I am sorry if some readers are superstitious.
I mean, what I write about winter won’t be a curse, as calving season for most is approaching fast.
There is no wish for a cold late winter implied here.
For some time I have been musing to myself about winter in the Interior of B.C.
This happens when we are explaining to visitors about where the dangers lurk when it is really cold.
We all have stories about prolonged cold snaps.
I like the ones about mowing hay on the ice on wet meadows when the late summer and early fall were too wet to get on them.
It is a good thing that the old horse-drawn mowing machines had steel cleats capable of traction on the ice.
The hay would be better than eating pine needles, you might say.
I have never had to do this, but I have had to haul hay for cattle and horse feed at -50 F, so cold that the horses pulling the sleighs could not breath hard (so it was slow going) without freezing lungs.
And if you unharnessed after using them, then put the frozen harness on the next day, they would shake a while until they warmed the harness.
The cook and homemaker did not appreciate a set of harness warming in the kitchen or living room!
Calves are bad enough when born during inclement weather. So, we left the harness on the horses for the coldest of the days.
Some of the older folks in the ranching business will remember how warm they got when loading a ton or so of loose hay from the stack onto the sleigh.
The warmth lasted until you were about a mile from the stack, then you had to get off and walk behind the sleigh to keep warm.
Even colts that were just started would not venture to runaway, especially if tied back to an old horse.
Somehow they knew that a fast pace might freeze their lungs.
When it was -48 F it was tough to get help.
Only some of us had to get out to work.
Keeping the home’s fires burning was obviously important. And the children should not be far from home in these temperatures.
When not so cold our boys liked to come and help and toboggan behind the sleigh.
When little (two to fours years) much of the sleigh ride home would be spent with little, almost frozen, feet under my coat on my stomach.
This was in spite of best efforts by mother to dress them properly.
I am brave to write about bad weather when we are about to go to Mexico for three weeks.
We do this now that we have learned that profitable ranchers take a good holiday every year. We still wonder if the holiday is the “chicken” and the profit part is the “egg,” or the other way around.
David Zirnhelt is a member of the Cariboo Cattlemen’s Association and chair of the advisory committee for the Applied Sustainable Ranching program which is starting at Thompson Rivers University in Williams Lake this January.
