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?
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
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
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
Wednesday, May 13, 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
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
Monday, April 27, 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.
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