Founders (21 page)

Their main security upgrade was to reorganize the woodshed, stacking the split wood for better ballistic protection. They also cut more advantageous gun ports. The firewood itself provided most of the ballistic protection, but they supplemented it with scrap steel and five 30-gallon drums that were filled with fist-sized rocks 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
before
the inflation kicked in.”

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 received little traffic. The refugees were often seen pushing or pulling a variety of handcarts. These included garden carts, wheelbarrows, perambulators, deer hauling carts, toy wagons, and even a wheeled golf bag. Some of the refugees were persistent beggars, and a few were even stridently antagonistic.

After the first such encounter, Ken mentioned the “safety through anonymous giving” technique that Durward Perkins had used in Iowa. The Norwoods weren’t Christians, but they were moral, and they could see the need for charitable giving. In December, Ken contacted the bishop at St. Mary’s Church in Newell. Two days later, with the help of three men from the church who came in a pickup, they butchered an older cow, a steer, and a steer calf. The latter had been born partially lame the previous spring.

The three men from the Catholic church arrived in a ubiquitous “mobile butcher” pickup with a small boom hoist arm mounted on the back. This arm had a hand-cranked cable hoist. Not wanting to waste any ammunition, they stunned the cattle with a pneumatic captive bolt pistol that was administered to the cows’ skulls, just as they passed through a mechanical squeeze chute. They were then dumped from the chute and quickly “stuck” to bleed out. The oldest man in the group was an experienced butcher, so they made quick work of gutting the cattle and using a meat saw to remove their heads. The hearts and livers went into an ice chest. The guts,
lungs, forelegs, and heads went into the manure scraper, to be hauled to the garbage pit for burial. The carcasses were hoisted onto the truck and hauled into Newell with their hides still on.

That afternoon, the meat was butchered into small cuts and hauled to the church and stored outdoors in several old chest freezers that would soon be buried in a snowbank that was formed each year by snow sliding off the church roof. Carl also donated 300 pounds of corn-oat-barley blend cattle feed to the church. When soaked in water and cooked, it made palatable breakfast mush.

Carl painted a sign for his gatepost that directed refugees to the Catholic church, which was located on 6th Street in Newell.

For handling bands of refugees, the Norwoods developed an SOP: Using the Motorola FRS walkie-talkies, whoever was on OP duty at the woodshed would alert those in the house that strangers were approaching. They would then be greeted at shouting distance from behind the small firewood pile on the ranch house’s front porch. Meanwhile, the OP sentry would remain hidden and quiet. In case there was any trouble, the OP sentry would then be the ace in the hole—standing ready to engage anyone at the gate in a close ambush.

After they put up the sign directing refugees to St. Mary’s Church, their interaction with them became more brief and blunt. Usually, Ken or Carl would simply shout, “Read the sign. . . . May God bless you. Now move on!”

On December 22, Graham rode his horse into town to attend a Christmas party hosted by some of his homeschooling friends. When he returned the next day, Graham gave an update on the security situation in Newell. “There’s a concrete company at the south end of town that used to make pre-cast septic tanks and outhouses for the State Park Department and the Forest Service. Nobody’s heard anything from the owners of the company. I heard that they went to go double up with some relatives in Montana. Anyway, there’s all these vault toilet buildings sitting around, unused.
So an ex–telephone lineman with the Vigilance Committee figured out a way to turn them into pillboxes. They set up a generator and used a wet diamond saw to cut gun ports. They hauled two of the vault toilets on trucks to each of the three roadblocks, and set them up on either side of the road. I saw the setup on Highway 212. They have it just east of the KLT Road junction. It is
so
sweet. They used a bunch of those modular highway concrete center divider things, and laid them out to constrict the road into three S-curves. Cars have to take the new S-turns really slowly. And all the time, they’re in the line of fire of the pillboxes. It’s devastating.”

“Never, under any circumstances, ever become a refugee. . . . Die if you must, but die on your home turf with your face to the wind, not in some stinking hellhole 2,000 kilometers away, among people you neither know nor care about.”