on silly looking English saddles with fancy looking bridles. I felt so embarrassed for the horse. Then on top of that, they would make them gallop along at this restricted gait like they were constipated and I don’t mean just the horse. It seemed a perversion of sorts. If Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians had happened upon Custer and his troops dressed like that there would have been no massacre of the Calvary. The Indians would probably have died laughing. Or they may have just turned tail and run for fear of catching some weird communicable disease from the white man.

Riders now call themselves equestrians or something like that and they refer to their horses as mounts or steeds. What is the world coming to? Horses aren’t pets; they are beasts of burden, with the emphasis on beast. Their real names are Plug, Cayuse, Nag, Roman Nosed Son of a Gun, Miserable S.O.B., and Stupid Bean Brain. Those are names with substance and meaning. What kind of a name is Secretariat? How would you like to be a secretary and have a horse named after you?

I attended an International Horse Show at the world famous Spruce Meadows outside of Calgary and listened to the lengthy introductions of worldrenowned riders and horses. What class! What bunk! I wish they would let me announce some of the entries at Spruce Meadows equestrian events. This is how it might sound.

“And next we have this fag with the weird black wussy hat from England perched astride a very feminine looking saddle a top a roman-nosed, hardmouthed, constipated looking roan plug from Okotoks. And folks, if that sucker decides he doesn’t want to jump that pile of logs and starts to buck, that numb-nuts on top is going to end up ass end over teakettle because he doesn’t have a horn on his saddle.”

I think that would make the folks in the grandstand sit a little straighter and listen a little more carefully. Surely a horse is not supposed to be so humiliated. I know they are dumb animals but hopefully that have some feelings. They are meant to be ridden hard, cussed at, abused and put away wet. If you rub them down with brushes and soft cloths like they do with horses today, then you will miss one of the most interesting and enlightening experiences of life.

When we finished working or riding a horse and turned him loose he would walk over in the grass, lie down and roll on his back and squirm back and forth to scratch his sweaty, itchy back. The fully exposed underside of a horse is something you don’t quickly forget and dismiss. It really helps you to appreciate why God made them so that when they are standing up; their backs are on top and not the underside of their stomach. Now, proper equestrians probably never get that experience because they rub them down after riding. I feel sorry for them.

A few years ago, two professors from my old alma mater came to Canada and wanted me to take them back into the Mountains of Waterton National Park to go fishing. Of course they wanted to ride not walk. So I took them back into the mountains and showed them the best fishing of their lives.

Later we came back to my cabin to unload the horses and turn them loose. After we took the saddles off we led them over to the pasture to let them go. As I took them through the gate I said to the two university rocket scientists, “I’ve trained these horses to do something interesting, would you like to see it?”

“Yes, of course we would like to see it. What is it?”

“Well,” I said, “it is easy to teach a dog to lie down and roll over but have you ever seen a horse that has been trained to do that?”

seen a horse that has been trained to do that?” “You’re kidding. These horses that we have been riding all day are trick horses and have been trained to do that? We’d have to see that to believe it.”

By that time they were well and truly set up. When you take the bridle off a sweaty horse they walk a short distance away and start turning around in a circle. A few seconds later, down they go for a roll in the grass and dirt. They do it to scratch their backs and almost always roll all the way over before getting back up. I turned their horses loose and said to the horses. “All right, I want you to walk over there, turn around in a circle and then lie down and roll over. Afterwards I want you to get up shake and walk away.”

It was a lengthy set of instructions and I saw the skepticism and doubt in the eyes of the professors. The three horses walked a few steps away and both started turning in a circle preparatory to lying down and rolling over. Then they all grunted and lay down. Next they rolled up onto their backs and scratched back and forth. Then they rolled the rest of the way over, got up, shook themselves to get the dirt off and walked off. My two friends were amazed.

“How did you ever teach them to do that?” They asked.

“Well,” I said, “you have to start when they are really young and you can throw them down and make them roll over. You reinforce them with chocolate and then you just stay at it until they learn it. After they have once learned it, you know horses never forget, just like elephants.”

“Amazing,” they said.

Years later when I would go back in my University town visiting my own children that were attending, I would drop over to the administration building to see my two gullible friends. Every time I visited their offices they would call in some secretary or other professor and tell them the story about my three trained horses. I’m afraid I have never really confessed the truth. But one of these days they are going to see the same phenomenon happen somewhere else with other horses, make a fool of themselves, learn the real truth and I’m going to get a phone call.

SADDLING UP

I have also observed equestrians saddling their horses and trying to get the cinch tight so the saddle doesn’t slide off. Horses are really smart when it comes to fooling riders. When you go to tighten a cinch on an experienced horse, he will take a big breath and hold it until you have tightened the cinch. Then let his breath out and the cinch will be loose. A loose cinch is more comfortable for a horse than a tight one. In a recent study 267 horses were given a choice between a tight cinch and a loose one. 99% of all horses chose the loose cinch. So it is obvious that you can’t give the horse that choice.

I was walking through one of the stables (that’s equestrian for barn) and there was this rider with white pantaloons and a silly hat trying to get the cinch tightened. This is what I heard: “Now Leopold, honey, please don’t do that, Daddy needs the cinch tighter. Come on please. Let the air out so I can get it a little tighter. You know it doesn’t hurt.” Honest truth, that is exactly what he said. Well, Leopold and Daddy tussled back and forth for about ten minutes before the cinch got tightened. I wanted so badly to jump over the stall and show Daddy how to help Leopold change his mind in a hurry and take away the choice for the horse.

That is one of the first things we learned on the ranch when we saddled horses. You don’t give them the choice. You tighten the cinch as tight as you can get it. Then you take one step back like you are going to punt a football. Then you boot him right in the gut as hard as you can possibly kick. While old Leopold, or whatever his name might be, is stretched out sucking air, you calmly tighten the cinch to the desired tension and step into the saddle. Not only does the cinch get tight, but the horse has no question about who is boss.

We went through a lot of horses while I was growing up. Some just died for unknown causes, some went to retirement in the glue factory, some went to France to be eaten by Frenchmen and others got sold to some poor buyer who didn’t know all the horse’s bad habits. The amazing thing was that you could sell a miserable, bad-tempered horse to someone else that you knew and not ever have it injure your relationship. The buyer could never admit that he had been taken, so he would brag about his great buy and his fine new horse until some other poor sap got conned into buying the horse. Then there would be another repeat. Some horses never even got ridden; just bragged about and sold again. It reminds me of a book I read called The Peter Principle. It explains how in business a man gets promoted to his highest level of incompetence. That was what happened to the horses. The remarkable thing was that after a while the buyers and sellers actually started believing their own delusions and would even sit around in groups and brag about the merits of old Star or Baldy or Blaze. Everyone knew they were nags but you would never hear an admission. It was the same with cars. No matter what anyone bought, Ford, Chevy, Dodge or Fargo, it was the very best car or truck that ever had been manufactured and sold to man.

BLACK DEVIL HORSE

We owned a big black, horrible horse name Black Bird. I don’t remember the trade that resulted in him coming to live with us. Later I tried to trade him to someone else for a dead chicken but got no takers. He doubled as both a riding horse and a work-horse. His disposition was unpredictable and volatile.

My job in the summer was to run a dump rake. That was the piece of equipment from hell. It had huge curbed teeth to rake the hay, large steel wheels, no suspension and a single seat bolted to a piece of spring steel that could propel you into outer space if you hit a bump. A team of horses pulled it until the rake was filled with hay. Then you would hit a trip lever with your foot and the teeth would lift up, dump the hay and then crash back down to the ground.

My father hitched an old roan mare by the name of Mac to the black devil horse, Black Bird, and that was my raking team. As I would ride along on the rake holding on to the reins, Blackbird would switch his tail over the reins. This horse had the most sensitive bum on the ranch. When he would flip his tail over the rein it would get caught underneath. If I pulled the rein to get it free, he would feel the pressure under his tail, snort, fart (that’s breaking wind for you equestrians) and bolt. He would go berserk. The more I pulled on the rein to free it, the tighter he would clamp his tail and run and the rodeo would begin. I would be screaming at him to whoa! Mac would get caught up in the excitement and run with him. The worst fear was that he would run over an irrigation ditch and the seat would fling me to my death. So I would yell and holler and try to steer him away from the ditches. I felt like a driver at the Chuck Wagon races at the Calgary Stampede.

I remember the first time I saw those famous Calgary Stampede Chuck Wagon Races. Everyone was commenting on how fast the horses were running and how dangerous it was. I was not nearly so impressed. It looked a lot safer than sitting on a dump rake at 40 miles per hour, with the horses out of control.

If I couldn’t get them stopped I would dump the rake but hold down on the pressure lever with my other foot. Then the teeth couldn’t dump and it would skid the wheels and not let them turn. Finally, I would steer them toward big piles of hay and drag them with the teeth to slow them down. Eventually, they would become exhausted and come to a stop. Both horses would be streaming with sweat and huffing and puffing. My adrenaline would be so high that I could have killed Black Bird with my bare hands.

There were many times when that horse almost killed me. Once during one of his snort, fart and bolt episodes he headed for an irrigation ditch and I couldn’t get him turned. Just before we hit the ditch it became very clear to me that if I stayed on the rake I was skyward bound. But I also knew if I jumped off, I would face the anger of my father for abandoning the rake to its probable destruction. Being more afraid of my dad than dying, I stayed on board. We hit the ditch at full gallop. The spring steel seat catapulted me clear up onto the tongue between the two horses and I grabbed one of the hames (that is a real word and is an actual part of the harness) to keep from falling beneath the horses’ hooves. If I let go I would be trampled to death or the teeth in the rake would have made short work of me.

Now the harnesses that the horses were wearing included blinders to prevent the horses from seeing behind them. The theory was that if they couldn’t see what they were pulling it was less likely to frighten them. If not, sometimes what was going on behind would scare the hell out of them and you would have a runaway and an awful wreck. In the case of Black Bird, he would run at any excuse.

I climbed up onto the tongue, grabbed the collars of the harnesses and crawled up onto Blackbird’s back. He couldn’t see me so he must have assumed that some beast of prey was attacking him. He then began to buck and kick and fart (he was always looking for any excuse to do that) in earnest. I thought I was a goner. While all this was going on a crowd had gathered at the haystack to watch. Later they said it was quite spectacular. I yelled at him to stop, grabbed one rein on the outside and ran him in a circle until he finally became exhausted. There are no words to express the hatred I had for that horse. My main desire after that was to be present when he died. I wanted it to be slow and painful. I used to wave a bottle of glue under his nose occasionally just so he knew where he was going to end up if I had my way. I’m tired of talking about horses so instead I’m going to tell you about Uncle Charlie.

UNCLE CHARLIE’S MONGOOSE

My Uncle Charlie was a saint. I never heard him swear or ever tell a bad joke. The only fib he ever told me was when he showed me an old WWII rifle that he had and told me that it would shoot as far as you could see and if you could see it you could hit it with his gun. However, when he became really old he got Alzheimer’s and a part of him that we had never seen before emerged. How could such a dark side lurk inside for all those years and never emerge? When he was spending his last days in the hospital we would go to see him and he would make indecent passes at the nurses, cuss and tell shady jokes. The nurses in the auxiliary unit couldn’t understand why Uncle Charlie had so many young fellows come to visit him. He didn’t know any of us, but gave us quite an education and entertainment. Our parents told us that he wasn’t in his right mind and therefore wasn’t accountable for what he said and did.

Somehow we generalized that to mean we weren’t accountable for listening so we visited often. I’ve thought since that that is a pretty good idea. When you get really old, the way to get lots of people to visit you is to cuss, tell dirty jokes and make passes at the nurses. You’d be a lot more entertaining than if you just sat around and grumbled and slobbered. Because you are senile you won’t be held responsible and you get it all out of your system before you kick-thebucket and have to meet your maker. Maybe instead of trying to cure Alzheimer’s we should give old folks permission to enjoy it more.

The only indication that Uncle Charlie had a slightly un-saintly side was that he had a mongoose. Now it wasn’t a real mongoose but oh, what a mongoose it was! Uncle Charlie built a cage that consisted of a rear part that was enclosed and dark. The front of it had a door opening. The front part of the cage was like a seethrough chicken-wire porch. Supposedly the mongoose slept back in the dark rear but came out to feed and exercise in the wire-enclosed front part. The mongoose would lie in the back part with his tail and back legs visible through the hole. You could look through the wire and see the back part of the dangerous beast. Plastered all over the cage were signs that said, “Beware Mongoose”, “Stand Back”, “Keep Your Hands Clear”, and “Caution, Severe Biting Animal.”

Now none of us had ever seen a mongoose, but from the warning signs we concluded it was vicious, dangerous and pretty terrifying. We learned in school that a King Cobra had enough venom to kill a mature elephant. We also knew that a mongoose could kill a King Cobra. Even though we had never seen a mongoose we considered one to be of ferocious nature and aggressive enough to kill any one of use. But of course that only made us more curious, because after all it was in a cage, right? So we would edge closer trying to get a better look at the mongoose. When we were within range, Uncle Charlie would trip a lever and what happened next would take years off people’s lives, cause them to say heretofore unuttered swear words, and cause them to leap vertical distances that would be the envy of NBA basketball players. For some it caused them to spontaneously wet their pants and others fainted dead away. It evoked one of the most primitive of human responses; flight or immobilization.

Although most responded with flight, others were so damn mad they wanted to kill Uncle Charlie. But Charlie was a good foot racer and by the time they had unsuccessfully chased him for a half a mile their anger cooled and some even saw the humor in it. Now I suppose you are wondering by now what it was that caused such a commotion.

Well there wasn’t a real mongoose in the cage as you might have guessed. Instead there was a tanned mink pelt. The part that you could see looked like a live mongoose’s rear end. The front of the mink pelt was attached by a string to a small nail on a spring-hinged door. When Uncle Charlie tripped the lever, the trap door would spring open and throw the mink pelt right onto the person who was peeking into the cage.

Of course, the warning signs plastered on the cage had already created a mental set of anxiety and fear. So when the fake mongoose came springing out of the cage and landed square on your head or chest, instinct took over. If the mink pelt happened to stick to you, it was almost assured that the resulting blows that you would inflict on your own body to rid yourself of the mongoose would cause quite severe bruising.

Uncle Charlie was going through the port of entry between Canada and the United States once and was asked by the American Customs Officers if he had anything to declare or if he had any pets. Charlie replied that he only had a pet mongoose that he was taking across the border. “A mongoose,” said the customs officer, “what are you doing with a mongoose? I’ll have to inspect it and see that it has its rabies shot.”

“But it’s never had a rabies shot” Uncle Charlie said.

“Why hasn’t it had a rabies shot?” Asked the customs officer.

“Oh, sir that damn mongoose is too mean to ever give a rabies shot. I don’t know how you could hold him and not get your hand bit off.”

“Well you can’t bring a dangerous animal like that into the United States and what the hell are you doing with such a mean animal anyway?” Asked the border officer.

Of course the customs officer had never seen a mongoose, but imagined it to be a vicious, dangerous animal based on what Charlie said.

Well if I can’t take him across the border can I leave him here until I get back?” Asked Charlie.

“No, you can’t leave him here with us, he’s far too dangerous.”

“Would you like to see him?”

“Yes I would” said the man “but are you sure he’s safe?”

“As long as he stays in the cage he can’t hurt anyone, but I’ll tell you this, I would hate to be around if he ever got out of his cage.”

So Charlie gets on a heavy pair of welders leather gloves and opens the trunk. He tells the officer to stand well back and the lifts the cage out of the trunk and sets it down on the pavement. The officer edges closer and closer and then spots the tail and rear end sticking out of the door. “Are you sure that cage is strong enough to hold him?” Finally, the customs officer has moved until he is situated in the “kill zone” (that is the zone where the mongoose will land) and Uncle Charlie releases the trap door. The mongoose came flying out and landed right on the officer’s chest. The officer begins screaming and swearing and leaping up and down. The mongoose finally falls from his chest onto the ground and by this time the border cop has his gun out and is preparing to shoot the mongoose before he can attack again. About then he realizes that the mongoose is not really a mongoose and that Uncle Charlie is hung over the truck laughing with tears running down his cheeks.

In that moment of realization he knows he has been had. He switches his pistol in the direction of Uncle Charlie and seriously considers shooting him instead. Finally, reason prevails and he calms down. He is so mad and upset that he walks around the car twice to calm down and talk himself out of shooting Charlie.

Then the most peculiar phenomenon occurred. He says, “If I go in and get another customs officer will you do the same to him?” So one by one each of the customs officers comes out to get ambushed and then immediately wants the next person inside to experience the same thing.

That was the strange thing about that mongoose. As soon as you got over the awful experience, immediately there came to mind other people that you wanted to experience it as well. It happened every time. Even as a spectator, knowing exactly what was going to happen, when that mongoose came flying out it would scare the bejeebers out of you.

However, it was nothing compared to the person experiencing it for the first time. When he did it to my Aunt Fay, she wet her pants and fainted but she was no more recovered and on her feet that she wanted it done to her husband, Uncle Heber. I guess it was just the kind of experience that needed to be shared.

I inherited the mongoose for a limited period of time, planning to replicate it and have one of my very own. I was north of Calgary with my friend Danny Heninger and his brother Paul. We had been shooting sporting clays for the afternoon and on the way home I was telling them about the pet mongoose that I had. Now it is a well-known fact that you can never fool a Heninger. I just casually brought it up while we were shooting but never pursued it any further. About an hour later he rose to the bait and wanted to know more about the mongoose. I told him about how vicious and mean it was. A while later he said, “Why in the heck do you want a vicious mongoose when you have kids?” So I explained that if I kept him in the cage he wasn’t able to hurt anyone. I was careful not to suggest showing him or anything else. I didn’t elaborate or encourage him to see it. I knew if I did he would smell a rat and shy away. I was just really brief in my responses and slowly reeled him in.

When we arrived at my house he said, “Mind if I come in and see that mongoose?” I said, “Are you sure you’ve got time?” He and Paul got out of the car and followed me into the kitchen. I went out in the garage and carried the cage into the house and set it on the table. My son Brad walked out of the family room and asked me if he could get some lunch meat out of the fridge and drop it in the cage and see if the mongoose would come out where we could see him. I said, “sure, but don’t get your fingers anywhere near that wire in case it doesn’t hold him.”

Heninger said later that even at that point he has some reservations about the authenticity of my story, but he knew I hadn’t had time to prime Brad to say what he did so after what Brad said, he dropped his doubts and was totally unprepared for what happened next. “Oh look, I can see part of him sticking out the little door” said Paul. Danny leaned closer and I released the mongoose and it landed right on his neck. Both he and Paul whirled to flee and ran right into each other and then slammed into the closet door and almost went down. Danny was tearing at his neck trying to get the mongoose off before it sank his fangs into his jugular and also saying some bad words.

Well in a few seconds things settled down and both realized they have been attacked by a benign piece of fur. Danny turns to Paul and says, “We’ve got to find us a new friend.” They walked out, got in their car without another word and left. To this day Danny does not like me telling this story because it was the only time on record that a Heninger was bested.

A HORSE SHOOTING

When I reached the 11th grade some education genius decided that our small rural high school should be closed and all students were to be bussed 15 miles into Cardston. Their school was much larger and the kids from Mt. View were pretty lost. As we listened to their stories of adventure and excitement they didn’t seem very adventurous or exciting compared to our adventures in Mt. View. We began telling some of our stories and soon had a spell bound audience of wannabes. When they heard our hunting stories there were a number of kids who begged us to take them hunting.

There was one particular kid named Dennis Remington. After reading the rest of this account you may wonder why, but later he became my dearest friend. He came from a wealthy family and had the best of everything. We all envied him. His dad had got him a new 244 Remington Rifle with a variable scope. We had never seen such a wonderful gun. Our guns were old saddle guns of a 30- 30 vintage. The bluing was worn off and the wooden gun stocks no longer had any finish on them. Dennis’s gun on the other hand was smooth, the gun bluing was new and the stock was a beautiful walnut textured grain. If we couldn’t have that gun we wanted to be around it. Consequently we agreed to take him hunting one Saturday in early November.

We had hunted the early morning without any success. About noon we came to a slope with trees on both sides and at the top but it was clear in the middle. There was about a foot of new snow and there was a rock about halfway up the open slope that was bare on the downhill side. We told Dennis to shoot and see if he could hit the rock with his hotshot gun. He laid his gun across the hood of the truck, took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. His bullet struck the rock with a resounding smack.

There are different accounts of what happened next. But this account is really close. When Dennis smacked the rock it stampeded a bunch of workhorses that Raymond West had put in that field to winter. The big old workhorses came charging out of the trees and headed up the slope. Now granted they were kicking up some snow and maybe that contributed to him not seeing very well. But really, there were brown horses, black horses, white horses, painted horses and grey horses. None of those colors are the natural colors of elk and besides Dennis had a nine-power scope trained on them.

My cousin, Bryce Pilling, shouted, “ELK Remington, Elk, shoot, shoot!!!” Well, before we could get Dennis stopped he had emptied his whole magazine at the galloping horses. I finally got to him and wrenched the gun from his grasp. “Those are horses, you idiot, you have shot Raymond’s horses.” His face drained of all color and went into shock. “What are we going to do, what is going to happen to us?” We immediately set him straight and changed the plural of “we” to “me”. We immediately absolved ourselves of any responsibility and laid it all directly on him. However, having said that, none of us were suffering from the confusion of what to do next. We grabbed Remington, threw him into the back of the truck. The rest of us jumped in the cab and tore out of there.

We had learned long ago that flight was usually the behavior of choice once anyone made a mistake. It accomplished a number of important things. It delayed any consequences, it gave us time to make up a statement of innocence and it created the possibility of not even being detected. We didn’t know if Dennis had hit any of the elk-horses but there was no point in establishing that information at the time. We sped into Mountain View, stuffed Dennis in his car and told him to drive back to Cardston as fast as he could and we would let him know what happened.

Later that day we drove back up to the site of the shooting and discovered that Remington had missed hitting any of the horses and they were all okay. Quickly, however, we realized that this had the wonderful elements of a delicious caper. We discussed the potential mischief and selected a plan of action. Since I was in the same school grade as Dennis, I was appointed as the spokesman to carry off the plan. All the others were to support any story that they heard.

The next Monday at school I got Dennis aside and told him that we had gone back and checked and two horses were dead and another one was badly wounded. I told him that Raymond had found out about the tragedy and had to shoot the wounded horse. That made three horses dead.

Luckily Dennis was leaning against the gym wall or he would have fallen into a dead faint. “What am I going to do?” He pleaded. Now Dennis had been raised in a good family who had taught him to always be honest. He said that the only thing he could think to do was to drive out to Mt. View, confess to Raymond what he had done and get his dad to pay for the dead horses.

Imagine what a lack of education he had living in a city if that was the only idea that came to his mind. I immediately nipped that idea in the bud. “You can’t do that Dennis, Raymond is a terrible person and will likely beat you on the spot or press charges and have you stuck in jail.” He recoiled and quailed in despair. I said, “Dennis don’t worry, we are your friends and will take care of this and hopefully protect you from getting in huge trouble.” He thanked me profusely and offered anything I wanted of his in compensation. I thought seriously about his .244 but figured that was maybe taking it too far.

The next day I told him that Raymond had sworn he was going to kill whoever killed his horses. Wednesday I told him that Raymond had put up a poster in the post office with a reward for any information leading to the identity of the shooter of his prize work horses.

Poor Dennis, he was losing sleep, he wasn’t eating, his grades in school were going down and he was becoming more and more withdrawn and depressed. Friday I told Dennis that Raymond had got some prints from the snow boot tracks and was taking them to the police. Over the weekend Dennis continued to deteriorate and by Monday he was desperate. On Monday afternoon he came to me and said that he couldn’t take it any longer. He said he was going to tell his dad, confess to the bishop and by so doing would have to implicate the rest of us.

That was not exactly where we thought this was going to go so I told him to give me one more day to see what I could do and then I would talk with him the following day. He agreed to wait one more day but said he couldn’t wait any longer than that before he got this off his conscience.

I met with the other guys who were involved and we decided maybe we better come clean. However, by that time we were in pretty deep. One kid suggested that we tell Dennis that we took the rap for him and that would obligate him to us the rest of his life. We all agreed that was an excellent plan. The next day Dennis and I met and this is what I told him: “Dennis, we didn’t want you to get into trouble and we didn’t want you to go to jail, so we all went and confessed to Raymond that we were responsible and that it was our mistake to shoot at his horses when we thought they were elk. Raymond screamed and hollered at us but then he calmed down and softened a little bit. We don’t know if he is going to tell our parents, but whatever happens we are going to spare you any humiliation. After all, what are good friends for?”

His eyes filled with tears and he hugged me. “How can I ever repay you for what you’ve done for me? If there is anything I can do for you, I know it will never equal what you have done for me but I will do anything you ask.” I went away feeling quite good about myself for what I had done for him. His promise of compensation came in real handy later on.

WANT TO KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO WIN 10 MILLION DOLLARS ?

Some years ago the lottery in Canada reached the ten million dollar mark. My brother, who never gambles, decided to risk buying one ticket. The night that the winning ticket number was going to be drawn was the same night that Noel had a meeting and would be unable to watch TV to find out the winning ticket number.

He called our brother-in-law, Jack Ady and asked him if he would watch the TV program that evening and write down the winning number so Noel could compare it against his own ticket and see if he had won.

Unbeknownst to Noel, Jack called Noel’s wife and asked her if she would get the number of Noel’s ticket and give it to him. Noel’s wife, Diana did not suspect any ulterior motive and therefore later denied any complicity with what happened next.

On the next Wednesday when the winning ticket was drawn, Jack watched the TV and of course Noel’s was not the winning ticket. The next day, Noel called Jack to see if he had written down the winning number. Noel didn’t know that Jack was in possession of his own ticket number. Acting a little confused Jack said, “Let me see, I wrote it down somewhere here.” He fussed around for a minute or two and finally said, “Oh here it is, let see…” and he read the number, not of the winning ticket but the number of Noel’s ticket.

The phone went dead. Jack said, “Noel, NOEL, but it was too late. Diana picked up the dropped receiver and asked Jack what had happened. Jack said, “Where is Noel, what happened?” Diana said, “I don’t know what happened but he has dropped the receiver, run out the door, jumped the fence and is running down through the field leaping in the air and clapping his hands.” Jack confessed to Diana what he had done. Poor Diana had to break the news to Noel and Jack didn’t dare come out to Mt. View for a number of months until the dust settled. If you ever want to see fire flash and instant hostility just ask Noel how it feels to win ten million dollars.

FISHING SPINNERS AND BUCKING HORSES

The title of this story pretty much gives it away. When I was in graduate school one of my professors, Dr. Bennion, persuaded me to go to a ranch up in the Uintah Mountains and ride horses to the Yellow Stone River and catch huge eastern slope cutthroat trout. Of course I accepted thinking that it might be great fishing and might even help my grades.

However, when we arrived at the ranch where we were to pick up our horses I realized I had been snookered. The horses weren’t shod and nobody knew how to put shoes on horses. So you can guess who got elected. About three hours later I finished shoeing the horses and we were ready to go. Dr. Bennion had a sizable spinner box, made of aluminum, hooked on to his belt. When he mounted, the horse took a little jump and the spinners in the box rattled. This frightened the horse so he started to buck. The more he bucked the more the spinners rattled and clanked.

What a rodeo. To his credit, Dr. Bennion stayed on the horse until it quit bucking. However, I was laughing so hard I almost fell off the horse I was riding. When the horse stopped bucking, Bennion got off and took his container of spinners and stuffed in into a sack where it wouldn’t rattle and we got on with the trip.

The fish weren’t as large as promised but they were numerous. Bennion told me he should have brought a packhorse to haul out all my fish. He apparently forgot to tell me about limits and he also mentioned something I had never heard of before called, “catch and release”. That was the most stupid thing I had ever heard of. If I went to the work of catching a fish you can be darn sure I wasn’t about to turn it loose. Otherwise why would a guy fish in the first place?

ELK VS. RACE HORSE A RACE TO THE NEAR DEATH

I said earlier that Blackbird was a dual purpose horse. We worked him on a hay rake in the summer and also rode him as a saddle horse. A better description however of this dual purpose horse is that he was both stupid and dangerous. That was his dual personality. My father wouldn’t ride him so if I wanted to go along with him on hunting adventures I had to ride Blackbird. The only advantage, as I said in an earlier story, was that he could run like the wind.

Uncle Oakley and Dad were going Elk hunting and said if I would ride Blackbird I could come along with them. I would have ridden a green-broke buffalo for the chance to hunt and so I readily agreed. There were five inches of new snow and we rode our horses up south of home about six miles into the foothills. Dad located me at the edge of a group of trees and told me to wait there and he and Oakley were going to ride around a group of trees and see if they could pick up any elk tracks. I tied Blackbird to a tree and sat on a stump and waited.

I had to borrow a rifle that I had never shot before, and remember I couldn’t shoot very well anyway. So that combination of a borrowed gun and less than expert marksmanship accounts for what happened next.

It was a cold clear morning when the sounds are easy to distinguish. Everything was as still as death (that is pretty still). I heard some sparrows starting to make noise just down over the ridge from where I was sitting.

Being the fine woodsman that I was, I said to myself, “I wonder what is disturbing those sparrows and causing them to chatter?” I immediately had an anticipatory response. I sharpened my hearing acuity, trained in on the direction of the disturbance and shifted my rifle to the ready position. Nothing happened. However, a few moments later I heard a branch -snap coming from the same direction. Again, forest skills whispered, “Sparrows don’t snap large branches.” By now my senses were razor sharp and ready. Suddenly, out of the trees burst a cow elk about the size of an elephant. My adrenal glands immediately secreted large amounts of adrenalin into my blood stream such that it threw my aim off. I shot three times at the elk. I may have poked my gun barrel past her for a couple of the shots she was so close. But strangely enough the combination of adrenaline, borrowed rifle, youthful exuberance, the alignment of Mars and Jupiter, a distended bladder etc. etc., caused my shots to go awry. That means I missed the elk as clean as a whistle.

I don’t know where the phrase “clean as whistle” came from because most of the whistles that I have blown had other people’s germs and spit on them. Even if you buy a new one they may have been factory tested before shipping which means that the whistle factory employees have already blown the whistle. The only guaranteed clean whistle is one that you make for yourself out of a piece of willow wood. But that is another story and I don’t want to lose my place with the elk; I missed my shots but don’t want to lose my place.

The elk was, of course, not waiting around for me to accidentally hit her so she jumped the road and took off across a field headed for heavier timber on the other side. I had a flashback to movies I had seen where Indians would shoot at settlers and pilgrims off their horses while running at full tilt. (I don’t know where that “full tilt” idiom came from either) But full tilt meant flat-out and flat-out meant as fast as it is possible to run without breaking the sound barrier.

Without wasting even a moment of reconsideration I ran to Blackbird, untied him from the tree and leaped into the saddle. Actually, I didn’t leap into the saddle. Blackbird was so tall I had to bring him alongside the stump and then climb into the saddle. Anyway, after I leaped into the saddle we took off after the elk.

In earlier stories I confirmed that Blackbird’s only redeeming feature was his ability to run, and run he did. In a short period of time, and much to my surprise we not only caught up with the elk, but the horse was trying to pass. The elk turned neither to the right nor to the left but was making a beeline for the timber. I pulled back on Blackbird’s reins until we were alongside the elk. I turned my rifle to shoot her and fired off a shot that somehow missed. However, it served to temporarily deafen my horse. He could no longer hear any of my instructions.

While preparing to lever off another shot at the elk, I happened to look up ahead. We were approaching a barbwire fence at high speed with very little time left to avert a disaster. The elk had no problem because she could easily clear the fence in a single bound. She probably had that in mind all along and was just setting me up. However, Blackbird was not capable of making the leap and clearing the fence. A collision with a barbwire fence has ugly consequences for both horse and rider. I began hollering “whoa” to my deaf horse and sawed back and forth on the reins trying to get him to stop. He was having none of it. He was enjoying the race, and the silence, (remember he was deaf from the shooting). He clamped the bridle bit in his mouth so I had no chance of reining him in.

Finally, he looked ahead and saw the fence. He slammed on the brakes and went into a four wheel skid. His momentum was checked but not mine. The elk jumped the fence and disappeared into the timber and I cleared Blackbird’s ears and landed butt-first in the snow. He narrowly avoided skidding over the top of me and we both came to a stop just short of the fence. I had lost my rifle in the snow when I first hit, and fortunately for Blackbird it took me several minutes to find it. My initial intent was to shoot him and only after a period of time did I cool down enough to change my mind. In the meantime he was happy as a lark because he had outrun an elk and couldn’t wait to get back to the barnyard and do some bragging. I mounted my horse and rode back to where my father and Uncle Oakley were sitting on their horses waiting. Before I got within 200 yards of them I could hear them laughing. There was no way I could lie myself out because they had seen the whole thing.

WEST COAST TRAIL “THE HIKE FROM HELL”

The bishop of the ward our family attended in Calgary was responsible for the spiritual and temporal welfare of all its members. His specific assignment was to be especially there for the youth in the church. He and one of his counselors decided that it would be a good idea to take the youth on a hike where they could learn some self-reliance, etc., etc.

We were living in the middle of the Rocky Mountains that harbored the most beautiful hiking trails in the whole world. Wanting, I guess, to be original, Bishop Swan decided that a hike down the West Coast Trail would be a wonderful and challenging experience. I had children of the age to go and parents were invited to attend. I was unable to make the first trek. I also didn’t pay enough attention to the reports following their return. I should have listened more carefully to the horrific tales of rain, mud, etc., etc. I had been a hiker all my life and knew all the trails in Waterton and Glacier Park. I figured that no hike could be more difficult than the ones in the Rocky Mountains. I learned later that I didn’t have enough imagination to anticipate what that trip was like.

A year rolled by and plans were made to go on another West Coast Trail hike. Orientation and preparation meetings were held to prepare each member to go. I, of course, already knew all there was to know about hiking so chose not to waste my time attending the preparatory meetings. I agreed to go on the next trip and after returning wrote an Ode about the experience. I think that the Ode itself expresses my true feelings about what happened.

ODE TO THE WEST COAST TRAIL

This is a tale of a trail
Called Vancouver’s West Coast
That lures hapless victims
With a sick need to boast.

It occurs in a Rain Forest,
A scum-sucking scene,
With slugs, slime, snow covered walks
And obstacles worse than obscene.

I know two strange fellows
Both demented and strange,
Who keep luring others
On this “trip” they’ve arranged

“Oh, it’s wonderful fun”,
They tell all who’ll heed,
But run for your lives folks
It’s a ruse to deceive.

Their hidden agenda is much more nefarious,
They want you to hurt and suffer injurious.
They’re crazy, these two, in fact they’re notorious
So fear for yourselves, if they say, “Oh come join us.”

They both have names; one’s Merv and one’s Brent.
They seem so harmless, so kind and content.
But hidden from most with a bland exterior
Is a deep down aggression, a pain in the posterior.

Since they’ve been there before
They know all the tricks.
They step on the rocks
While we fall in the cricks.


The water you drink is a slough colored brown.
The walks are so slippery that most times you’re down
On your face in the mud and the slime and the slugs
It just makes us want to punch in their mugs,

And drag them naked over coral and shell.
We’ll punish them bad for this backpack from hell.
Their bodies we’ll throw to sharks down below,
We’ll tag their toes in the morgue as “John Doe”.

Next winter when they say, “Let’s go again, guys”
We’ll choke them to death with their nice Sunday ties.
“Enough! Enough!” We’ll ignore their poor cries.
We’ll beat on their bodies till one of them dies.

The other we’ll boil in seaweed and kelp
Then peel off his skin and throw in his pelt
To the seals and the fishes that swim in the sea.
They’ll never again inflict it on me.

It’s an asinine backpacking experience in pain.
It’s a continuous ordeal in continuous rain.
You never get dry, you don’t have a prayer.
Not even your clothes or your own underwear.

The trail itself is an abomination
But Mervyn and Brent (they’re a strange combination)
Seem bent and determined with no consolation
To inflict its abuse on each new generation.

It rains and it rains until every thing’s wet.
The board walks are slicker than snot on green grass,
If you don’t watch each step,
You fall right on your ______.

The ladders are steep and go on forever.
They’re old and decrepit and slippery to climb.
If you look down and panic
Life’s not worth a dime.


Brent’s backpack was heavy, it contained all his gear.
The latest, the greatest, from far and from near.
He strained all his water until it was clear.
The worst swear he said was only, “oh dear”.

Profanity helped the rest of us cope
When the rocks were slick and so was the rope.
The words that I said, when I fell on my face
Are not even in print, no, not any place.

Our feet never dried in over six days.
They grew wrinkled and sore in ten different ways.
The blisters had blisters on top of their backs.
Dear cheerful Merv said, “You’re a bunch of sad-sacks”.

And Jared, our guide, who never got lost,
Was worth twice his price, whatever the cost.
He knew left from right, he knew down from up,
He knew quite a lot for such a young pup.

And Courtney and Sarah, what two pretty gals.
Mathew and Jordan, great little pals.
Darrel, Jared and Wade, the three hiking fools,
Sloshing and slopping through black muddy pools.

But, Darrel and Jared and Courtney and Merv,
And Mathew and Sarah and Jared and Brent,
Those are the culprits, the ones that we fear,
Don’t let them talk to you, don’t let them near.

They’ll fill up your head with promises great.
They’ll plan the whole trip and set up the date.
But listen, dear friends, to this voice from the grave:
You don’t have to do this to prove that you’re brave.

The West Coast Trail is a journey through hell.
It’s not required hiking for those who are well.
It’s a specialty trip for the blind and the dumb,
For those whose brains are contained in their bums.


So one little word that you just have to learn,
Whenever they come and ask you to go.
The magic word, it’s of enormous concern,
That two letter word is none other than
NO!

No way, get away, not even a chance.
You can shoot me and beat me or pull down my pants,
But never, no never, I’ll not again say
To the wet hole from hell
Called the “blank-blank” West Coast Trail.

After living in our own sweat and stink for seven days you can imagine how we smelled when we entered back into civilization. We went into a 7-Eleven store to get some junk food and everyone else in the store, except the staff, walked out.

My kids and I were going to fly back to Calgary instead of riding in the van. The plane didn’t leave until the next morning. Every hotel we walked into in downtown Vancouver was filled. Finally, after getting rejected again I told the clerk that unless he got us a room I and my two boys were going to sleep in the lobby. He said that we couldn’t do that and that we smelled really bad. I went over and stretched out on one of the lobby couches and twenty minutes later we had a room. I will never ever forget that hot shower when we got in the room. We took off all our hiking clothes and threw them away.

Later I found out that the West Coast Trail is considered one of the top four most difficult hikes in North America. Duh!

DEFLATED EGO

When I finished my doctorate I had to intern in a mental hospital for a year. Finding an internship was a difficult task. All the prestigious hospitals hardly paid any money. I was married with two children and had to have more money than any of those internships paid. I finally located an internship in Northern Idaho at a State Mental Hospital that paid three times as much as any other hospital. The competition for that one position was very fierce. I was selected as the successful candidate for the position.

One day we were sitting in psychiatric rounds after I had been there for a few months. I finally got up the nerve to ask the supervising psychiatrist why I had been selected for the internship when so many others had applied and been rejected. I expected some comments like, “Well you had the best Grade Point Average of all the other candidates,” or, “Your psychotherapy and diagnostic skills were notably better than anyone else’s,” or, “Your professors recommended you as the best student in the doctoral program.”

However, it was not to be, and certainly not what I expected. Dr. Bernstein said, “Well all of the candidates who applied were mostly equally qualified. All of them had an excellent GPA and all their professors said they were excellent students and good therapists. So,” he said, “we tried to look for something that would distinguish one candidate from all the others. To do that we reviewed the recommending professors’ comments. The only thing that distinguished you from all the others was that one of your professors, a Dr. Bob Bennion, said you were the best damn deer hunter he had ever known, so we took you.” So much for my ego.

DIRT BIKING THE BAJA KENT VS. KENT

Some years ago, some of my friends and I decided to go to Mexico and ride the Baja 500 on dirt bikes. I had ridden a dirt bike extensively in the mountains and foothills where the riding demanded execution and short bursts of speed. However, the demands of the race in Mexico required that you maintain a certain rate of speed just to get up on top of the sand so the bike would plane. Otherwise it was just like a boat that couldn’t get up on top of the water and plane. It was unstable. The minimum speed required to stay on plane was 45 mph. That meant that no matter what terrain came along, you had to maintain 45 mph.

On the first day I fell seven times. The motor-cross bike I was riding was a big 600 cc Honda single cylinder and when it fell over it was difficult to get up again. Going from Ensenada to San Felipe was the race course for the first day. The last 27 miles were a constant whoop-de-doo. That means it was straight moguls. There were no flat spots, just constant sand moguls. The way you had to ride them was to stay right on the throttle and just smack the tops of each of the moguls and never, not ever, ever land in between them.

Well, I stayed on top for about the first 10 miles but then began to tire. You couldn’t stop and rest because there was no way to get started and back up to the speed required to stay on the tops of the whoop-de-doos. Finally, my arms became so tired that my coordination failed. I missed the top of one of the moguls, over shot it, my front tire hit the pocket between the bumps and I and my bike got separated, if not divorced. However, only for a brief period of time because when I finally came to rest the bike was laying on top of me with the throttle stuck open. The spinning back tire was trying to wear through my plastic boot and get to the skin on my leg. My helmet had been torn off and there was blood running down the side of my face.

My screaming caught the attention of a dermatologist friend, Kent Remington, who was following closely behind me and saw the wreck. He stopped his bike, jumped off and lifted my bike off me. He pulled out his first aid kit, cleaned the blood off the side of my face, and pulled the cut together and smeared crazy glue over it until it was sealed. About twenty seconds later I was on my feet, had my helmet on and started my bike. I took a turn out into the desert, picked up the requisite amount of speed, swung back into the whoop-de-doos and finally made it into San Felipe.

After dinner that night I wandered down on to the beach to have a talk with myself. I guess I could have talked with myself in the motel, but instead the two of us walked down onto the beach. It was clear to both of us that my problem was that I was too afraid of the speed. The speed was more than I was used to and if I went as fast as necessary I was going to crash and get hurt. But myself said, “if you don’t go fast the slowness is what is going to get you really hurt.”

So I said, “I think I will just quit and go back home that way I won’t get hurt at all.” Then myself said, “If you do that all your friends will laugh at you and call you a wimp. They will tell the people back in Calgary and pretty soon the whole city will know that you are chicken. Can you live with that?”

I thought about it for a while and said to myself, “How can I get past my fear so I can ride faster?” Myself answered, “How come you live your life out of your fears? Why don’t you just say to yourself, ‘it doesn’t matter if you are afraid, you know you have to drive faster if you are going to avoid getting hurt, so make the decision out of what you know instead of what you feel.’ ”

“Whoa, what a novel idea,” I said to myself, “but isn’t it true that if I fall at a higher speed I will get hurt worse than if I crash at a slower speed?” Myself was getting a little impatient with my fears and said, “Yes, stupid, of course you will get hurt worse if you fall when you are going faster, but if you are going faster you are less likely to fall.”

Now, it is really hard to do something when your head is telling you one thing but your emotions are sweating from the fear and anxiety.

“But isn’t fear an adaptive emotion, designed to warn us when we are in danger so we don’t get hurt?” I said to myself with a certain smugness, thinking I had bested him in the argument.

“Well then just pack your bags; listen to your fears and go back home.” Darn, he had called my bluff.

“But I don’t want to experience the shame that accompanies that choice” I said.

“Well you can’t have your cake and eat it too”, he replied. “You can’t ride faster and have no fear and you can’t go home and not be embarrassed and ashamed.”

I said to myself, “Just shut-up, will you? Just shut-up!” But he refused to be silenced. “Choose, you have to make a choice, either you go for it or stop whining and go home.” I never knew myself to be such a pushy pain in the butt. He kept pushing me for a decision.

After wrestling with myself for about an hour I realized that the only way I could get past my fear of the speed required was to come to grips with the possibility of my own injury and possible death. So I said to myself, “Well, okay. If I speed up are you prepared to accept the possibility of a very painful and possibly serious injury?” He pointed out that a lot of the other guys had scars on their knees, scars around their rotator cuffs, scares on their hips and scratches on their arms from accidents and that they were still riding and riding fast. He said, “Heck they even joke about their crashes.”

Oh it was hard to make that decision but I went to bed determined to take the risk the next day. The little voice of anxiety continued to whisper in my ear, “It is not the speed that kills and injures, it’s the impact.” But after a restless night I woke up ready to cast caution to the winds and go for it. There was however, a temporary setback. When I opened my eyes and sat up in bed all hell broke loose in my motel room. Bill Tanner and Kent Remington, two of the friends that came down with me, had captured a scurvy, wild eyed, Mexican alley cat and stuck it in my room. I was asleep at the time and so the cat apparently was undisturbed. When I awoke and sat up the cat went berserk! It leaped at the windows, caught the blind and tore it down and then began doing laps around the room screeching like a cornered bobcat. Some of those laps took him over the top of my bed.

He was shedding fur, toppling furniture and scratching everything his claws could rip. I wisely dove under the covers to escape the frantic ball of fur and claws. I could feel him going across my covers and hear the ripping of the cover. The cat was so dirty and disheveled I just knew he had rabies or some other awful disease. And so it was my misfortune that fear again returned. Not only was I scared but myself was scared as well. We were both huddled under the covers yelling for help.

Finally, Bill and Kent heard the awful commotion and opened the door to see what was happening. The moment the door opened the cat bolted out to freedom. Oh, they thought that was so funny. What kind of warped sense of humor would possess them to do that? The next night I searched for a desert diamond backed rattle snake to put in their room but couldn’t find one.

HOME MADE FUNERALS

I can’t tell you the genesis of this idea but I think this is how it began. My brother-in-law, Jack Ady, had been elected as a member of the legislative assembly in the province of Alberta. That is like a State Senator in the United States. As such, he was required to attend many social functions as well as attend to his political responsibilities. My sister, Darlene, accompanied him on most of the social functions. One evening she found herself sitting at a formal dinner table next to the president of a company that built coffins and sold them to the funeral homes.

Now, for most people that would perhaps occasion a discussion about the health of the business or how they finished the coffins them etc., etc. Not for Darlene. She had a nose for bargains that rivaled that of any of her Jewish friends. Did you know that is why Jews have such large noses? The air is free. Anyway Darlene’s mind immediately became curious about how much the wholesale cost of a coffin was compared to what a funeral home charged. The coffin man told her and she was amazed. What funeral homes charged $5,000 for, the coffin maker charged $450.

Darlene has never passed up a bargain in her life and immediately asked if she could buy two coffins directly from him and by-pass the funeral home. Now the coffin maker was in a tough spot. If a funeral home found out he was wholesaling coffins behind their backs they could refuse to buy from him ever again or file a complaint with the funeral ethics board or whatever. However, he was sitting next to the wife of a politician with whom he needed to garner favor. Darlene stared him in the face until he withered and finally agreed to sell her two coffins if she never ever revealed her source.

Two weeks later two beautiful coffins in plywood containers arrived at Dad and Mom’s ranch and were stored in the front of their garage. Each time they drove in the garage they beheld their mortal packaging for their remains. You might think that a little bizarre but hey, a dollar saved is a dollar saved. Interestingly enough we never thought another thing about it.

When Father died in the auxiliary hospital, Noel and Jack loaded him in the truck and brought him out to the ranch and put him in one of the coffins. Then they took him over to the garage at my cabin, which was just across the road and left him there because it was cold. They didn’t embalm him or even take him to the funeral home.

He died two days before I could leave Calgary and come down to Mt. View for the funeral. I arrived late at night on a Wednesday evening. My cabin had a three-car garage and they put Dad in the one bay that didn’t have any electric light in it. When I drove in, the family went into the house and I got a flashlight to go out and see Dad. Yes, I guess I was a little spooked. I have never felt very comfortable around dead humans and I was more than just a little nervous. As I approached the door into the garage a terrible thought occurred to me. “What if Noel and Jack are going to play a joke on me and one of them is going to be laying in the coffin and when I open the lid they are going to scare me?” You might say “Never, never. They wouldn’t ever stoop so low.” Of course they would and so would I if I had the opportunity.

I crept into the garage with the flashlight shining on the coffin. I said, “I know you’re in there so the joke is on you. My sister told me what you guys were doing so you may as well give it up and get out.”

I waited. Nothing happened. I drew closer and reached out and tapped on the coffin with the flashlight. “Come out, I know you’re in there. You can’t scare me now so just get out. What you are doing is a sick thing.” I waited longer this time. Nothing.

By this time I had worked myself up pretty good and was all for bolting for the door and waiting until morning. In fact I did make it out the door and back into the house. My wife sent me back out.

I slowly lifted the lid of the coffin and thankfully the person in there was Dad. I had a good talk with him, although it was pretty much one sided. The next day we began making arrangements for his funeral. The local funeral undertaker in Cardston got wind of what we were doing, and thinking it was because of the money came out and offered us a discount on the funeral arrangements. It wasn’t about money, but come to think of it, if you remember the first of this story it was about money. We knew a bargain when we saw one.

When we declined the offer of a discounted funeral the director then agree to do it for nothing. It was not because of his good heart but instead, he confessed, because if we did our own funeral other people might start doing their own funerals and then he would be out of business. He begged us not to do it. However, we were having way too much fun. In retrospect, I consider the burying of my parents and the complete arrangement of their funerals as one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. It was marvelous.

When the day of Dad’s funeral arrived the hearse was Noel’s pickup truck. We transported him early to the church and then realized we had no gurney to set him on and wheel him from the viewing room into the chapel. We located, in the media library, the wheeled cart that was used to display and move the TV from the library to the classrooms. We balanced the coffin on the media cart and it worked great.

When we started for the chapel one of the wheels was squeaking terribly so there was a short delay while someone retrieved a can of WD-40 out of their truck. We gave the wheel a good squirt and the problem disappeared. We draped a large doily over the coffin and headed down the aisle to the front of the chapel. The cart was a little hard to steer. I was pushing and Noel was pulling but the cart still kept veering first to the left and then the right. We clipped a couple of elbows that were sticking out from the pews but finally made it to the front of the church and positioned the coffin correctly. The folks in the pews kept looking around for the funeral attendants but none were to be seen.

From there the funeral proceeded perfectly. The music was wonderful, the sermons were encouraging and the spirit was sweet. The service ended and Noel and I again undertook to steer the errant cart down the aisle. The darn wheel started squeaking again so we thought if we sped up it might quit. When we increased the speed the doily shifted on the coffin and hooked under one of the wheels. The wheel whipped it off the coffin so fast that people gasped and thought maybe something had happened and the corpse was moving. We slammed on the brakes to retrieve the doily and the coffin slid forward on the gurney. Fortunately, Noel was in front and stopped it before it flew off onto the floor. Actually, he did it so smoothly I’m not sure anyone noticed. I shoved the gurney forward and fortunately the coffin rebalanced.

We replaced the doily and proceeded to the door with whatever decorum was left. The pallbearers hoisted Dad into the back of the truck and a fight almost broke out amongst the grandkids to see who got to ride in the back of the truck with grandpa. Rather than create a further fuss, we said they could all get in.

So the grandkids were standing up around the coffin and the rest were either sitting on top of the coffin or straddling it like a horse. There was a moment or two when self-consciousness and embarrassment threatened to immobilize all the family adults but the grandkids were having so much fun that it became infectious.

Fortunately, my oldest sister Donna and her husband Bruce were away on a mission for the church or she would have been horrified and mortified; in that order. So the truck that now looked like that picture of the Clinton’s leaving the White House moved to the front of the funeral procession. It proceeded from the church down the road, across the creek and up to the cemetery hill. We had to stop three times because grandkids got bucked off the coffin and fell out of the truck.

Finally we arrived at the graveside. Ross Uibel, the best friend our family ever had, went up with his back hoe and dug the grave. The grandkids jumped off the truck and immediately went over to look in the hole. One kid pushed another kid in and even before the rest of procession arrived we had to pull three kids out of the grave. Then some of the grandkids wanted to see grandpa one last time before he was buried. So Jack got out his electric drill and we unscrewed the coffin lid and lifted it. The grandkids all came over for their one last look. Jack screwed the lid down, and apparently there were three grandkids that had been over playing on another grave that hadn’t gotten to see him and all the other kids had. They started crying so Jack got out his electric drill and popped the coffin open again.

By that time I think my dad was getting a little impatient because I heard a little voice in my ear that sounded a lot like him that said, “You open that casket again and you’re coming in that hole with me.” I immediately took charge and had Jack screw it down again and then we put it in the plywood box it came in and lowered it into the grave. We had a lovely graveside service and the local folks began to disperse and go home. Not the grandkids. You would think there would be some sense of sobriety and quiet. But again not so. They were playing tag, they were singing songs, they were dancing on other graves, they were trying to push other grave stones over and some were throwing rocks at the gophers.

My first inclination was to be critical, but then I realized what I was really seeing. I was seeing death being dealt with in the most natural and healthy way that it could possibly be done. There was no sorrow, there were no regrets, and there was neither great unhappiness nor sadness. Instead it was like a happy send-off to the next life for Father. I’ll bet if he were watching he would have been delighted.

It took quite some time before we were all ready to leave. There were many trips to the grave by the kids, many questions asked to parents and wonderful answers given. I just hope he isn’t mad because we buried him in a cheap coffin and refused to have a funeral home care for his body.

However, I think that given my dad’s propensity to ignore protocol he may even have been delighted with that.

Now, our mother’s funeral was a little different. She died just a few years later, but did so in the summer. Consequently, we had to have her embalmed because we couldn’t keep her cold long enough for the funeral like we did with Dad. Noel and I picked her up from the funeral home under the disapproving and critical eye of the funeral director. Noel had a Chevy Tahoe that was covered in the back so we slid her in there and headed for the ranch.

We got the casket out of storage and took it into Noel’s shop to load her in. When we took the coffin out of the plywood box and opened it up for the transfer, we realized that the coffin manufacturer had put the hinge for the lid on the wrong lid. There was a hold-open device that should have been on the top lid so it would hold the lid open for the viewing. But the hold-open hinge was on the larger lid that covered the body. No problem, just exchange the hinges. Noel handed me an electric drill to back the screws off. I undid the top lid first and when the last screw was taken out the lid of the casket flipped off onto the concrete floor of the shed and split right into two pieces.

There are no words to describe what we felt. We spontaneously put our arms around each other and hopped around in a circle uttering, “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” Except for the moaning, we were completely immobilized. The despair and fear were maximized right to the top. Gregg, Noel’s step son, walked by the shop, stuck his head in, saw the broken lid and said, “Boys, your mother is going to be pissed at you for this”. Don’t you think we didn’t already know that one. Not only was Mother going to be pissed, but so were Darlene and Glenda. Fortunately, Donna was away on another mission or she would have been horrified and mortified and the order wouldn’t have matter.

The feeling of despair finally passed and was replaced with the kind of fear that motivates the next step of problem solving. We shoved Mom back in the Tahoe, slammed the tailgate and Noel took off for the country store to find some glue. I ran to another shop to find a piece of wood that might cover the crack. Noel arrived a few minutes later and must have jostled Mom in the panic run to the store because some of the embalming fluid started leaking down one of her legs. Matters were going from bad to worse in a big hurry. We carefully smeared the fast setting epoxy glue along the cracked joint of the lid. Then on the inside of the lid we overlapped a piece of wood and screwed it into the coffin lid. We carefully wiped any glue off the top of the lid and darkened the crack with brown shoe polish. Then we screwed the hinge into place and sat for five minutes to see if the glue was going to harden and keep the lid together.

We sat down for a moment and realized we were soaked with sweat and still hadn’t dressed for the funeral which was to begin in less than an hour. I’m sure each of us were praying and apologizing to Mother for what had happened. After the five minutes were up we tested the lid and our prayers had been answered. It held. The only problem was the long piece of wood inside the coffin lid that would be exposed when the lid was opened for the viewing. We went up to the house and saw a picture of Mother that was going to be put on a table next to the casket. We grabbed the picture, took it down to the coffin and using some almost invisible finish nails, nailed it over the piece of wood so that when the lid opened the picture would be right there. We thought it was a great solution.

We slipped Mom into her coffin, closed the lid, pushed her in the Tahoe and drove to the house. Noel’s wife, Sandy, had just acquired a new shiny golf trailer for her golf cart. It had chrome rims and was almost brand new. Our sister decided that we should use that for the hearse instead of the back of the Tahoe. Mother had tons of lilac bushes and they were in full bloom. We wheeled the golf cart over to the bushes with the coffin in it and all the grandkids cut lilacs and covered the bottom of the trailer with a layer of lilacs. On the mesh sides they wove more lilacs until it looked like one of the floats in the Rose Parade.

We made it to the church without the lilacs blowing away and wheeled Mom in on the media cart the same as before. We were pretty experience by then. During the service my son, Brad, got a little bored and decided to step outside. To his surprise the lilacs were covered with thousands of honey bees. They were attempting to create a swarm right on the trailer-hearse. Brad slipped back in the church and located a hose and dragged it outside, hooked it up to an outside faucet and drove the bees away spraying them with the high-pressure water. When the funeral ended and we wheeled the coffin outside it looked like there had been a torrential down pour. We looked at the sky but it was clear blue. The only wet part was the trailer and the pavement surrounding it. At the time we had no explanation but, as would often occur if you couldn’t explain something, we just said, “Oh well”. Actually that was a handy explanation for a lot of situations.

So “Oh well”, we loaded her on the soaked lilacs, the grandkids again climbed on the trailer and coffin and we headed for the cemetery. By this time everyone was pretty much familiar with the routine so everything proceeded smoothly. After the graveside service the honeybees had somehow relocated the lilacs and began to collect. One of the grandkids got stung so we decided to call it a day. Darlene and Glenda never found out until much later about the broken and miraculously repaired casket lid. I think families are missing a wonderful opportunity when they have to use a funeral home for a burial. So many people came and asked us about why and how we did our own funerals. Maybe we started a trend. But then again I don’t think very many families have the moxy to attempt such a thing. I have never been to a funeral that resulted in more closure, more peaceful feelings, an easier time with the transition from this life to the next than the time we did our own parents funerals.

CHURCH-GOING SNAKES

When I was very young we attended an old stone church with the chapel on the lower floor and the basketball court on the upper floor. When I was about 10 years old they built a new church and the old one was torn down. Behind the old stone church was a large pile of unused stones left over from the demolition.

Almost all the garter snakes in the whole country seemed to winter in that pile of rocks. When spring came they started coming out of hibernation and there were snakes everywhere. When garter snakes have babies they are born live and when they are threatened the mother opens her mouth and they all slither down her throat. I’ll bet you didn’t know that if you grab the mother by the tail and swing her around your head that the centrifugal force causes her to spit little snakes in every direction. Well now you do know that. It is true.

Between Sunday School and Priesthood Meeting we young boys would go out and catch the snakes by the tails and chase all the girls with them. There was much screaming and running that took place. If the truth were known, we hated touching the snakes as well but sometimes a boy’s got to do what boy’s got to do. We’d pick them up and chased the girls. If you didn’t dare pick up a snake you were considered a real wimp.

It became apparent that our activities were viewed by the brethren as an inappropriate Sabbath activity because we became the subject of the Bishop’s meeting where Alf Nielsen was given the responsibility to put an end to the sport.

Jack Thompson had a particularly large mother snake with little ones inside and was chasing me at full speed toward the end of the church. I had almost rounded the corner when Alf stepped around and opened his mouth to holler “HEY!” I suspect there were more words intended besides hey, like, “Hey, you kids have got to stop that,” or something like that. However, all the happened was “HEY!” I’m not sure he completed even that word. Jack could see that I was going to beat him around the corner, so he swung the snake with all his force at my head. He overshot me and I looked up at Alf and saw that he had opened his mouth to holler. Just then the snake went past my head and hit him sideways right in the open mouth. He instinctively clamped his teeth down on the snake and it wrapped itself around his head and started spitting babies down his suit.

I can only tell you that I was very surprised and disappointed at the language that next came out of Alf ’s mouth. He first of all had to spit the snake’s body out of his mouth, then he had to spit and gag to get the taste out, next he vomited, who knows why, and then he began to cuss. There were at least seven new swear words that the whole junior Sunday School learned that day. They were ones I had never heard before and they were instantly committed to memory for later use.

Alf finally got control of himself and instead of returning and reporting to the bishop, jumped in his pickup and headed home. Alf could never take any ribbing about what happened or he would punch the other person. Personally I thought that if it wasn’t funny at least it was very entertaining.

SHEARING SHEEP

I would gladly go on record to say that shearing sheep is the hardest job in the whole world. I have personally seen sheep shearers drink more than five gallons of water in one day and sweat it all out and still lose weight. There were bragging stories about how many sheep someone could shear in one day. I believe Luell Perrett held the record and 212.

Here is how sheep were sheared. First of all they were penned with the side of the pen adjacent to the sheep shearing being only a wool sack on a rope. This fooled the sheep into thinking it was a real fence, when in fact you could reach in under the sack and grab a sheep by the leg and drag it out. Next you had to upend the sheep and sit it on its bum. Then the shearer would step in and begin shearing. The terribly dangerous part was the shearing machine itself. It was an electric motor secured to a plank located near the head of the shearer. There was a belt from the electric motor and a pulley that turned a steel shaft that went down and hooked on to the shearing head or handle. In between this were two joints with little gears. This allowed for a movable swinging arm so the shearing head could be moved in any direction. The shear head itself consisted of what looked like a very large clipper set. The difference being that the clipper head that moved back and forth could cut your fingers off if they got in the way. Paul Dee Payne cut all his metacarpals on one hand and was in a cast for six months. There were lots of other horror stories about the dangers of the clipper head that had all of us very nervous about shearing.

The shearer would sit the sheep on its butt, lift its chin up and begin cutting wool right from the chin, down the brisket, over the stomach and down to where the wool ended at her udder. The clippers were buried in the wool and it was impossible to see them. They had to be absolutely flat against the skin or they would cut just like a knife. I don’t know if I ever saw a sheep that didn’t have at least a little blood on her after being of shearing.

Then Noel or I would have to gather the sheared fleece of wool, tie it into a bundle and throw it in a pile. After shearing was finished a huge wool sack would then be suspended from a tower so that it hung down in midair. Then the fleeces had to be thrown into the bag. First off the bag had to be wet. When a few fleeces were thrown in, someone had to drop down in the bag and as the fleeces were thrown in that person had to tromp the fleeces down so more fleeces would fit in the sack. With the sack being wet, the fleeces would stick when they were tromped. The fleeces would fall down on the person’s head and then have to be pushed down so they could be stomped tight.

That might not sound so bad but let me add another little factor to the equation. The fleeces were often full of sheep ticks that would get in your hair, your ears and every other orifice or crease they could find. Before long they would begin burrowing into your skin and start sucking your blood.

Now, if that doesn’t give you the heebee-jeebees… To have ticks crawling on you just about drove us crazy. When we finished stomping the wool and lifting the fleeces we would strip off all our clothes and leap into the creek. Even so it was inevitable that we would miss some of the ticks and days later find them bloated with our blood in undiscovered places. You couldn’t just pull them out because their heads would pull off and stay in your body and then there was a risk of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Even though we never contracted the fever we were always terrified we would and that we could die.

The trick was to get the tick to voluntarily quit sucking, pull back his head and back out. No amount of verbal persuasion worked. This was the standard procedure. You would heat a needle until it was red hot. Then you would carefully stick the tick in the rear end. In no time at all the tick would pull out his fangs and back out.

Sometimes we would collect a can full of ticks and then put them in a fire and enjoy watching them explode. Little kids in my town were very hard on any creature that frightened them. Killing and torturing were often used against the enemy.

My oldest sister was terrified of sheep ticks and wouldn’t go anywhere near the shearing operation. At night we noticed that Donna would often smear her face with Ponds Cold Cream, leave it on for about a half hour while walking around the house with her face all white so the cold cream could working it’s magic on her face. We never really knew what it was for. Noel and I just figured it was one of those girl things.

Once, when we had collected a can of ticks, we had this great idea of putting them in Donna’s Cold Cream Jar. We sneaked into her bedroom and poured about twenty ticks into the cold cream and then stirred them around until they were out of sight in the cold cream. The consistency of the cold cream prevented the ticks from moving back to the surface.

Noel and I, again, forgot about what we had done because other things came up that day that took our attention elsewhere. Sometime into the evening Donna went hysterical. She flung the bathroom door open and came running out into the kitchen in her bathrobe with cold cream all over her face, screaming and clawing at her face. We were all stunned and didn’t know what to do because we had no idea what was going on. Somewhere in the screaming we though we heard “sheep tick” and instantly we knew we were in trouble. Donna always made such a big deal out of little stuff. Mother grabbed a towel and leaped to her feet and began to clean Donna’s face, which was by now showing signs of blood because of all the scratching she was doing to her face. Meanwhile father reached around the table and blocked our retreat until he found out what had happened. Why he instantly suspected our involvement was a mystery to us.

Well, when things settled down we learned what apparently had happened. Donna smeared the cold cream on her face and while she was spreading it around she felt some little bumps. So she went to the mirror and lo and behold here whole face was covered with little moving bumps. I guess the ticks were still alive and when smeared on her face began swimming through the cold cream. I think it was somewhere around that time that the screaming and hysteria commenced and Donna lost it. Noel and I spent another restless night in the chicken coop. Where was their sense of humor?

WEINER PIGS

The first summer that Noel & I spent at the ranch after we were married, we decided that we would each get a little pig and raise it through the summer and then kill it and freeze it when we went back to university. We figured we could just turn them loose in the tree strip and feed them now and again and let them forage for themselves and it wouldn’t cost us much.

We went out to Johnny Walburger’s because he raised pigs. He had the sows separated in his shed from the little baby pigs. They were called wiener pigs, but for what reason I don’t know. They had grown large enough that it was all one guy could do to lift and hold one. The mothers were mad and squealing because they were separated from the babies. The babies were scared and squealing because they wanted to be back with their mothers. Noel and I climbed in the pen with the [little pigs and the mothers kept trying to get at us.

Now it is important to know that being bitten by a pig is worse than getting a bite from a lion. Their jaws are so strong they can bite your leg or arm right off. We knew all this going in and so our anxieties were already pretty high. The mothers could see us through the panel trying to catch their babies and they wished with all their hearts to get through the panel and chomp us to death. Just as we climbed over the panel Johnny said, “See that door in the corner boys?” We looked and there was a small door with a panel across it and some open space above the panel. “If I holler it will mean the sows have broken down the panel so run for your lives and climb over the panel and out the door,” he warned.

We had to herd the little pigs into the corner where the door was and then, when they were bunched tight and couldn’t scatter so fast, we were going to rush in and each of us grab one by the hind leg. I lagged a little behind Noel while we were herding the wieners and then slowly angled over behind him so he couldn’t see me. Then I reached up and grabbed him by the thigh and let out a big snort. Well he was airborne. He streaked for the opening above the panel, touching down now and then on the backs of the little pigs. I don’t believe his feet ever touched the ground. Instead of climbing over the panel he dove over the panel clearing it by at least a foot. Since he dove it should be clear that he didn’t land on his feet.

Johnny had been regularly cleaning his pig pens and throwing all the poop out the door for later removal by his tractor. When Noel sprang over the panel he landed face and chest down in the piles of pig poop that were still soft and gushy. Needless to say, I later had to catch both little pigs myself. Noel refused to go back in the shed. He was far too stinky and dirty to ride home in the cab of the truck so he and the two pigs sat in the back of the truck all the way back to the ranch. By the time we got there even the pigs were glad to get away from his smell. For a week or two we all called him “Weiner”.

STRAWBERRY RAINBOWS

When I was going to University in Utah, my brother-in-law, Larry Snyder, came to visit. He wanted to go camping and so we hooked a trailer on the back of my Volkswagen van, loaded all our camping gear and Larry, four other guys and I headed for the mountains. We went over the Highline Trail and down toward Strawberry Reservoir. I had never been there before but kind of knew the directions. As we came down off the Skyline Trail we came upon a very nice looking river. There were deep holes and long slow sections of very attractive looking water. After fishing and hunting as many years as I had, you begin to know what habitat is inviting to game animals and what kind of water attracts fish. This water looked very promising. As we were driving past one particular stretch of river I saw a trout of monstrous proportions leap out of the water. If there had been pavement instead of dirt there would have be a very large squeal of burning rubber. The van stopped so fast that the trailer almost whipped sideways. “Out everybody, get your fishing poles. We’re going to try this river.”

Almost with every cast we were dragging in huge, fat rainbow trout. We emptied all our food out of the coolers and began to fill them with fish. They were so big that the heads and tails were sticking out both ends of the coolers. We couldn’t believe our good luck. I did, however, note that a couple of the big rainbows that I picked up by the stomach spit a bunch of red eggs out their backside. “Hmmm,” I said to myself. “I wonder if these fish are spawning?” However, I quickly got distracted when I hooked another one. We finally had all the freezers full of fish and some extras besides. From up the road a truck came down toward us and stopped.

“Hey, don’t you guys know that the season isn’t open yet and there is no fishing here anyways because this is where all the brood trout from Strawberry Reservoir come to spawn?” All the coolers were located in the trees where he couldn’t see them.

“Gosh no, we didn’t know that. Thanks for letting us know. We were just getting ready to fish,” I shouted back.

Just then, around the bend in the creek came one of the guys with about four big trout hanging on a rope and hollering, “Here put these in the cooler I’ve got five more on the bank.”

“I’m calling the game warden and he is going to put your asses in jail,” yelled the guy in the truck as he took off with dust flying.

Well, that created just a little bit of anxiety for us. My brother-in-law, who had probably never even jay walked in his life, could clearly see some time in prison and panicked. He wanted to throw all the fish back in the river (destroy the evidence) and get back on the highway and hide for three days in Salt Lake City. He obviously had no experience in such wilderness matters. We loaded all the fish into the trailer and covered them with tarps. Then Larry and I headed back the way we had come and the guys on the motorcycles proceeded on down the dirt road.

Larry was so tense he couldn’t even talk as we drove back to the highway. Once on the highway we carefully stayed under the speed limit and arrived back home safely. We cleaned all of the trout and took them over and froze them in a locker that we had rented from Ford’s Frozen Lockers. The boys on the motorcycles got stopped for questioning by the game warden as they were driving down the road. Of course they knew nothing. They didn’t have any fishing tackle with them and they had washed their hands really well. They continued down the road and made a loop back and arrived home a few hours later.

Larry quit shaking later on that evening. He never asked to go camping with us again, but I can still see the look on his face when he hooked that first big rainbow and it blew out of the water. Some things include a little risk.

THE PILLING WILDFIRE

Shortly after moving to Idaho the following occurred and the record was kept in a letter home to my brother. In Canada he and I were forever starting fires in the spring to burn old grass and invariably they would get away from us and we’d panic until we got them put out and under control.

Even though I thought the experience would shame me to my neighbors, exactly the opposite happened. Because I had built my home up on the mountain they thought I was a snob but after burning down the valley they accepted me as being more like them. I learned later that many of them had also started fires so I became one of the boys.

Dear Noel,

Remember how often we would get a fire started burning grass and the next thing, the wind would come up and we had a prairie fire on our hands. Well it got a little out of hand this time and you weren’t here to help out.

The other day we had a special visit to our house. There were two helicopters, one spotter plane, and two fire retardant air planes. Twenty- Two (22) wild fire trucks and tankers, 1 bull dozer, three tractors with dozer blades, 13 pickup trucks and 37 fire fighters in bright yellow flame retardant suits. I’ll bet you can’t guess the reason for their special visit. I’ll give you a hint and see if you can sleuth the truth. Starting from the fire pit/burning barrel just behind the trees on the east of the house it is black from the bottom of the valley to the top of the ridge about as far back as you can see. Another hint! There is no longer any sage brush, grass, flowers, mice, bunnies, gophers, stink bugs, skunks, meadow larks, partridges, badgers, rattle snakes, bull snakes or any other creepy crawling things. Have you guessed yet?

Half of the hill sides are red from flame retardant. Well I can’t keep you in suspense any longer. Now there is no absolute proof that this is what happened but this is the current hypothesis that is receiving wide support. About 7:30 am this morning I took a paste board box out to burn in the fire pit. I watched it burn and part of it fell out into the grass. The grass was quite dry and started burning. I whacked it with a shovel and even went and got the hose and sprayed some water on it. Then I went back to working around the yard etc., etc. About noon Janice and I got on the motorcycle to drive to town for some groceries. Jordan just arrived as we were leaving. We stopped and spend a little time with him and then he began to unpack his stuff and rearrange his room. Janice & I continued on to Burley. About two hours later we were coming home and I noticed an inordinate amount of smoke coming from the east. I wondered why someone would be burning anything because the wind had come up and was quite brisk. As I rounded a corner and looked up on the Mountain to my surprise and horror, there was a black line extended directly east (down wind) from our house. It went clear to the top of the ridge and down to the bottom.

I instantly knew what had happened. Jordan had taken up smoking while at BYU and was out smoking behind the house and started a grass fire. We rushed on home (another 6 miles) and were met at our road by neighbors and trucks and equipment and airplanes etc., etc. I was just sick. Jordan smoking!! However, when we got to the house there was a different story. Jordan says as he was unpacking the wind had come up and out near the burn barrel he heard flames crackling. He turned the hose on and rushed out to spray it but the hose needed to be pulled out of the hose retractor and while he was pulling it out the fire rushed up the hillside and out of reach of the hose. (A likely story) He ran to the phone and called 911 and some neighbors instantly showed up and they kept the fire from burning west and scorching my garden or trees, or house etc., etc. Jordan vehemently denies smoking and starting the fire but what do you think? I know the fire track goes right to the burn barrel but that is only circumstantial evidence. He could have been standing by the barrel when he was smoking. I searched for evidence of cigarettes but as yet have found none.

If I have to pay for all the costs I will be contacting each of you personally for huge monies. You turn first to your family right? The fire inspector was here to interrogate me and get a statement. I stuck to the Jordan smoking theory. The fire marshal was reluctant to believe it and kept going back to the blackened trail of destruction that led to the burn barrel. I threw Jordan to the ground right in front of the fire marshal and tried to beat a confession out of him but to no avail. He stuck to his story about the negligence of his father. I have no son. The BLM said that when it snowed they would come with helicopters and re-seed all the blackened acres, but in the meantime we now have more than just brown up the canyon. It is now brown and black. They later wanted me to pay $24,000 dollars in reparations.

The hard part is that all my neighbors will now think I am a dumbcoff. I think maybe I won’t go to church for a few months. My neighbor who has the dairy that I fought to have disallowed was right here with his bull dozer cutting a blocking path for the fire. What am I to do about that? Now I am going to have to humble myself and go and thank him. Ohhhhh, that is going to be really hard. He and I have had some pretty good tussles. But disgression is the better part of valor and so that job is mine to do. I’ll be the laughing stock and the butt of jokes from years in this community. These good folks here never forget. If Jordan had owned up to the smoking, then it wouldn’t fall so heavy on me. I could have blamed it on my darn kids. But no, I am going to have to wear it. Oh it will be a heavy thing to bear. Already I can imagine the jokes and talk that is going to be going around behind my back or even worse right to my face. It will include elements like, “city folks”, that’s what you get when you live up on the mountain”, “city people should stay in the city”, “sometimes there is just no substitute for common sense”. “Darn guy, he could have burned up the whole mountain.” Oh I will rue the day that this happened. You can see it from anywhere in the valley. Already sight seers are driving up around my house. I think I will go out and set up a lemonade stand and charge admission for 4-wheel tours. Then as each person came I could tell them about Jordan and the evils and dangers of smoking and that version would get around the community instead of the story about the stupid city person leaving a fire unattended. I’ll bet it won’t be long until I have to put my house up for sale and move. I’ll have to wait until next spring until the hills green up or it won’t sell. What does the word pyromaniac mean? I must not be spelling it correctly because I can’t find it in the dictionary. The fire inspector said something about it. I think it is a word of sympathy for fathers whose sons cause damage because they smoke.

I hope you are feeling better. Don’t forget that I love you. It was so nice to visit you. We need to go on another horse trip into Lineham.

Love you, Kent

OUR FATED TRIP TO BRANSON, MISSOURI

My sister Darlene got talked into taking a trip to Branson, Missouri to enjoy pre-Christmas entertainment. She & Jack didn’t want to go alone so talked Janice & I into accompanying them. We were to fly and meet them somewhere close and then continue the tour in a coach. Now we had never been on a tour before. Always I had avoided them because I hate being stuck in a group and my personal space is pretty big so I never wanted to be in a vehicle with people I didn’t know and not be the driver. However, Darlene is pretty persuasive. Remember, she talked a coffin maker out of two coffins against his wishes. So we consented.

The trouble began as soon as we arrived at the airport and proceeded to the South West Airlines check-in. There were old people as far as the eye could see. They were discussing in rather loud voices the medications they were taking and whether or not anyone had diarrhea as a side effect. They all had their brochures out and were talking about whether or not they had to check-in, where were their boarding passes, how many pieces of luggage, was their luggage too heavy, what did they forget etc., etc. I immediately started having a panic attack. It looked like we were stuck with a group of people whose average age must have been at least 80. They were laughing and giggling at the most inane things like a bunch of kindergarten kids. That comparison was to be confirmed later again and again. I hoisted my luggage and headed for the exit. Janice grabbed me and held me until the panic subsided somewhat. I was terrified. How could I spend a week with these old people? Janice reminded me that my hair was as grey as some of theirs but I also pointed out to her that there were some other important differences. I still had all my teeth, I wasn’t drooling at the mouth, I didn’t shake when I moved, I at least had some hair, I didn’t have hearing aids, I didn’t talk loudly so people half way across the concourse could hear me since I wasn’t wearing hearing aids, I didn’t spend twenty minutes looking for the bathroom and another twenty minutes to remember why I needed a bathroom. I thought those were pretty significant differences.

We finally checked our luggage and proceeded to the screening area and there was a huge bottle-neck. Those old folks couldn’t understand the instructions to remove all items with metal and their shoes as well. They kept trying to go through the gate and the alarm would go off so they would send them back again to remove all the metal items. They would only remove one at a time and so it would beep again when they tried to clear. Back and forth, back and forth. I was going nuts. It looked like the writing on the wall for the rest of the trip. Again I felt another anxiety attack coming on. Shortly thereafter it progressed to an anxiety depression. I was just sick at having to be lumped with this bunch and depressed because there was no way out.

When it came time to line up in “A” and “B” rows to board the plane all the old geezers panicked. They couldn’t figure out how to do it. Even kindergarten kids could have figured it out. I tried to explain to one anxious old couple but they still couldn’t get it. Finally, I told them to wait until everyone else got on the plane and there was nobody in front of them and then it would be their turn. They seemed relieved at that and I noticed they were the last ones on the plane. They walked into the plane looking like deer in the head lights. They had never flown before.

During the flight they kept getting up and down checking their luggage in the overhead bins to see if they had forgotten anything. Like they could have done anything about it now? They kept dropping their bags and the stewardesses kept having to re-seat them and stow their dropped luggage back in the over-head bins. They just couldn’t settle down. There was constant commotion. Coming in over the mountains to Denver we ran into a little turbulence and immediately there-after a long line formed for the bathroom even though the flight attendants said they couldn’t be out of their seats because of the fasten seat belt sign was on. They were having none of it. They were scared by the turbulence and they needed a bathroom. The flight attendants finally decided the alternative was worse and just let them leave their seat regardless of the seat belt sign. The last one barely made it to their seat before touch-down.

When we arrived in Denver there was a three hour layover. It took all of that time for them to figure out the new gate for departure. They checked and double checked and triple checked with every airport attendant they could find. They checked and triple checked the arrival and departure schedule and then argued about whether the plane would be there on time. They seemed terrified that they were going to miss their connection and be marooned in Denver. I kept as much distance as I could from them. I was beginning to develop an irrational or maybe not so irrational fear that in a few more years I may be acting the same way. Please family, if you see me being this way, just shoot me or put me away somewhere, but please put me out of my misery or at least don’t let me out in public.

After another chaotic lining-up spectacle we departed for Kansas City. I was scrunched down in a window seat near the back trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. I feared being numbered amongst the lunatic fringe. They settled down a little and the flight ended without further incident. Most of them fell asleep, I guess because it was their nap time, but oh, the racket! The snoring, the coughing and the hacking resulted in the co-pilot making three separate trips back to see if an engine had come loose. Thank heavens for noisecanceling headphones. I put mine on, cranked the volume up on my I-Pod and was almost able to shut out the dissonant sounds emanating from their noses and mouths. The stewardess were busy hurrying up and down the aisles wiping the saliva and drool from the upturned snoring faces. I don’t mind telling you it was the most unnerving flight of my life. When they came around with the in-flight snack, my appetite had blown off about 200 miles earlier. I toyed with the idea of dropping some peanuts in their open snoring mounts just to see what would happen but Janice stopped me. Then when they realized how meager the snack was they remembered that they had packed a lunch in their luggage. Then the luggage bins were opened and luggage dropped and people bumping into each other and lunches being extracted and oh my goodness what confusion. I was surprised we even made it to Kansas City without losing some of them.

Oh I forgot something. Before we got on the plane in Salt Lake City we had a tour guide that was at least as old as any of the tourists. She was trying to give instructions. I know she was a pre-school teacher in her former life because that is exactly how she talked to us. Everything was simple and had to be repealed 20 different times in 20 different ways. Even so, some of them still asked questions that she had just got through explaining. She told us that after we got off the plane in Kansas City we were to get our luggage from the baggage claim and then some of us were to proceed to the red bus and the others were to proceed to the green bus. You won’t believe this but one old girl asked, “how will we know which is the red bus and which is the green bus?” Even though I snorted in derision we later realized she had asked a good question. Both buses were green but one of the green buses had a sign in the window that said “Red Bus”. You can only imagine what trouble that caused us.

When we got down to the baggage claim the luggage was spewing out a spout and onto the moving slide. The old boys would think they saw their bag and reach to grab the handle but then because the piece of luggage was heavy they would be jerked off their feet and onto the moving carousel. After 5 or 6 of them got dragged around the circle none of the other brethren would try. So their wives stepped forward to take over, but after 2 or 3 of them took the same tumble with more embarrassing results the retrieval operation ceased. I held back hoping this might be a natural selection elimination but Janice stepped forward and began to take every piece of luggage off the carousel and set it out where the old folks could check it out without getting ripped off their feet. The guilt finally got to me so I went over and helped her until every piece of luggage was lifted off the carousel. But they still had difficulty identifying their piece of luggage. In order to make their luggage they had tied colorful ribbons around their handles. However by this time they had forgotten what color was theirs so confusion again reigned supreme. Finally one old gal got out a magnifying glass and they passed it around until everyone got their own luggage.

Then we all trundled out to the green bus with the red sign and the green bus without a sign and the drivers loaded our bags into a compartment under the bus. We then boarded the bus to sit in our assigned seats. I guess choosing our own seat would have been too confusing. After we were seated we were told that we had another 4 hour bus ride to Branson. We spent more time on the bus than on the plane. It took us 13 hours of travel time. I could have flown from Nome, Alaska to Florida in less time.

We were instructed by the tour guide that she was going to hand a voodoo-looking doll on the right side of the bus and that meant that the row behind the doll was supposed to exit from the bus first and then the other row thereafter. Every other day she would switch the doll so each row got a first turn. Like who cares? It doesn’t matter who gets off first. They were lucky just to get off the bus at all. Then she told us that every day we were to move forward three seats so everyone would have a chance to sit in different seats. How simple did she think we were? Even so, 20 or 30 people asked for clarification. Sheesh!

As we started down the road I finally realized what sheep feel like in those livestock transports. I felt just like one of them. Periodically I would look at the people across the aisle and say, “bah.” They would give me a funny look like I had lost my mind. However, I continued every few miles to say, “bah,” until one old guy looked at me and said, “I was raised on a sheep ranch, I know exactly where you are coming from.” So he started say bah too and pretty soon we had a whole chorus.

Oh I forgot one more indignity. Just before the bus left, the driver got up and said that there was a bathroom in the back of the bus but we could only go #1 but not #2. (Kindergarten?) They told us if we needed to go #2 that we were to notify him and he would find a place to pull off the road and find a bathroom. I resisted the temptation part way down the road to leap to my feet and should: “NUMBER 2, NUMBER2, QUICK, and I CAN’T WAIT!” But Janice wouldn’t let me.

Two hours into the trip we were informed that one person on board was a Broadway singer and had entertained in many famous places, none of which I had ever heard. People from Utah think that the universe rotates around them and that the rest of the world should be aware of their every thought and behavior. Anyway the guy gets up on the bus and informs us that he isn’t comfortable using the microphone and that he will sing without it. Now the bus is nosy, it is as long as a football field and he is going to sing without the microphone. He put some music on the PA system, cranks up the volume and begins to move his lips. I think he must be a mime because we can’t hear a thing. Since I can’t read lips I quickly lost interest and put on my noise-canceling head phones. He got quiet offended and sat down. I learned later he wasn’t a mime. I noticed many of the men in the back of the bus cranking up their hearing aids, so I wasn’t the only one not hearing.

About this time a guy across the aisle was talking about something called body cleansing. He leaned over to me and asked me if I had ever examined my stool. I said, “No mostly I just sit on it without even looking at it.” He gave me a strange look and didn’t bother pursuing the conversation further. What a putz. Imagine opening a conversation with a stranger with that kind of question. He is lucky he didn’t get punched in the mouth. I thought about asking him if his enlarged prostrate caused him to pee on his shoes. Again Janice contained me.

The driver informed us that half way to Branson we were going to stop to visit a cheese factory. I got so excited I could hardly wait. Wow a real cheese factory! I kept looking out the window hoping it was around the next corner. I wish I had the microphone so I could say over and over again, “are we there yet?” Really I was about excited as I get when I see a fence post.

True to his word, we finally arrived at the cheese factory. By that time my anticipation had almost exhausted me. Yah right! After about twenty minutes everyone was able to exit the bus. A line immediately formed at both bathrooms. I moseyed further back in the store and found a bathroom that nobody else knew about. I didn’t tell anyone about it except Janice, so it was our little secret. The cheese factory wasn’t a factory at all. It was just a cheese store outlet. How cheesy was that? However, there were shelves and shelves of different varieties of cheese. There were little containers with samples and toothpicks nearby to skewer the samples and taste them for free. As soon as the bathroom line ended there began a stabbing fest. Those toothpicks were so busy you would have thought we were a troop of Ethiopian refugees that hadn’t eaten for weeks. They wore out four sets of toothpicks and had to keep returning for replacements. I reached out to sample a garlic cheese piece and got stabbed in the back of my hand by four people. I backed off and let the feeding frenzy continue without me. I believe one or two people and Janice was one of them, actually bought something. For the rest of the people it was just a stop for some free cheese. When we pulled out, the store owner and all the staff came out in the parking lot to see us off. I noticed that as we pulled out onto the road they were very delighted and relieved to see us gone.

Finally we arrived in Branson. When we pulled up to our motel it somehow changed from the brochures into a low profile motel located away from everything important. It was a fair jog to the breakfast spot, the swimming pool and the exercise room. Then I realized that their probably wasn’t going to be a big demand for the swimming pool or the exercise room. We were then transported to the Lone Star Restaurant for dinner. That restaurant nationally is supposed to be a pretty good restaurant so my spirits picked up a bit. It was short lived. I realized it was the Lone Star Steakhouse that was rated.

Not so here. Instead of seating us in regular seating they trooped us into a back room that was so cold the icicles were handing inside. We weren’t allowed a regular menu and instead were give a typed sheet with three entrée options: ribs, chicken, or steak. The salad consisted of lettuce along with lettuce topped with more lettuce. No cucumbers, no peppers, no tomatoes just lettuce. When the steaks came they were a little smaller than a dollar hamburger from MacDonald’s and about the same thickness. However, the Macdonald hamburger is much more tender. These steaks were tougher than boiled owl. Most of the folks sent their steaks back to be pureed. Then it was into the bus and back to the motel.

That evening Jack & Darlene finally arrived along with friends Lloyd and Gerry Newton.

They helped make the trip more enjoyable or at least endurable. Lloyd had lots of good stories and entertained us the whole trip. (Why does Lloyd have two L’s in it?) I also noticed that they are getting a little older too. Fortunately they didn’t exhibit many of the afore-mentioned behaviors of the rest of the group.

Breakfast was included in the tour package, but even so the folks got up early and padded over to the breakfast location afraid that if they didn’t get first there wouldn’t be enough.

At breakfast one old guy leaned over to me and asked me if I heard about the one legged waitress that worked and IHOP. There were black cats hanging all around the eating place which was a bit discouraging seeing as our luck was already pretty bad. The beds were harder than concrete and the pillows were made from the left over concrete when they were pouring the mattresses.

After breakfast we boarded the coach to go to the first show. Of course everyone had forgotten the seat change directions so mass confusion reigned before everyone found their correct seat. Welcome to kindergarten. I finally realized what Branson is: it is a huge number of theaters where live entertainment happens. It is like Las Vegas without the smut. All the shows are for families and old people. Actually I wished my grandchildren could have seen the shows. The first one we saw was the Lowe Family, originally from Utah. Things started looking up. Wow! They were unbelievable: sing, dance, play a multitude on instruments. It was wonderful and not only entertaining but family supportive and promotive. I don’t think there is such a word as ‘promotive’ but I just created it and pronounced it ‘good’.

Then it was off to lunch. We had to buy that ourselves then we had some time to kill so we went for a scenic tour of Branson. Much of the scenic tour was spent having bathroom breaks and car sickness interludes. It wasn’t so beautiful because the trees had lost all their leaves but there were beautiful hotels and theaters and a lake with good fly fishing for trout. There was a large fish hatchery that we drove past so fast all I saw was the sign. Actually it is a marvelous place with wonderful entertainment.

The IMAX theater was next on our agenda. We saw a film on the Ozarks. I found a great snack to take on the coach; beef jerky. What makes it great is that you don’t have to share it with anyone because the old gummers can’t chew it. Dinner was at the Grand Country Buffet. They said that in our tour package it didn’t include a soda. When I got my meal I asked the waitress for one. “Sorry” she said, “a soda isn’t included in the tour package.” I said, “Okay, I’ll pay for it, just get me a soda. “Sorry, I can’t do that because your meal is prepaid. I can’t add anything to it.” “Listen Miss whatever your name is, how about I just leave you an extra amount as a tip, then I get my soda and you get a little money.” “I’m sorry sir but the tip is already included in the tour package.” “I know that,” I said, “but this way the money could go directly into your pocket.” Well the Ozark lamp finally turned on in her head and I finally got a soda.

We then walked around a mall and toured some more. One thing I will say for these old farts, they have a lot of stamina. I was worn out and they looked, …well now that I think about it I think they slept through a lot of the day’s activities and that maybe is why they could last. We went to the New Shanghai Circus with Chinese acrobats. The performers looked pretty young and I suspected that they were under age. I figured the Chinese Communists took these little kids from their families and coerced them into a forced labor of sorts. I’ll bet they work them day and night, much like a slave labor camp, don’t let them go home and visit their parents and then when they are good enough they ship them over to perform in Branson and the Chinese government takes all the money they make and use it to buy guns and missiles. The people introducing the show told us that all of the kids were between the ages of 14 and 24 and they had been cleared by U.S. and Chinese officials. I didn’t believe that for a moment and after the show the participants were all standing in the lobby to greet us. I listened to the people in front of me asking their ages because they didn’t look a day over 10 years old. Each of them responded saying, “I am 14.” It sounded way to pat an answer to me, so when I walked down the line I said, “What is the color of your hair.” “I am 14.” I asked another kid if the Chinese were ever going to attack the U.S. Answer? “I am 14.” So I leave it up to you.

I think my suspicions were well grounded.

There is a lot more to this story but I am getting tired or writing. To make a long story short, when we finally arrived back after midnight in Salt Lake City we saw that there had been a heavy snow storm. We had left our car in an off site parking lot and I called the shuttle service as soon as we landed to send a bus to take us to the parking lot. I thought I would get a jump on the old guys, but it was not to be. They packed the shuttle full of folks and luggage which took 25 minutes just to load. Then we drove to the parking lot at which point the shuttle driver asked for their tags that told them where their cars were parked. There was a dead silence. Then they started asking each other if they had tags. They had no tags. All the cars were covered with snow and all looked alike. One old guy even asked his wife if she was sure they had even left their car in this lot. Oh my goodness. What followed next was a hunting expedition. When we finally arrived at our car (we had our tag) it took us ten minutes just to get our stuff off the shuttle. There were still eight couples on the shuttle who had no idea where their cars were. I would like to have stayed and helped but we had a three hour drive ahead of us. So in their hour of need I deserted them and left the shuttle driver with the problem. I must admit I finished the trip with a real affection for the old folks that came on the tour. I learned better how to be of service to them and I concluded that it was really important that somehow I kick the bucket before I get to that time of my life.

AFTERWORD

So now I am at the end of my story telling. I have lots more stories but I’m sick of trying to organize them into a book. Besides I much prefer telling a story than trying to write one. Maybe sometime later I will write a sequel, but I anticipate that will probably not happen. I would like to write a book of stories about my grandchildren sometime. Last week I was going to Las Vegas with my brother and his wife. Josh (age 13) asked me why I was going to Vegas. I said, “to gamble and chase women.”

His immediate reply was “if you do grandpa you will come home broke and you’ll get slapped.”

Maybe I’ll start writing down all those wonderful things they say and compile them into a book. I hope when my grandchildren read the stories in this book that they will realize that I grew up in a time and place that is very different than their reality. They may have a hard time understanding why someone would do the things that we did. It was different back then. I hope they don’t decide to follow any of my example. I know that some of my stories have already had negative repercussions on some of my kids. I told Jordan about a time on Halloween when we would find some fresh cow manure and put it in a paper bag and then set in on someone’s doorstep and light it on fire and ring the doorbell. The home owner would rush out see the burning bag and stomp it out with his foot. Of course then his foot was all covered with cow manure. Big Joke! Well when Jordan was thirteen, he and his friends decided to do the same thing on Halloween in Calgary. Of course there was no fresh cow manure in Calgary so the fresh manure came from one of the boys.

Then went down the street from a friend’s house, put the paper bag on the step, lit it on fire and away they ran.

Well the home owner called the fire engine and the police. There was fresh snow on the ground and the policeman tracked the culprits right to the door of the house where they had fled. What worked in Mountain View surely didn’t work in Calgary.

Back then, children had so much more latitude to create and explore. There was so much more understanding and acceptance of children’s behaviors by adults and by the community. Things that in today’s world would be viewed as serious and predictive of adult deviancy were viewed back then as just being rambunctious.

Thank heaven I grew up in the time and place and space that I did. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had any stories to tell. I apologize if any of my stories are offensive. They are not meant to be. It’s just what happened.

So I issue this disclaimer. None of the things that you read in this book are to be attempted by anyone who reads them. Results can be dangerous.

DEDICATION

My daughter informed me that it is customary to dedicate your book to someone or something. I thought and thought to whom I could dedicate this book but everyone I considered as a possibility I think might be offended. I don’t think this is the kind of book that anyone would appreciate being in anyway connected.

In fact, I think that some of the people referenced in the book might be offended and concerned that I used their real name. Even members of my own family might be upset with the contents of the book. So rather than dedicate the book to anyone in particular, I think instead I will just apologize to anyone who may have become offended or upset.

It’s just the way it happened. Hopefully, all folks referenced are too old to care anymore. If not I apologize. The person who really got me thinking about writing this book was Patrick McManus. I read his stories and enjoyed them so much. Then I realized I had similar experiences and if he could write about them so could I.