An Afternoon Walk in the Woods

This happened on Paiute Mountain when Joanne was about five years old. Call it 1939. At the time Sid was up on the mountain and working at or had some connection with the sawmill. Possibly Norwin, Esther's brother, was there as well along with his daughter Beverly. Audrey and Bev were probably thirteen at the time.

At the time the cook at the sawmill was a girl in her middle to late teens. Audrey and Bev used to go up to the sawmill because it was another girl, some company. After breakfast was served the cook persuaded Audrey and Bev to go for a walk with her. So off they went for a walk. The girls didn't know that their friend the cook was running away.

In due course the three of them were missed and somehow Esther got word of it. She grabbed Joanne and Fritz, loaded them into the family flivver and went to Nick Williams. Nick asked Esther to wait for a little bit. They had some lunch. Then they drove to where a canyon emptied into Walker Basin. “Now, call to them,” asked Nick.

Audrey adds a few things to this account since she was an actual participant in the adventure. “I was the most timid and didn't want to leave (the sawmill) in the first place, but Beverly wanted to go and they chided me for being a coward, which I was. …

“Beverly always felt that no one wanted her and I think that was why she was so adventurous. She told me later that she was just showing off when she climbed one hundred feet up a big pine tree and swung the top of the tree back and forth... . She needed someone to take notice of her. The other girl was simply bored. I just wanted to go home and be safe.

“The canyon was shaped like a funnel. About halfway down the canyon it was so narrow it was hard to find a place to put our feet...At one spot there were a lot of rocks with the water running down and between them. We had to slide twenty feet down these rocks, which were very steep, once down we could not go back up. Fortunately there were leaves all over the rocks so we slid, not scraped, our way down, but the men following us were not so lucky and they had torn clothes and scratched bottoms from the slide.

“They were very angry and threatened us with having an axe handle broken over our butts.

“When it was nearly dark and we were coming to the desert, I wanted to build a bed by the river so we could sleep near water. We built a little shelter and then the mountain lion started screaming. Then they (Bev and the other girl) finally became scared too, and so we ran down to the desert floor where we met the biggest rattlesnake I have ever seen. By that time the men were close behind us and killed the snake just before Mother called us to the truck, which was parked on a dirt road nearby.”

Joanne adds that Esther called to the girls and they answered. Soon, they materialized out of the brush. Williams knew from the trail they had taken where they would have to come out in Walker Basin, and he didn't even need a global positioning device. Ranching all of your life and seeing the land from the back of a horse gives you a pretty good sense of the lay of the land.

Sid. And possibly Norwin, came out soon after the girls. He had found the tracks of a mountain lion following them. Probably the cat was curious about who was trespassing on his range.

Audrey adds, “I got to see Nick's place and one thing I remember was a huge service area with a long table and on it were large metal bowls with cream and butter in them.They looked so rich to me.

“Driving back to the mountain it was dark and cold. The headlights of the pickup brightened the bottoms of the trees and rocks, the wind blew our hair and faces, and it was silent except for the sound of the car, and the stars were bright and the feeling was eerie to be safe in the dark as the car struggled up the hill. We did not speak.”

Scuttle

Joanne's parents lived in East Los Angeles during World War II. A number of cats and dogs came into their lives. Joanne was fond of them all, but she established a special rapport with a female cat named Scuttle. Joanne was Scuttle's special person. That's not always comfortable.

Scuttle turned up pregnant, as female cats often do, and chose the family linen closet as her place to deliver. Joanne was attracted to the closet by Scuttles noises. She found the cat in mid-delivery and Scuttle promptly grabbed her hand with both paws. She took a forefinger in her mouth, but didn't bite hard, just held it. When Joanne tried to withdraw, Scuttle bit down a little harder. The cat just wanted the girl there in her time of need.

Scuttle delivered a litter of kittens. A little time passed and the family decided to visit their mining claim on Paiute Mountain. With the gasoline rationing during the war, trips to the mountain were very rare, only twice a year.

The cabin had been shut up for quite a while. Whatever the mice could get into, they had gotten into it. Fortunately, the Heysers had brought along fresh provisions. They got the cabin opened up, a fire going in the fire place to take the chill off, and eventually the entire family went to bed.

That's when Scuttle came into her own. There were mice all over the cabin. They had multiplied during the war years. As far as Scuttle was concerned, it was a kitty cat heaven. All night long she busied herself. People heard her. Scramble-scratch-scramble-scratch-squeak-squeak-THUMP!

The next morning all of Scuttle's babies lay on their backs, their kitten bellies distended and stretched to the fullest. They were so full of mice they couldn't eat. Not only that, every member of the family had a dead mouse on their pillow. Once her babies had enough and she was full, she didn't see why she shouldn't share the bounty. Everyone had a mouse on their pillow, except Joanne. She had three.

It isn't always comfortable being a cat's special person.

Life's Mysteries

Joanne and I were married by a Unitarian minister in June, 1956. After the ceremony we borrowed her parents' GMC 3/4-ton and their poodle, Bobo, and set off to the cabin for our honeymoon. I think her parents insisted we take Bobo because they wanted someone on the expedition who had some sense.

Everything went according to plan except we forgot Bobo's dog food. He had to settle for leftovers. He liked the stew and the spaghetti, but he drew the line at beans. One night we put spaghetti and beans in a big mixing bowl. He ate all the spaghetti and licked the bowl clean – but he left every bean. But he had licked each bean dry. I still don't know how he did that. One of life's mysteries.

Another great mystery is some peoples' sense of timing. What was it that could prompt Joanne's first cousin Bill to show up with a friend to do some hunting while we were on our honeymoon? Alternatively, what could have prompted us to have our honeymoon just when he and his friend wanted to go hunting?

Bill and his friend hiked around for a while and stayed the night. They left early next morning. And it was OK. It was fine. Joanne and I have been married 53 years and counting, and I reckon that we have spent almost 18 of those years in bed together. From that standpoint, one night out of 18 years isn't that big of a deal. Besides, we really needed someone to help us eat those beans.

Vaca Mexicana

Vaca Mexicana
©Ken Harris, 2008

In 1956 or 57 my wife and I lived in a Hollywood apartment and attended universities. We were both working very hard and welcomed the opportunity to take a brief vacation whenever we could. Usually we went to Joanne’s the cabin. Usually we took Bobo, a poodle, with us. He was supposed to keep us out of trouble.

Bobo was very intelligent and could learn anything in five minutes. However, he could forget anything he wanted in ten minutes. He also put his own spin on his orders of the day. “Don’t get on the couch” meant “Don't let anyone see you on the coucn." But he was pleasant company even with his faults.

On this particular occasion we had finished supper in the cabin and the three of us went for a walk to the meadow several hundred yards to the north. We gingerly crawled through a rusty barbed wire fence surrounding the pasture and noted the sign of many cattle. The meadow was part of the Bureau of Land Management domain and overgrazing seemed to be a part of their policy.

We came across the herd. There were a lot of them. Mexican cows, some with twisty horns, all of them lean. A few had extravagant brands on their hips. None of them looked like Elsie, the Bordens cow. The herd bull stood to the far side of the herd and ignored us. He didn’t look like Elmer, either. His disinterest in us was his only redeeming trait that I could see.

We stayed clear of the herd and tried to keep within running distance of the fence. It was just as well we had, for Bobo found a calf. He immediately tried to play a game with the calf, something named “I chase you around.” The calf cried, “Mama!”

The old lady showed up immediately. As soon as she saw Bobo and us her expression changed from exasperation to menace. She was a strawberry road cow, so lean you could count her ribs, and she had long, twisty, glinting horns. The right horn would have gone in my navel and out my nose.

We called for Bobo, quietly. “Bobo.” Then firmly. “Bobo!” Then desperately. “BOBO!!!”

By this time the cow had decided which of us she wanted to gore first and she began to move. So did we. I beat Joanne to the fence by several yards at once demonstrating speed and lack of gallantry. Bobo, delighted that we had joined in the game, yapped and barked even harder. He never understood the danger we all faced. And so long as he could outrun us, I guess he didn't face any real danger.

The calf ran away from all the noise and confusion and the cow followed. And that’s all of the story. Nothing bad really happened. Except I remember thinking the next morning as I shaved, “This is ridiculous. I shouldn't get grey at 23.”

The Dead Bull

One summer when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, who knows, around 1950, there was a fire guard up at the Ranger Station. Two people I was googoo over were the fire guard and Nita Williams. The fire guard said he’d love to have some cow horns. I said, “Well, there’s bound to be some around here somewhere. I’ll keep an eye open.”

A little later Mom and I were over at the Kings and I was talking about how I would love to find some cow horns. Frank said he’d heard there was a dead bull up Chilson Creek a ways. Shouldn’t be much more than a mile or so.

So I walked up the canyon, up the creek, but I didn’t come to it. I went back to the cabin and said I couldn’t find it, so Mom said she’d walk up with me. She said maybe I didn’t go far enough. So we walked further up the canyon and, lo and behold, we came to a big bull lying there that had a nice set of horns. We looked at him and then we looked up and about two hundred feet further there was another bull lying there dead. There was blood on its nose, the eyes were still in it and the yellowjackets were just starting to come. There was a little tiny slit in the stomach skin where somebody had been pulling on it. Mother and I looked at each other. We didn’t say a word. We turned around and we took off at the run. Whoever shot that bull was still there. Later on we kidded that we needed to put a notice up at the Post Office. “Whoever shot the bull up in Chilson Canyon, we didn’t see you.”

For a while there was a Post Office at the saw mill when it was active. Anna Horne, Oakley’s wife, was the Post Mistress. Since they went back and forth all the time, it was the Post Office for a few years. And then there was the summer the vegetable truck came up. The guy would come up on one day of the week, say a Thursday. He’d bring the mail and he’d take orders for fresh vegetables. We’d order meat and buy vegetables whenever he came up, so it got to be a place where everybody met. I saw Louie the Indian after not having seen him for years and years down at the vegetable truck.

In fact, that’s where I got the letter that snared Ken Harris. Because Zoanne and I had been up there for a week and a letter came to me from Ken and he said, among other things, “I’m putting it in writing. Will you marry me?” After that he was caught. In those days they had, what did they call it when you begged off after asking someone to marry you? Breach of promise?

We hunted a lot. Most every day somebody went out hunting. Fritz and I used to hunt quail because if you went up to the Squaw Pocket Mine on the edge of the meadow during the day, especially in the morning. Quail would come down from high up in the hills where they nested down to the meadow where they could hide in the grass and get water. We knew enough about the mountain quail calls to know what they were talking about. As they moved down in a covey, you could hear one over here talking and anther over there talking, and you could tell that they were moving along. Now if something spooked them, you could immediately tell that, too. So what we’d do is we’d try to figure out where they were coming down and we’d hide in ambush. As soon as they came in sight, we’d try to shoot two or three, just whatever we needed.

I used to take the .22 and go up to the willows. They had “willow caves.” They’d go back four or five feet and I used to chase them into the caves. I never, ever got a quail that way.

Shooting Cows

One summer we shot 9-L cows. The 9-L was Alexander Rudnik's brand. He ran cattle up on Paiute and constantly overgrazed. Years and years before there had been certain kinds of flowers, but they disappeared with the overgrazing.

This one summer too many 9L cattle were hanging around the cabin. that is, we shot them with a 4-10, trying to hit them in their flanks. It was unfriendly of us, but because we were by a creek, they hung around and it was hard to get rid of them. We didn’t want to blind anybody, so we aimed for the end with the tail. One old bull came by every day. I guess when we shot him we got some shot into his scrotum because he really jumped and took off.

The 9L rounded up this big herd of cows and calves. They missed a little two-year-old steer. The steer, I guess, was lonesome because he kept hanging around the cabin. We knew the roundup had been held and we said, “Mom, can we kill that steer?”

She said, “Absolutely not. That’s criminal. That’s not like poaching, that’s thievery,” and so on. We nagged her and nagged her and nagged her for over two weeks until she finally said, “Oh, all right, go kill the goddamned thing, but do it a long ways from the cabin.”

The day that decision was made, he didn’t show up. We tracked him, and that dumb little animal had left the cabin, headed over the ridge, down Kelso Creek and off the mountain. Smart, smart. I wonder if we were sending out bad vibes?

Dealing with Rattlesnakes

Besides the animals we hunted for food, we dealt with a lot of rattlesnakes. When we first moved to French Gulch everyone called it Rattlesnake Gulch. Lots of rattlesnakes there. We were all fairly young. I was probably about five. Fritz would then have been ten and Audrey eleven. Our neighbors used to kid us. “You oughta eat them rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes are good food.” Of course, not one of them had ever eaten a rattlesnake.

So, what did we know? We wanted to eat a rattlesnake. Mom was gone when we found a rattlesnake in the foundation of the cabin. We dragged it out and killed it and decided to eat it. Mom was raised in a finicky house, even though she was very open minded and we ate all kinds of things. But we knew she wouldn’t really want to eat the snake. So we took action. We knew you were supposed to soak the snake in salt water, so we put it in a soup tureen filled with brine. It was a lovely tureen. It had a lid and everything. When Mama came home the four of us, Beverly (she was there, too), Audrey, Fritz and I, lined up and said, “Mama, we want to cook this.”

We took the lid off the tureen and Mother said, “NO!”

We all cried in unison. It was well rehearsed. She finally said, “Oh, dammit. Look, I’m going up on the hill. And don’t tell me which pan you used.” So we dried off the salt water, cut it up into two-inch sections, rolled it in egg and flour and fried it. My siblings had me eat the first piece. Just in case. Being the youngest child, what did I know?

Ever after that we ate rattlesnake, if they were fat. There are a lot of bones in a rattlesnake, and if it doesn’t have meat on it, it’s not worth the work. We became known for eating rattlesnakes, and in our wanderings over the mountains when we found a rattlesnake we killed it. Now I wouldn’t do that. Kids do stupid things.

We only met two rattlesnakes that were really mean. One of them, I don’t know what had gotten into him. He was beside the road and something must have gotten him upset. We were walking beside the road minding our own business and he coiled up. Then he started to come towards us. We rarely used a gun for a snake. It was a waste of ammunition. We broke their backs with a stick and then cut their heads off with a knife. We all carried knives.

Another time a rattlesnake that had been eating something, trying to swallow it, and apparently it wasn’t warm enough. A cold blooded animal’s temperature depends upon ambient temperature, and they have to have a certain temperature to eat. You can’t put something into a cold oven. Apparently this snake had swallowed it and threw it up, and it was really pissed. He came after us, so we did him in.

Usually the snakes tried to get away. Fritz stepped on one once. It started to rattle and then stopped, like it was embarrassed and shouldn’t have done that. We used to tell visitors that the first person in line wakes it up, the second person makes it mad, and the third person gets bit. In all our years up on Paiute, no one we knew, let alone us kids, ever got bit.

We were always killing rattlesnakes, and we had snake hides. We’d skin the snake out and tack up the hide and add a little salt. Then you’d make a hat band out of it, or you’d give it away, or something. Sometimes we’d just cut the rattles off and save them. Like I say, in this day and age, I would never do this, but kids, what the heck.

One time Fritz and I were out hunting quail out at the Squaw Pocket clain. There was a rock face about ten feet high and twenty feet wide. It was actually a huge boulder pile, but the boulders were very large. This rock face had a split about five feet up. As we walked by a snake fell out of the split. We jumped back and thought, “Jeez, where’d that snake come from?” We looked up and there were other snakes sticking out, too. Apparently it got too crowded up there and this one slipped and came down. So we killed him. Then we got a long stick and started pulling out snakes. Once on the ground, we killed them. We had quite a pile of snakes.

We got about seven or eight snakes that day. Interestingly enough, they were all different colors. They all had the patterns, but some were palish pink, others were palish green. Apparently they had all been shedding and the underlying coat colors were a little different.

We’d gotten a few quail so we put these snakes in the same bag with the quail and took them home to mother. We didn’t tell her what was in the bag and she was unhappy. She berated us.

Mother made us throw the snakes out. We had a deer hanging. We had skinned it out some distance from the cabin and had quartered it up. I guess we gave half of it away. It was fairly fresh, only three days old. Mother told us to get rid of those rattlesnakes and take them a long way from the cabin. Well, you know kids. We went over the hill a little ways and threw them behind a rock where we hoped she wouldn’t find them. Soon the buzzards started circling. We were certain it was the rattlesnakes, but mother thought it was the deer. When she found out it was the snakes, well, we didn’t get a paddling, but we got a dressing down.

On another day we went back and got another six snakes. All in all, we got fourteen snakes out of that nest. We killed them all. That’s what kids do sometimes.

Copyright Joanne Heyser Harris 2009

Strange Pets

Sometimes we had some strange pets. We would pick up some creature, keep it for a while and turn it loose. There’s an animal called the California rosy boa or the rubber boa. They’re a little tiny snake. Eighteen inches would be a big one. When they bend their skin wrinkles like rubber. You don’t always see them, but that summer we saw four or five of them. I picked up a rubber boa one day that was long enough, and wrapped it around my neck. This was just fine with the snake because it was warm. I wore the snake for two or three weeks, ‘til the novelty wore off and everybody on the mountain was shocked. Then I turned it loose.

Once Mama wanted to replace the wooden floor of the cabin with a concrete floor because of the fire hazard. When the floor was partly up we found this creature just under the edge of the floor where it was still intact. It was a small thing, bigger than a squirrel but certainly not as big as a skunk. Fritz had on big heavy gloves. He walked over to it and the animal didn’t run off. He picked it up and said, “It’s a God damned skunk!” But it didn’t smell quite like a skunk. It turned out to be a civet cat. It didn’t have stripes on its back, but checks. Fritz took it outside and put it down and it scurried off. We didn’t try to keep that for a pet.

Copyright Joanne Harris May 2009

The Bobcat

Someone at the sawmill had found a bobcat kitten and put it into a small cage. When Audrey, mother and I came up to the cabin in June, after school was out, Oakley Horne, who ran the sawmill, said to us, ”Why don’t you take this bobcat down to your place and see if he’ll be calmer? He’s really violent and the guys tease him and pound on his cage and things like that and the poor thing’s a nervous wreck.” Which was pretty sensitive for Oakley.

We took it down to the cabin. Its cage had a little flat bottom with a sloping roof on each side. It wasn’t three feet wide, I don’t suppose, by a foot-and-a-half, maybe two feet high. There really wasn’t much room for this poor cat. We built a bottom for a new cage and added something about four feet high and just as wide and covered it with wire. I don’t know how we did it, but we managed to get the bottom off of the old cage and drop the cat into our cage. We left a part of the bottom of the old cage so that it was kind of a loft. We then had the bobcat.

At night it used to howl and jump at the wire. I slept through all of this, but mother didn’t. It got calmer and calmer. We never teased it, and we were just women. Our main problem was trying to feed the thing. We weren’t allowed to shoot around the cabin. We had a rule on Paiute -- if you shot it, you ate it. This discouraged our guests from taking pot shots at what Daddy called the filly loo birds, whatever they were . Anyway, we had to hunt for the cat’s food.

If we got a quail, we weren’t going to feed it to the bob cat. We ate it. We tried shooting bluejays. God, bluejays are hard to shoot. There’s a lot of feather and very little bird in there. We tried to shoot rabbits. This poor bobcat was not eating well, and it was really, really mad at us because we were trying to give it human food, which it wouldn’t touch. So we hunted.

I snuck up to a little place at a bend in the creek near the meadow and there was a rabbit sitting in the grass near the willows. The willows were so heavy that it was difficult to cross the creek. I shot at the rabbit. I didn’t know whether I hit it, but I thought it went into the willows across the creek.

I worked my way across the creek on a fallen log. This was the way we usually crossed the creek, on fallen logs. I walked across looking for the rabbit, studying the willows in case it was in there. You know, it’s funny sometimes, but I just got the feeling that I’d better turn around and look.

I turned around and looked. And there was a bobcat sitting on a rock about 150 feet away, watching me. I shot immediately. We didn’t allow predators near the cabin. We were the predators. So I made a quick shot with the .22 and the bobcat did a somersault off the rock and lit on the ground. Then it sat up and looked at me. So I shot it again. It dropped down, but then lifted its head and looked at me again. So I shot it again. Then it stayed down.

When you’re hunting, you never walk up to something you think you’ve killed unless your gun is ready. More people have been maimed and killed by animals they thought were dead, and a bobcat is a nasty creature when upset. And this one might have been upset. I got up there, poked it with the gun, and soon determined it was dead.

All three of my shots had gone into this bobcat’s forehead. The .22 has such little shock power. The animal was killed, I’m sure, from the first shot, but it just didn’t know it.

It turned out to be a very large cat. I dragged it home and skinned it out, and then we looked at all this meat. We thought, we would eat some, too. We would eat most anything. We thought we’d feed some to the bobcat, but we didn’t think we could feed it raw. So we kind of cooked it, boiled it a little bit, and gave it to the bobcat. Boy, he tore into it and he ate it all up. So we fed most of the bobcat to the bobcat. That was a big help.

This poor cat spent the summer, almost three months, with us, and it calmed down a lot. I could open the door, which was above the bottom floor, and put something in and it would take it and it never bite my hand. It never was vicious. Of course, it was in a cage.

When fall came we decided that we had to kill it or turn it loose. We thought the poor thing had never been on its own and didn’t know how it would make out, but we decided that we had to give it its chance. So we turned it loose. We opened the cage door and it kind of looked around carefully and stepped out of the cage. It didn’t take off at the run but ran to a big log beside the driveway and jumped up on it. It looked at us. It walked along the log a bit further, and then looked at us again. When it had walked all the way along the log it disappeared into a bunch of willows.

People said that winter the bobcat may have showed up at the sawmill a few times. That was the same year we had the pigeons. We thought that since the pigeons were roosting in the annex of the cabin, they could winter there. They could fly out from there during the day and be protected at night. But the following spring there were no pigeons. We had a sneaking notion that the bobcat ate them. But they probably wouldn’t have survived anyway, and it was the bobcat’s time to learn to hunt. It’s really difficult for an animal raised in a cage to go back to nature, even though many of us feel this is the right thing to do. They don’t have much of a chance.

Outhouse Tales

This was maybe the summer of 1952, somewhere in there. Zoanne Halvorsen and I were at the cabin, taking care of an injured horse and running with the fire guards (and the wife of one of them). We were going to be leaving the next day and they had come down for dinner the evening before. We wanted to pull some sort of joke on them, a gentle, practical joke. And so, at dinner, we told them, we had to go take care of the horse one more time.

They offered to go with us, but we said, “No, no, you stay here. Watch the fire. Make sure the food doesn’t burn.” We didn’t want them to come with us, of course, because we weren’t going to take care of any horse. So we promised that we’d hurry.

They stayed at the cabin and we went up to the Ranger Station and looked around. We decided to nail the door to the outhouse shut. Anyone in a hurry in the morning, would have to slow down and get a hammer. Nothing destructive. Nothing damaging. Just something to let them know we’d been there.

We nailed the outhouse door shut and then returned to the cabin, saying the horse looked fine. They stayed until 10:00 or 11:00, and then left. We said our goodbyes since we were going to be leaving early in the morning.

The next morning, pretty early, just getting light, I started the fire and went up to the outhouse, the only flush outhouse on Paiute Mountain. It was a dewy morning and I sat down on the seat and thought, “God, how did the seat get so wet?” I slid further into the seat and thought, “God, that feels sticky.” Then I stood up and ran my fingers around the inside lip of the toilet seat and found that someone, some fire guard, had smeared honey there. Honey doesn’t come off too easily. I limped back to the cabin for some warm water and a washrag to expunge the stuff and warn Zoanne to take something up with her.

We cleaned up the toilet, put out the fire and closed the cabin. We got about a half mile from the cabin, over a hill and down into a little gulley at the Grey Squirrel claim, where we found a toilet paper streamer across the road between two trees. It said, “Have a good trip” or something like that. These guys had snuck back while we were sleeping. Boy, they had been quiet.

Archie the Pig

One summer we didn’t have a dog, but we had a pig. In East LA Daddy was considered the person to go to when you had problems, legal or otherwise. He had done the income tax for somebody who had a litter of pigs, and they gave us a pig in exchange. The pig was weaned and we built him a little pen back by the chicken coop. We put the pig in it and started feeding him. I don’t suppose there was any law against a pig or a cow in the back yard in those days.

It was a boar piglet and we wanted to castrate it. Our next door neighbor, Bill Melford, half German-half Mexican and our good neighbor for years, knew how to castrate pigs and agreed to do it. We got the pig down and held him, and Bill did the job. You’ve heard the expression “scream like a stuck pig.” This pig screamed and screamed. About two days later somebody from the Health Department showed up and said, “We understand you’ve got a pig here. There’s been a complaint about dirt and things like that.”

Mom said, “Well, yeah, we’ve got a little weanling pig.” He went in the back yard and said, “Oh, it’s one little pig and things are very clean.” He looked over the fence. We knew who’d complained. And these people had family members living in old trailers and a shack. He said, “Do people actually live in that stuff back there?” So they may have brought something down on themselves. And Mother was very careful after that to keep the pig area clean.

We named him Archie and this time we took Archie the Pig to Paiute with us. We’d scratched him a lot and he was tame, so we took him up to the cabin and turned him loose. About the second or third night, the coyotes got him cornered on the porch. Lots of hullabaloo there. After that, we couldn’t drive him away from the cabin.

We fed him the day’s scraps, potato skins, bits of onion, things like that. We’d stew ‘em up. Then we had a big bag of mixed grain we’d cook in, and we’d feed it all to the pig. Well, this silly pig. Dinner was always boiling hot and we’d say, “Archie, it’s hot, it’s hot.” But he’d put his nose in there and start eating, screaming because it was burning him. He’d eat his dinner fast and sloppy. The food would go in his mouth and a stream of water would come out one side. It was amazing how he could handle food.

Once somebody gave him a piece of gum. He chewed the gum until it was time to feed him. We fed him and he went through the whole thing. When it was through, he walked by chewing the gum. The ability of a pig to handle food is amazing.

We had running water in the cabin when Archie was there because by that time we’d piped it in from the spring. The sink had about a 20-foot pipe that went out into the yard where the water ran out. Little bits of stuff would come out the pipe sometimes and form a little puddle. The pig would go through the puddle eating what was in it. Then, when he wanted water, he’d stick his snout up the pipe and grunt. It would echo in the deep sink, and somebody had to go give Archie some water. Of course, he had the creek to drink out of. And he loved the equisetum that grew by the creek, boy, he loved that.

Archie was our dog that summer and he would go for walks with us. If we went, he went. If we went to the sawmill, he would follow us. It didn’t matter where we went, Archie would go. And then he got older and heavier. What was amazing was the quickness and agility of that pig, as quick and agile as a cat. He’d play with things, a blanket or something, the way a dog or a cat would. It was just amazing watching him. Once he found a fruit jar lid, just the ring, and he used to carry that around on his nose.

If you sat on the porch, he’d come up and sit on your lap. That was fine when he was little. But he was growing up, and by the end of summer he was about 80 pounds. If you sat in this old chair, built low to the ground, he’d get in your lap. There would be the middle of the pig in your lap but a lot of the pig on both sides.

We had a dutch door going into the cabin which we kept locked. But he’d learned to jiggle it and open it. If we weren’t there he’d see what was around in food. One time he ate a berry pie. And then he got on the couch. This pig was spoiled.

Because he was afraid of the coyotes, you could not leave him home. Going for a ten-mile hike, wandering to this cabin and that cabin, would take all day. As he got bigger, it got hard on him because he was heavy and we weren’t anywhere near water. But he wouldn’t be left behind. If everybody left the cabin, you could not force him to stay there.

We figured he could count to nine or ten. Sometimes there would be four or five of us sitting at the cabin and a lot of company would come up. During the Second World War and at the end of the war my father worked for the Air Force as a civilian, but had lots of military friends. The cabin became the place to go. If you could get Sid to invite you to the cabin… . It was a wonderful place. It had a lot of magic for a lot of people. Anyway, we learned that if we were all going to go some place in the car, if we took off, the pig came galloping after the car. There was no leaving him. So we would have one person climb out the bay window on the east side of the cabin, sneak up the hill to the ditch, to the mine dump, walk along the ditch to the road and be picked up later. After this happened, everybody else left, maybe nine people, then the pig would stay. But if everybody went out that front door, you couldn’t make that pig stay. This happened all the time. If the pig thought that there was someone in the house, he would be content to stay at the cabin.

Archie was destined for the end of the year party. This was after the world war. We had a “closing of the mountain” party on Labor Day. This was the first one. The party was going to be at Art’s place at the Bowman Mine, and the Archie was going to be the guest of honor. The pig had been our pet all summer, so all three of us kids, Audrey, Fritz and I, refused to stay on the mountain. We left a week early. We weren’t going to be there for the barbecue. The pig was duly done in and, scraped, put in a pit and they had a big barbecue.

You know, when you spend your life eating game, shooting animals, having to clean them, things like that, you become a little bit inured, a little hardened to the realities of life. I don’t know if “hardened” is the right word, but you show a strong streak of practicality. So when friends are going down the tubes, being eaten, it’s not such a strange thing.

Even though we weren’t willing to eat part of Archie, we had all done all those things. And you know, the strange thing is, we all hunted all those years. Fritz and I would go out and ambush quail. We got very good at the calls of the quail. We never shot quail before the first of August because the coveys were too young. We wanted the young to be able to survive because that was part of next year’s food. Also, we did not tolerate any predators close to the cabin. If we saw a bobcat or something like that near the cabin, we shot them. So, where it sounds cold blooded, it’s kind of like a farm life. You have to accept the fact that there are different life styles and you learn some of these things.

Our Dogs on Paiute

We always had a dog. In the early days we had Mamie. And we had Frowsy, a German Shepherd bitch we got from Louie. Really a nice dog. Bit in the eye by a rattlesnake one time. She crawled under the cabin and stayed for three days. Her eye was all grey, but she seemed to be in pretty good shape. The eye eventually cleared up. Amazing what eyes will do. We had several dogs get bit, but we never had one die.

One summer we had a Dalmatian we took up there, Cloudy. He used to wander around with us kids, but apparently one time he went up to the sawmill and got into some battery acid because when he came back he was heaving. We kind of figured out what was going on and we had to put him down.

But that’s the only dog I can remember – oh, there was Willie. When we lived in East LA, dogs came and went. Traffic, and things like that, and stray dogs. Mother picked up this little puppy, Willie. He was just covered with fleas and sick and we had to keep our distance from him. Mother took him to heart and bathed him and cleaned him up. It was unheard of to go to a veterinarian, especially poor folks. Willie got very healthy.

We had a cat named Twidget. Willie played with the cat. He’d pick the cat up by the scruff of the neck and drag it around the house. I swear, what the cat put up with.

One summer school still had a couple of weeks to run. I couldn’t have been much more than twelve years old, I was in our back yard in East LA when I heard kids running and screaming. I knew they were chasing a dog. A dog came staggering through the fence. I thought, “Oh, oh, this isn’t right.” So I got up behind the dog and I picked him up by the scruff of the neck and the skin on his back, and took him by a box. I turned the box over him and put a weight on it and got Mama. She called the Humane Society and said we had a dog there and she thought it might have rabies. In the meantime, our dog had been out wandering, as people let their dogs do back then. As soon as Willie came home, Mother put him in the house. We didn’t think he had been near the dog.

The Humane Society picked up the dog. They didn’t really check the dog out because they believed there hadn’t been a case of rabies in LA County for years. Daddy took Mother and Willie up to the cabin and left them there. Two weeks later the rest of us came up and we had the usual celebration. There was fresh food and something to drink for the adults and Coke for the kids. Mother mentioned that Willie had acted strangely a few times, so she was watching him and locking him downstairs at night. She said what he had gone down to the creek to drink and suddenly came to a skidding halt and backed up from the water shaking his head. She was reminded of hydrophobia.

That night – I guess Fritz and Audrey weren’t there, it was just me and Mom and Dad –we all went upstairs to bed. We heard the dog running around knocking into things. Mother said, “Joanne, don’t get out of bed. Just stay in bed.” She had forgotten to close the door between upstairs and downstairs. In the morning, when we could see, the dog was downstairs and staggering. He wasn’t getting near anybody. I sat down in a chair and finally he came over a little bit closer to me and lay down by my feet. We discussed it and we said this dog had got to be shot. Suddenly Willie ran outside and ran in circles. My folks said, Oh God, let’s shoot him quick. If he takes off into the forest, other animals will attack him. So we shot him and buried him. We buried him deep because we didn’t want somebody digging him up.

When we went back to East LA we called the Humane Society and said the dog had rabies. We suspected our dog had gotten it from that dog they’d collected. They still said there hadn’t been a case of rabies in four years. They weren’t interested in having us cut off the head and bring it down for testing. That was the last time that area was ever rabies free, because the dog had been spreading rabies.

I think of how casually we handled things like that. Those were the days, you know, when the world was a different place.

Copyright Joanne Harris 2009

Chickens, Ducks and Pigeons

It seems to me we had lots of animals up there on the mountain. When we went to Paiute, we always took our dogs and cats with us. We took pigeons. Chickens.

Down from the cabin was a little tiny shack, probably not more than six by eight feet. It was made out of squared logs, and we figured it was where they stored the dynamite because it was a hundred yards from the cabin. We fixed it up with chicken roosts and locked the chickens up and night where they could lay their eggs, if they would be so kind. During the day we let them out. For city chickens, they really, really got smart. They’d be out scratching and some chicken would give a certain quawk and every chicken would disappear.

Once a chicken pecking around right in front of the porch when a hawk swooped down at it. The chicken laid its head on the ground and spread its wings out and just flattened itself on the ground. The hawk overshot it, and came to rest in a tree to think about making a second dive. We got a gun and shot the hawk. We ate the hawk, not the chicken. We took some of the chickens home with us again, those that were still around.

One summer we took some ducklings up there. So funny. So sad. Actually we took them two summers. Ducklings are so cute. They can’t fly. Their wings are the last things to grow. The creek was right there by the cabin, 25 feet away from it. The willows were heavy and the ducklings would just spend the whole day in the creek, eating and feeding. At night we would lock them up. That first summer a predator got one duck. We thought, well, that’s not bad.

So the next year we brought up a dozen ducks. These ducks were more adventurous. They went up the creek, but we figured they were in the creek and in the willows, so they were probably O.K. We didn’t realize they were going all the way up into the meadow, about an eighth of a mile. We were sitting on the front porch when a little duckling, I swear to God he wasn’t more that eight inches high, came running ‘round the corner dead fast quack quack quacking ran right up to us. We figured, oh shit, grabbed a gun and took off up towards the meadow. All we saw when we got up to the meadow gate was a couple of coyotes taking off. We never found anything of those other ducklings.

So the first summer we lost one, and the next summer we lost all but one. And that little duckling, you couldn’t drive him away from the cabin.

One summer when I was older we took a bunch of pigeons up there to try to establish pigeons on Paiute. There must have been twenty pigeons, a large flock. We kept them locked up for a week and fed them, and that was all that was required to fix their home. They’d take off during the day, and I think they went down into the valley around Weldon. They’d be gone all day long and in the evening, they’d come back. This went on for a long time.

One evening we were in our evening sitting spots watching the pigeon flock come in. Suddenly about six hawks -- not all the same kind, either -- apparently had decided to waylay them. They all swooped in at once, but I don’t think they got a pigeon. We had one old pigeon we called NPA because he had a National Pigeon Association band on him. He was the oldest pigeon there. So he’s flying along when a hawk comes shooting up behind him. NPA turned his head, and, I swear, I didn’t know a pigeon had an afterburner. But that pigeon, from flopping along slowly, went “tchewww”—and he was gone! It was amazing. That ambush never happened again, but the pigeons were a lot more careful after that.

Copyright Joanne Heyser Harris 2009

Even More Paiute People

The John Weiss and Earl and Mattie Morelands lived up on top of the mountain, about 6000 feet where the firs grew. I don’t know anything about their background. Weiss had a small cabin, tightly chinked, a really good cabin. The Morelands had a bigger cabin and even had a bunkhouse and a barn. They had the Lone Star Mine, I believe it was, and worked it for years. A shaft went down 200 feet with stopes going off here and there. Daddy and I got to go down there once.

Herb and Irma Gorman were up there for years and years. They lived in the Claraville flat area. Claraville was an interesting area because there was a public meadow there, something like twenty acres. It had been kind of a city back in gold rush days. There was one little cabin there, known as the Recorder’s Shack, the oldest cabin in the Claraville area. It was made out of squared logs. When Mother built the fireplace at our cabin, the mantle log came from the Recorder’s Shack. My brother carved “Blessed by that spot where cheerful guests retire, to pause from toil and trim their evening fire” on it, a few letters at a time. Fritz was good at carving. My mother always liked the quote, she said, because it showed that guests were supposed to work.

Also we lived in a comparatively big cabin that was rotting into the ground that for a while, Tip Fulton’s old place. Now there was another real character. I wish I could remember what Tip did for a living. Everybody was supposed to be a miner because that’s the only way they could hold their claims. There was very little private property other than Nick’s meadow up there. I don’t know if any of the claims had ever been patented. I suppose a few had way in the past.

A lot of people lived in this old cabin through the years. It was abandoned, but had board floors. I think it had two rooms and an old stove. It had what you needed. And it had an old outhouse back a ways from it. So a person could move in and be sort of comfortable.

Kelso Creek wasn’t more than three- or four-hundred feet from the Claraville Meadow. You couldn’t drink out of it, but you could use the water for cooking and other things. Also, the Claraville Meadow had a wonderful spring that had been rocked in so the livestock couldn’t drink out it, but could drank out of the overflow instead. That’s where we got water for that cabin.

I don’t think Tip was married in the early days, but he got married some time when I was young. Tip liked to tell stories. He was famous for talking about the time the pigs ate Little Nevy, and how it rained for forty days and forty nights. And it was either he or his father got bit by a rattlesnake and he sucked the venom to “keep the pizen from gettin’ to his heart.” Tip was kind of a gossip and scandal monger, according to my folks. He had a lot of stories.

Later on, when we lived over on French Gulch, Tip owned a cow. Every day in the evening we kids would walk over to Tip’s place, probably a couple miles, to get a half gallon of milk. We had milk all that summer.

I actually don’t know the background of these people very much because I saw them through a child’s eyes.

Copyright Joanne Harris 2009

Art Griswold

Art Griswold owned or worked two mines on the mountain. I don’t know how old he was because he was always old when I knew him, but that was from the point of view of a little kid. He was over six feet tall and very thin, almost cadaverous, and kind of slumped. He had a big handlebar mustache and a little head of hair.

Nick didn’t like Art. He thought Art was a coward. During the late thirties someone came up on the mountain asking for Art. When Art heard about it he took off and didn’t come back for several years.

Interestingly enough, during the Second World War, Art – let’s start again. Art was entitled to a Spanish-American War pension but he never collected it because he wasn’t going to be one of those guys on welfare. During the Second World War he went down to N.O.T.S., the Naval Ordnance Test Station, in Inyo Kern where he worked as a guard. After the war the FBI got to going through old records and came across Art’s fingerprints, which matched those of a guy wanted for murdering a U.S. marshal in Arizona or New Mexico. My father had some legal experience since he had read the law with my grandfather, Robert Emmet Austin, for a few years while they were still speaking. Art came to Daddy and said he was in trouble, and so Daddy handled it for him. Who knows what really happened. Anyway, it seemed that all the witnesses were dead. All the FBI wanted to do was close the case, which they did. Guess who immediately applied for his Spanish American War pension? He hadn’t filed all those years because he was a fugitive, and that time he took off across the hill, when Nick thought he was a coward, probably somebody from that old adventure was looking for him.

Mother called Art one of “nature’s gentlemen.” He never made an off-color remark. He never did anything off-color and certainly when there was just mother and us kids, he was always a perfect gentleman. If you had liquor in the house, he’d come down and visit. I suppose he did moonshine, too. Most of the stuff that I saw had labels on it, but I’m sure that he did some for himself.

Copyright Joanne Heyser Harris 2009

Paiute People

Paiute People
Copyright Joanne Heyser Harris 2009

I only knew some of the people who were on the mountain from a child’s point of view. I’ve mentioned Louie the Indian. Frank and Jenny King were an old couple. At least, they seemed ancient to me. They lived over on what we called King Creek. Frank did placer mining to keep his claim. And he had about a half acre garden. Once he thought he was going to save time and plough his garden with his horse, Pasco. He got Pasco hitched up and the horse took off over the barbed wire fence, plough and all. I don’t know if Frank ever found all the harness.

Frank was tall, old and thin. He drank a lot. He hunted to keep them in food. The Kings did whatever was necessary to live up there comfortably. There may have been a little bootlegging, but I don’t know. I don’t know if they call it bootlegging if you just do it for your own use, rather than selling it. Jenny was a Swede and had been a nurse during the First World War. She was short and rotund and really, really, really nice. She was always very good to us kids. I never particularly knew Frank one way or another.

Their cabin was very close to Tommy’s cabin, about an eighth of a mile. We were on the same flat. We used to walk back and forth all the time.

Old Nick, as I understand it, was the first white child born in Havilah County, which later became Kern County. In Bakersfield there is either a museum for him or he is in a museum. We used to call him “Ten Daughters Nick,” because he had ten daughters and one son. He called the son “Boy.” There was a lot of talk about who fathered whom and who was really whom. When we knew Nick, Nita Williams was the daughter who was around all the time. She and Mother used to work cattle with Nick. There was another daughter they used to call “Little Bits.”

Nick’s wife had been dead for some years. He had a large ranch in Walker Basin where Mother and I stayed that one year, and he also had a very long meadow, French Meadow, probably about five or six miles long, up on Paiute Mountain. He had a log cabin in that Meadow that he didn’t use any more. We kids used to play in it. Every time we would wander by we would go in it. It kept getting lower and lower to the ground, but it was there for a long time. The cabin had this wonderful spring beside it, maybe a hundred gallons a minute coming right out of the ground. Nick ran his cattle up on Paiute during the summers, and wintered down in Walker Basin.

Nita Williams was my ideal, a genuine cowgirl. They tolerated me. I remember the summer I was seventeen. I and some other people helped brand and castrate some calves. I helped give shots and hold legs. They would rope a calf with a horse and dragged it near the fire. Then, after somebody would throw the calf, I sat on the ground with one foot against and just above the hock of the bottom leg and held the top leg with both hands and leaned back to really keep the legs apart. Then people would knew what they were doing would castrate, brand and earmark the calf, and then let it go. They had a lot of help from people who had never done anything like it before. It was an interesting time.

Frozen Dynamite and Typhoid Fever

Frozen Dynamite and Typhoid Fever
© Joanne Heyser Harris 2008

I recall however one problem building the road over that ditch. There was a tree and a large rock pile in the middle of the ditch. We couldn’t move these rocks. Nobody had a bulldozer, my goodness. So we had to dynamite it. Now Daddy had done a lot of dynamiting. I don’t know where he learned all this stuff, but, you know, at certain things he was really good. As a kid you never think your father’s a very intelligent person, but Father had to be very intelligent in many ways, as I found out in later years.

Howsomever, we needed some dynamite. Who had some dynamite? Art Griswold said that he had two cases of frozen dynamite we could use. But of course, frozen dynamite is exceedingly dangerous. Normally, the way Daddy would do it with proper dynamite, good dynamite, he’d take a cap, which was like a cartridge without a lead pellet in it, he’d cut a piece of fuse and he’d put it into the cap and crimp it so it wouldn’t come out, and then he’d take his knife and bore a hole into the end of the stick of dynamite and push the cap in. That’s how dynamite was armed. Then you would drill a hole in the mine tunnel some place and put the dynamite in. Usually you armed more than one stick at a time, but you kept track of how many you set, maybe five or six. And you lit ‘em and ran out of the tunnel and you called out, “Fire in the hole!” and then you’d count each blast very carefully, all of the blasts. They were timed to go off differently so they didn’t go off in one big blast but boom, boom, boom, boom. You’d know whether they’d all gone off. You didn’t want any hangfires in there. You couldn’t go back in the tunnel. There was no ventilation in there, and the fumes from the tunnel could cause quite a headache. It was twenty-four hours before you could go back into the tunnel.

To make a long story short, they were going to donate these two cases of dynamite. That was a good thing to do with frozen dynamite. But you didn’t cut one of these sticks and put a cap in it. When it's frozen, something in it crystallizes and it's a bomb. You don't necessarily need a cap to set it off. Dropping it might do the job.

What you do is take the fuse, you cap it, and delicately lay it inside the box. Well, here came Frank King and Art Griswold, each with a case of frozen dynamite on his shoulder. They were drunk! They staggered. There was a small crowd, there were probably six of seven people there, and they ran. The men got the dynamite off their shoulders and carefully laid it in among the rocks. The tree was right by the rock pile, because I remember they put one by the tree. They put a long fuse on it and everybody went off a good long distance. But I remember the tree shot straight into the air so fast it left most of its bark behind. It went up, up, up, up, did a cartwheel and came down on the other side of the canyon, probably a sixteenth of a mile away. There were rocks all over the place. The rocks and tree were moved, but there was this big hole in the ground. It took a lot of shoveling, but it was filled up and we had the road into the cabin and didn’t have to go by the Watkins’ and my mother was very happy.

People who live alone in the mountains very often get a thing called Cabin Fever. It’s rarely the men who get the Cabin Fever because they’re usually outside, hunting. They were doing the hunting, they were doing the mining. The women were staying in the cabin cooking, keeping the fire going, stuff like that. So you became desperate for company. Anna Watkins would walk over fairly often and Mother really got tired of seeing her, so we built a little tree house which up by the spring and took turns when it was about the time of day when Anna would show up. One of us would be put up in that tree in a little seat. It wasn’t like a playhouse. It was just seats. We could see up into the meadow, the part of the meadow after it crossed the bridge. We’d see Anna coming and then we’d race down to the house and tell Mama Anna was coming and Mama would pick up a gun and go hunting. And Anna would come and we’d say, “Oh, Mama went hunting and won’t be back.” Mama wanted solitude. She had the kids, the cabin, and she had a lot of hunting to do. That’s the only way we got meat. She kept very busy, and she didn’t want company. That’s one of the things she didn’t want. That was difficult for her. For Anna. Difficult for her, too.

The building of the cabin was my mother’s Life Project, she said. I know now it gave her interest and focus on a project when she was having problems with Daddy, and things – she had had a nervous breakdown. The cabin was her solace and her interest, and she was quite an engineer. She could always figure things out. So the building of the cabin, well, that went on all the years we were there. In the early years they jacked up the cabin and put new logs under it. I guess the first thing that was done after the cabin was functional and we’d moved in, was the Annex. That was a little room to the side that went around part of the front and part of the side. It was kind of like a sloping roof off the other roof.

And this was the summer of ’41, I guess, when my sister came down with typhoid fever. We had a spring. The spring was a good producing spring, but it wasn’t rocked in at all. It was just a hole in the ground. The adults decided that we were going to make a proper spring, that is, dig it out, rock it in. That way we’d keep the cattle out of it. Mom had five kids that summer. Beverly and Dana were there. And we all drank out of the creek for the two weeks that they were doing the spring. What’s amazing is that only my sister got typhoid fever with all of us kids there.

I didn’t know any of this. My mother was afraid that it might be typhoid fever. Audrey was very ill. She had a high fever. Mother kept her in the annex away from us kids and took care of her there. I guess that was the summer we also replaced the roof of the cabin because it was in August and all of the mountaineers said, “take the roof off in August, it never rains in August.” At that particular time Beverly was there and the Paul and Bernie LaGue were there. Audrey was in the back room, because Mom said the only person who was dry was Audrey. She was in the back room in the annex and it didn’t rain in there. Beverly was dry because there was an old piano box she crawled into. Everybody else was just drenched. It just poured that night.

Mother wanted to get a doctor. There was a doctor on the mountain. I can’t remember his name. She asked him to come down and look at Audrey. He didn’t think it was typhoid fever. But Audrey was in bed for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. I remember one time when Daddy came up and she was able to get out of bed and get across the little bridge across the creek by the cabin. And I can see her doing that and running into Daddy’s arms. So she was getting better by then. But when we actually came down from the mountain – she had actually been too sick to move until then – we take our medicines so much for granted nowadays – of course there were no antibiotics – when we got back to town, East L.A., in the fall, Mother took Audrey to the doctor and, yes, she had typhoid fever. And she had to be tested for a year to see if she was a carrier.

The Ranger Station

The Ranger Station
©Joanne Heyser Harris

Kids get bored and try to keep life interesting. No less so with us on Paiute. I seem to remember tp-ing someone's cabin, scaring campers in the public campground and generally wandering the mountain to see who was in residence and who had left the mountain. We never stole anything, but there were several abandoned cabins from the Gold Rush and lots of stuff to pick up. Every cabin had a coffee grinder tacked to a tree. There were old bedframes in most cabins and an ouythouse nearby.

Fritz started trying to dig up old graves until Mama found out and put a stop to it. She was afraid of what diseases might be left in the grave. Also the depredations were repaired, showing someone was monitoring the graves. Never knew who.

We kids usually became friends with the summer forest fire guards since Audrey (Andrea) was in her middle teens and the guards were in their late teens or early twenties.

One summer we had shared a joke with the guard and a friend of his. And Englishman took an American guest on a red coat fox hunt. The punch line was, “We say, 'Tally-ho the fox,' not 'Kill the little bastard.'”

We had been off the mountain for a week or so, and to announce our return we sneaked up to the ranger station at night and ran some long underwear up the flag pole. We had printed “Tally-ho the fox” on the underwear. Unknown to us, the ranger station was empty because of a fire in another district. During the three days the guard was gone, the district ranger came by. He removed the banner and suggested to the guard that it “lacked dignity.”

A few years later a girl friend and I came up to stay at the cabin for a week. This year there were two guards, one of whom was married. We visited back and forth and we all rode a couple of horses in the public meadow. They came over for dinner the evening before we had to leave. While dinner was cooking we left them at the cabin. We told them we had to doctor a horse who had cut himself on some barbed wire. Actually, the horse was well and we intended to nail the door to the ranger station outhouse shut. We did so and returned to the cabin for dinner and a pleasant evening.

Next morning we got up around 5:00 and I went to the outhouse and sat down. “Hmmm, lots of dew on the toilet seat,” I thoght. “Hmmm, pretty sticky dew,” I thought. Investigation showed the dew to be jam. We weren't the only ones who could sneak around at night. About a quarter mile from the cabin on the road out we found a sign that said, “Have a dry trip home.”

The next time, someone left a bucket of water above the cabin door. It got my father.

Living at French Gulch

Living at French Gulch
Copyright Joanne Harris 2008

By the time I was about eight I begin to remember doing things by myself. We lived on French Gulch, at the bottom of French Meadow but on the other side of the fence. Through the meadow and across an old bridge out another gate of the meadow, you came to John Watkins’ claim. John and Anna Watkins had a cabin there. It was two-story and had three rooms downstairs.

They had an outhouse, a three-holer, and we girls used to have fun in there. We girls would go into there and lock the boys out. There was another boy around, besides my brother. We went in there to talk and you might as well do two things at once. That three-holer was really uptown.

The Watkins mine was called the Squaw Pocket, so they were miners, sort of. Most of the people up there were miners, sort of. I guess the Morlands took it pretty seriously. Art Griswold, who owned the Bowman, actually had another mine also.

Mining had pretty well slowed down. During the Second World War there was no money for mining. It was suspended in many places because of the necessity of taking the people and the money for the war.

Sometimes Dixie Lee Cassidy, Anna Watkins’ granddaughter was there. We’d go over there, my sister and I, and sometimes Beverly, to visit and play.

Anna had a quilting frame. When you weren’t using it you pulled on a pulley and it pulled it up into the ceiling. When you wanted to work on it, you dropped it down and the ladies sat around and quilted. I can remember seeing that. It was an actual quilting party the way they used to be. This would have been in the Forties.

Somehow they had a fawn. We’ve all seen Bambi, and isn’t he sweet. Let me tell you, fawns are vicious. This particular fawn attacked my brother regularly, right up to the time he was a yearling. It didn’t attack the rest of us, just him. It stood up and struck with those really razor sharp hooves. My brother carried a monkey wrench with a missing movable jaw whenever he went over there. When the deer came after him, Fritz hit it between the ears with it with all his might. Then the fawn would leave him alone for a while. People would say, “Well, stop it, deer, don’t do that,” but Fritz always carried his wrench.

The Watkins were neighbors. One of the problems with going to the cabin was you had to drive right by their house to go through the gate, into the meadow, across a bridge and out the other gate to where our cabin was. If you didn’t want them to know you were in – well-- there was no way of getting around it. So Mama set out to build a road that came in another way.

It came out of – what was it? – no, it wasn’t Claraville – Bella Union, that was it --anyhow, the road cut off from there and it followed a fairly natural path. The work was done with shovels. You cleared the brush and moved a few rocks, drove the car back and forth over it, and pretty soon it began to be a track. Then we came around a hill – I can picture the whole thing in my mind – and then went down through a low spot which was on a claim called Grey Squirrel which my father had filed on, besides our claim which was High, Wide and Handsome. Then it came along an old ditch left over from the Gold Rush days. This was a water ditch. The ditch systems were very extensive very quickly after the Gold Rush started. I really don’t remember where this ditch started, but it went along the hill above the cabin and across the mine dump that was there at that cabin. (We didn’t start that mine. We did some work in it because we had to do assessment work.) And then it went along the hill. The road came to the ditch and went along the hill, which was rather a steep hill. You couldn’t have built a road there without this ditch. It was sort of flat and filled, and then when the road got to the dump came down a very steep hill and you could park right at the cabin.

The wedding Night

Some who read this might have an expectation of a virtual night of debauchery, however as sad it is to dissapoint you certain realities must be observed.

Laurie, my daughter was married to a nice young man in a pleasant cermony in Woodland Hills, California. She was married under a canopy in a jewish ceramony where a small glass is stomped and then everyone cheers.

The ceramony screamed for a song called Sunrise, Sunset, but that was not to be. The young couple did not have much money as is true of most young couples so they decided to have their hoeymoon on the mountain. It was late in the summer and though at that time in the city the temperature is blessed, on the mountain it is more like the beginning of a small curse.

After the fun, the couple drive most of the night to the mountain and when they arrived on top of the Harris grade it was cold, dark and very windy, icey, cold, windy to be exact. While it is true that cities have road signs here and there, on the mountain there are no signs. There is only one road on the Paiutes, the rest is driveways varying from one thousand feet to five miles in length.

Naturally they passed the drive way to the High Wide and Handosme claim, our cabin, and became lost in the dark. As much in love as they were at this time, tempers were getting short, they were cold and hungry and wished they had stayed home.

Finaly they saw something they recognized at the side of the road, it was the ranger's station closed of course for the rest of the year. The small cabin was locked and the only thing they could get into was the two seater outhouse. Most outhouses are full of spaces to help them to smell better and this one was no exception. They discussed their situation thoughtfully but could not decide weather it was better to sit and cuddle or to walk back and forth, one on the floor, the other across the two seats.

They spent the entire night arguing as to which was the best idea, it was Laurie who wished to cuddle. The wind howling through the boards was cold, it was dark and smelly and each did his thing to keep warm, Lauire huddled in a corner while her new love paced back and forth mumbling unkind things about life in general.

As much as I and others love the mountain it can be cruel, especially to newcomers. Actually they were lucky to find any shelter at all and it made the rest of the marriage some what more tolerable.

A few years before I and my love arrived at the cabin at about ten oclock at night to spend a pleasant weekend. It was alright in the car but when we opened the car door to go inside the cabin the cold took our breath away. We only had to walk about twenty feet to get to the cabin door, but that is a long way when you are freezing to death. Bye the time we got to the door our hands were numb and getting the key out of my pocket was difficult because I could not feel anything, but getting the key into the lock was really difficult.

I could hold onto the door knob alright but getting the key into the lock took a long time, a period long enough to die of cold. The shaking became worse and worse and getting the key into the lock became more and more difficult. It was actually a race against time. But we did get in. To light a match to start a fire could not be done so we went straight to bed taking with us part of a turkey we had brough along.

We finaly got warm and munched on our turkey drum sticks and life got better as we drifted off to sleep.

At this time life stopped getting better for I woke up feeling something crawling on me, lots of somethings in fact. I reached for a flash light and saw the bed, sheets and our bodies covered with the largest ants I have ever seen, almost an inch long each. There were millions of them. I did a little screaming and my husband did a great deal of screaming as we leaped out of bed. But wwe did survive and that was that.

It is best to leave the mountain to the mountain lions and coyotes during the fall and winter months.

The Morlands, The Bowman Mine

The Morlands, the Bowman Mine and Other Postcard Memories
© Joanne H. Harris, 2009

We lived in various places. We lived at Art Griswold’s Bowman Mine for a while. Daddy was a partner in the mine. The Bowman was a mine up above French Meadow, and it had been a good mine. But it was a very loose, unstable hill to go through. You had to cap and stall the tunnel: those are the things that support the ceiling, and you had to put boards all the way along.

There was a shaft in there, and a pocket of gold. But the shaft had semi caved in before anybody could get the gold out. So Art told Daddy that if he would go down the shaft and then along the tunnel for a ways, and find the pocket of gold, they would give him a third interest in the mine. So Daddy did it: he went down there and got the gold. Daddy was amazingly agile. When he worked for the fire department, he was a lineman. He could shinny up poles, climb trees. Even so, recovering the gold was an absolutely amazing thing to do. But he was young. He couldn’t have been more than 28 or 29. So this would have been around 1935 0r 1936.

There is a picture of me at the Bowman. I couldn’t be more than two years old. The chronology of when we were where, I just can’t tell you.

Mother told me this story. We were living at the Bowman Mine. A bunch of guys came up to work the mine, which had a stamp mill with three stamps, donkey engine and one of these big belts. That stuff was still there when I was thirteen years old. It was a working mine and in those days they used a lot of cyanide in processing and separating the gold. I guess they still do. Down below the stamp mill about 500 feet was a cyanide pond. It was about twenty feet across when full. It dried up after a while. We kids were always warned, “Stay away from it.” Every now and then you’d find a dead cow down there.

Anyway, Mama was at the mine and these guys wanted her to cook for them. She threw them out and they had to go cook for themselves. She had Audrey, Beverly, me and Fritz, and I guess she had Beverly's brother, Dana, too. Way up on top of the mountain Mattie Morland and her husband, Earl, had a mine. I was in there once. It was amazing. It started with a shaft that went down a couple of hundred feet.

Mattie was six feet tall, a big woman, not fat even slightly. She had heard that about a lone woman with a bunch of kids staying down at the Bowman Mine and decided she’d better come down there and meet her. Now Mother was a tough person, but she came from South Pasadena, a very civilized place. Here comes great, tall Mattie wearing overhauls and carrying a large pistol. She was very primitive looking. She walked about ten miles to introduce herself, visit, and help Mother understand how things were on the mountain.

I don’t remember this at all. This is the story I’ve heard. Mattie decided she would stay overnight. That night Mother put us all to bed and then Mattie climbed in bed with Mother. Mother was shocked. But Mattie wasn’t queer, but there was the children’s bed and the adults’ bed. This was the primitive way: you shared the bed. Mattie was a wonderful woman and my folks were friends with the Morlands until they died thirty years later. They were good people.

Nick Williams built a new board shack on the mountain. We called it a shack because it wasn’t log. He had a log cabin in the old meadow. There was a wonderful spring by it. The water just poured out of the ground, a hundred gallons a minute. He built the new cabin out of sawed boards across the road from the old cabin because the old one was rotting into the ground. He was very proud of his new cabin. It had three rooms and two doors. In back it had a nice outhouse and a barn.

Once when Nick wasn’t there my father and Mother’s brother, Norwin, played a joke. They were always doing juvenile things. They put a sign up front of the shack that said “Public Restrooms.” Daddy put a sign over the front door which said “Women” and a sign sticking out over the side door that said “Men.” This was because the building looked so out of place on the mountain. There wasn’t another one like it on the mountain at that time.

Nick and family came back and found these signs and thought, “Who could have done this?” They decided that the Morlands had done it. So when Mattie had all her clothes hung on the line and she and Earl had gone somewhere, the Williamses snuck up there and tied all Mattie’s clothes in knots. Mattie and Earl reckoned as how – I don’t know who they reckoned as how, but they didn’t think about my folks. It was a good thing because by that time jokes had begun to go around the mountain. My folks kept a low profile. I guess we were living on French Gulch by this time.

A Little Game of Poker, Mountainstyle

A Little Game of Poker, Mountainstyle
Copyright Andrea Heyser 2009

The evolution of life on this planet has been a wondrous thing, for some of the developments found in life forms, including people, appear to be miracles. For example, life on the mountain is at times very quiet and others extremely frightening. Sometimes one and sometimes the other. But nature has been very kind to us in that after a frightening period and a period of quiet five hundred new genes turn on and repair all the existing proteins in our cells leaving us healthier than before. This does not happen at anyother time.

This has been so ingrained into us for over four hundred million years that to not have stress-and-then-quiet at times is damaging to our minds and bodies.

As an interesting aside, this stress-and-then-quiet routine can make people and other animals fall in love. I used to know a test pilot who told me that he could make any woman go to bed with him in just an hour or two. He described it thus. " I take her for a ride in my little sports car, and at a certain spot I go very fast and scare her half to death, then I stop and we get out of the car and lie down and I hold her and tell her how sorry I am and then we rest. After that it is easy." Look also at the greatest love of all, that of one soldier for another during battle. Look at mating rituals where animals meet, play and rest and then mate.

So strong is this need for unrest and then rest that when we have too much of one and not enough of the other our bodies and minds are uncomfortable until we change our behavior and comply with nature.

That brings me to the mountain. There can be so much rest that we feel as though we will go mad with BOREDOM! Some times on the mountain it is so peaceful we think we will actually die of boredom. We walk for miles to trade cheap novels, cowboy novels, and it does not take long until you are reading them twice. We associate with people we would avoid down below and feel grateful for their company. We would give people unrest cures, you should see the cabin we T P ed. Not the outside, but the inside, a joy to behold, we would hold satanic rituals, but finally all is lost and we have to do something new.

Enter the poker game played Paiute style.

An ordinary poker game would not suffice, it had to be special. So we would pick up a deck of cards and a few other things and head up the dusty road to French Meadow. We would crawl under the fence and go onto the grass which is about a foot and a half deep and rolling in a gentle wind. We would pick a spot in the center, under a bright blue sky, surrounded by cattle and the whispering sound coming from the trees when the wind rubs the needles together, and sit in a tight circle.

Next we would prepare our space by each placing a weapon in front of us on the grass. I always used the colt woodsman, fully loaded, Kampe would have one of his old military rifles in front of him, Fritz had a Bowie knife unsheathed in front of him and I think some one had a hatchet or an ax. And we would sit under the summer sky with the cows about us, eyeing us suspiciously and we cheated outrageously. We threatened each other, accused one and all of various crimes, laughed and joked and in general played like children everywhere.

We, the Heyser gang, knew how to have fun. The adults also played poker, but in the house with a kerosene lamp in front of the fireplace.

I remember one game in particular. The adults were playing as we children sat in front of the fire.

Joanne was as usual planning to rustle one of Nick's cows. She spent the whole summer on this project. But when she finally got a steer down in the place where she planned to kill it and she also had the proper ropes to hang it, mother refused to let her do it. She bawled for the whole next day, saying over and over, "I want to rustle a cow." She was only twelve at that time.

Anyway, all was quiet, each with our own thoughts when I noticed one of the men reaching down to his ankle from time to time. Suddenly with a loud scream he jumped up from the table nearly knocking it down and shouted "My God, something is crawling up my leg!" At this he ran for the door while the rest of us watched with astonishment. I grabbed a flash light and we all ran out to see a huge beetle crawling on the ground. The men argued for some time on how to kill it, and finally my father got his colt woodsman out and shot it. This beetle was about three inches long and had big horns on it. I don't want to run into any of these again.

All in all, however if this story should be read by the man who had the beetle crawling up his leg I wish to thank him for the many chuckles I have had over the incident, as over the years he has made a Heyser girl very happy.

More Memories at Tommy's Cabin

More Memories at Tommy's Cabin
Copyright Joanne H. Harris, 2008

We lived at Tommy’s cabin for at least a year, as best I remember. Daddy went into partners with Rollie and Oakley Horne at a sawmill on top of the mountain. He’d stay up there for a few days, and then he’d come down and be at the cabin for a few days, and then he’d go back up. That’s right – the sawmill and the girl who ran away! That was around 1939.

I remember very little of this story. We were at that sawmill. My cousin Beverly Austin, was there, too. There was a girl there cooking for the men. She couldn’t have been much older than Audrey and Beverly, and they were eleven or twelve. She decided to run away and took Audrey and Beverly with her. They went down off the side of the mountain, down and down, and nobody could find them. There was a great hue and cry, but they couldn’t be found.

Mother went to Nick’s ranch in Walker Basin because the mountain went down there. My mother told Nick that the girls were lost. She didn’t know at the time that one of them was running away, but she knew when they had left the sawmill. Nick took a look and said, “O.K., we need to leave about 1:00 o’clock.” Mother threw a fit but Nick said, “No, we don’t leave before 1:00 o’clock.”

About 1:00 o’clock they got into his car and he drove up into a canyon at the bottom of the mountain. He got out and said, “Now, you call.” My mother yelled for Audrey and Beverly and they answered. Nick really knew the mountain. Apparently, canyons being what they are and uphill being very steep, people funneled into this area. So that’s how Nick found them. The girl had been running away and took Audrey and Beverly with her. It was a very primitive place, a very primitive place.

Beverly had to have been with us when we were living at Tommy’s cabin. I remember Audrey and Beverly made me a dollhouse out of a box a foot-and-a-half square and about ten inches high. They took the box lids, the parts that folded down, and slotted them into the box to make rooms. Then they took sticks and made a closet. (I’ve never forgotten this because I always figured I was going to make something like this for a kid.) They cut out clothes and stuck them to the coat hangers and cut out paper dolls and put them in the doll house. It was an amazing little thing.

We thought we were having fun. We didn’t know we were poor. I never in my life thought we were poor folks.

Tommy Thomson's Cabin

Tommy Thomson's Cabin
Copyright Joanne Harris 2006

Most of the events described here happened around 1937-38, somewhere in there.

I’ve thinking about when we moved to the cabin and when Mother worked on it. The trees burning. There was quite a bit of burning done around the cabin, snags and downed logs, things like that. We couldn’t have been living there at the time.

Once Mother, Daddy, Fritz and I, maybe Audrey, but I don’t remember who else, were working on the cabin. They had been burning and there were places where stumps had been burned out. You know how you can walk on ashes and make patterns in them? I walked into an ash pile where a stump had been and my foot sank into this pile of embers and ashes. I was wearing high top tennis shoes without shoe laces and my foot came up full of coals. Fortunately I was very near the creek. I shrieked and made a mighty leap into the creek. Even so, I had blisters all around my ankle and the upper part of my foot.

We had brought with us a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a roll of toilet paper that day. Mother smeared my burns with peanut butter and wrapped the foot with toilet paper. There were scars on my foot for a few years. It was not a life-threatening accident and my foot still functioned. The main problem with it was pain.

We must have been staying at Tommy Thomson’s cabin while we were working on ours. Tommy had a cabin over near Frank and Jenny King’s. We stayed there off and on for almost a year. At this stage, I remember this thing and that, but not in order, and now everybody’s dead except my sister Andrea and me. My brother, whom I used to refer to when I wanted to know what was going on, is gone, so I have to rely on my memory and the pictures we have of that era.

We had a few adventures at Tommy’s cabin. That’s where we met Louie Parenti, or “Louie the Indian.” My mother said he was a French-Canadian Indian. But we just called him Louie the Indian. There was no racism in that. He was just one of the mountaineers.

Louie lived straight up the mountain above Tommy’s cabin, about a mile with his pack of wild dogs. In fact, our German Shepherd dog that we had for several years, Mamie, was one of Louie’s pups. So we saw him from time to time.

Once Louie killed a mountain lion. He heard his pack of pups barking, and he went down to see what was what. The pups had treed a lion. The lion was sitting in the tree deciding which pup he was going to eat first, but Louie shot the lion and killed him.

We ate part of that lion. When you live in the mountains and shoot your own food, you don’t always get a deer with a rack of antlers. The trusty hunter doesn’t always come in with a month’s food over his shoulders. You get what you get.

We had a couple of goats when we lived there. Mother had them for milk for us kids, and I can see my uncle, my mother’s brother Norwin Austin, trying to catch them to milk them. In my mind’s eye I see him running and whirling a lasso over his head.

Mother said that if anybody left the door open the goats would run in and jump on the bed and piss. Once she was sitting outside reading a book when somebody drove up. She put the book down and went over to the car and when she turned around, the goat was eating the book. These goats were a lot of fun and a lot of mess. Audrey had to milk them. If I was five, she was eleven. She had to do quite a few things like that.

Once Audrey, Fritz, Beverly and I had been told to “clean up our area,” whatever that area was. Somebody had thrown sweepings into the stove that included a 30.30 cartridge. We were all standing around the stove when the cartridge exploded. It was a tin stove, not cast iron. Little pieces of shrapnel flew and mother got some in her leg. The stove lid flew into the air and lit on my sister’s head. It was exciting. I was the youngest one. I don’t remember if my cousin, Dana Austin, was there, but he would have been just my age.

More about life at Tommy's cabin next week.

First Years on Paiute

First Years on Paiute
Copyright Joanne Harris 2009

The year after Walker Basin, 1938, Mom went up on Paiute. We didn’t have any place on the mountain, but she found an old, abandoned cabin. The neighbors said, “Oh, boy, you better leave that alone.” That was the Gherenger Claim. I can’t remember his first name. But people said, “That’s his claim and he doesn’t want people messing with it, even though he hasn’t filed on it recently.”

So my folks talked to him and he said, “Naw, take it, I’m never going to use it again.”

The folks filed on it. It didn't have much of a cabin, fifteen feet by twenty. But we started living there. Daddy wasn’t around very much. Mama decided – you know, she was a natural engineer and I guess she knew what the rest of us didn’t – she decided that she was going to work on the cabin.

It wasn’t in very good shape. The bottom logs were rotting into the ground. I guess Daddy must have fallen the log sized trees, forty- or fifty-feet tall, so she could replace the rotted ones. She borrowed an old white mule and a rock sled from Nick Williams.

A rock sled is a little tiny sled with very heavy slides on it, runners made out of two-by material with tin on the bottoms so they’ll slide. They have a cross piece where you can chain the butt of a log, and then it doesn’t dig into the ground when you drag it. That's how she started dragging in logs.

I don’t suppose I was peeling logs then, because I was pretty young. But Fritz peeled logs. How they did it, I don’t know, but they jacked up the cabin and put new, peeled logs under it. Mama raised the roof, literally. This was her project for years.

When she was at Paiute, she didn’t have any problems she couldn’t handle. So we spent a lot of our time at Paiute.

We had a house in East L.A. and Fritz went to school. I was much younger, and I will always remember Audrey and Fritz being there, and my cousin, Beverly. My mother’s brother, Norwin, had two children, Beverly and Dana. He abandoned them completely. Well, their mother abandoned them too. Beverly lived with us off and on for years and years. Dana lived with us for almost five years. During those years Mom was always working on the cabin and we were playing around.

The cabin was in a place called French Gulch. It had no amenities like running water or electricity. In later years we had the first flush toilet on Paiute Mountain. It was an outhouse built up the hill by the mine tunnel. There was water running out of the mine tunnel, so we put a bucket there and the water ran into the bucket. You flushed the toilet with the water in the bucket because Mom had built a toilet with a 55-gallon septic and about 50 feet of leach line. We used it for years and years.

Mom was always working on the cabin. Mystical. In those years it wasn’t mythical or mystical. It was just where we lived. We played around and as we got older we took longer trips. We’d go walking, Audrey and Beverly and Fritz were older than I. How far we wandered! You know, I don’t ever remember being told to stay home.

Audrey and Fritz and Beverly built themselves a little log cabin down the creek a ways out of logs laid cross ways. It had a door and a roof on it and, of course, this was their play house. But I wanted to play there too. It was, “Oh, Joanne, go back, go back. You’re not welcome. Beat it.” And finally they said, “Look, if we build you a cabin out of boards and rock up on the mine dump, (across the creek and up the road three- or four-hundred yards, oh, maybe not that far, but a long ways away) you’ll stay away from ours.” Some place there’s a piece of paper. My cousin Beverly had a legal mind. She’s the one who wrote it up and we all signed it.

So they built me my cabin, and you can guess what happened. I didn’t want to be up there by myself.

We lived there for years and years and years. I had adventures with the horses. We had to shoot our own meat when we were there, so there was a lot of hunting done. Beverly wasn’t living with us then, but I think by the time I was ten years old I was carrying a gun. The rules were really, really rigid.

I remember one spring when I was around twelve (1946). Ammunition was expensive, but every spring we all got to shoot off two or three shots at some cans across the creek to warm up and sight the guns in. And sight ourselves in. I hit the can and I turned around and yelled, “I got it!” As I turned, the gun fanned across other people. I will never forget that because I was upstairs and in bed and I didn’t get to speak to anybody until next morning. Never, never forgot it. Wonderful lesson.

We had guns in the house. We had a 25.20, which my brother bought about the end of the Second World War with some money he’d saved from a paper route. And we had the 30.30 and we had a 4-10 shotgun. And the 22s came and went. My father had a Colt Woodsman .22 semi-automatic, which was the gun of choice for packing. Those guns always sat there loaded, and we all knew they were loaded. It was never a problem with any of us kids. Never a problem. And if we had an accident with a gun, we never told anybody about it, that’s for damn sure.

A good cowman never eats his own beef

Being as the Paiutes had no electricity we did not have any refrigeration so if you wanted meat you had to go out and kill it unless you brought a meat animal with you.

One such animal was Archy, a pig. Archy was an intelligent animal and he liked nothing better than sitting on the couch in front of the fire eating a pie or two. He was strong and difficult to control. Mother fed him in a dish pan which he would finish in ten seconds or less while easily spitting out the onions from one side of his mouth at the same time spitting out the seeds from the other side. Not one seed or onion landed in the dish pan. It was a thing of wonder to watch.

Wherever we went Archy would follow, it was impossible to sneak out or outrun him, Archy was always with us. Once someone saw us fooling around at the Bella Union flats and told the ranger. The ranger replied "Oh that's just the Heyser kids with the pig and hound." We were well known on the mountain.

One day we went to the sawmill and I was talking to someone when Joanne came running up to me while at the same time I heard some piercing screaming. She said that Archy was surrounded. I ran towards the screams and there was Archy in a corner surrounded by five of the biggest, meanest cats you ever saw. These cats said they were going to beat up Archy and they looked as though they could do it. Of course we saved him for the umpteenth time.

We usually walked over five miles and Archy was good for only about three. He had tiny little feet and after a while they would hurt upon which he would lie down in the middle of the road and start screaming, telling every lion in the area there was to be food tonight. We always had to carry Archy home and it was hard as he was heavy. We would take turns carrying him and were usually exhausted by the time we got home. If we had left him on the road mother would have been very unhappy and I think Archy knew it and so just waited to be carried.

Fritz, my bother, wanted to be a provider and he went out early every morning to find a deer to shoot. He had a good spot on a rock pile right above a deer trail and saw many deer, but each time he set his sights on the animal he would get buck fever just looking at those big brown eyes.

One day he came home frightened. While sitting on his rock he heard a fawn calling in fear and saw it running with a wolf right behind it. The wolf however was not having a good time as it was kayaying and looking behind, and there, slashing and leaping, was a doe, a very angry doe, striking out at the wolf with her cookie cutter hooves.

He said he was afraid the doe would return to take him on next. But not long after that, early in the morning we heard a rifle shot and later home comes Fritz, covered with blood, not his own and on his back was a deer. At last we had meat, if wrapped with the pink coverlet during the day, and hung at night it would have lasted us more than a month.

Alas, the law of the hills destroyed our dreams of steak for supper. In the Paiutes meat is very hard to come by, and every one needs meat up there. People depend on one another, except for the cowboys, and people share everything, even their meat, not out of love for others but because one cannot escape from sharing.

You see, when some one butchers an animal the coyotes come out of nowhere and all night long they howl near the site. Since the cabins are miles apart it does not take a genius to figure out who has meat. The next day the guests start arriving, one by one and two by two, "just to see how we are," they say. It does not take long for the conversation to turn to meat and one must share. To not share could be dangerous. Most of the people we shared with did not give us any meat, but still the law of the hills applies. By the end of the day all we had left was a front quarter, enough for stew for a few days.

Now the cowboys had much the same problem, except they tend to rustle one another's cows. When ever Nick butchered a steer he hung out a thirty year old hide with one leg missing to show the other cowmen he had butchered one of his own. But the hide did have his brand on it, a muleshoe L, so no body said anything, out loud at least.

My mother helped out Nick at times so Nick would give her a little meat from time to time, but mother said it always had worms on it. I asked Nick one time why he killed beef that were not his when he had so many of his own and he said "Youngun, a good cowman never eats his own beef."

With all these little problems people on the mountain still had to associate with one another during the day, but by night with stealth, problems were solved or perhaps exacerbated. No one could live on the mountain without neighbors who would help in an emergency and that included some one who might even be trying to kill you from time to time. Up on the mountain you could not choose your friends, you took what was available.

I recall Jerry, a little weasel like man, who lived in a tiny cabin with one room. It was black from smoke and smelled of urine. One day he showed me a coffee can full of gold. Now Jerry did not have a mine. Mother told me the gold was from our place which he took during the winter when we were gone, from surface ore we had here and there. He used his two dogs to pull the sled of ore until he got hungry and ate them. I guess he had to carry the ore himself after that.

One time I asked Jerry what he ate in the winter and he said he made bread from the cambium layer of pine trees. He would dry it and grind it up and make little cakes with it in a coffee can. I don't know how he lived so long, he got cold and hungry and he said some one tried to kill him by putting something white into his coffee can. I notice however that everyone up on the mountain lives a very long time. It's a place of life, no denying it.

Some idiot gave Jerry another dog but the last time I saw Jerry he told me that Glen had shot it. Jerry had killed Glen's dog accidentally he said. Jerry talked like they were going to kill one another. Both men were dangerous and in a place where they could get away with it. There were a number of feuds on the mountain you must be tired of reading about them. So I won't mention them any more.