My two young housemates have left for a couple of weeks in the city, looking after a friend’s place and doing some holiday visiting. I knew this was in the works, but that didn’t stop me from panicking when it was almost time for them to go. I would be Up Here. On My Own. We were in the middle of a sudden cold snap and everything froze, including the feet of one of my favourite hens. Claudia or Margaret…I used to be able to tell Claudia by the cowlick in her tail feathers, but after Bea pulled more of them out, it wasn’t so easy. I think I almost wanted it to be Margaret because Claudia has already been through so much, what with her hatred of the first rooster, Henri, who attacked all of us with equal viciousness, and her attempted flight that landed her in the rafters where she produced a listless egg or two before returning to the coop. She then went “broody” which is a bit like PMS only it involves refusing to eat or drink and drooping on the nest, hogging it so the other chickens can’t get near to lay their eggs, so they start laying wherever it strikes their fancy. There is lots of advice out there on how to startle a hen out of broodiness. One method involves covering her with a bucket for three days. I chose to dunk her in cold water up to her neck (on a sunny day). It didn’t work, but the dog attack did. I don’t think she’s laid an egg since.
“Don’t be such a wuss, Mum,” said my empathic daughter. “You’ve done way harder things than this, and we’ve been practicing by deserting you for several days at a time. Besides, we’re winterizing like mad and we’ll have all our routines figured out before you go.” Right, like shutting the barn door after the horses have lit out for the neighbour’s yard a mile down the road. Which they’ve done before, and yes, once on a day when I was here on my own with no vehicle. I did have a phone, and wished I didn’t, because it meant I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t received the neighbour’s call, which meant I had to do something about fetching our three semi-wild horses home. But then it also meant I could phone a somewhat horsier neighbour who indeed came down and helped me.
Alright, so the fences have been mended and extended and augmented with electric wiring and the horses still have a fair amount of freedom but their avenue of escape has been cut off. The horse field is between me and the rest of the property, though, so I still have to brave the attack pony, Firefly, who doesn’t like anyone tiptoeing through her 20 acre yard to check on the solar powered fence charger, which works less well with several inches of snow glued to the solar panel. Firefly doesn’t like you to cut through to go for a walk, or a snowshoe, or to feed anyone else but her. I find myself taking huge detours, bushwacking up the old road or climbing rickety fences to avoid her attention. If all else fails and she’s thundering straight for me, I channel Gandalf: “You SHALL not pass!!” in a thundering voice with outstretched arm. It does work, I admit, but takes quite a toll on the psychic energy, especially because it’s hard to believe it’s going to keep on working while I inch my way across hundreds of yards of open fields until I can roll under the home fence.
“I have a dream,” says my daughter. “I want to fence in the farm road, with gates at strategic intervals, so we can come and go and the horses can be in one field or another.” That’s lovely dear, I think. In the meantime, I have a dream that the horses won’t notice if the fence doesn’t happen to be carrying a charge while you’re gone. I remember my daughter saying though, that Molly the mare can sense whether it’s on or not from ten feet away. So now I have to rely on Molly’s essential ennui. I trust that she doesn’t actually give a hoot whether it’s on or not. To this end, I heap up the feeder with hay, having learned that eating is a horse’s favourite and pretty much only pastime in the winter.
Mornings typically come stealing through my lack of curtains and I luxuriate in bed awhile, with three large fat cats pinning down the covers. Bea the dog hears the change in my breathing and starts periodic whining outside my door. It’s actually only a curtain, and I recently removed the barrier that kept her out while she was an impetuous puppy, because while none of the cats really mind dogs, they put up with no nonsense whatever and a blinded farm dog is of little use to anyone. When I can’t ignore Bea’s hints any longer, I take a bracing breath and lurch to my feet. Bea starts dancing around in anticipation of wrestling me to the ground with her huge paws. I try to ignore her and pull on my canvas farm lady pants and a few sweaters and some extremely wooly socks before braving her affections. By now I judge that the chickens will be getting impatient in their little cupboard-within-a-coop, where we shut them up at night. I told you we fill the crockpot with water, set it to high and put the lid on. Thus it generates enough heat through the really crunchily searing cold nights to keep them from following Claudia/Margaret’s example and dying of frostbite. In the interests of humane farming practices which we are inventing as we go along, we are also inuring them to the sight of the crockpot, lest one day it become their final resting place.
So now there comes a flow chart of choices. Feed Bea? Feed the cats? Start the fire? Plunge outside with an bucket of liquified water for the coop? By the good sweet lord, was there ever another kind of water where I used to live before this? Should I pay attention to the row of horses’ heads hanging over the fence, staring through the kitchen window and telepathing messages like “neglectful crumb, our water’s low” or “how about some of those pre-breakfast alfalfa cubes?” I think you’ve guessed it. Start the coffee. In the time it takes for the water to boil, light the fire. Unless I’ve forgotten to fill the woodbox, then presents another flow chart: what size wood is missing? Is it a paper hunt that’s needed? If chopping is involved, the fire may as well wait because there’s no better way to warm up than to chop a little wood.
Okay! Let the coffee brew and step into the felt-lined gumboots and the down jacket, scarf, hat and insulated work gloves. Pick up the bucket of whatever scraps Bea didn’t eat in the night. Fetch that clean water, and out you go.
No matter what the weather, it takes longer than it might to walk the few yards to the henhouse, because this place is intense. It’s usually incredibly beautiful and sometimes quite scary. Either way, I stumble, awestricken, rubbernecking all around at the clouds, the trees, the mountains, the sky…and then get down to business. I fumble my way through the fox-proof latch on the door, and clear some of the two feet of hay and wood shavings (aha! Another enigmatic reference to the deep litter method. So the aim is to essentially create a composting toilet in the chicken coop. Let’s just say it worked great in the summer and fall. If it gets at all stinky in there, you add more herbaceous matter. More carbon to deal with the nitrogen. Once a year, in the spring, you clean out the whole thing into the compost pile and let it be there for awhile before you use it to help you grow vegetables. I’ll report on that after spring thaw, when all the frozen poop comes out of hibernation.)
I sing-talk to the chickens. “Good morning girls! And Rupert. Here I come, just me, not a predator. Rupert. No need to kill me when I open the cupboard door.” First, I plug in the heatlamp which augments the bit of heat from the glorious, glittering, extremely distant sun, and the insulating effect of hay stacked around the inside perimeter, which adds interest to the chicken’s day as they jump around and root through it for seeds and bugs. We found the bulb at the hardware store, but they had no fixtures. Duh, everyone had already bought them all. But then! We noticed this green metal fixture pressed into use as a reading lamp in the cabin. It’s as old as the hills and may well set us all on fire one day, but my conscience won’t let me freeze another chicken. I set down the fresh water, and cautiously pull back the recycled closet doors. Tim insulated the ceiling and walls of the cupboard with that blue foamie stuff. Little did we know they’d enjoy pecking it and eating it, so covering that with plastic was another little modification the young people did before leaving on their adventure. Hard to imagine what the insulation would actually do to the one organic egg we’re still collecting every second day. Our $40 dollar eggs, I affectionately call them. Depending on how long I’ve tarried, there might be a few hens gathered on the converted dog kennels/nesting boxes/goat shelters below the roost. I step back and let them fly out. Sometimes one hurtles herself like a curve ball and crashes into me anyway. The same two always hesitate at the end. My friend Kathy tells me chickens have no depth perception, which explains their behaviour to a T. I am practicing patience these days, and waiting for chickens to jump 3 feet onto the ground when they haven’t a clue where the ground is qualifies as a patience exercise. Sometimes I revert to type and just shove them off.
The next step is to throw some feed around and present them with what treats I’ve scrounged (if one of the cats has brought a furry little rodent in the night, I save it on my bedroom windowsill and then present it to whoever’s favour I am trying to curry. Usually the rooster. I’m not scared of him or anything but the last one turned on a dime one day so I’m just being cautious.) and then it’s time to leave them to their hen house politics and check on the horses. Thanks to one of those generous kind neighbours I’ve mentioned, we’ve got a central feeding place out in the field, a “round bale feeder” where we can roll a five or six hundred pound bale off the back of a pick up and aim for it to land in the middle of it. If you miss you can, with two or three hefty friends, lift up the feeder and place it over the bale. Or you can stand back and let John do it with his bare hands, whatever your pride dictates.
We have our very own pick up truck, but due to circumstances which will be described at another time (for it is indeed another story) the tailgate won’t currently open. This means not being able to roll a bale. So John brings the bales, one at a time, when his powerful psychic abilities tell him the horses will have eaten most of the hay. He’ll drop in on his way to plow a neighbour’s driveway or unfreeze their pipes or deliver a tractor part or a prescription he might have picked up in town. That’s John. They call him the Bulkley Browser (our local broadsheet). He’ll bring stuff he notices you need, that he happens to have laying around somewhere, and he’ll bring stories and lore about who’s related to who and what reminds him of which. He’ll remind you of happenings about to happen or tell tales about what’s happened in the past.
I’m sure I’m giving him a few tales to tell but I’m not worried. He hasn’t got a mean bone in his body.
If it’s not a bale delivery day, and our three horses are being particularly selfish and pushing the newcomer orphan quarterhorse off the hay, which they love to do, I will slog over to the little hay shed we made out of piping and a tarp and heft a square bale into the wheelbarrow and stagger with it through the snow (but it’s downhill! Yay!) to the fence. We have a horse grooming tool I don’t know the name of that has serrated edges. This makes a great binder-twine cutter. So, while the horses loom over the fence, all in a row with a bit more space between the three greedy heads and Falcon’s smaller, shyer head, I saw apart the two pieces of string and the bale falls neatly into flakes a few inches thick. I have no idea how the bales are made to do that, but it’s extremely handy because you know approximately how much you’re feeding each horse. I throw some to the attack pony first, and then to her gelding uncle. She’s not really a pony, she’s a quarterhorse/mustang cross, a love child. The result of Molly’s one wild summer on a ranch in Clinton. Another story. There’s a strategy to it all, and the main idea is to make sure Falcon gets some before the others notice or imagine a scarcity and push him off his pile. So you put an extra small pile between the three of them and him, to potentially distract them on their way to his pile. You also put a pile on the other side of him, which gives him somewhere to go while they’re eating his pile.
Then I check their water. One of the clever modifications the young people did was to get the old galvanized stock tank operational. There’s a beautiful complicated water tap out there, frost-proof except in really filthy unexplainable conditions, and a rubber pipe you fit over it and then hang on the fence later so the water runs out of it. There’s a little heater thing that floats in the tank and is powered from an outdoor fixture the previous owner had installed. Tim has screened it with a little roll of goat-proof wire that used to divide the back seat of the Corolla from the front when we needed to bring the goats home from Smithers and again to take them to their husband up the road. They’re still there, and will remain until the young people get home because currently the Corolla, intrepid and front-wheel-drive though she is, might not make it up the long winding driveway to the neighbour’s place. The Corolla has been with me so long we finish each other’s sentences, and though she’s no shiny chromey beauty, she’s solid. The only time ever she hasn’t started first try was during that last cold snap, before we got her a block heater. I feel so guilty. Can you imagine her humiliation? And now I think she’s maybe lost confidence or something. She was game last night, and she got me to the New Year’s Dance and back, but I’ve never seen the ice build up on the inside of her windshield like that, or her hesitation on the snowy curves. I swear she was feeling every bump in the road last night. I can’t believe we let her freeze solid, her doors banging uselessly against their catches, her oil the consistency of Tar Sands Bitumen. Right, another story…
That’s the chickens and horses taken care of for now, then, so I can go make more coffee, and feed the dog and cats. We like to give them raw meat, but ironically there aren’t many places to buy it up here, and it’s a 100 km. drive to the farmer’s market in Smithers. The time will come when we will make our own from the scraps when we butcher our own animals. For now, I don’t really like to think about helping to kill animals who have been born and raised on the farm. I will trust that I will be ready to manage it, probably by next fall. It’s part of what we’ve signed on to, coming here. Along with the relative isolation and the relatively few distractions from our own thoughts, a mixed blessing that one.
Breakfast is usually either porridge, made from organic oats, dates, raisins and nuts, or egg and bacon on toasted home made bread, along with whatever vegetables haven’t frozen in the cold room (because everything did. The only temperature regulator in there is a little wooden flap that can be open, partially open, or closed. It’s ultra important to pay attention to what the weather is doing, because if it gets too warm in there for too long, it shortens the shelf life of the vegetables and fruit. Eventually, everything will soften, mould, and rot. If it freezes in there, everything will also rot when it thaws.)
As usual, I have neglected the dishes and other domestic chores in favour of the more glamorous ones involving hay and poop. I have added the chore of sitting down to write about these things, in the hope that I can chronicle our adjustment to this wild place, and capture some of the changes we necessarily experience within ourselves. I like to make light of little crises, once they’re past, but sometimes it’s annoying and tedious to have to deal with messes of our own making. I live in fear of the septic backing up or the pipes freezing and bursting. I’m not as worried as some would be about power outages because we heat with wood, but there is the matter of water. The pump is electric. We have a back up generator as well, which is fairly intimidating but won’t be once we’ve learned to use it. There’s also the stock tank, which holds a lot and could be dipped into to water the other animals. We keep a large pot of water full all the time. And when the wind comes up, we know the power line will go down somewhere, so we scurry around getting ready.
That’s about it, for the winter chores. Not bad at all, really, are they?