Well, if he catches you, it's a terrible death as his teeth tear at your flesh until there is nothing left of you. But if he doesn't, you've got some tale to tell your children and grandchildren.
THE PROPHECY
By Victor Epp
About the only excuse for this story being called 'The Prophecy' is that you might just come to the conclusion that I might be going to say something important. Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't. I'm not saying either way. That way we won't get into an argument about it. Besides, I'm not the one who has to listen to this stuff anyway.
Truth be known, this story involves at least one prophecy that was made years ago. Remember the day we boarded the bus to the big city and I had been mortified at my Tante Lise's good-natured teasing that I would now be a 'city slicker'? Well, wait 'til I tell you.
By now you know that all I ever wanted out of life was to be a farmer - well, after my own fashion anyway. Not that I sat around and pined for the wide-open spaces mind. No sir, there were adventures and opportunities right there in the big city that just couldn't be passed up. Well heck, you can't just lie down and let the world go by just because you can't go out in the field and pick stones or build stukes or that sort of thing. I mean, in the winter there was road hockey with Campbell’s soup cans for goals and frozen meadow muffins from Bill the milkman's horse. There was even real hockey for those whose school grades were good enough.
You could always tell when spring rolled around by the pockets full of marbles the boys carried around. Aside from marbles and the pie game that was played with a half open pocketknife, there was always the challenge of getting across ditches and frozen puddles over what we called 'rubber ice.' That was fun only if you managed to get over it without crashing through. Needless to say it was only fun about thirty percent of the time. The other seventy percent of the time you had the teacher to deal with. After that you had your mother to deal with and if she was having a bad enough day, you might just get to deal with your dad too. Still, we persisted. Then there was the old swimming hole. Actually it was an old creek that flowed through the local cemetery and past a Chinese market garden. Last one in on the first Sunday in April that the ice was broken up was a rotten egg, or something like that.
Of course, summer had an altogether different set of adventures. If you didn't have a baseball glove, you made one out of your winter mitts. If we'd only had enough sense to play catch with guys our own age, but no, we had to play with the older boys. They were nice enough but man, could they burn the ball! You'd spend most of the summer with one hand looking like a tenderized pork chop. See, you can look at our motivation in two ways. One is to say that we were just plain dumb. The other is that we were toughening ourselves up. Personally, I like that one better.
I've already told you about raiding gardens and corn roasts and things like that, so I won't beat it to death. Besides which, by the time I was fourteen I already had two years of part time work experience. I'd worked in an auto body shop, had a summer on construction and in the winter I delivered papers and even set pins in a bowling alley. Then I got a job at a downtown theatre as an usher. Man, you got a uniform and everything. That was cool!
Now you'd think with all those goings on, a person would be well satisfied, and generally that was true. Well I was until dad dropped the bomb on me. It seemed that one of the families out on the farm needed an extra hand to plow under the stubble after combining. Holy Toledo! I could go out and plow with a tractor and they'd even pay me wages and everything! The fact that I had never driven a tractor before or even worked a horse drawn plow never even crossed my mind. I was going to be a farm hand! I could have quit school right then and there! Mind you, it was only the first week of August so there was no pressing need.
By the time I got out to my uncles' place I had pretty well settled down to normal again and in fact the reality of what was expected of me started to loom larger and larger. Nick, my farm boss, came by at dusk to pick me up and take me out to their place. Normally I'd have had to get there on my own but he happened to be courting my cousin at the time, so it wasn't a wasted trip for him.
The minor adjustments I had to make were really not all that serious even though the new environment was pretty much of a culture shock to me. Well, let me stop here and explain the situation. There were three brothers living at the Harder farm. Of course, Mister and Missus Harder lived there too but they were away somewhere. These boys were all in their twenty’s so to a fourteen-year-old they were not boys at all but full grown men. Now that was going to be interesting. See, I didn't have any brothers so this would be a whole new experience for me. With the size of these guys though, it was a little iffy as to whether I would enjoy the whole affair.
The sleeping arrangements were probably by rank and age. Nothing doing but I had to bunk in with Frank, the youngest. Of course they made a joke out of it, saying that it was safer than climbing in with Ben just because of his sheer size. If he happened to roll over in the night, that would be the end of me. It turned out to be a bad choice either way because Frank was one of those restless sleepers. Within a half hour of going to bed, he had rolled over so many times that the covers were wrapped around him like a mummy and I was left shivering on the bed next to him.
It wasn't until after breakfast the next morning that I got indoctrinated into the dynamic of the Harder camp. First of all, these guys knew their business. Secondly, once they got out the oor, they were all business. They had one of the first self-propelled combines in the area and once their own place was done, they went custom combining all over the place. Given the amount of work there was and the weather, they more or less had to be well organized. You could more or less compare them to the pit crew and racecar drivers in the Indy five hundred all rolled into one. No kidding, these guys were built for speed. Once Nick got on the other side of the kitchen door, it was impossible for him to just walk. If he didn't have a tractor or truck under him, he'd be running.
Ben and Frank were a little different mind you. They saved their speed for their vehicles. Both of them drove motorcycles. Big 'Indians' they were, not those sissy pants Harley Davidsons. No sir! These were the same kind of motorcycles the army used in WWII, only faster. I don't think those bikes could go any slower than ninety miles an hour, and gravel roads be damned.
I could go on and on about it but I guess you get the idea. After taking the time to show me the ropes and taking me out to the first field I had to plow, Nick left me on my own with the little Allis-Chalmers four-bottom plow. Wow! What a rush that was! You'd have thought I owned the whole Interlake region. I'll tell you what though. None of the instructions were lost on me. The furrows would be straight and even and I wouldn't do anything to tip the little tractor either. After all, I could farm with the best of them. Well, that last part was only in my head.
Allowing for lunch and supper breaks, we went from eight in the morning until about ten o'clock at night. That wasn't because we were ready to quit either, but the dew on the ground dictated our hours. By the time we all pulled into the farmyard, every one of us was black as the land we'd been working, covered with sweat and mosquitoes. It was glorious! Then came the ritual cleaning - the farm version of a shower. First you stripped down to absolute buck-naked. You shook the dust out of your clothes, put them away in a safe place, turned on the pump and hosed each other down. That in itself was a source of entertainment for the boys. Naturally, because of the pecking order, I was the last one to get hosed down. By the time it got to me, the water was coming out of the bottom of the aquifer and was colder than all get out. Of course everybody hung around just to see me dance.
That's about how it went for the whole two weeks I was there. By and large the weather co-operated and there was very little down time. Well, everything has to come to an end sooner or later though. I was really sorry to see the last of this adventure. As far as I was concerned, it could have gone on forever. But a day before I was scheduled to leave, it just happened that dad and a couple of his buddies were out hunting partridge. Well that is to say, Dad's buddies were hunting and he was the guide. Somehow word got out that they were holed up at my uncle's place and would wait for me to give me a ride back home to the city.
What that meant was that I had to take my gear and walk the two and a half miles to my uncle's place. Now you would think that a bunch of hunters doing nothing more than chasing prairie chickens all day could have swung by Harder place and picked me up in that big forty-nine Plymouth of Mr. McLeod's. It never occurred to me that they were too busy filling their faces with Tante Anna's cooking and each other with tall tales to bother with the likes of me.
Okay now, farming is one thing. Wandering alone in the wilderness is quite another. I gathered my stuff, got my pay, and said my good byes. In all fairness to the boys, they just didn't have the time to take me back to my uncle's place. As I said, they were all business and the window of opportunity was closing fast. So here I was on the narrow gravel road with a long journey ahead of me in the early evening.
Once out of the long driveway I was alone - all alone - in the wilderness like I already told you. Do you have any idea how far two and a half miles is when you're just starting out? Once you're at the other end it's not that big a deal but when you take the first steps, it might as well be a thousand miles. You know full well that you're never going to make it alive.
At least I had some supper in my belly to carry me along the way. It was early evening and I figured that if I marched along at a good clip I could make it before dark. Heck, maybe I'd even hitch a ride from a passing farmer. Oh yeah, right! I might as well have been in the Sahara Desert as here for all the traffic there was. Nope, there was no other way than shank's mare on this trip.
By this time of day the sun was getting low in the west, casting long shadows among the trees. Now at the end of August the shortening days seem to speed up all of a sudden. Once the long fingers of shadows began to creep across the road, I knew it wouldn't be long before it was pitch dark and I had a lot of ground to cover. After all, there were no streetlights out here. There were no people either, so it seemed. There was just me and the wild animals in the bush. Oh, you couldn't see them, but they were there following me, I knew that much for sure. You could just feel their presence.
My feet decided to pick up some speed. How far had I walked so far - a mile, a hundred miles? I hadn't walked far enough because the number eight highway was still nowhere in sight. And the shadows were getting longer. You could just hear the animals creeping up in the trees, stalking me all the way. I tried to tell myself that it was just the wind rustling the poplar leaves but no, this was different. It was definitely a pack of predators; large savage beasts waiting for just the right moment to pounce and rip the flesh from my body. Someday, if anybody ever happened to come down this forsaken road again, they might come upon my ravaged carcass in the ditch and then they'd know they should have come and picked me up in the first place. That would teach them.
Oh they were out there all right. There were wolves for sure, maybe some bobcats, could even be a bear or two. With each step I took, they got closer - and bigger. You see; that's the thing about wild animals in the Interlake. At first they are a normal size as you might expect if you could actually see them. But when they disappear into to bush, especially if they are stalking you, they get bigger - and hungrier by the minute. Why if a person had to walk two and a half miles with these ravenous creatures closing in, they might grow as big as elephants by the time the finally decide to put you out of your misery.
All these thoughts racing through my mind were creating havoc with my body. My feet didn't want to listen to my legs, which in turn didn't want to listen to my brain. That was just as well because my brain wouldn't even listen to itself. I should slow down because I was kicking up too much dust for the animals to see. On the other hand I should break into a full gallop to possibly outrun them. Why oh why did I ever drink so much juice at suppertime? Well, wild animals or not, there were some things a person had to take care of. By now the number eight was within sight, and with it came a small sense of security. I headed for the ditch to the fence line in some ridiculous show of modesty. Just as I got there, a spruce grouse flew up in a flurry just about a foot in front of me, Well, a shotgun blast at point blank range would have scared me a whole lot less. I immediately forgot about my reason for being at the fence and made a beeline for the road.
It turned out the number eight was no better for traffic than the mile road. The only thing was, it was dustier. Where was everybody anyway? It never even occurred to me that they were all out in the field combining. All I could think of was that I was left out here in no man's land at the mercy of these savage beasts that were getting bigger and closer by the minute.
So busy was I with all this lamenting and yammering to myself that I almost missed the driveway at my uncle's farm. By now it was fully dusk and if it hadn't been for the light in Tante Anna's dining room I might have. There was the big forty-nine Plymouth sitting in the driveway. I made a beeline for the outhouse.
Of course, once I got in the house, they had to make a big deal of how late it was. They were just about to leave without me. Oh yeah, right. Why then did it take another two hours to drink some more coffee and spin another string of yarns, forgetting all about my hair-raising ordeal?
It didn't come to mind until we got home that night and I was safe in my own bed once more that Tante Lise had been right all along. How could she have prophesied seven years before that moving to the big city would turn me into a 'city slicker'? Maybe she was right and then maybe she wasn't. After all, it wasn't that I was scared out of my ever-loving wits or anything like that. I was just cautious because I knew about those big dangerous, man-eating animals out there. That was about the last thought I had before sinking into a very deep, long, safe sleep.
Well, there you have it. You can argue about whether this was about a prophecy until you are blue in the face if you want. I'm not saying one more word about it.
If you enjoyed this story, you may consider purchasing a ebook written by Victor Epp. Introducing "TruthSeeker"
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