Of Moths and Madness

When the men in the white suits come for me with the strait jacket, tell them it was the moths that finally drove me over the edge.

I understand that country living includes critters. I’ve had a lifetime of grabbing grain cans only to have a mouse zip up my arm. I should have nerves of steel by now. South Dakota alone should have made me into Superwoman. I once crawled under a wooden granary to retrieve a litter of puppies with the full knowledge that the dog flushed rats out of the corn every morning. (I worried they might invade the house. My husband assured me they would much rather stay outside, where there was food.)

Thanks to the high water table and a sump hole inexplicably inserted on the high end of the basement floor, we occasionally had to prop open the window to run a hose out from the low end. One morning, I opened the basement door and came face to face with a possum on the landing. I’d never seen a possum before. I assumed it was a rat the size of a Chihuahua. Luckily, we’d been planning on knocking out that wall between the dining room and kitchen anyway.

And then there was the day I woke from a nap to the sound of skittering feet, and looked over to see a pocket gopher scaling my bedroom curtains.

Even the birds got in on the act. My living room door was two steps up from the ground, at the ideal level for sparrows to swoop into the house when I hit the electric garage door closer and scared them off the rails. I got be a real pro at herding them out the sliding glass doors with a broom and a minimal amount of splatter.

In Oregon, it was spiders. Big spiders, little spiders, white spiders, gray spiders. Black fuzzy jumping spiders that could leap from windowsill to toilet in a single bound. Nickel-sized brown spiders that lurked in my shower. Menacing black widow spiders that hid in the dark corners of my tack room.

But it’s the moths that are going to do me in.

The robins started it by chiseling a hole under the eaves of my kitchen roof. By the time I discovered their handiwork, it was too late to seal it up. They’d already built their nests. Call me soft-hearted. Or allergic to the smell of rotting eggs. I got used to the sound of scratching and cheeping above my table and sort of forgot about the hole.

Until the moths.

We came home after dark from a visit to the neighbors, switched on the living room light, and were engulfed in a blizzard of moths. Fluttering and flapping, smacking into lights and walls and ceilings and me. My son ran screaming to the bedroom and hid under the blankets. My husband and I armed ourselves with rolled up magazines and ran around flailing at the things until the floor was thick with casualties.

That was a week ago. Seven nights of terror. Every evening, as dusk falls, they begin to creep out of the cracks and crevices. They hunker along the top curves of the log beams in the living room, where swatting is nearly impossible. When you try, they hurl themselves at your head, tangle in your hair, dive down your collar. After the third time he watched me strip off my shirt and stomp it to death on the floor, my husband decided we needed a better weapon. Once he stopped laughing, of course.

Enter the ShopVac.

I now have a new bedtime routine. ShopVac wand in one hand, paperback book in the other to fend off frontal attacks, I prowl the house, looking for suspicious, wedge-shaped brown spots. It sucks them right off the ceiling beams with a satisfying thwip! And I’m getting better with practice. I can occasionally snatch one right out of the air. Makes me feel like Luke Skywalker, light saber at ready, saving the universe from Darth Vader’s evil minions.

I also have no cobwebs for the first time in living memory.

But the battle goes on. The enemy seems to have endless reinforcements. No matter how I scour the perimeter, a few slip past. I pick up a book from my nightstand and a moth blasts out in my face. I grab the dish towel from the rack and a moth shoots up my sleeve. Two nights in a row, just as I dozed off to sleep, I’ve been dive-bombed right there on my pillow.

We’re talking shriek and freak. Claw marks on the ceiling.

Now I lie here, barely able to close my eyes, heart leaping into my throat at every sound. I’m exhausted. Frazzled. Seriously considering a buzz cut.

Please, somebody, come and take me away.

What's in a Name

The Indian wars began centuries before white men arrived in Montana. Assiniboine, Cree, Blackfeet, Crow, Shoshone—all separate nations competing for their chunk of the plains, including control of sacred sites and the migrating herds of buffalo, much like a smaller version of the Middle East. Some tribes formed alliances for mutual benefit. Others were engaged in long-standing, brutal conflict.

In the late 1700's and early 1800's, what is now northcentral Montana was divvied up primarily between two tribes. The Assiniboine controlled the area roughly bordered by the current Interstate 15, north of the Missouri River, into southern Alberta and clear out to North Dakota. The Blackfeet ruled the east slope of the Rockies, from west of present day Calgary all the way south to the headwaters of the Missouri in southern Montana.

The Blackfeet were sworn enemies of the Assiniboine because, as one historian stated, the Blackfeet were sworn enemies of everybody, but also because they butted up against each other constantly, following the buffalo herds across the plains. They couldn’t even agree on how to do business. As white fur traders infiltrated the area in the early 1800’s, the Blackfeet traded exclusively with the Hudson Bay Company of Canada, while the Assiniboine practically owned Fort Union.

In 1847, Fort Benton was established in central Montana as the farthest west trading post on the Missouri River. Sometime in the next few years, a band of Blackfeet was attacked near the fort by what we assume was an Assiniboine war party, although that far south Cree were also a possibility. All of the Blackfeet were slain with the lone exception of a terrified little girl named Under Fox Woman.

She was rescued and taken to Fort Benton where she was adopted by the Pambruns. She remained with them until she married Adolphus Joseph Dubray, otherwise known as Tin Cup Joe because he started out in Butte, selling hardware to the miners.

Under Fox Woman gave birth to a child in 1865, a boy named Aleck. The exact date and circumstances of her death are not known, but Joe moved to Sasketchewan with his son, remarried, and had a daughter in 1868, so we can assume Under Fox Woman died within a year or two of her son’s birth. Joe and his second wife would go on to have fourteen more children.

Yeah, I said fourteen.

In the late 1800’s Joe learned the United States government was allotting parcels of land on the Blackfeet reservation to tribal members. He sent his son Aleck back to Fort Benton to find Mrs. Pambrun, who testified that he was indeed the child of a Blackfeet Indian. The land allotment he received was east of the Rocky Mountains, along the north fork of the Milk River just south of where it crossed the border into Canada.

Aleck's son and namesake would later be allotted a chunk of property north and east of his father's. We still call this portion of our deeded property the ‘Aleck Dubray’.

Yes, there was a point to this whole story.

Last week, my aunt invited us to bring our son to a naming ceremony, where he would receive his Indian name. These names are traditionally passed down through families. The last person in my family tree whose Blackfeet name is known to us is Under Fox Woman, so we chose as a name for our son White Fox, or Iks-Sin-Oh-Pah, to honor my great-great grandmother.

There's a lot in a name.

Much as I would like to brag that I know my family history back to front, it would be a lie. I stole it all from my cousin Rhonda Michael. She kicks butt on this stuff. 

Still Slogging Around

Yes, we got more rain. Another inch and a half at the end of last week. The pastures look incredible. You can barely tell there's been a cow on our leases, let alone most of our herd. We already have more hay than we got last year and we're only 3/4 done, at most.

But yes, we are sick to death of mud.

I'm hoping to get out and take some good pictures this week. In the meantime, head over to my alternate blog and you can see why I consider myself the Queen of Half Done.

Calling out the Cavalry

I'm not a real news hound, but it's been hard to live in the western half of the United States without being aware of the ongoing manhunt for a trio of prison escapees from Arizona and their female accomplice. After their escape, they shanghaied a pair of truck drivers and forced them to drive to New Mexico, where they then appear to have murdered a man and his wife to steal their pickup and head north.

They split up somewhere along the way, and one of the men was captured in Colorado a few days ago. The other three were spotted in the Yellowstone Park area on Sunday. This was a bit of a concern to my family, as my brother in law is working on a bridge construction project down there that requires him to show up at three o'clock in the morning. I do have to give the escapees credit, though. What better place to hide in plain sight than in the midst of throngs of cap and sunglass wearing tourists?

Yesterday the hay was finally ready to bale, the baler and tractor were both functional, and my husband was going great guns on a field over the hill and a mile west from the house. I walked out to take him supper right before dark. He said don't bother to wait up, he was going to bale as long as he could keep his eyes open. So I went home, got the kid ready for bed and was just about to hunker down myself when I heard a vehicle. I went out into the living room just in time to see a pair of taillights going west, down a track that leads to our haystacks, north pastures and eventually, the Canadian border.

Then the phone rang. My dad. The border patrol had called. One of the fugitives and his fiance/accomplice/cousin (eeuwww) had been spotted twenty miles away in St. Mary's and they were warning all residents along the adjacent Canadian line to keep their eyes open and lock their doors.

Did I mention my husband was a mile from the house, in the middle of a hayfield, alone? Without his cell phone, of course.

"Someone just came past, headed west," I told my dad.

"Are you sure it wasn't Greg?"

"I don't think so. It didn't sound like the brown pickup." As in, minus a muffler and rattling so loud you expect to find pieces of it scattered everywhere it goes. Plus, I'm pretty sure it hasn't had both taillights since we've owned it.

After a short debate, we decided Dad should call the border patrol and report the strange vehicle, while I drove out to tell Greg what was going on. It was quarter to eleven. Pitch dark. I went outside and, lo and behold, there was the brown pickup, parked in its usual spot. Oh, right. Greg was driving the newer blue Ford because he'd had to run to town for parts. I jumped in the brown pickup, which ranks amongst its few accessories a .22 rifle and full box of shells. Too bad the dome light in the pickup is broken and I am barely capable of loading the thing in the daylight.

I bounced and rattled out to the hayfield, flagged Greg down and shared the news. He sort of shrugged. I told him about the vehicle we'd seen going past.

"Oh, that was me," he said. "I forgot my flashlight at the shop."

Which was when the border patrol helicopter buzzed us. No doubt in response to my dad's call. Um, oops. But hey, excellent response time.

For complete details on the escapees: http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/apArticle/id/D9HGPS5G0/

Numb with Excitement

I'm taking a break from my usual programming today. I have mentioned before that I have a literary agent, the awesome and fearsome Janet Reid of Fine Print Literary Management in New York City. Yep, the Big Apple. Oddly enough, I am not her only client, which is good considering I've yet to provide her with a book she could sell. (This one. I swear, Janet.)

Anyway, some of her other clients do sell books, and one of them is celebrating the release of his debut novel, Numb. Sean Ferrell is one of my favorite online writer friends. One of our other writer friends is sponsoring a contest in his honor. You can check out the contest and her review of Numb at Harley May.

And this is my illustration of a few of the key scenes of Numb, all rolled together (you have to look close, Harley. That's a nail in the back of his neck):

For those of you who were counting on finding my words of wisdom, head on over to Everybody Needs a Little Romance to enjoy my latest excuse for why I never get anything done around here.

How to Dress a Horse

This is a video from rodeo slack at Browning. Sadly, I couldn't get the sound to record, so you don't get the full atmospheric effect. But as you can tell, the pace is fairly laid back at eight o'clock in the morning.

This is a steer wrestler from British Columbia. I never actually heard his name. His friend in the blue shirt is the poor sucker who got stuck pushing my breakaway calf. The stuff in the bottle is fly spray. FYI, I edited this video quite a bit. From the time he started brushing the horse to where it now ends...eleven minutes.

I recommend watching full screen and checking out the background activity, too. The guy testing out his ropes, and the one clear back at the white horse trailer who's shoeing his horse.

Confessions of a Nameaphobic

   Confession time: I am terrible at names. And especially at putting names together with faces. I’m not sure why this is. I can remember the chart number of a worker’s compensation patient from the orthopedic surgeon’s office where I worked three years ago. The phone number at my apartment in Texas where I lived for only ten months during my first job out of college (let’s not talk about how many years ago that was). But let one of my mother’s cousins say hello at the local cafe and I’m toast.

    It would be less embarrassing if I didn’t even try to remember names. But I work at it. At large social gatherings I plant myself next to one of Those Who Know Everyone and quiz them about any familiar face that wanders past. Play little word games with myself. You know, like I should remember Joe Tallman because he isn’t tall, he’s short.

    Nothing helps.

    It’s not as simple as a memory problem. It’s more like stage fright. Sitting here right now, I can think of a person’s name and picture their face clear as day. Plop me down in front of the concession stand at the Tal Michael Memorial Rodeo, though, and I’m like the National Anthem singer who forgets the words they’ve sung a thousand times. Froze up. Totally blank.

   Uh-oh. That woman is looking at me like she knows me. Oh, crud, she’s saying hello. Come on, come on brain…give me something.

   At which point I blurt out the first name that pops into my head, which is always a sister or a cousin or a next door neighbor but NEVER the person standing in front of me. Or I go with a big dumb smile and, “Well, it’s good to see YOU, too.” And the woman gives me the look that says, “Wow, what a moron” and walks away. And then I remember exactly who she is and that time at the Birch Creek arena when we persuaded her little brother to go snipe hunting and what color her barrel horse was back in 1983. 

   Family reunions and other social gatherings that attract large numbers of relatives and acquaintances are a nightmare. The more I screw up, the more I panic, until I start second-guessing myself on even the no-brainers.

   Wait. Are you sure? Don’t say the name until you’re sure. Okay, yes, I’m pretty sure that’s the guy in my wedding photos.  

   Don’t even bother looking for me at the big Lewis and Clark Days Festival and all school reunion. I can’t take the pressure. It does not help that I moved away for a couple of decades and let’s face it, we all don’t look quite like we did back in high school. I’m pretty sure I’m taller now, which would account for why some people don’t seem to recognize me right off. Or they’re suffering from the same nameaphobia that sends me ducking down an alternate aisle in the grocery store when I have one of my attacks.

   Please don’t take it personally. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid you. I’m just giving myself a few moments to recall whether we shared the same Algebra teacher or the same grandparents. Feel free to walk over, whack me upside the head and say, “Hey, dummy, I’m Mike, remember?”

   Until then, I will stick with Mr. Tatsey, just to be safe. Or “Hey, you.”