Chapter 12

It was a beautiful early evening and with all the screens in place the front deck of the house was a great place to be, but with four of us sitting out there, it felt crowded to me. I suppose I was just spoiled by the fact that I was used to being at the cabin by myself a lot of the time. When I suggested to Paula that we go spread a lot of the salvaged greens and other vegies around for the animals and feed most of the rest to the horses, she was on her feet in an instant, asking if there was anything special we'd need.

When I suggested jeans and shoes, she looked at me as if I was going strange, so I shrugged my shoulders, I wasn't about to argue. At least she did ask why I suggested them, so I explained that the mosquitoes and gnats hung in the grass so that as you walked along, they rose and started to feed. That changed her mind. Aileen had a curious look on her face as Paula disappeared at a run.

"What's wrong?" I asked her.

"Well, CJ, I was hoping that perhaps I could have a turn at trying to feed the deer later." She said quietly.

"You'll have a chance." I smiled. "I always save a few of the best bits back until later just in case, but you're welcome to come along with us now too, if you want."

"Umm, me too?" Sydney asked.

"Sure, why not." I chuckled. "I told you folks before, make yourself at home. If you start to do something that bugs me, I'll let you know about it."

I suppose I should have expected them to rush off, but I'll admit that seeing both of them literally leap to their feet and hurry inside to change their clothes surprised me at the time. Then they all astounded me in how fast they were back and ready to go for a walk. It only took a few minutes for us to pick out a few bits and pieces of lettuce, some small wilted carrots and a badly bruised apple to save for possible deer feed for later. Then as I carried the box across the lawn, they spread a lot of the stale and bruised vegetables and fruit on the ground as we walked toward the barn and pasture where the horses were kept.

They were chattering and my horses must have heard us coming because suddenly they came trotting out of the trees toward us. Suddenly the women all fell silent, simply staring at the two big horses coming toward us. It was classic.

"Omigod, they're huge!" Paula gasped as she suddenly clung to one of my arms even though we were still on the outside of the pole fence I had used on this section of the horses' pasture. "Are they tame!"

"Oh yeah, they're perfectly tame." I chuckled. "They're pets, but they're working pets."

I realised of course that all of them had expected me to keep riding horses, but that's not really why 'Di' and 'Almond' were kept around. I took the time to explain that although I treated them almost as pets, they were also a working team of Percherons. They earned their keep every year by being my 'ecologically sound' power source, taking the place of a small tractor.

"But, they're so big!" Aileen sighed.

"My size." Sydney laughed easily. "My Dad had horses almost like these two, back when we lived in the US. As a kid, I can remember that I used to ride on their backs while he'd plow with them."

She reached out a hand and scratched the spot in Di's forehead that all horses seem to love having scratched and of course Di snorted softly, blowing a gust of horse breath our way. That made Sydney laugh aloud.

"This one reminds me of one of the horses Daddy had." She grinned at me. "We didn't have a tractor, so he used a team of horses instead."

"Umm hm." I grinned at her. "Actually they can do a lot of things a tractor can't do. Either one can haul a huge dead fall out of the woods to be bucked up into firewood or I can hook them up as a team to do almost any heavy work around the place. In actual fact, I used them hooked to an old horse drawn Fresno scoop to add the finishing touches when I deepened and levelled the bottom of the lake after I first moved into the cabin. I'd have gotten stuck down there in that muck with a tractor, but the horses just waded through it."

"Oh come on, CJ, you're not trying to tell us that you built the lake are you?" Aileen said as she turned and looked at it.

"No, I just improved it a lot." I grinned. "You see when I first saw the property it was early spring and one of the things which had impressed me was the 'S' shaped lake, nestled in amongst the tall Fir trees and Willows. I checked and found out that it was fed by a small stream that flows out of the park that backs up the property. Of course that influenced where we wanted to build our houses. What I didn't realize was that in a dry year, the stream dried up and the 'lake' did too, then it became a weed and mosquito infested swamp."

"Ouch, I'll bet that p'd you off." Sydney smiled, still petting and fussing with the horse.

"Oh it did!" I snorted. "While we'd been building the cabins, we went through a couple of very dry years and we found out that if the drought carried on long enough, the 'lake' disappeared completely. It simply dried right up. Of course that was probably opportune because it gave me a chance to really check things out using a small backhoe. I found that the lake must have been a beaver dam at some time in the distant past, but it had gradually filled with silt. I also found out that the whole area is underlaid with a substratum of either blue clay or rock. That was when I made up my mind that we needed a 'proper' lake, not a slough that dried up on us."

"So, what did you do?" Paula asked, turning to look at the lake speculatively.

"Well, first I investigated everything a bit." I chuckled and shrugged my shoulders. "I checked with the Provincial archives and found a couple of photos of the area; they showed a decent sized lake where the swamp was. Since it was on those photos and I could prove it was there in the past, it gave me the excuse to restore it to what it had been like. So I went up in a plane and took a photo of the area, then superimposed the old picture onto the new one, after that I called in a surveyor with a laser level and had him mark out the area. Then it was just a matter of getting in some big equipment to dig out the hole and making a decent sized dam that wouldn't wash away, but as well as I added a wetland area to cut down on the amount of silt that washed in from the park next door."

"But it all looks so natural now." She protested, gesturing with a sweep of her hand. "How did you manage to get everything to look so good and do it so fast? I mean you said you've only been here for five years and everything looks like it's been here forever."

"Oh, I called in an expert." I grinned as I shrugged my shoulders at her again. "I found a University prof. who specialized in water plants and fresh water marine biology. She and a bunch of her students came up and supplied a lot of the manpower and skill to help out as a special project."

"What did she and her students do? It looks so good and it still seems completely natural."

"Well, to start with they salvaged a lot of the plants from all over the area and transplanted them to a safe area. When the caterpillar and the big front end loader that I hired came in, the professor had them scrape all the silt and the topsoil from the whole area so it could be safely stockpiled in separate piles off to one side. After that she sat down with me and we designed the dam and the contour of the lake bottom; then it was a matter of letting the big machines dig out the clay to move it around so we could make the dam and the base for the wetland areas. It was only a couple of weeks before the big machines were all done."

"And what happened then?" Sydney grinned at me, egging me on.

"That's when the professor and I got really busy." I laughed. "She wanted to start restoring things, but I wasn't really satisfied with a simple packed clay dam with no spillway. I was positive that the clay would dry out and crack, then it would simply erode away. I wanted a solid concrete barrier set into the clay with a proper spillway that had several small pools and rapids. In other words I wanted a 'natural' appearing spillway that would look like it had always been there, but I wanted to have a really solid barrier that would last as well."

"How did you build that? It sounds difficult."

"Oh it wasn't hard to figure out how to do it, but it was costly. I used a backhoe to trench across the dam at a place where there was a solid rock barrier on either side, then we put in forms and cast huge footings, and on top of that we built a wall of sorts. When it was backfilled and the clay was packed around it, I had my barrier and all I had to do was landscape the downstream runoff area with some rocks that I had brought in to set into the clay so the erosion would be cut down. That took almost another two weeks, but at the same time, the prof and her crew were using a small tractor with a front end bucket to backfill the wetlands with the silt that had been stockpiled off to the sides. They even wanted to spread a thin layer of silt on the lake bottom. By doing that a lot of the natural marsh and lake bottom plants could reestablish themselves where they belonged because the seeds and even the old roots of the natural plants were already in the soil. That's when I thought of the idea of using horses because by then there was some water spilling into the lake bottom and they'd have gotten stuck with even a light tractor."

"So that's where my buddy here came in." Sydney grinned, patting the horse once more.

"Yeah, first off I rented the horses to just use for a while, but after I'd had them for a week, I went back to the owner and bought them outright, along with their harness and a few horse drawn implements. After two months, I felt that they'd already paid for themselves and decided I wanted to keep them permanently. It didn't hurt any that Mom and Em fell in love with the team as well, so when I planned the barn and pasture areas, I picked this area so that both of the women can see them from their cabins." I gestured toward Mom and Em's cabins that we could make out on the far side of the lake; from the angle that we were looking at them they appeared almost one above the other with Em's cabin being the furthest from us, but higher up the slope of the little valley we lived in.

"The horses were even essential in grading and packing the hundreds of yards of sand that I had hauled in to establish two little beaches in the tiny coves in front of each cabin. That was when I had the opportunity to trench in the supply and return pipes as well as the sand filters for the water supply to the heat pumps for each of the cabins."

I laughed again and pointed to another shed off to one side that was filled with old tools and equipment. "Of course, having the horses, I had to trace down and buy old horse drawn implements so I could do the work. Then I found a small horse drawn carriage with rubber tires and a restored sleigh on a trip back to northern Alberta. I bought them both and arranged for them to be shipped home. The first Sunday morning after I got back, I had Em drop in on Mom, then went over riding in the carriage pulled by the horses and took them for a ride. That's when Em adopted the horses and insisted on learning all about driving and caring for them. Since that time, she and Mom have become a common sight in the neighbourhood as they go for rides in the carriage. As you might expect I never mentioned the sleigh to either Mom or Em until we had one of our rare snowfalls a couple of years ago, then I took them for a ride in it. Now it's become a habit for Em and Mom to enjoy the sleigh every time it does snow. I think every kid in the neighbourhood for about five miles around here has had a ride in that sleigh and every neighbour has at least one photo of Em and Mom with a load of kids in the sleigh while the horses trot along one snow-covered street or another."

"I think you're changing the subject on us." Aileen broke in.

"I'm sorry, but I don't understand." I frowned.

"You were telling us about the work you put into building the lake, now you're back to the horses." She smiled. "You spent a lot of time working on that lake. I have an idea that there's a lot more to that story than you're letting on."

"I suppose there is." I shrugged. "It would just be a description of how we did things though, so I think you'd be bored."

"I'd rather talk about the horses anyway." Sydney laughed. "What do you call them?"

"The one you're petting is Di and her teammate is Almond."

"That's a strange name."

"Not really." I laughed softly. "If you say their names quickly and sort of run them together, it reminds me of where the money came from to pay for all this."

I could see Sydney frown for a second, then shake her head as she grinned at me.

"Oh, what a horrible pun." Paula laughed.

"Yep." I grinned and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "Gonna dump me because of my bad puns?"

"Oh I think I can live with them, just as long as you hold them down to one or two a year." She grinned, snuggling against me.

I could feel goose bumps on her bare arms and realized that since the sun was now blocked from shining directly on us by the tall trees to the west of the cabin, the temperature was quickly dropping. I was going to say something about that and add another warning about the evening invasion of insects when I saw a slight movement at the edge of the tree line. I simply pointed at the deer who stood there and then toward the cabin, adding the gesture of a finger touched to my lips to ensure that everyone would hold their voices down.

By moving slowly and quietly, we managed to retreat to the cabin without disturbing our four legged visitors. In fact by the time we were climbing the steps onto the deck, there were three full-grown deer and two fawns slowly working their way out into the clearing, all of them grazing on the fresh grass and obviously enjoying the peace and quiet. Then one or two of them found the lettuce and other goodies that we'd spread on the lawn. Of course that unexpected banquet was soon the center of their attention.

That evening though, we hadn't attracted any of the relatively tame animals. Either that or some of the local brats had been chasing these animals away from their homes or had actually been out in the bush, chasing the deer around. No matter how patient any of us were, as soon as we stepped out onto the deck, the deer became shy and began to move away.