The Anachronistic Ranch, Part 2
Rattlesnakes, Mountain Lions, Long-distance Feeding of Cats, and the Three Theodores
Looking out from the front porch of the main house, to the right stood the rabbit hutch, the chicken coop, the bath house, and several small cabins where temporary ranch hands would lay their heads, nights.
Straight ahead was a larger guest cabin where we stayed when we were visiting. The one-room but spacious cabin was rustic and spartan. It was not insulated, but on cold nights it didn’t matter, because we had heavy blankets and each other for warmth (the kids in one bed, our parents in another). During the day, stripes of sun rays illuminated the interior; on a clear night, we could see the stars through the gaps in the roof. I say roof because there was no ceiling between the floor and the heavens, just the roof. The building was basically a giant packing crate. The home-away-from-home was equipped with a chamber pot for nighttime needs that didn’t require a trudge outside to the outhouse (something we tried to avoid mostly because of the chilliness of the nights). I can still remember the sound of it being used in the wee hours . . . or were they the wee-wee hours? A tempest in a chamber pot, you might say. Surely the insistent, tinny sound of the unleashed stream on the pot awoke those slumbering, but nobody ever complained.
To the left of the main house was the “light plant” (a building housing a large electricity generator, normally only operated at certain times during the day), then a very long, tall, weathered, unpainted barn which housed blacksmithing and other tools and hardware on shelves running the length of the structure. Maybe it wasn’t rightly called a barn, due to its usage, but it seems way too large to have been called a tool shed, and the anvil, bellows and furnace used for blacksmith work didn’t take up enough space for it to merit being called a blacksmith shop. Beyond that, across the dirt driveway leading into the ranch from the outside world, stood another, lower, barn, wherein the horses, sheep, and cows were ensconced.
I recall “helping” Pop milk the cows a few times. As I entered the barn, I would see him sitting on a bucket just to the right of the cow’s right rear leg, massaging the cows teats, from top to bottom. A rhythmic splashing into the milk pail changed to a deeper and more subdued tone the fuller the pail got. I would stand by him, watching the operation. We would then notice a cat standing at the entrance of the barn, sitting on its hind legs, alert and anticipating. Pop would aim a teat in its direction, give it a squeeze, and fresh, unhomogenized milk would squirt in a white arc into the cat’s welcoming maw. I loved that. I was utterly enthralled with the sagacity of the cat showing up at the opportune moment, and the precision teat-squirting on my grandfather’s part. Bessie, for her part (I don’t know if Pop called all cows ‘Bessie,’ or just this one), was less impressed, but not averse to the diversion of her milk. She would simply glance back at puss while she was capturing the airborne liquid, then face forward again and go back to contentedly chewing her cud.
Besides the domestic animals (Yogi the dog and a couple of cats) and the farm animals (cows, horses, pigs, sheep, rabbits, and chickens), there were plenty of wild animals in the area, too. The deer, bears, mountain lions and such far outnumbered the handful of people living in the vicinity. The creatures of forest and glen probably viewed the humans there—my grandparents and some of their relatives—as an endangered species, so scarce were they in number, comparatively. Still, though, the wild beasts didn’t always leave the homo sapien interlopers alone.
My great-grandparents, Will Shannon (1876-1962) and Gertrude Bailey Shannon (1883-1977), settled in the area in the late 1890s. Will came from Canada, Gertie from Kansas, quite possibly by prairie schooner. Gertie bore thirteen children, her first being born when she was 17, and her last at 46 (impressive, but twenty years shy of the world record).
In 1911, Will and Gertie’s five-year-old daughter Deborah (“Girly”) was bitten by a rattlesnake. She spotted it at her younger brother’s feet, as they were walking to visit their father and brothers “working in the wheat.” Girly pushed her brother out of the way and was bitten herself. Pop was one of Girly’s older brothers. He was nine at the time his sister died from the rattlesnake bite.
Snakes were not the only dangerous animals in the area. One night, as we lay in our beds in the guest cabin, Pop visited us and told us about another night, many years prior, when he was out on his horse, and his steed got spooked. A mountain lion was stalking them. The big cat was doubtless craving equine meat rather than human, but it still made for a hair-raising ride home. It was touch-and-go for a while, but both horse and rider made it back to The Ranch unscathed.
Speaking of mountain lions, we were visiting The Ranch one snowy winter when my grandparents were temporarily living in the old schoolhouse. This was not so much because the schoolhouse was no longer being used and thus available for habitation, but due to the fact that their house had burned down. The old schoolhouse was a one-room affair. Its most important fixture was a pot-bellied stove in the center, which was normally used for warmth, but did double duty while they stayed there, also being used for cooking.
One early evening during our visit, we heard a scratching at the door. It was cold outside, warm inside. There were also enticing aromas emanating from within. Who could it be, though? The door was opened, and who walked in, without hesitating, but a young bobcat. He didn’t stop, or stay. He didn’t hurry, but neither did he dawdle. He simply walked right in, looked around, with just a slight move of his head to the right and then to the left, padded to the other side of the building, where someone opened the door for him, and out he went. Curiosity did not kill the cat that time.
During one of our other visits, the three Theodores (my grandfather Theodore Roosevelt “Pop” Shannon, my father Theodore Russell “Ted” Shannon, and my older brother, Theodore Patrick “Teddy” Shannon) and I were in Pop’s jeep on the way to the feed store a few miles away to pick up provender for some of the farm animals. Pop and his son/my dad were in the two seats up front. Teddy and I were standing up in the back of the open jeep, talking and looking at the scenery as we bumped along the winding dirt and gravel road. I was looking out one side of the jeep, while Teddy was on the other side, doing the same. After some time, I made a comment about something or asked him a question, to which he didn’t respond. Irritated, I looked around, and Teddy wasn’t there. I looked down the road we had just traversed and didn’t see him. I looked in the front of the jeep, just in case he had clambered up into there somehow. He was not there, either, though. I knocked on the glass to get the attention of the two bigger Theodores. Pop’s reaction? “We’ll pick him up on the way back. We’re almost there now.”
That was Pop in a nutshell. The opposite of a worry-wart. But we didn’t see my brother on the way back. When we arrived back at The Ranch, he was waiting for us, and none too thrilled with our delay in checking on him. He had walked the two or three miles back while we were completing our purchases at the feed store. Fortunately he wasn’t hurt; just a little shaken and rattled.
One of Pop’s favorite expressions was “Boys will be boys.” He even said this after Teddy burned down the small cabin he and I were sleeping in one night. Well, I might have been sleeping. Being only a year old at the time, I don’t remember anything about it, but Teddy, who was, after all, in his “terrible twos,” apparently thought the kerosene lantern above the bed was pretty, and wanted to examine it more closely. In his eagerness to do so, he knocked it off the shelf and onto the bed, which caught fire. In the best instance of good timing possible, our mother looked out at the cabin from the main house just as the fire started, and we were saved in the nick of time; but the cabin burned to the dirtline.
Boys will be boys, I guess.
The other thing I remember Pop saying often was “yep.” And not just “yep,” but compound yeps. If he agreed with something, he would say, “Yep yep yep.” If he really agreed with something, it was, “Yep! Yep yep yep. Yep yep yep yep Yep! Yep yep yep.” and so on. Not only was he unflappable (when not being pursued by a mountain lion), he was also not at all wishy-washy about expressing his concurrence when he saw eye to eye with someone.
That’s another vision that has stayed with me all these decades: Pop sitting at the kitchen table wearing his metal hard hat (besides being a rancher and a farmer, he was also a logger) and saying in that booming baritone of his, “Yep. Yep yep yep. Yep yep yep yep Yep! Yep yep yep.”
And so on.
The Anachronistic Ranch, Part 1 is here