ANIMAL FRIENDS
It wouldn't be quite right to write about my early life on the homestead without giving some space to the various animals that were such an important part of our lives. Although I am a long, long way away from the farm, there is still something of the farm in me! That old saying "you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy" is surely true in my case. A good share of the "country" in me has to do with animals, and my continuing interest in and liking for them.
Dad's farming operation was what you might call true diversified farming. Of course, that was the pattern on nearly all the homesteads around our area. Money was so scarce, each family simply had to raise as much of their food as possible, and that meant having lots of animals and chickens around the place--they constituted the grocery market for us! So we had chickens, turkeys, cows and their calves, horses, cats and dogs--plus some others I'll mention later. We always had our own eggs, butter, milk, and meat, and sometimes had surpluses to sell. Everything was used in some way or another; very little was ever wasted.
I may have mentioned in an earlier chapter my recollection of a huge old red steer, with long horns, which I saw from my Dad's arms, when I was about three. Of course, he was no pet so far as I was concerned, but Dad and Mom liked him, and hated the day he had to be butchered to provide meat for the family. In general, though, we didn't make particular pets of any of the cattle. We had to deal pretty closely with the milk cows, so they were all named. Some of them even knew their names, I'm sure, especially Old Vollie, the cow the folks bought when the Voliekinovitches left their homestead. She (the cow) was the matriarch of our whole herd, and was kept almost until the end of our days on the homestead.
There were some rather special cows. One I remember was part Jersey, a little black cow with wicked horns. I don't think we kept her very long. The chief thing I remember about her was her aggressiveness when she had a new calf one spring day. She had dropped her calf in a coulee about a half mile from the house, and Dad, Robert and I went out to bring her and the calf in. Robert and I were quite small, and were tagging along just to see the calf. We made the mistake of assuming that she would behave like the other cows did, with some blustering when anyone got too close to the calf, but no real objection to our handling or picking up the little one.
But not that Jersey beast! Before we got really near her and the calf she began to paw the dirt like a bull, and act pretty nasty, tossing her horns, and bellowing. She made a dash for the dog, and he quickly retreated. Then she chased Robert and me up a hill for a ways! We had been warned that when a cow or bull chased you, to always run up a hill (if one were handy!) and that the animal wouldn't chase you very far. I still don't know whether that is completely true or not, but she didn't follow us any great distance. After that, Dad decided that discretion was better than valor! The upshot of it was that we all left her and the calf, to let her bring it home when she was good and ready.
We raised turkeys in small numbers for several years. Beside the noble experiment Robert and I conducted once to see how long young turkeys could swim (see the chapter on fun and games, yet to come), turkeys meant a lot to us. We ate some, we even ate some of their beautiful big mottled eggs at times. They were especially important to us because we realized some cash money from them, by butchering and selling them.
The hen turkeys pretty well took care of themselves when it came to accumulating a clutch of eggs and hatching out the little turkeys. As soon as the little turkeys were large enough to learn to find food for themselves, a new task was created, one just suited to a small boy like me. That was sort of herding or watching them as they wandered around the place, feeding on grasshoppers or other tidbits they liked. They had to be protected from themselves, seeing to it that they didn't wander too far away, and get lost, and also from coyotes, which apparently like young turkeys. We didn't lose many to coyotes, but they did get one once in a while, when there was no one around the birds while they were out away from the buildings. Actually, I never saw a coyote while watching them, but I was sure there were some around, somewhere. I was mortally afraid of coyotes, and made a rather dubious guardian for the flock!
The turkey that gave me trouble was our big old gobbler. We had him for two or three years, maybe more. He was a huge old bird, and very jealous of his flock of hens. When I would be alone, without the dog to protect me, he took it upon himself to keep me away from the flock! (Did he think I was an odd rival gobbler?) First he would strut around for a while, gobbling at intervals. Then he would put his head down and charge straight at me, and, of course, I would turn and run like crazy! But like the cow I mentioned above, he didn't follow very far. He didn't really want to catch me, I suspect. One time I was armed with a sort of walking stick, or maybe it was one of my stick horses, when he came at me. I waited until he was within range, and swung hard with that stick, catching him right on the neck. To my horror, he dropped in the dirt, fluttering his wings a little, and appeared to be dying! I thought I would surely be in big trouble if he did die, though inwardly I felt quite triumphant in having done battle with him, and having won! However, like the famous Scots, "after lying in the dust to bleed a while" he slowly recovered, and walked off, pretty wobbily, back to the other birds. That didn't fully convince him not to bother me. It was probably that November, when we were preparing to butcher the whole lot of the turkeys--twenty or so, I remember--that we had the turkeys penned in the chicken house, feeding them to get as much weight on them as possible. I had gone into the chicken house for some reason--no doubt to feed the silly things--when that gobbler came after me again! This time there was no place to run, and I had nothing to defend myself with. He literally ran right up the front of me, and beat me about the head and face with his big wings. I was the one who retreated that time; I got out of there as quickly as I could, shaken but not really damaged very much. How glad I was when that old bird hung cold and limp along with the others! He was by far the largest of our turkeys, dressing out at nearly twenty pounds!
Butchering turkeys was a messy business, at least the way we did it. Turkeys had to have their heads and feet on when sold, so you couldn't simply kill the turkey by beheading it, as we did with chickens. Also, the killing had to be done in just the right way, or the feathers would be almost impossible to pull out, especially the big wing feathers.
The technique our Dad used was to first hang the turkey by its legs up to one of the rafters in the barn. Then he took a long, thin-bladed knife, very sharp, opened the turkey's mouth, and with the knife cut the big blood vessels at the back of the throat. The bird then was simply allowed to bleed to death, which really took only a short time. In that short time, though, there was lots of blood flying every which way from the wild flopping of the turkey's wings.
Then came the difficult job of picking off the feathers, without benefit of scalding as was done with chickens. After most of the feathers were gone, there usually was a need for a long session of pulling pinfeathers--little feathers which had not yet had a chance to emerge fully from the skin. We used tweezers to pull the pinfeathers. Sometimes the big wing feathers gave us a lot of trouble, because they wouldn't come out easily at all. We used a pair of pliers on them, to get a good grip. I think it took us most of two days to butcher that whole flock of turkeys and get them ready to take to Glasgow to market. I think this is quite enough for a blog. Another chapter will reveal more of my nature, I suppose, by telling of other animals in those homestead years.