Things kids in the stix do or used to do for fun (house)

[Gunluvver2]

I grew up on a farm/ranch in fairly desolate country in the Plains of Eastern Colorado. I was the oldest and only boy with two sisters, two and four years younger. There weren't a heckuva lot of kids within five miles in any direction so getting enough kids together for a baseball or football game was almost impossible. I always envied the city kids because during the summer they could meet somewhere and get up a football or baseball game. If they got tired of that they had the swimming pool that opened up at 1PM every day except Monday, when the pool was drained, cleaned and refilled. I suppose I could have walked the 11 miles to town and the 11 miles back but walking on a dirt road wasn't much fun. I did it a few times but I never really cared for it. It is funny looking back because I probably walked more than 20 miles in a day just wandering around in the canyons and breaks looking for something to shoot with my .22 rifle.

I got my first bicycle when I was about four but we had a thing called goatheads all over the place. A goathead is a three pronged sticker that will work its way into the thickest of tires and leave you with a flat miles from home. A bicycle didn't stand a chance. My Dad had to farm with horses when he was a kid and right before WW2 rolled around he bought a tractor and sold all the horses. He always said it would be a cold day in hell before he would let a horse on his place. So I was S.O.O.L and on foot. Luckily I got my first BB gun at about the same time I got the bike so walking was a better way of sneaking up on field mice and ground squirrels anyway.

I got the first .22 rifle the summer before I started first grade (not quite six at the time. Has the World changed or what?). I had my daily chores and my Dad always bought me a box of .22 Long Rifle shells each Saturday as my allowance (50 rounds). Even though my rifle was a single shot a box of .22's didn't last very long at all. I had a very expensive addiction and had to find a way to feed it LOL.

One of the neighbors about four miles away had a few hundred cattle in his feedlot. Crows and sparrows were real pests and he told me he would pay me a penny for every sparrow I could shoot and a nickel for a crow. At the time a box of .22 shorts cost me about a dime, .22 longs were around fifteen cents and plain .22 long rifles were about a quarter. I had to be really careful that my bullets didn't richochet and hit a cow because the neighbor made a big point of my being very careful about where I shot. My Stevens single shot rifle could handle all three types of ammo and I soon found out that it made more sense to use the .22 Shorts since I could afford a few misses and still make a profit. Another advantage to the .22 Shorts was the fact that they were not so powerful that they would do any damage to a feedbunk or worse yet richochet all over the place. Within two weeks I think I had killed every sparrow, Starling, Grackle or Crow in that part of the county. It was easy money that first two weeks but there was a shortage of targets soon after. But at least I was getting enough money to buy more ammo and even making a small profit. It finally got so bad that the crows wouldn't come within a hudred yards of me. The only way I could stay in business was to switch to .22 Long rifles. They would let me reach out a lot farther but a Crow at a hundred yards is a pretty small target for a .22. Instead of one crow/one shot it soon became one crow/three shots and waiting several minutes for the shot anyway. I was a victim of my own success. My first lesson in conservation and the preservation of a market. LOL.

After about a month I told the neighbor (Ernie) that I would have to quit coming over because it was just too much work. He told me that he would hire me again the next summer since the birds would be back and be a nuisance again by that time. So I was all set for a few weeks of work the next year. Another neighbor (Willard)had heard about my luck with the birds and he had a huge prairie dog problem. He was willing to pay a quarter for a P.Dog. Since there had been a few outbreaks of Bubonic Plague in P.Dog populations in the area he didn't want me to bring him the carcasses. He would take my word for a count. Coyotes and Coons will clean up all the dead critters during the night.

If any of you have ever shot P.Dogs they are smart little critters and they always have a watcher to alert the colony of danger. I found a nice little overlook within 40 yards of the first ring of P.Dog burrows and I managed to hit 30 of them with just two misses. It only took about an hour that first day. I grabbed my gear and started walking towards the house to collect my first days pay. Willard asked me how many P. Dogs I had killed. I told him thrity. He gave me $8.00. I told him he had overpaid me by $.50. He told me that he hadn't. He had set up on the hill about a quarter of a mile behind me with a high powered spotting scope and he had seen me hit the two P.Dogs that I thought I had missed. So I was 100% that day. Of course the next day I didn't do so well. I got about the same number of P. Dogs but I was not able to get very many close in shots and it was longer and longer in between shots. After about a week of shooting every day I was having to make longer and longer shots and missing shots and getting fewer and fewer P.Dogs.

I told Willard that I would have to stop coming over a few weeks later because the P. Dogs were getting so spooky I was having too shoot too far out. He told me that just about every morning he would see coyotes moving through the draw that ran through the P. Dog town. The coyotes were picking up the Dogs I had shot the day before and taking them to their den to feed pups. I changed my business plan. I would shoot a few P. Dogs late in the afternoon and then I would get up before the sun came up and bushwhack the coyotes that were scavenging the Dog carcasses during the night. At that time there was a bounty on Coyotes. If I remember correctly Colorado was paying $2.00 for tails and Kansas was paying about the same for ears. So each coyote was worth about four bucks. Since it was summer time the pelts were worthless. Every Saturday my Dad would take me to the Sherrifs office in the Kansas and Colorado counties closest by and I would collect bounties. I had a pretty good nest egg built up by the time school started that next fall. I did this for another summer but when I turned nine my Dad needed me to help him with field work. He did let me take my rifle on the tractor though and if I saw a coyote I would stop and take him. I guess Dad figured it was cheaper for him to let me collect bounties than it was for me to hit him up for higher wages ,smart Man.

The years (1950 to 1955) from when I was four until I was Nine were like something Mark Twain wrote about in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I know my Dad and Mom were having a tough time keeping things together because of the various struggles that farming entails but I was living in my own little paradise. I still appreciate how my parents let me (and my sisters) enjoy our childhood without worrying us to death with talk about how rough things were. In later years I came to realize just how tough things were for them but I don't remember ever missing a meal and we always had shoes and clothes. I was fortunate in having a Dad, Grandad and various Uncles that taught me how to trap,track, hunt, fish, butcher and use and appreciate nature. One of the most valuable things I think I learned from growing up in a situation like I did is the fact that you have to enjoy your own company before you can appreciate the company of others. That is a skill that comes in handy if you are living in the stix or in a large city. If you can't get along with yourself. . . how can you get along with others?

Enough of my rambling on for the night. I finished off a six pack this evening and my kidneys are telling me I have neglected them, plus it is way past bedtime for must of us old pharts.

GL2

[krudmonk]

methamphetamine