followed by long hot days with sixteen hours of sun. The earth steamed, things grew like plants in trick photography. We looked away from the field for a minute and looked back to find the wheat ankle high, looked away again, and back, and found it as high as our knees. Gophers mowed big swaths, cutting it to get at the tender joints, and so we went up and down the mile-long field with traps and .22âs and buckets of sweet-smelling strychnine-soaked wheat. That summer, according to the prize they gave us, my brother and I collected more gopher tails than anybody in southern Saskatchewan.
We lived an idyl of miniature savagery, small humans against rodents. Experts in dispensing death, we knew to the slightest kick and reflex the gophersâ ways of dying: knew how the eyes popped out blue as marbles when we clubbed a trapped gopher with a stake, knew how a gopher shot in the behind just as he dove into his hole would sometimes back right out again with ridiculous promptness and die in the open, knew how an unburied carcass would begin within a few hours to seethe with little black scavenger bugs, and how a big orange carrion beetle working in one could all but roll it over with the energy of his greed, and how after a few days of scavengers and sun a gas-bloated gopher had shrunk to a flattened wisp of fur.
We were as untroubled by all our slaughter as early plainsmen were by their slaughter of buffalo. In the name of the wheat we absolved ourselves of cruelty and callousness. Our justification came at the end of that first summer when my father, who was just six feet tall, walked into the field one afternoon and disappeared.The wheat overtopped and absorbed him. From a field of less than thirty acres he took more than twelve hundred bushels of Number One Northern.
It was our last triumph. The next spring my father went out early to prepare another field and plant the old one. We joined him late in June, after driving all day in a drenching downpourâload soaked, us soaked, horses streaming, old Red the cow splashing along behind with her hipbones poking up under her slicked wet hide like a chairback under a sheet. My father had barely got the crops inâthirty acres of wheat, twenty of flax. Then we sat for two weeks in the mouse-smelling shack, playing checkers and reading, while the rain continued to come down. We wondered if the seed would be washed out of the ground, it rained so. The cat prowled unhappily and lost his reputation for being house-broken, because he would not go out in the wet.
Between soakers we inspected the fields. A thin combing of green, then sturdy rows, then ankle highâit grew like weeds. Though I trapped for gophers, I caught few; they had drowned in their holes. The cat grew thin for lack of field mice. Going to the vegetable garden for our usual summer job of picking off potato bugs and piling them at the ends of the rows and burning them with kerosene, we found hardly a bug on the vines. Nothing throve on that rainy prairie but wheat and flax. Rich farmerâs sons, we grew lavish in our selection of next Christmasâs gifts from the Sears Roebuck catalog. For weeks on end water stood in the burnouts; every low spot was a slough; the rezavoy lapped the top of the dam. Like effete visitors to a summer resort area, we swam in water over our heads. We had no hot winds, no hailstorms, no twisters, no grasshoppers. Every natural pest and hazard was suspended. Except one. Rust. We got a flax crop, but no wheat at all, not a bushel. In town, where my father had planted his potato field and hired the Chinese to look after it, we had a bumper crop of spuds, so big that storage had to be found for a good part of it. Those were the potatoes that were in the cellar of Joe Knightâs hotel when it burned down.
Bad luck, surely. And yet if bad luck had not begun for us in 1916 we would simply have been a year or so longer on the hook. As it was, 1917 gave us our seed back, 1918
We lived an idyl of miniature savagery, small humans against rodents. Experts in dispensing death, we knew to the slightest kick and reflex the gophersâ ways of dying: knew how the eyes popped out blue as marbles when we clubbed a trapped gopher with a stake, knew how a gopher shot in the behind just as he dove into his hole would sometimes back right out again with ridiculous promptness and die in the open, knew how an unburied carcass would begin within a few hours to seethe with little black scavenger bugs, and how a big orange carrion beetle working in one could all but roll it over with the energy of his greed, and how after a few days of scavengers and sun a gas-bloated gopher had shrunk to a flattened wisp of fur.
We were as untroubled by all our slaughter as early plainsmen were by their slaughter of buffalo. In the name of the wheat we absolved ourselves of cruelty and callousness. Our justification came at the end of that first summer when my father, who was just six feet tall, walked into the field one afternoon and disappeared.The wheat overtopped and absorbed him. From a field of less than thirty acres he took more than twelve hundred bushels of Number One Northern.
It was our last triumph. The next spring my father went out early to prepare another field and plant the old one. We joined him late in June, after driving all day in a drenching downpourâload soaked, us soaked, horses streaming, old Red the cow splashing along behind with her hipbones poking up under her slicked wet hide like a chairback under a sheet. My father had barely got the crops inâthirty acres of wheat, twenty of flax. Then we sat for two weeks in the mouse-smelling shack, playing checkers and reading, while the rain continued to come down. We wondered if the seed would be washed out of the ground, it rained so. The cat prowled unhappily and lost his reputation for being house-broken, because he would not go out in the wet.
Between soakers we inspected the fields. A thin combing of green, then sturdy rows, then ankle highâit grew like weeds. Though I trapped for gophers, I caught few; they had drowned in their holes. The cat grew thin for lack of field mice. Going to the vegetable garden for our usual summer job of picking off potato bugs and piling them at the ends of the rows and burning them with kerosene, we found hardly a bug on the vines. Nothing throve on that rainy prairie but wheat and flax. Rich farmerâs sons, we grew lavish in our selection of next Christmasâs gifts from the Sears Roebuck catalog. For weeks on end water stood in the burnouts; every low spot was a slough; the rezavoy lapped the top of the dam. Like effete visitors to a summer resort area, we swam in water over our heads. We had no hot winds, no hailstorms, no twisters, no grasshoppers. Every natural pest and hazard was suspended. Except one. Rust. We got a flax crop, but no wheat at all, not a bushel. In town, where my father had planted his potato field and hired the Chinese to look after it, we had a bumper crop of spuds, so big that storage had to be found for a good part of it. Those were the potatoes that were in the cellar of Joe Knightâs hotel when it burned down.
Bad luck, surely. And yet if bad luck had not begun for us in 1916 we would simply have been a year or so longer on the hook. As it was, 1917 gave us our seed back, 1918
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