Chapter 59: Private Road - Limited Access

Once the McAdam brothers had moved out and I had bought back their lease, I decided to actively seek out a family, or at least a couple, who could act as ‘gatekeepers’ for Mile High Ranch. Let’s face the truth here, I was suspicious that Sandy and I might still be targets for retaliation by that radical church group from Calgary. I wanted to find a family who were willing to live on the former McAdam brother’s lease and act as watchmen at the gate, not to stop anyone, but just to warn us if those nuts ever did come hunting Sandy or me. So with that idea in mind, I approached my friends and family over the problem, explaining that I wanted a to rent the house and acreage to a couple who wouldn’t be easily intimidated by loud obnoxious idiots. Naturally the first people I approached were Art and Debbie Dumfries, since they would be the new couple’s closest neighbours, then I approached several of the members of my family. Within hours I’d had four different people suggest the name of the same young couple - Al and Em Jeffries.

Sandy and I both liked that idea a lot and we knew the pair quite well, which made the idea even better. Al had worked for me the year we had put in the new access road from the plateau, he’d started out working for me as a blaster and had continued to work for me on the ranch most of that summer. Not only that, but Em was Charlie Engels daughter and Charlie was a ‘shirt tail’ relative, the grandchild of one of Grampa Bender’s ‘girlfriends, ‘ Maggie Engels. The story I heard was that Maggie had spent one winter on the ranch and refused to live there any longer, but Grampa Bender wouldn’t move to town, so they parted company.

An added bonus, as far as I was concerned was that Al and his wife, Em had a young son, but were living in a small single bedroom house so they wanted to move. I was smart though, I called Charlie Engels, since Al was working for him and asked if it would screw up his crews if Al lived in our area and got a very direct answer.

“Hell no! It would be doing me a favour. I could use him out on that side of town almost all summer and definitely all bloody winter. What are you thinking of doing, renting him the McAdam house?”

“Yep, I need someone there who has both brains and good judgement. I want somebody who can keep an eye on my gate and warn me if I have any intruders coming down to the ranch. I don’t want anyone to get into fights or anything, I just need a human alarm to call down to the ranch if someone does show up, but Art and Debbie aren’t home a lot of the time.”

“Huh, after what ‘Devil Bill” McAdam and those damn church freaks did to you and your family, I don’t blame you. Just call Al and Em and tell them just what you told me, well, maybe you should show them that house and the yard first,” Charlie advised, then chuckled. “Right now neither one of them is too happy with where they’re living.”

So as a result, Sandy and I arranged to meet Al and Em at the acreage the next day. I did warn them of my suspicions about those religious nuts, but Allan ‘Boom Boom’ Jeffries had been a semi-pro hockey player. He not only understood intimidation and retaliation, but he wasn’t the type to be frightened off easily. Em wasn’t that much different, besides she’d been raised in the country and felt stifled living in a tiny house in town. Both of them liked the McAdam place, but for different reasons. While Em was enthusiastic about the size of the house and all the appliances which had been left behind, Al was delighted by the fact that they were living on ten acres of land for a decent rental cost. They jumped on the chance of renting the place and acting as our ‘distant early warning’ system.

As a precaution, when Al and Em moved in he put up new chain-link fencing around the acreage, then brought in a pair of German Shepard-Rottweiler crossbred dogs and posted the property with ‘Beware, Guard Dogs’ signs. Once Al, Em, their son, Charlie and their two dogs were settled in, they held an open house and made sure the dogs were introduced to all of our friends and frequent visitors. As they explained it to me, if a ‘Rotty cross’ knew your friends it wouldn’t bother anyone unless it was ordered to. Well, not unless you were dumb enough to attack either the dog or its master, so having everyone know the dogs was an excellent idea. Of course with the dogs inside a fence and a ‘bump to pass’ gate on the road to the ranch, all those two dogs really functioned as was a vocal alarm system, but with Em being at home every day that’s all we needed. If a strange vehicle drove past, the dogs would bark and she could give us a call to warn us, which was all I really wanted.

I think Sandy was just a bit leery of the dogs when we first arrived at the party, at least until I set Toby on the floor beside the big male dog. Toby took one look at the dog and decided he was just a bigger version of Duke and since Duke was his buddy, this dog must be a buddy too. Ten seconds later Toby was using the dog as a handhold and holding the dog’s shoulder as a brace while he patted the dog’s head. I’ll swear to this day that the dog had a grin on his face as he swung his head around to look at me, then he swung his head even further and licked Toby’s face. Of course Toby squealed and I laughed, which drew both Sandy and Kristina’s attention. Talk about opposite reactions - Sandy looked terrified while Kristina looked jealous because she thought Toby was having fun and she wasn’t involved. Kristina wanted down, and she wanted down now! Luckily Em saw what was going on and came over to reassure Sandy that both dogs loved kids, which saved me from being shouted at right then. Sandy even let Kristina down to play after a minute or two. Of course the female dog decided that she wanted in on the fun about then and in short order both kids were patting and mauling the two dogs the same way they patted and crawled around Duke and Princess. Then Em went over to Al and took their son from his arms and set little Charlie on the floor as well. It turned out he was a friendly little tyke, so in seconds there was a muddle of three kids and two dogs in one corner of the room. What I found neat was the fact that the two dogs wouldn’t let the kids squabble, if any two of those three kids got pushy, one of the dogs would stick a huge head between them and break it up.

“Some guard dogs those two are,” George scoffed.

“Yeah, well don’t get too cocky,” I warned him. “If you were to take a swing at Al or Em, or acted like you planned to hurt one of those three kids, the dogs would probably tear you a new bunghole.”

“Actually the dogs are both trained to watch Em’s and my reaction to others,” Al grinned, as he walked over and dropped an arm on Sandy’s and my shoulders. “For instance they know we’re friends with both Sandy and Chris, so they would be almost as protective of them and their family as they are toward us. Besides, they’re trained not to bite unless they have to, instead they knock people down to put any threat out of action, then raise an alarm so we can check out the situation. Just think of them the same way you would a defenceman in a hockey game. If you’re on their team, they won’t interfere with you, but if you’re playing on the other team, watch your butt. Okay?”

Thankfully, everyone who came to the party took Al’s and my words to heart and as far as I know there were never any incidents with Al and Em’s dogs.

There was one surprising development out of that party and our two kids reactions to those big dogs, but it didn’t happen until a few months later. That’s when Al and Em showed up at our door late one evening, but both of them were carrying a small pup in their hands.

“Hi, we came bearing gifts,” Em smiled tentatively at Sandy and me. “These two pups are the runts of Majesty’s first litter so we won’t sell them, but we really don’t want to have them put down either. They were so small that we haven’t even advertised them, but you’ve got two kids that love dogs and we think they should each have a dog of their own. The pups are weaned, as well as fully house trained and they’ve had all their shots. The vet says they’re perfectly healthy, just a little smaller than normal, but he says that sometimes happens on a first litter. We even brought them over late at night so the chance of the kids being up and around was slim, just in case you decide that you can’t keep them. So what do you think, do you want a pair of free puppies or not?”

I really didn’t know what to say, but one look at Sandy’s face and I knew that Toby and Kristina were each going to have a dog, so I rolled my eyes as I looked directly at her. “You’re choice dear, only remember, they may be runts, but they’ll still grow to be bigger than Duke. Knowing that, I think if do we keep them they should be ‘outside’ dogs that can shelter in the barns in the winter, just like Duke and Princess do.”

“Well, are they fixed?” Sandy demanded.

“Oh they’re still much too young for that, but they are both females and as young as they are neither of your dogs will hurt them, in fact they’ll protect them,” Em smiled, because she knew she’d made a puppy sale, even if the pups were a gift. “I know Duke is a fully functional male, so you should have these girls neutered after they’re about six or eight months old, but talk to the vet. He knows their age and can keep track of that for you, just in case you forget.”

By that time both Duke and Princess were underfoot, whining and rubbing against both Sandy and me, wanting to meet the pups.

So Sandy reached out for the pup that Em was holding. Al winked as he handed me the other one, and it was a done deal - we’d added a pair of German Shepard-Rottweiler pups to our menagerie. Not surprisingly we were able to put the pups down with Duke and Princess in a very short time. They soon herded the pups over to the old blanket they slept on during the summer and in no time flat the four of them were settled in for the night.

Once we saw that the pups were settled with the two older dogs we invited Al and Em inside to chat and have a coffee.

The next morning when our kids went out on the front porch and saw those two pups I was soon wishing I had a movie camera. Both the kids and the pups were soon having a wonderful time and I quickly realised that our two little monsters weren’t monsters at all, at least not when it came to handling the pups. Even at two years old they knew enough about young animals to pick up the pups so their backs were supported, instead of the way a normal two year old kid would grab a puppy or a kitten with a choke hold around its neck or belly. I think they must have absorbed our careful methods from watching all the grownups as we handled kids, calves, foals and piglets.

I’d only been watching for a moment or two before Toby came toddling over to me with one of the pups in his arms, giggling at his squirming burden as it tried to lick his face.

“What’s ‘is name, Papa?” he demanded with another giggle.

“I don’t know, I don’t think she has a name yet, but both pups are little girl dogs, so I guess they need girl names.”

“Can Tina an’ me call ‘em what we want?” he asked hopefully, still having trouble pronouncing Kristina’s name.

“I suppose so, but maybe you should ask Mommy that question?”

“‘kay, Papa, I will,” he grinned and carefully put the pup down, then scooted inside to find his mom.

Of course the pup tried to follow him, but didn’t get to the doorway before the screen door had closed, so it scratched at the door and whined pitifully. Instead of letting it get bowled over when Toby came charging back outside, I scooped it up and sat down near Kristina and the other pup. I got a brief smile, but the pup squirming in her lap was the center of Kristina’s attention, so for once she was being very quiet. As a result we were still sitting there when Toby and Sandy came back outside, then we had a talk about dog names, but didn’t make any decision right then.

Eventually those two little pups became ‘Uno’ and ‘Dos’ - in other words numbers One and Two, in Spanish. In the same vein, Kristina adopted the nickname of Tina, which was pronounced ‘Teena’ and for some reason Sandy and I had become ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ - not Mom and Dad. But then, as I told Sandy, “Kids will be kids and our kids have minds of their own!”

The next time I saw Al was later that year, sometime in December, and he was with his father-in-law, Charlie Engels. They had come to see me about securing an long-term lease on the property where Al and Em lived, because they had only been renting up to that point. I’d already heard that they were considering the idea of making a few changes to their operation and I understood that those changes included building a large equipment shed on the lease in order to store some of Charlie’s equipment there. As a result of the rumours I’d heard, I was somewhat prepared for their requests even before the meeting began and I’d done a little checking into how their requests might affect all of us. In fact the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea, but there were a few small details that needed to be ironed out.

As usual Charlie was quick to start explaining why he and Al were there to see me. “There’s a helluva lot of road work and construction being started in this area. Only it’s a pain in the ass having to truck our equipment forty-odd miles from my place just to do a small job, then having to haul it all the way home again afterward. I can’t afford to let those small jobs go though, or some other operator will move into this area and that would mean we’d have an even bigger pain in the rump.” Charlie stated openly. “We’d like to lease that acreage and use it as our western base of operations with Allan in charge. We’d build a second access off the county road, about a hundred yards north of your main entrance, which means we wouldn’t disturb your access in any way. Then we’d build a pair of equipment sheds, and bring in a semi and a lo-boy trailer, a couple of cats, a dump truck and a backhoe, that way we’d have a core of basic equipment in the area. Besides, as things are now Tom has to drive thirty-five miles to work on my equipment in the winter, but he’d be a lot closer to his work if we had a repair shop out here.”

“On top of that, Em says the layout of the house is very strange right now and she’d love it if we made some changes to the interior, but we can’t really do that if we’re just renting on a month to month basis,” Al jumped into the conversation then. “If we go ahead with this new base of operations, some of the equipment operators might be staying in the spare bedrooms during the work week. That means Em would be cooking for them as well, but right now the kitchen is just too small for that, so she’d like to expand it and make it handier.”

“We’d want at least a ten year lease on the place though and twenty would be better. You’d gain by having some permanent neighbours, and on top of that you wouldn’t need to plow the roads in the winter. We’d do that for you, right to your front yard if you want,” Charlie added, then he looked a bit guilty. “I do have one additional question about the lease though. I know you’ve been working on improving those big fields up near the lease and I was wondering if you’re going to be running animals on the grass you’re growing there now?”

“No, I hadn’t really planned on using that as grazing land because of the lack of water. I’m hoping to be able to get a decent crop of hay from that area in the next year or two though, but why do you ask?”

“Well, I’d like to lease more acreage from you so I could put in a landing strip and a hanger. The problem with that is the prevailing winds which seem to come from west-northwest. That would mean our airstrip would cut across your hayfield on an angle. It wouldn’t be very wide, but it’d be quite long and the perfect spot for it starts just north of the present lease, so it almost cuts your field in half. It’d just be a grass surface, not pavement or anything, but the land has to be levelled a bit, then seeded to tough grass and mowed regularly. It wouldn’t be raised much or ditched heavily, so your farming equipment could run right over it with no problem. We’d have to level some of the little knolls and bevel back the edges, but I promise we wouldn’t dam up any low spots to make wet areas for you. It’s really a simple project and dirt moving is what we do for a living, so this would be treated as a regular job by our guys and they know what they’re doing.”

“What’s he’s trying to tell you is Em has her pilot’s license and she recently bought a small plane. She wants to be able to have it here so she can fly it more often and her Daddy is spoiling her again,” Al grinned and winked. “More than that though, I think her daddy would like to be able to fly over to visit us if he gets the urge.”

Since Al and Em were very good workers and I was certain they’d be good tenants, I went along with their basic ideas, but I did suggest we modify some of their proposals. In the first place I advised them that it would be cheaper for the company to take out a second lease of four or five acres for their new buildings, because the county would tax whatever area was leased to the company as commercial property. Secondly I offered to sell Al and Em all the buildings on the ten-acre lease, provided they kept that lease as a mini-farm, that way they could do what they wanted to the house or the sheds the McAdams had built. Third, I could see several advantages to having a landing strip close to the ranch, so I gave that my tentative approval, but with some minor modifications. I suggested they build the airplane hanger on the inside corner of the present lease, then have the airstrip start just outside that corner so the hanger was as far as possible from the county road and my access road. Finally I would rent them the area to put in their little landing strip, asking a reduced rent, but with the provision that I could ask for an occasional ride for me or my family. Of course I insisted they had to do all the grading, levelling, seeding and maintenance along the verges of the strip to my exact specifications. However, since I didn’t know anything about seeding or caring for landing strips, what they did on the strip itself was up to them. I warned them that I was going to hold them to the concept that I had to be able to move my haying equipment across the airstrip without any problems and I insisted that they had to build the strip without creating any erosion or flooding problems.

I was surprised that they agreed to all of my combined offers and suggestions. It worked out darn well in most cases too. Charlie got his western base of operations, which was actually a large increase in potential for his business. Al got a boost in wages for running the western portion of Charlie’s company. Em got a new kitchen and some other changes to the house, but she was keen to start a mini-farm operation of her own. Sandy had already given her some chickens, but we had a young Jersey heifer that was in calf and Em bought her from us, so her mini-farm was well under way in short order. Even Tom soon had a decent repair shop that was fully fitted out to do work on heavy machinery. The only project that seemed to become a lasting problem was the airstrip for Em’s plane.

That airstrip must have cost Charlie a bundle in the long run. It started out to be one strip running west-northwest from the inner corner of their initial ten acre lease. Then Em found that at certain times of the year the wind shifted and came quite steadily from the west-southwest. That meant they needed a cross strip, so they came to see me about building a somewhat squashed X-shaped landing field. That took up additional space and cut down the amount of acreage I had for growing grass, and I felt I had to ask for some additional compensation. Charlie didn’t mind the increase in his rental payments, but he was soon quite upset with his attempts to grow a decent cover of grass on the surface he’d levelled and prepared so well. He must have sunk a ton of money into that thing and the grass simply wouldn’t grow in smoothly or thickly. In fact his grass didn’t look as good as the rougher native grasses that I had growing well on most areas of the ‘Frenchmen’s’ half-section. The difference was that I had worked with nature, whereas he had fought it.

The initial problem was the fact that I didn’t want to lose all the work and effort we’d invested in establishing what grass we did have growing in that area. So I demanded to be there when Charlie had Mark Jackson come out to survey the proposed strip. By doing that I’d be able to see what problems I might have to face when Charlie made changes to the grades of my hayfield. Now that field was nowhere near perfectly level to start with, in fact it sloped gradually away from the county road and back toward ‘Mile High’ valley. Then to complicate matters there were several small swales and minor erosion gullies that Charlie’s air-strip would cross as it ran from one side of the field to the other. Charlie’s suggestion was to strip off the extra soil from the swales and small knolls, then use that soil to backfill the small erosion gullies he crossed. I agreed to that on one condition, that he had to have all that done before the last week of August so I could have any of those areas reseeded before the fall rains started. He argued with that time frame, but I was adamant, pointing out that once those rains started, so would erosion, but if I could get the seed down soon enough, the seedlings would prevent the damage from getting too bad. He finally went along with the idea, but had either Art or one of his other workers earn extra wages by working on that whenever they had a few hours free. I could work with that though. As Art finished grading one of those areas I’d have either Eddy or Manny take a load of manure from our stock pens and spread it on the surface, then disk it in. As a result we were able to seed all of those leveled areas by early September and we had a decent cover crop protecting the bare soil by the time the first snow fell.

Meanwhile Charlie had been working on the airstrip in his spare time, but he wasn’t finished in time to seed it that fall. He’d started out by rough levelling the strip and bevelling the edges so I could drive right over it from almost any direction with my haying equipment. Once he had that done, he began to improve the soil on the strip by hauling in truckloads of sawdust and horse manure, spreading those in the areas where he wanted to plant his ‘tough’ grass. He cultivated those soil amendments into the ground, then in late spring he seeded the area and rolled the whole thing to pack it. The grass sprouted, grew an inch or so tall, then died in the summer heat. Even I knew that was from lack of moisture, since the roots hadn’t developed enough or reached deeply enough to support the plants in hot weather. By mid July that ‘X’ was nearly all bare soil and the wind was stirring it into dust, which was not good news for me because that could bring on erosion and once erosion gets started, it spreads. I was already fighting erosion on that quarter section of land and I didn’t need Charlie’s mess to make my life more difficult. So I called up both Charlie and the District Agriculturalist, then had them meet me on the field one afternoon in late July of the second year.

Leo Burton, the DA, took one look at the mess and frowned, then turned to me and asked, “What the hell are you trying to do now, Chris? You sure screwed it up, whatever it was.”

“It wasn’t Chris that screwed up, this is my fault,” Charlie admitted. “I rented this land from him to put in an airstrip so my daughter could land her airplane here, but it seems I did it all wrong. The bloody grass seed I bought just won’t grow like it should because the rain isn’t cooperating this summer and I can’t think of any way to water it the way you would if it was a lawn. Meanwhile the cheap-shit grass Chris threw down last fall is growing like gang busters and making me look like a damn fool.”

“You own this quarter section of land outright, don’t you, Chris, so it won’t have any effect on your lease if he plants cultivated grasses here will it?” Leo asked.

“That’s right, I own this quarter.” I nodded, as I leaned back against my pickup truck’s fender. “The problem is Charlie went by the book, but when I seeded my areas I did it my way, because I’ve done this crap before. I already know better than to try to fight Mother Nature.”

Leo looked at me and winked, using the eye Charlie couldn’t see, then confronted Charlie with a frown on his face. After that I listened in as Charlie was educated about planting cover-crops and seeding grass at the right time of the year. Next he was tutored about seeding with annual rye grass and creeping clover, mixed with the bent grasses and fescues that are normally recommended for landing strips. He was also told to plant the seed in the early fall, not the late spring, that way the annual rye would provide a cover crop and allow the other grasses and clover to germinate in a protected environment.

“That’s fine for next year, but this fucking mess is starting to erode from the wind and rain now,” I stuck my two cents in when Leo paused, and I deliberately used strong language to get my point across. “Have you any bright ideas how to stop that shit, because the wind is already blowing the soil around and I’ll be damned if I want to see the damage rains will cause in the fall. I sure as hell don’t want to have any new gullies get started here in the middle of my hay field.”

“Actually your hay field is what can provide the answer,” Leo looked at me and winked again. “I know you’re busy, but perhaps you could rent some haying equipment to Charlie, then he can hire some high-school students to cut part of your hay fields up here. They could spread the freshly cut grass on the bare ground and if they chose to cut the hay from areas where there are patches of scrub brush intruding into the hay fields, the twigs will help hold the grass in place. Then in mid-September Charlie can spread his seed on top of whatever grass hasn’t rotted or blown away, then disk it in lightly, barely cutting the soil and afterward he can roll it to compact the whole lot. If anything compacting it will add protection and increase the odds of germination for the fresh seed. You just want to cut through the rotted grasses and skim the soil, in fact if the grass you put on top is fully rotted, just harrow the strip or else just roll the seed in. For gosh sakes do NOT disk the seed in deeply or it won’t germinate, instead it will just rot.”

I had Manny cut a small patch of hay with the flail mower each morning, then I rented Charlie an old dump rake and the old Massey tractor, along with my old Fordson Major and a manure spreader. He hired three kids to run the equipment and they spent two weeks raking the hay Manny mowed, then loading it into the manure spreader before spreading each load on the future landing strip. By the first week in August they had the whole strip covered in a layer of matted hay, which slowed the erosion that had been happening.

As far as I was concerned I felt the whole thing had been a waste of time and effort because Charlie went at it ‘bass ackwards’ in the first place. He tried to fight nature and any farmer or rancher knows that’s a losing proposition from the start.

Em eventually got her landing strip, but by the time it was usable she was five months pregnant and she wasn’t interested in flying right then. So in the long run, it was almost three years from the time Al and Em moved onto the lease before she landed her plane there and taxied it to her little hanger for the first time. Actually we had a celebration for the arrival of her plane and she took several of us up for a quick flight over the ranch. It wasn’t until I saw Mile High Ranch from the air that I realised how big our place really was, or how much the whole ranch had changed in the last few years.

I’m almost certain that anyone who had seen the place in Grampa Bender’s day would have had a hard time recognising Mile High Ranch by then. Not only were there two additional houses on the ranch, but we’d added two new barns, one for the mares who were close to foaling and one for the stallions that we were raising for sale. The dairy cattle and ‘pet’ horses were still kept in the old barn, but by that time we’d decided to stop increasing the size of our beef herd. Instead we’d keep the herd down to small numbers, while keeping the pedigree of our animals very strong. As a result the herd was small enough to shelter outdoors in the winter under a lean-to roof in a corral. Let’s face it, cattle and horses just don’t like to graze in the same area, but I’m a horse breeder at heart, so the horses won out and had the run of the most open pasture areas. I love to see prime Quarter Horses running free on an expanse of grass, but they were making us money too, in fact our Quarter Horses had probably become our prime cash crop in a few years. Our secondary income had to be the hay we grew and sold, but on top of that we usually managed to sell a few purebred cattle, a couple of little donkeys, a few goats, and a few dozen of Sandy’s two breeds of ‘Heritage’ chickens each year.

Other improvements had been made as well. We’d built a new pigsty and two new chicken coops and all of them were wired for electricity. All three of them were insulated too, so they had both light and heat and we could keep the animals comfortable in the cold weather. The pigsty was small, just big enough for two or three hogs. I’d buy weaner pigs at a local auction each spring, then have them butchered in the fall instead of bothering to keep a sow year around, so we actually didn’t need to heat the pigsty in the winter. Sandy still used her incubator to hatch chicks and was a member of a society that encourages people to keep the older breeds, but the two hen houses and chicken runs were only big enough for fifty to seventy-five hens. That meant we ate a lot of chicken when she culled out the cockerels each summer or culled out the older hens in the fall. I wasn’t about to argue about that though, I like either roasted or fried chicken in the summer and chicken soup or chicken and dumplings in the winter.