To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both long-term and short-term plans. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors review their week’s prep activities and planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, ranch improvements, bug-out bag fine-tuning, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles [1], but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year. We always welcome you to share your own successes and wisdom in your e-mailed letters. We post many of those — or excerpts thereof — in the Odds ‘n Sods Column or in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
This week I slaughtered and butchered an excess yearling bull from our herd. He had one undescended testicle (cryptorchidism), so he wasn’t a candidate for selling–only butcher. I estimate that he weighed nearly 650 pounds, on the hoof. He was big boy, so the discards from this project required two full-size gut buckets, plus a trash barrel. I estimate that the guts weighed 160 pounds, the hide was nearly 30 pounds, and the removed head, lungs, tail, and forelegs weighed another 50 to 60 pounds. This left us with two sides of beef weighing about 200 pounds each. The main gut bucket was so heavy that I had to divide the guts in two, to be able to heft that weight up to the bed of our pickup truck, for disposal. Because of some recent parasite problems on our ranch, the heart and liver were discarded. That was sad, but as they say: “Better safe than sorry.”
One side of the beef went our #1 Son, as a birthday gift. He helped me with the second day of butchering. In three hours, he did most of the cutting on that side of beef. He also brought his meat grinder, which made quicker work of the hamburger-making. I mostly ran the grinder and packaged and labeled, while he cut. As per our usual, We saved nearly all of the bones — either for soup bones, or to broil for our dog. Lily plans to tan the hide.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
The beautiful weather lasted until Friday morning when a front came in with clouds, wind, and rain. The temperature high that we saw was seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The week’s low temperature was forty degrees Fahrenheit. The Front that came in on Friday came in from the south bringing in warm air. I always find it very interesting to be outside, during a weather front change. That morning, I was riding my bike. The air was quite chilly only forty-six degrees as I rode loops around the house the wind began to pick up from the south. I noticed that when I went around the back of the house facing the house meadow and into the parking lot the air was quite warm and smelled of warm summer pine mixed faintly with smoke. It felt and smelled to me really good. As I went up the driveway to the gate to the county road, the air turned very cold and smelled of Balsam. That air is coming off the six thousand plus foot mountain funneling down a stream bed canyon directly from the west. I went around the house about ten times and each time I could feel and smell the different swirling air currents. So neat.
[2]While I was outside doing animal chores at 6:30 am in the morning on butchering day, Miss Violet looked out her bedroom window and saw a black bear in our house meadow. She told me later that she had seen it, but had not yet told Jim. I suspect he could smell our apples on the trees and/or the honey in our beehives in our orchard and was looking for a way in. It has a 10-foot fence all around it and a tall tube gate to match, with a huge chain. Anyway, I had just finished feeding and watering the livestock and was getting the gut buckets set up for Jim and was going to get the grain for the bull calf to keep him very occupied before the “blap”, when Jim yelled to me.
Jim had come out to the living room, probably about the same time Miss Violet had looked out her window, opened the door and saw the bear. He immediately yelled to me from the porch. By his report the bear was in the near-house meadow and even though he yelled to me the bear kept approaching the porch. He yelled again and so it moved off into the woods by the outhouse. I came towards the house to see what he wanted. He told me that a big black bear, one of the biggest he had ever seen on our ranch, was just now in the near-house meadow and had just stepped into the woods by our newly-constructed outhouse. “Oh” thought, I. There is the South Meadow fence and a gate just fifty feet past the outhouse in the woods. So I didn’t think he was going to go too far at all. Jim asked me if I had my Glock. I did. So Jim, being a man on a mission, headed to the barn to prepare to dispatch the yearling bull. Since I had my holstered Glock .45 ACP, I started to yell, “Hey bear, hey bear, hey bear, hey bear!” I went up onto the porch and rang our dinner bell a number of times. I just wanted it to leave our ranch. Then, I went off the porch and walked past our woodshed over to the dirt track that goes down to the gate to the South Pasture. I went around one biggish tree trunk and Lo, the bear was right there on all fours, looking at me, right in front of the gate — less than seventy feet away.
We stared at each other for a moment.
“Umm, Okay” thought, I. “Just as I suspected. Still here. He doesn’t appear to be afraid of me after all that yelling and bell ringing. Plus he is kinda trapped between me and the four foot fence and gate. Time to move and give it more space.”
As I I backed up around the tree, I pulled the Glock from it’s holster, turned and dashed ten steps (I measured the steps later) towards the stairs of the porch, stopped, about ten feet away from them and whipped around. I looked back and could see the bear through the trees by the gate watching me. I took another few steps towards the porch stairs, sideways. Then I aimed my Glock alongside it and shot a round into the ground. I did not have a bear tag, so I wasn’t going to kill it. In fact, I wasn’t even thinking that I could take it. All that I was thinking was to scare it off our land — away from our livestock and orchard. There was kinda of an “Oh darn” moment afterwards. We could’ve used it’s meat to feed the dog and cats. We won’t eat it because it’s not kosher. We keep Biblical kosher, not Rabbinic kosher.
Back to the story. It ran back into the small woods and came out into the meadow near the outhouse and looked at me. I went to fire off another round. The pistol didn’t fire. I looked quick at the Glock. The fired casing was jammed in the ejection port — a “stovepipe” jam. I had limp-wristed the first shot. I cleared the jam, instinctively. (Muscle memory is a good thing!) In the split second that I took to look and to clear the jam, the bear had disappeared from the meadow. It either went towards the trees down by the orchard, or it went back into the trees by the South Meadow fence. So I just stood there watching for it intently, for about two minutes. Unexpectedly, another shot rang out. I nearly jumped out of my skin. My first thought was that unbeknownst to me, Jim had seen the bear and had shot towards it to scare it, too. But as I looked toward the barn, I saw him moving towards the gate of the hay barn and realized that he had just dispatched the yearling Bull. So I left off watching for the bear, wherever he was, and as I went into the house to clean the kitchen and to organize for butchering later in the day, I thanked the Lord God for the life of the bull calf and for the food that he would provide for us, this winter.
Another story: We are still dealing with mice though not as many as before. One night I woke up to use the loo. I lifted up the covers and scooted to the end of the bed. I was wearing socks. I almost never wear socks to bed. I dropped my feet to the vinyl floor very forcefully and stood up. Under one foot, I vaguely felt something that felt like maybe a rolled up sock or a part of the blanket that had fallen off the end of the bed. I didn’t think anything of it. Went to the loo and returned to bed. About mid morning the next day, as I was vacuuming our bedroom floor on my side of the bed, Our bed is an island. One can walk all they way around it. I looked towards the corner of the bottom of the bed and suddenly saw a dead mouse in the middle of the floor space between the bed and the sliding glass doors, only about fourteen inches wide. “That is a weird place for a dead mouse, I thought. I went over and looked at it more closely. It looked kinda flat. I called Jim to come and get it. I can pick them up too, and have, but generally I ask him to deal with them. I told him, “I think I must’ve stepped on it last night.” He picked it up and said, “Yep it’s quite flat.” He took it away and I saw something else on the floor kinda tan near where the mouse had laid. It was a large larva probably from a bot fly that must have been forced out of the mouse, when I stepped on it. EEEWWW GROSS! I went and grabbed a wad of TP and scooped it up and flushed it down the toilet. My next thoughts were, “Thank God I was wearing socks last night.” Then I thought, “I am going to wash our sheets.” I stripped our bed and threw the sheets into the wash. Gross me out!
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed, and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
o o o
As always, please share and send e-mails of your own successes and hard-earned wisdom and we will post them in the “Snippets” column this coming week. We want to hear from you.