Chilcotin Yarns by Bruce Watt

Author:Bruce Watt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-927051-44-3
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I didn’t have the best reputation for accurately gauging the depth of some mudholes, or the thickness of the ice on some lakes. I’m not sure why . . .

PESSIMISM

I have long been considered an eternal optimist, while John Siebert was considered the ultimate pessimist. I believe I might have strengthened John’s pessimism. When we came up to a mudhole, for example, his usual expression was, “Uh-oh, we’ll never make it.” And I’d say, “Now, John, it’s got to have a hard bottom. I’m sure that hole has a hard bottom. Let’s take a run at her.” We’d take a run at it, and I’d bet that 85 percent of the time I was wrong. However, in all the times we travelled together, the things we did together and the problems that we had, never once did he ever say, “I told you so!”

For example, one time we drove out of Big Creek in a four-wheel-drive Jeep that he owned. He was going with me to pick up a colt that I had bought from Ronnie Thomlinson over at the company cabin on the Riske Creek side of the Chilcotin River. This was in February, and we’d had some cold weather. On the way we came upon a lake, right in the middle of the road. There had been a thaw earlier in the winter that formed these lakes all over the place, and then of course they froze up.

When we came to the lake, John said, “Uh-oh. You know, we’ll never get across it. You can’t trust that water out on the range like this.”

“John,” I said, “It’s been 50 below; we’ve had at least two weeks of 30 below and colder. That thing will be frozen solid to the bottom.”

“Well,” he said, “you never know.”

Naturally, I replied, “Well, come on, John. Let’s take a run at her and we’ll go across. It wouldn’t take much.”

We could have gone around, which would have meant cutting the fence. It wasn’t our fence, and we’d have to repair it, and so on and so forth. So we took a run at it. We got about halfway across and, of course, the Jeep dropped right through to the bottom. Mind you, it wasn’t very deep; it just came up to about—well, it covered the floorboards of the Jeep.

John never said what one would expect at that moment, which would be “I told you, by God.” Instead he just said, “I think I’ve got an axe in the back. We’ll just have to get chopping.” Which we did: we chopped for two hours to get back out of that hole. Then we had to go around and cut the fence anyway.

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