and gravel. There was no shortage of rocks on the property.
There was already a bridge across the creek that was intended for the cattle. It had been in place for decades but it sat 100 yards south of the house, which was too far for their current purposes. To provide a safe and convenient way to draw water in buckets from the creek, Carl had constructed a new bridge shortly after the Crunch set in. It was a footbridge thirty yards from the house, and was constructed mainly with 4x4s and 2x6 planks. At the center of the span, Carl had built an extended platform with a notched railing so that whoever went to the bridge to draw water would have a safe place to stand.
Typically, they put the water in four 5-gallon plastic water cans and wheeled them back and forth to the house in a twelve-cubic-foot EZ-Haul garden cart.
The next day, Graham showed them the cattle facilities. There were two large connected corrals, each sixty yards square. There was a pair of small bullpens, also adjoining. There was also a tall connecting alley built of planks, with a veterinary squeeze chute and cattle truck-loading ramp at one end. It had a swinging Y gate panel that could shunt cattle to either a high ramp or a low ramp, depending on the deck height of the arriving vehicle or trailer. The ramps themselves were inexpensively built with earth and used railroad ties. Graham mentioned that the entire property was cross-fenced, allowing for efficient grazing. This also kept the cattle out of the hay fields until after the last cutting.
“We got two hay cuttings last summer, which is unusual for here without irrigation, so we have more than enough hay for this winter,” Carl told them.
“How do you deal with all the manure?” Terry asked.
Pointing his thumb at the barn, Graham answered, “We rig Andre up with a horse collar and an old road scraper. Anything in the corners of the corrals, and in the bullpens, we get by hand with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. Before the Crunch, we used the tractor for most of it, and it was a breeze. But nowadays we can’t spare the fuel.”
Terry sighed. “Sounds like countless hours of fun.”
“Yeah, the manure scraping and hauling takes up a lot of our time. Especially now that we’re penning all the stock up every night, year-round, to prevent rustling, there’s a lot more manure to deal with. Between that and hauling water to the house and doing laundry by hand, the manual labor takes up several hours of our time every day. When the grid went down, it put us back in the nineteenth century.”
As they walked toward the pair of bullpens, Graham asked, “You folks been around bulls before?”
Ken answered, “Yeah. We know to never turn our backs on a bull. Like they say, a bull is a bull.”
“Yes, please do be careful, sir. You pour just a smidgen of grain in either feed trough, and you can get Earl to move where you want him, without any prodding. Just make sure that the connecting gate is latched before you start to shovel manure.”
“Understood.”
Pointing to a large manure pile just south of the larger corrals, Graham said, “There’s no market for our manure these days. Even though we offer it cheap, nobody wants to burn the fuel to come this far out of town to haul it.”
Terry nodded, agreeing. “Fuel is precious, and that’s changed the way people do business. It has changed a lot of things.”
Looking at the enormous black bull in the pen, Ken asked, “What can you tell me about your bull?”
“He’s registered Angus. His name is Earl, which is short for Earl of Aberdeen. He cost Dad $24,000, and that was two years
Ken let out a whistle. “Wow.”
Terry chimed in, quoting something that Durward Perkins had told her. “Well, they say that genetically your bull is half of your herd.”
Graham said, “That’s right, ma’am. But pretty soon we’ll be line breeding, using Earl to cover, at least with our next batch of heifers that are coming up. He sired them. So Dad has made arrangements to swap Earl for a dis-related bull that belongs to a man over near St. Ogne. His bull’s genetics aren’t quite as good as Earl’s, but at least his bull has a ring in his nose, and he’s broken to lead. They say he’ll follow you around like a pup. That’s quite an improvement over Earl, who is the classic range bull.”
Terry nodded. “Enough said. We’ll be careful.”
Graham continued, “The only problem is finding a way to transport the bulls, to do the swap. We’re out of gas, and so is the man with the other bull. Oh well, we still have about six months to figure that out.”
Terry asked, “So how are you going to get the cattle to come into the pens when the grass is up, after you’ve run out of grain?”
“Well, we don’t need to use much grain. They come into the corral each night, pretty much like clockwork. It was Mom’s idea to remove the salt blocks from all the pastures, and only give them salt in the corrals. So they have an inducement to come in every night. The cattle have gotten into a habit. Also, our dogs know the routine. They help herd any stragglers in each night. After we run out of grain, we can always use sugar beets. Those work just as well as grain does.”
With the relative luxury of just eight-hour guard shifts, Ken and Terry had more time available than they had the winter before when they were working for the Perkinses.
With several common interests, Terry and Cordelia became fast friends. Terry demonstrated to the Norwoods the method that she’d seen the Perkinses use for mass production of beef jerky. Because the Norwoods had nearly run out of granulated salt, they simply placed a new fifty-pound white livestock salt block in a six-gallon food-grade plastic bucket and added water to form a salt brine. To support the drying rack suspension wires, Ken and Graham used drywall power screws, driven by hand with a Phillips screwdriver.
The Laytons were taught how to tack up and ride horses. They became good riders, but both had trouble learning how to throw a lariat. They also learned how to trim and rasp hooves, and the basics of horseshoeing.
Ken and Terry also spent many hours with the Norwoods, passing along some of the training that they had received from Todd Gray’s retreat group. This included a lot of gun handling, small unit tactics, range and wind estimation for long-range shooting, and immediate action drills. Ken particularly enjoyed mentoring Graham in handgun shooting. Because ammunition was in short supply, most of their training was dry practice. For safety, this instruction was done beside the woodshed with the woodpile providing a backstop.
Graham’s revolver, a Smith & Wesson Model 1917, was a veritable antique but still serviceable. Graham carried the gun in an old cavalry holster that had long before had its original full flap narrowed to just a retention strap. The holster’s butt-forward configuration—originally designed to accommodate cavalrymen carrying both a saber and a revolver—was awkward, but Graham made up for this with plenty of practice. He became lightning fast at reloading the revolver, using spring steel full-moon clips that each held six cartridges. Ken observed that these were faster than any mechanical speed loader that he had ever seen used.
In his years of high-power rifle competition, Ken had considerable exposure to M1 Garand and M1A rifles. So in addition to long-range marksmanship with iron sights, Ken was able to teach Graham some of the intricacies of M1 Garand bore cleaning, gas system maintenance, and greasing of the rifle’s bolt camming surfaces and the hammer.
Ken particularly stressed the importance of repeated cleanings when using U.S. military surplus .30-06 full metal jacket ball and AP ammunition from the 1940s and early 1950s. Much of this ammunition, he warned Graham, was corrosively primed. Ken also took the opportunity to cross-train the Norwoods on handling and fieldstripping their HK, CAR-15, and Colt Model 1911 pistols. The Norwoods reciprocated, teaching the Laytons how to fieldstrip all the guns in their collection.
As winter set in, they got into a regular routine for manning the OP at the woodshed. Remembering the brazier that they had used at the farm in Iowa, Ken, with Carl’s help, constructed a comparable one. The base was a six-foot length of scrap six-inch-diameter well casing pipe. Rather than laboriously cutting off the pipe with a hacksaw, they simply dug a hole with a posthole digger and buried fifty inches of the pipe. This also had the advantage of creating a brazier that they knew would never accidentally tip over. The brazier itself was a mini grill that had been designed for backyard barbeques. It was brazed onto the top of the well casing pipe using a torch from the workshop of a friend who lived nearby, on KLT Road.
Several times that winter they had encounters with refugees. Thankfully, Parilla Road was a side road that
