Chickens - pets and victims!
We found the ranch chickens to be quite interesting from trying to figure out how smart they were (not very) to enjoying the tiny little chicks that the hens managed to produce by hiding their eggs so we couldn't find them, and thereby allowing them to hatch.
As small children, we spent lots of time trying to catch chickens and were never very successful. Mother hens were defensive and mean, younger birds were fast and clever, and roosters often looked too fierce to mess with. We did find that if one tied a piece of corn onto the end of a long string, a chicken would peck it up and swallow it, allowing us to lead it around for a while until the corn came back up if pulled too hard. We also found that chickens would eat anything with grain in it and encouraged a couple of hapless birds to eat some kid-concocted, very fermented grain brew which made the unfortunate chickens rather drunk! One actually passed out from imbibing too much. We were sure that we had killed it, but it finally came around!
We knew that chickens were food, both from the hens' eggs and from the younger birds who became fried or roasted chicken. We grew up watching the dads gather a few birds and chop off their heads with a hatchet, staring wide-eyed as the headless birds ran about for a bit before keeling over. My brother, Tom, found a dead chicken in the chicken yard, and, thinking that he was going to help Mom out, carried it into the kitchen and plopped it down on the counter with an announcement "Mom, I brought you a chicken for dinner!" The chicken was way past anything close to dinner except for a coyote or such and was speedily taken away, much to Tom's disappointment.
Magpies
Magpie birds are pests on a ranch. They are great nuisances and, therefore, are very often dispatched. We had a couple of magpie traps on the ranch which were large cages, about 5 feet square and about 6-7 feet high. The chicken wire mesh that covered the entire cage, including the top, was accessed through a door in one side. The top had a round hole with inverted wires pointing down into the cage. Corn was placed on the floor and magpies would enter easily through the hole in the top. They could not, however, get out, since they had to fly up to get out, and the inverted wired pointing down prohibited them from flying out. Most of these captives were "dispatched" by one of the cowboys or our dads.
My imaginative brothers, discovered that some fun could be had by entering the cage and capturing a magpie. The "lucky" bird was attached to the fishing line on a rod and reel and allowed to fly up and away.....until it reached the end of the line with a sudden stop, and was then reeled back in for another flight. If the bird was lucky, it eventually escaped, probably to fly back into the magpie trap and meet its end. Pretty awful looking back, but hilarious then.
Halloween Masks - Oh My!
Living in a remote place didn't offer much in the way of trick or treating for the kids living on the ranch. We did have fun with the holiday though and made stops at all the family houses and those of the hired men and their families.
Carol and I were introduced to Halloween when were probably four and five, when my dad brought home two witch masks for us. We had never had a mask before, and had only heard about witches in scary stories. We scurried off to the bedroom to look them over. We put them on and looked in the mirror and were terrified by what we thought were monsters staring back at us and ran out of the room wailing in fright! It took quite a bit of explanation and comforting for us to finally start to enjoy the scary masks.
Someone, usually Carol's Mom, had delicious apple cider to drink and Granddad Currier let us have a candy from his candy cupboard. One of the hired men gave us some really good cider...looking back, I'm pretty sure it was hard cider since it had quite a fizzy tang!!
Bogs are not for horses!
There were several boggy areas on the ranch where tall grass grew, but which were not generally traversable on foot, on a tractor, or on a horse. We were all educated as to where these were and instructed to stay out of them. But, one day, Carol and her cousin Dinny decided to ride one of the horses through a bog instead of around it so that they could get to the other side faster. It wasn't a fortuitous plan and the horse got bogged down up to his belly in the swamp. They could not get him out no matter how hard they tried and had to walk home and sheepishly beg one of the dads for help! It required a large tractor and rope and chain to haul the poor horse out. Fortunately, he wasn't injured and neither were Carol and Dinny, though they did get some severe lectures for that one.
Cowboys and Indians
One of our favorite games was a horseback game in which various factions warred with each other in wild games of cowboys and Indians or cowboys and rustlers and the like. One particular day, as we finished a great battle, one of the losers had to be brought in as a "dead man." I think it was Dinny (Carol's cousin) who was strapped across the back of one of the horses with her hands and feet tied together via a rope under the horses belly. All was well (though Dinny suffered some serious belly bouncing) until the ropes loosened just a tad, and she slipped down and around so that she was hanging under the horse's belly with her hands and feet up top! She looked so funny dangling under the horse with the horse hopping about, that we all were laughing so hard that it took some time to get her detached. All walked away in good shape fortunately!! No one volunteered to be the "dead man" after that!
Hornets...stinging devils....
Hornets up on the Ranch make huge, grey, papery nests, shaped rather like an upside down pear, and often 12 inches in diameter and over a foot long attached to tree or brush branches. One day, we learned the hard way not to smack a huge hornets' nest with sticks to get the hornets to come out! Why we thought that this was a good idea, I don't know, but all of us involved ran for our lives with a stream of big black hornets chasing us and stinging as we ran!
Fishing for suckers and creek swimming- pure JOY,,,
There was a great, deepish hole in Buzzard Creek about a mile and a half from our houses. In the summer, some of us older kids would walk to this spot which was down below several terraces of hayfields on a property called the Fitzpatrick Place (purchased by our grandfather from someone named Fitzpatrick, I suppose). We would walk there with willow fishing poles armed with treble hooks and worms for bait to catch the big sucker fish that swam in the deep hole in the creek. Suckers are not good to eat, very bony and not very flavorful. After bringing home a big sack of them once, our moms politely told us to not bother to bring them again!
After we tired of catching suckers and playing with them, getting them to kiss each other with their big sucker lips, we would jump into the fishing pool turning it into a swimming hole and having a great time splashing about until it was time to walk home again. Our moms must have thanked the stars above for that hole in the creek, since it meant we would be gone for hours at a time!! We were free range indeed and explored wherever, but always looked out for one another.
Snipe Hunts...for visiting kids (who were generally city kids)
If you don't know what a snipe hunt is, let me outline it for you. The hunt requires one or two unsuspecting visitors, a number of Ranch kids, and a big burlap bag. The hunt always took place at dusk in the summertime when night didn't fall for several hours after dusk.
The visitor was regaled with stories of hunting snipe, a very tricky bird that lived in large groups. The hapless city kid was told to stand at one end of either a big field or a pasture holding the big burlap bag (gunny sack) open and near the ground calling "Snipe, Snipe, Snipe." He was told that the other kids would circle far around and chase the snipes toward him, and that if he/she waited long enough, a bagful of snipes was to be had. Of course, there were no snipes, and after much yelling a whacking of sticks to demonstrate audible snipe herding, the Ranch kids went home and left the snipe bag holder to plaintively keep calling for snipes. Eventually, he/she generally figured out that he/she had been had and came back to the houses with a sheepish look on the face.
Bale Houses....castles in the country!
During haying time, when cuttings of hay had been baled and were lying in neat rows in the fields, waiting to be picked up and stacked, we kids would harness up the afore mentioned Mule (horse), hitch a small slip (a wood sled that slides along the ground) to his harness and gather as many bales as we could taking them to a central location. (Our Dads were happy with this occupation since it made picking up the bales easier, because many were in one place.) With these many bales, we would construct bale houses with long tunnels for access and several stories high. These were great fun and all the kids played for hours in them until the time came for them to be picked up and put in the haystack. Unfortunately, mice loved to hide under bales and we sometimes found them scurrying around in our castles. One time, cousin Beth rolled a bale over uncovering several mice, one of which promptly ran up the inside of her pants leg. You've never seen jeans come off so fast or heard so much screaming! Everyone else got a great laugh out of that one!
Nightime Games
One of the games that we played at night was a scary one. One person was "it" and had to hide his eyes for about 10 minutes while the other kids ran up the road into one of the pastures and hid along the way. The goal was for the kid who was "it" to walk up the road while the others periodically jumped out from bushes or down from trees emitting terrifying screams, howls and other noises. The "it" kid was deemed a winner if he didn't scream or run away in fright!
Building "cabins"
We went through several episodes of deciding to build little log houses in the woods. We would cut down trees, remove the branches, cut the logs to the right length and build little one room "cabins." It was a learning project and the cabins sufficed for summer play, but wouldn't have been very weather worthy in the winter!!
These are just a few of the things that the imaginative kids on the Currier Ranch enjoyed. We truly had a wonderful childhood with not much to be afraid of and lots to do. We were blessed with a place and parents who were not afraid to let us explore and learn. Our parents were not fearful that we would get injured or be eaten by a mountain lion or a bear (there were mountain lions and bears on the ranch)........ All of us grew up with no broken bones and no life-threatening situations. Consequently, we achieved adulthood as confident people, the lessons of the Ranch serving us still.
Watch for a blog about the Frosty Fanny Nudist Camp, soon to appear!
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