Liberators Page 15

  The McGregors no longer had any prospect of being able to buy fuel. All of the gas stations in the region and even the propane distributors had recently sold out. They assumed that they wouldn’t have enough fuel to run their Lister generator twelve hours a day, as they had been accustomed to do. In fact, running it just one day a week to do laundry might be too much. Nor could they run electric stock-tank heaters. As winter set in, they began a daily ritual of breaking up ice with sledgehammers.

  A military immersion heater or a Japanese wood-fired hot-tub heater would have been ideal for this situation, but unfortunately they didn’t have those, either. Claire suggested using a spare old rectangular wood stove they had stored in the machine shop to keep the main stock tank clear of ice. With the prospect of progressively colder nights and thicker ice ahead, they had to act soon.

  To transfer the most heat from the stove into the stock tank, at least part of the flat top of the woodstove would have to be beneath the tank. The logical place to position it was at the end of the tank, where the ground sloped away. Obviously they would need to dig a hole, but the ground was already frozen solid to a depth of six inches. Rather than hoping for an unseasonal warm spell to thaw the soil, they simply operated the stove for twenty-four hours above the spot where they planned to dig, keeping the stove stoked continuously.

  The excavation for the stove took longer than they thought, and it required considerable shoring with bricks and cinder blocks to provide access for loading wood, and enough of a slope to provide sufficient drainage for the inevitable snowmelts and rain.

  Once the stove project was complete, the next task was erecting several new laundry clotheslines, both outdoors and in the sunroom on the south porch. Since they had no prospect of having their propane tank refilled, they went into extreme conservation mode—with just minimal use of the propane cooking range, and no use of the propane-fired clothes dryer.

  The sunroom had once been quaint and decorous, and the place where Claire had often entertained friends for afternoon tea parties. She had always been adamant that muddy boots were banned from the room. But now the sunroom was decidedly utilitarian and crowded with clotheslines, a winter garden of salad greens in terra cotta pots on every available bit of floor space, and several solar battery chargers set up just inside the windows.

  Laundry days were timed to coincide with the weekly and later biweekly running of “the light plant,” as they called their generator. Those days were always a flurry of activity that started as soon as the generator was fired up. The laundry had already been sorted, and the dirtiest items had already been prewashed in the laundry sink. On those same days, they did any projects that required power tools.

  At the ranch, it felt as if the pace of life was simply slowing down, and they were returning to the isolation of frontier ranching life from a century ago. The newspaper ceased operation and mail delivery was halted. The local CBC station went off the air. The landline phone stopped working. And even if they had been in a cellular coverage area—and they weren’t—that service would have been unavailable as well. Nimpo Lake Internet—their local affiliate for Galaxy Broadband—ceased operation once the Galaxy satellite system went offline. (The satellite system required the continuous operation of ground segment stations.)

  The shortage of gasoline and diesel meant that visits by neighbors and friends became infrequent and were now mostly medical or veterinary emergencies or involved problems with water systems. (Living a long way from town in times of fuel scarcity meant that neighbors had to depend on one another’s help and expertise.) And suddenly, there were not enough horses to go around, and the asking prices for horses and saddles—all priced in terms of silver or barter goods—seemed astronomical.

  Feeding the cattle required no power, and their water came from a shallow well that was serviced by a pump powered by their PV panels and their battery bank.

  Hot water for the house had always been provided by a set of coils in the woodstove and a thermal siphon tank in the attic that had been nicknamed “the rumbler” many years before. They had a lot of books and had never become addicted to television. So, unlike many other families, the transition to Crunch living was not traumatic for the McGregors. (Alan had lived off-grid for most of his life, and Claire for all of her married life.)

  Perhaps the greatest change for them was the overwhelming sense of being out of touch with the world beyond their fences. They missed getting regular local news. They missed being able to talk on the phone with their daughters in their far-flung locales. They realized that there was something special about being able to open a fresh newspaper, and the absence of that made them feel wistful. The new lack of citrus fruits and coffee was often mentioned. They also had to go back to the old standby of checking their barometer each day, since they no longer had access to regional weather forecasts.

  The daytime AM radio reception at the ranch had always been poor, and their FM reception began only when they had driven halfway to Williams Lake, or in the other direction more than halfway to Bella Coola. (CBC Radio One in Prince George had a translator station in Bella Coola. Alan hated the CBC, invariably calling it “a bunch of socialist propaganda.”) So for most of their years at the ranch, it was only in the evenings or during predawn milking sessions that they had good AM radio reception. (Alan had enjoyed listening to the news on KOMO at 1,000 KHz, a fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel station, in Seattle.) But now, even that was gone. Apart from Phil’s shortwave radio—which Alan and Claire found difficult to hear clearly—their world had gone silent.

  With their cow now back at the ranch full-time, they milked her twice a day. She had recently been bred by a Dexter bull and was due to calve again in the spring. For a city boy like Phil Adams, the cow-milking routine was a new experience. He eventually enjoyed taking his turn milking, although he never became as efficient as Claire. (She always seemed to get at least one more pint out of Tessa than Phil did at each milking.) At the ranch they drank their milk raw and simply filtered. When they ran out of paper filters for their funnel, they substituted cotton fabric squares, cut from new dish towels.

  The cow produced more milk than the four of them could drink, and the skimmed cream made more butter than they could use, so the extra all went to five bantam hens that they obtained by bartering some extra salt blocks. The chickens were fed through the winter with milk, cream, and some oats from their cattle bins. The five hens were messy—inconsistently choosing odd places in the barn to roost each night—but the eggs that they produced were a blessing. Alan made plans to build a proper chicken coop in the coming spring or summer.

  • • •

  As recently as 2005, they had run up to six hundred cattle on the McGregor ranch, a number considered a “small operation” by local standards. Some of the ranches nearby controlled hundreds of thousands of acres of range pasture. But after their children had grown up and moved away, knowing the high cost of hiring ranch workers, they cut down to just twelve Coriander cows and heifers, and sixteen Coriander-Longhorn crosses (a mix of heifers and beef steers). They also had a Longhorn bull named Tex and Tessa, the Jersey milk cow, which were both often on loan to neighbors. In the two years before the Crunch, most of their income came from cutting hay. Because of Alan’s numerous back surgeries, they switched to contracting out the hay cutting, keeping some of the round bales for winter feed for their own livestock. As the Crunch set in and fuel became scarce, the price of hay skyrocketed, even after being redenominated into silver coinage. A gallon of gasoline or diesel now sold for the equivalent of two or three days’ wages for a laborer.

  The Coriander-Longhorn crosses sold well, both before and after the Crunch. They were cold tolerant, making them a good breed for the region. They also knew how to use their horns, which meant they had a decent chance of fending off wolves, bears, and mountain lions—but they were by no means invulnerable. The Chilcotin Range had a notoriously dense population of predators.

  After their children moved
away Alan and Claire McGregor had stopped raising a vegetable garden. And while the larder was well stocked by local standards, aside from beef, they would be lacking many staple foods by the following spring.

  They contacted a neighbor who was famous for her sprouting and traded a quarter of beef for an assortment of sprouting seeds and sprouting jar lids (stainless steel screens mounted in Mason jar lids).

  As Phil, Alan, and Claire helped Ray unpack his pickup and trailer, a bit of a show-and-tell session began. Each item that they carried into the house or shop seemed to have a story behind it.

  Once they had unloaded the trailer and parked it alongside his father’s stock trailer, Ray planned to put his camper shell (which had been stored in the barn) back on his truck.

  He had two almost identical Stihl chain saws, both with twenty-two-inch bars. One of the saws was stored in a factory orange plastic case, and the other was in a plywood box that Ray had constructed himself. For these saws he had a spare bar, a spare recoil starter assembly, and seventeen spare chains (although a few of them had been resharpened so many times that they were nearly worn out). He also had a lot of two-cycle fuel mixing oil and chain-bar lubricating oil in an odd assortment of containers—perhaps ten gallons in all. He had all of the usual safety equipment, including an integral helmet/earmuff/mesh face mask, and Kevlar safety chaps. He also had innumerable pairs of gloves, plastic wedges, files, tape measures, rolls of flagging tape in various colors, and other chain saw accoutrements, all stowed in a set of mesh bags mounted to the inside walls of the trailer.

  The largest items in the trailer were his enduro motorcycle and a hydraulic woodsplitter. The motorcycle was a KTM 250 XC and had a two-stroke engine, so its gasoline had to be mixed. Ray had repainted the orange parts of the bike with brown truck bed liner paint three years earlier, but the rough-textured brown paint had held up remarkably well, with the original orange color appearing only in a few small spots. The KTM was considered street legal in both the U.S. and Canada, although he had let its registration lapse while he was in the United States.

  The log splitter was a Swisher brand twenty-two-ton model with a Briggs and Stratton engine. One of the tires on the splitter had a chronic slow leak, but the machine was otherwise reliable and it cycled fairly quickly.

  Ray spent a lot of time showing them his old-fashioned logging tools. Some of these had been acquired while he was living in Michigan, including a large assortment of axes, sledges, mauls, and wedges; a bark spud; a “Swede” bow saw and extra blades; and a pair of cant hooks for rolling and moving large logs.

  Ray also had a well-stocked steel tool chest and a handmade plywood carry chest for his assortment of Ryobi eighteen-volt DC battery-powered tools. His father used the same brand, so they could share batteries.

  In his pickup, there wasn’t much to show for his “career” work as a historian, just two cardboard boxes, mostly containing back issues of history magazines. Claire was surprised to see that he had very few photocopied documents for his research; in recent years he’d used a scanner rather than make hard copies. All of his actual writings since high school fit on just one memory stick. He pulled out a compass and an altimeter that had been salvaged from a B-24 in a Kingman, Arizona, boneyard back in the 1950s.

  Ray quickly recounted an inventory of his guns: In addition to a Remington Nylon 66 .22 rifle and a Winchester Model 70 .30-06 that he’d left at the ranch, Ray had the shotgun and the Inglis Hi-Power that he’d retrieved on his trip home. Phil was fascinated by the Inglis pistol. This was Canada’s military-issue version of the venerable Browning P35 Hi-Power. Ray demonstrated how to attach and detach the shoulder stock, and the operation of its tangent rear sight, which was graduated out to an astoundingly optimistic five hundred meters.

  At this point, Claire said, “I’ll leave you to carry on with the Big Boy Toys, so that I can get dinner on the table. “

  Laying out all of the ammo that he carried in from the pickup, plus the ammo that he’d left stored at the ranch, he counted fourteen ammo cans, more than half of which were filled with various shotgun shells.

  As Ray was closing all of his ammo cans, Alan asked, “What about you, Phil? I guess we need to know what gear you have available to help us keep the place secure. I just saw you tote in your gun cases with hardly a word.”

  Phil nodded. “Yeah, I suppose you should know.”

  They walked down the hall to Phil’s bedroom—which had once been occupied by Ray’s sisters—and he opened the closet. The top shelf of the closet was sagging under the weight of the tidy phalanx of nineteen ammo cans.

  He pulled out the two black plastic Pelican waterproof cases and set them on the bed. He flipped the latches on the smaller one and swung it open.

  Alan let out a whistle and said, “That’s enough to get Jean Chrétien rolling in his grave.”

  Resting in the gray foam of the gun case was a DPMS clone of the Colt M4 Carbine and one detached green plastic magazine.

  “This one is semiautomatic only, and has a sixteen-inch barrel instead of the military-issue fourteen-and-a-half-inch barrel. But it’s otherwise functionally much like the U.S. M4 or the Canadian C7.”

  Ray corrected him. “C8, Phil. The C7 is our service rifle, but the C8 is the carbine.”

  “Right. Thanks for the reminder.”

  Looking back down at the rifle case, Phil went on. “The scope on the Picatinny rail is a Trijicon TA01 with a ‘donut of death’ reticle. That’s tritium-lit, so it’s a day/night scope. I also have both a Bushnell red dot and a PVS-14 ‘Gen Three’ night vision scope for it, packed in foam in one of the taller ammo cans. That scope can be used three ways: mounted on my M4, as a handheld monocular, or with a head mount. It may turn out to be the single most important piece of gear for securing the ranch.”

  Tapping the carbine’s buttstock, Phil said, “I’m sure this is über illegal here in Canada, so I suppose we’d better find a good hiding place for it.”

  Ray chimed in, “The magazines, too. They’re banned here, as well. We can’t have anything larger than five rounds for a rifle, or ten rounds for a pistol.”

  “That law stinks. I’ve got about thirty-five spare magazines, ranging in capacity from five rounds to forty rounds. But a dozen of them are my designated ‘go to war’ magazines—just like that loaded one, there in the case: thirty-round PMAGs. I like the foliage-green ones.”

  He swung the first case closed, and then opened up the larger one. In it was a Savage Axis stainless steel bolt-action chambered in .223 with a 3–9X scope, a takedown stainless steel Ruger 10/22 rifle with standard sights, and a stainless steel Ruger Mark II .22 target pistol.

  Alan clucked his tongue and said, “We’ll have to make that Ruger .22 pistol disappear, too.”

  “Is that a .308?” Alan asked, pointing at the larger rifle.

  “No. It’s only a .223. Basically a varmint rifle, but it is insanely accurate. I suppose it would do for deer if I aim for the head.”

  “If you want to pot a deer, then you can borrow Claire’s .243 Winchester. Her gun is a little Remington Model 7, about the size of that Savage.”

  Pointing up at the green-painted steel ammo cans, Phil said, “As for the ammo, there’s quite a mix: 5.56mm, mostly ball, some match grade, about two hundred rounds of tracer, and a half dozen boxes of .223 Remington hollowpoint varmint loads that I can shoot in both my bolt action and my M4. But the 5.56mm NATO ammo I can shoot only in the M4 because of a mismatch in chamber dimensions, which can cause pressure problems in the bolt action. By the way, just the opposite is true in .308s, where you can shoot 7.62mm NATO in a .308 Winchester, but not vice versa.”

  Gesturing farther down the shelf, he said: “Then there’s 9mm. You name it, and I’ve got it: ball, eight or nine different types of hollowpoints, some special low-lead ammo for indoor ranges, some tracers, and even one box of Arcane armor piercing. I also have two cans of .22 long rifle ammo, mostly hollowpoints.”

  After a moment, he
added, “Oh, I also have one .50-caliber can there with some odd boxes of ammo that I’ve somehow accumulated over the years, for guns that I don’t currently own. There’s .45 ACP, .40 S&W, and some .22 Magnum, a couple of boxes of .30-30, and a box of .30-40 Krag. That ammo should all be good for bartering.”

  “Any .243 Winchester?” Alan asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s a pity, because we only have thirty-seven rounds of .243 on hand for Claire’s rifle.”

  “And your deer rifle?” Phil asked.

  “Mine’s a .300 Winchester Magnum. That’ll do for elk, moose, and caribou, as well. Thankfully, I have nearly fourteen boxes of cartridges for that. I once found it on sale at a hardware store in Lytton that was going out of business for just twenty-four dollars a box. So I bought every box that they had.”

  After a moment, Alan added, “We have several other guns here at the ranch, all off-registry: an Ithaca Model 37 pump shotgun, a Webley .455 revolver, two .22 bolt actions, a .22 Remington pump, a .300 Savage lever action, a Winchester .45-70 lever action, and even an old Snider .577 single-shot carbine that my grandfather brought over from Scotland. There’s not much ammo on hand for most of those guns, I’m afraid.”

  “Perhaps we can do some trading with your neighbors.”

  “Possibly. But people have gotten very shy about discussing their guns in recent years. It’s as if the Montreal crowd has muzzled the entire nation. Most people in Canada of course refuse to even consider registering or giving up their ‘restricted’ guns, but they certainly have become circumspect about mentioning any guns—of all categories—that they own in casual conversation.”

  Phil nodded in understanding. He turned and flipped the large case closed and then said, “Last, but not least.”

  He then reached up under his shirt to the small of his back and pulled out his SIG P228 pistol and pointed it at the ceiling.

  Spiraling his wrist slightly, he said, “This shoots 9mm Parabellum—also called 9mm Luger—just like Ray’s Hi-Power.”