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The next year we moved to the farm and took a kitten named Fuzzy, with us from town. I remember my father had dug a deep pit for an outhouse, and at the bottom of the pit was a mouse. One of my brothers threw the kitten into the pit to catch the mouse. The kitten thought it was great fun and played with it for some time until the mouse bit it on the nose. It was then that Fuzzy the sweet little kitten turned into a killer. Fuzzy will be featured in several other stories. 

About this time we acquired a small dog of mixed inheritance. He was part English shepherd and part cocker spaniel. Except for his hair being a little bit too curly he looked much like a shepherd. We called him Ring, for the ring of white around his neck. Later on, when I become Robinson Crusoe, Ring will be called Friday. Looking back, Ring was an amazing dog of unusual intelligence. Fortunately we didn't know enough to train him to be anything but just a dog. One of the unusual things Ring was able to do was to know up to thirty minutes in advance when my father was on his way home from work. What was unusual and remarkable was; that since we had no telephone, even the family didn't know when he was due home. Dad worked an irregular shift and had a room at a tuberculosis hospital where he had to be on duty 2 nights a week, and part of every other weekend. Dad often traded duty nights for a weekend day off. So we never really knew what night he was due home. But Ring knew when my Dad pulled into a service station 12 miles away and on the other side of a hill even with the wind blowing in the opposite direction. My Dad always stopped to fill the gas tank, check the oil, water and air and chat with the station owner. Dad said he always thought of Ring sitting by the front gate waiting for him. So, thanks to Ring's ESP, my Mom always had time to get my Dad's dinner on the table.

My oldest brother, Merrill was 9 years older than I was. My other brother, David was 7 years older, so I wasn't much fun to play with. With the closest child my age, a mile away I spent most of the time playing by myself. My mother never worried about we 3 boys getting into trouble. She figured, "If we were smart enough to get into trouble we were smart enough to get out." As a result even as a small child of 7 or 8 I was allowed to go by myself and explore the 600-acre island in the middle of the river that ran through our farm. This island with no one living on it was a never-ending source of fascination and it drew me like a magnet. Once I had crossed the river on my raft I was in a world of my own, one that belonged completely to me. Sometimes I was Robinson Crusoe and with my faithful friend Friday (Ring), we spent hours exploring the hidden mysteries of MY island. The island was a dense rain-forest crisscrossed with small streams. If Friday and I sat on the bank of one of the small streams, the light filtering down through the trees turned it into a kaleidoscopic paradise. If we sat there long enough, and quietly enough, this silent mystical place would suddenly spring into life with all sorts of birds and animals. In the course of an hour we saw a deer, a muskrat, a duck swimming with her babies, a fox cautiously peeking out from behind some ferns, for comic relief two river otters sliding down a mud bank with a chorus of birds having a singing contest. My dog and I all part of this magical place that belonged completely to me and I to it. 
 
 As I mentioned, my father worked away from home so my mother and we boys ran the farm. My mother often dealt with a Horse Trader named Snathen. (Merrill called him, Snathen the Grass). Some times I suspected my mother was part horse trader herself. She told Snathen that she wanted a pure-bred Jersey cow. Unable to agree on a price my mother settled on cross-breed, half Jersey and half Guernsey. Snathen assured us that this cow was a high producer and would give us valuable calves. We never actually caught Snathen in a lie . True to his word the cow was a high producer and gave rich milk as promised. What Snathen failed to mention was the cow was 11 years old and went dry in 3 or 4 months. Snathen invariably got the better of my mother in his deals, after-all my mother was an "amateur" horse trader. The other cows we had at the time had horns and the new cow had been de-horned as a calf, so we called her, Mulely. Mulely was a gentle lovable old cow and in less than a year produced a calf. The calf had a white diamond on her fore-head so naturally was named Diamond. In time Diamond produced a calf that was as gentle as her grandmother Muley. But diamond herself was another story.

Unfortunately we failed to have Diamond de-horned and she developed very sharp horns that stuck straight out on the tips. To say that Diamond was mean was more than an understatement. In order to milk her she had to be hobbled. Even with her legs chained together she would still manage to kick over the milk pail and kick whoever was milking her. The small church we attended had a minister who claimed the Devil was a living entity. My brother David agreed, and said the devil was named Diamond. Someone said that cows can't kick backwards, WRONG!!! Diamond once kicked me backwards and out the manure window. It was an insult landing on the manure pile, but it was followed by injury as the hobbles hit me in the stomach. 

One summer evening I was bringing home the cows from the pasture when Diamond decided she wanted to be the lead cow in the line instead of Mulely. With her sharp horns she was able to persuade Mulely to let her lead the procession. The trail from the pasture led along the side of the river. At one spot the trail narrowed as it went past a large fir tree. Suddenly Mulely who had been closely following Diamond put on a burst of speed and got between the fir tree and Diamond. Diamond made a huge splash as she fell about ten feet into the river. This was the deepest point in the river and with a ten foot perpendicular bank there was no way she could get out. Fortunately cows don't sink, so there was little danger of her drowning. If it had been any other cow, such pitiful bellowing would have broken my heart. I went to get a rope and I could hear her bellowing all the way to the barn. She had fallen into our swimming hole and I stood on the diving board above her. After a couple of tries I was able to lasso her horns. Then I jumped into the river and towed her down-stream to a shallow place, where she was able to climb out. The next evening when I brought the cows in, Diamond was last in line and she didn't even kick the milk bucket over.

Diamond seemed to have inherited her meanness from her father the neighbor's bull. This was a bull that would calmly walk through a three barbed wire fence when the gate was open right next to it. He seemed to delight in knocking down our fences. He charged me a couple of times and if I knew he was near I carried a softball bat as protection. Once I was able to hit him between the eyes with the bat, he sat down, shook his head and then walked back through two of our fences. When we finally got electricity one of the first things I did was to put an electric fence around our barnyard. One of our heifers was in heat and on cue the neighbor's bull showed up, walking through the outside fence we shared with the neighbor. Racing eagerly up to the barnyard he stopped to examine this one wire fence. Something didn't look right to him. For once he showed some caution and walked up and wrapped his tongue around the single wire. Before he could extricate himself he had gotten three or four jolts. As he raced across the fields to his home I recognized the family bellow; it was the same one Diamond had used in the river. He never returned to knock down our fences.

One day as I was walking home from school someone asked me if I wanted a baby goat. It was so cute, I couldn't resist. The mother goat had died when it was born. I pleaded that it was an orphan and my mother let me keep it. I soon discovered it didn't know how to drink milk from a bowl. Fortunately a close neighbor lady raised goats and I took the baby goat to her. She dipped a finger in goat milk it began to suck on it and she lowered its mouth into a bowl of goat milk. The poor little thing was very hungry and it almost immediately began to drink from the bowl. She gave me a bottle of goat milk to take home and when I switched to cows milk it never noticed. It soon grew into an affectionate comical little Billy goat. I named him William, which seemed very clever when I was eight years old. When William grew older he loved to climb to the top of the hay pile and come racing down. Soon he. found it was even more fun when he butted Diamond in the side. This elicited satisfying "oof" sound. "Now William, you naughty boy, you shouldn't butt Diamond in the side". When William made the mistake of butting Mulely he was banished from the barn. All went well for a while until one day until William caught my mother bending over pulling weeds. At the time my mother was quite rotund and did several cartwheels before she stopped rolling. My mother was a mass of bruises and William went to the freezer-storage locker we kept in town. It was at least year before we could bear to eat him. He was delicious! 

Fuzzy apparently never knew he was a cat. He would follow you around like a dog. He even got on to the raft and went with me to the Island. One day I had just pushed off when the came running and made a leap for the raft. The raft was going faster than he had calculated and he fell in the water. I stopped and he climbed aboard, very wet, and looking at me disapprovingly as we crossed the river. He managed to catch a squirrel while we were on the Island, so perhaps it was worth it even to get wet.

Late one cold winter evening, Fuzzy and my brother David went to get the cows. The cows had wandered across a small stream and David in the shadows of the trees and the twilight stooped over to pick Fuzzy up to carry him across. He picked up the wrong cat. We could here him screaming as he ran towards the house. When he was about 50 yards away my mother realized what had happened as the familiar odor of skunk perfumed the night air. My mother began hosing him down with the freezing water from the well. This produced even louder screams. She had him lather up with Fels-Naptha soap and bury his clothes. Then he was allowed into the house to have a hot bath with tomato juice. Even at that, you could still smell skunk six months later if you took a hot bath.

Ring would have gone with David to get the cows if called, but he wisely preferred the warmth of the kitchen stove. The stove had legs tall enough for him to crawl under the stove with the cats. He had to be careful not to invade Fuzzy's space or he would get a whack on the nose. This elicited two yelps, one from the nose and the other when he hit the top of his head trying to stand up. But Fuzzy was a privileged character. He was a very valuable farm-cat. Fuzzy caught up to 60 gophers a year. Since a pair of gophers and their progeny could eat a quarter of acres of potatoes in a year, a cat that caught that many gophers, was indeed valuable. We knew how many he caught because he always climbed up to the roof of the back porch to eat them. Once a year we would clean the roof and count the gopher skulls.

One day I was up in a tree near the river and jumped down to the ground only to fall through into a big hole. I looked around and found I was in a series of small tunnels. I was an extremely small child and was able to crawl around inside these tunnels. At the end of one was a pile of white sticks with all the bark chewed off. As I crawled further I saw the water below, It was then I realized I was in a beavers den, I started to think what would happen if they returned and beat a hasty retreat out of there. I covered up the hole where I had entered the best I could and marveled at the industry of the beavers digging such large underground caverns. After that whenever I walked near the river I wondered if beavers could be just below me. 

The tuberculosis hospital where my Father worked maintained a small zoo for the ambulatory children with T. B. In addition to deer and chickens it had a pen with Golden and Silver pheasants. The pheasants had gotten to a population of about 75 and my father's boss told him to get rid all but 25. So my father loaded up 50 pheasants and turned them loose on our farm. In a couple of years we had some strange looking pheasants and eventually the native Chinese pheasants proved dominant. One day I hard Fuzzy crying at the screen door on the back porch. Since he seldom cried I ran to see what was the matter. Fuzzy had brought in a pheasant and it was to heavy for him to jump up to the porch roof with. My mother thought fast and traded him some hamburger she was cooking. Fuzzy must have thought it was good trade because we soon inundated with pheasants. When we finally tired of pheasant we refused to give him the hamburger and the pheasants stopped. 

Fuzzy had a sweet tooth and in the winter when hunting was sparse my mother used to make him a bread with the meal we fed the cows and leftover canned fruit. Since he would eat too much my mother kept it in the breadbox on top of the kitchen stove. One evening my mother went to get Fuzzy a piece and found the box empty. Fuzzy was the first suspect but it was finally determined my father had eaten it. He maintained it was delicious. 

But that's not the end of the story of Fuzzy and the breadbox. One day my mother made 2 dozen cupcakes and put them in the breadbox. A few hours later my mother and I came into the house to see Fuzzy sitting on top of the warming oven next to the open and empty bread-box. Fuzzy's stomach was so swollen he was almost round. He was so heavy with cupcakes he was afraid to jump down. I carefully lifted him down and he crawled under the stove and lay there belching. How he got the locked breadbox open was a mystery.

I also caught Fuzzy eating corn. We were finding the strangely mutilated ears of corn still on the stalk, with the husks scratched and the corn chewed off the cob. I wondered why Fuzzy was spending so much time in the cornfield and what he was catching, so I followed him. There he was reaching up and pulling the stalk down and scratching open the ear.

Ring also had a sweet tooth and in addition to sharing in the fruit bread he went picking blackberries with us. He would pick them off the vine and every once in a while he would get a thorn in the nose and let out a yelp. It must have been worth it as we heard quite few yelps. 

 My brother David liked to lean back in his chair at the kitchen table. My mother said he was wrecking the chair so David cleverly sawed a couple of inches off the back legs and he no longer had to lean back. Once in a while he forgot and fell over backwards. When he fell on Rings tail he got an injured reproachful look. But when he fell on Fuzzy he was bitten as well as scratched. So David attempted to level the legs again. After numerous tries he was practically sitting on the floor with Ring and Fuzzy. 

My mother, the amateur horse trader, traded two cows and a 5 dollars to Snathen for a giant Clydesdale to do the plowing. He was great at plowing but when we hooked him up to the cultivator his giant hooves stepped on the rows on both sides as he walked along. So another call to Snathen the pro-horse-trader. "I need a small horse to do the cultivating". Snathen arrived with a small horse. It seemed a bit wild as it tried to jump out of the trailer. He was beauty, a thoroughbred. Snathen, who could handle any animal, succeeded in hooking him up to a harrow and went racing after him across the field. Since Snathen was selling him for almost nothing, we boys pleaded to keep him and my mother against her better judgement relented. It turned out this had been a champion race horse who had won so many races that the owner refused to destroy him when he injured a leg and could no longer put on that burst of speed to win the race. The former owner just wanted Snathen to find him a home. After several days David and I were able to put a bridle on him. My oldest brother Merrill was never able to even touch him. Finally David and I were able to ride him. While he may have lost that last burst of speed he ran faster than we ever dreamed. The next year we planted the rows further apart so Clyde the Clydesdale could pull the cultivator. 

Mulely, now quite old, continued to produce calves. One was our bull and when she had another bull calf we sold the older one to a neighbor who knew he was from Muley the famous high-producer that gave such high butterfat milk. But we still had one of Muley's bull calves. This bull grew to maturity but seemed to have no interest in the heifers. He actually had a soft coat of fur, and like his mother Muley, was extremely gentle. Possibly the reason he was "gay" was because of too close in-breeding. I used to take my book out to where he was lying in the field and use him for a nice soft backrest. We named him Ferdinand after the flower smelling Disney character. We kept him as pet for a couple of years. 

One time I told someone I loved all animals, conveniently ignoring Diamond the cow from Hell. Also I realized I hated Blue jays. We had some humongous walnut trees between the house and the barn. They were at least 50 years old and bore several hundred of pounds of walnuts. I say they bore that many, actually the blue-jays got more than we did. My brother David was such an accurate shot with a 22 that he could drive nails into the barn, yet we almost never were able to shoot a blue-jay. They had some 6th sense as to when you were going to pull the trigger and jump out of the way. Our 12-gauge shotgun would bring them down but shells were expensive in those depression years. We had plenty of walnuts to eat but none to sell. Also we lost almost all of the cherries on another giant tree of the same vintage. It wasn't just that they would steal the cherries but they would sit there and laugh at you after you missed a shot. Grrrr!

My brother David and I agreed it was the worst year of our lives. This was the year we raised 3000 turkeys. Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the wild turkey our national bird. If old Ben had seen the modern turkey he would still be apologizing. Without doubt this is the worlds stupidest animal. When it rained they would stand with their beaks in the air with mouths open until they swallowed so much water they drowned. A car drives by on the road and they would all spook. All 3000 racing to the far fence and piling up until they began to smother. All you could do was wade into the pile throwing them over your head so they would run in the other direction. On top of this if you got scratched it developed into a nasty purple infection. It took a lot of work just to feed and water them. After one of their many stampedes all of the food and water containers had to be set upright again. Some of them can actually fly. Flying up in a tree they had no idea how to get down again. They would stay in the tree until they starved. We had been told not to have turkeys because the price had been so low the previous year. Because so many farmers didn't grow turkeys that year the price was high and we did quite well. My brother agreed with me, no amount of money was worth it. The next year we agreed to go back to real farming. Against the advice given by our neighbors to the dilettante farmers we grew Bermuda onions on the well-fertilized 5 acres where the turkeys had been. Once again the price was high because so many didn't plant. Perhaps ignorance is bliss?

Most farmers will tell you cows are smarter than horses and pigs are smarter than cows. We were actually more attached to our pigs than many of the other farm animals. So you have ambivalent feelings about having to eventually slaughter an animal which you have called by name. During the height of the Roosevelt depression we hired a carpenter for 15 cents an hour to build 2 houses for our 4 pigs. About the size of our RV, they had a grating in the corner which the pigs used for a toilet. And with fresh straw, they were a very clean animal. Because we never fed them garbage they actually didn't smell bad. They had a back door, which led to a lot with Pigweed (amaranth) to eat. In the lot they were affectionate and knew their names. And would come when called by name. One of our sows had a litter of piglets larger than she had teats. This meant we had to go out and pull Fatty off and put Runt on several times a day. About this time my mother and I came down with the flu, so we told dad to go out and pull Fatty off and put Runt on. My Dad was willing but when he entered the pen he narrowly escaped the charge of the sow. My Dad was not her friend. In fact she may have known that he was the butcher? Poor Dad was very tender man but Mom and I made him do all the dirty work. Neither of us could ever have slaughtered any of the animals. So, poor Dad got the job. I often think that even more people would be vegetarians if they had to butcher the animals themselves.

About the same time we moved to town one of my best buddies, Bill Barrows' family also moved to Salem. Bill met a musician named Jonnie Ray (he later became famous for "The Little White Cloud That Cried") and the three of us went to Portland for an early morning audition. Jonnie was to play piano for me. We arrived early and decided to go to the zoo. When we got to the zoo it was closed but this did not stop the crazy teen-agers. We simply climbed over the fence. I had recently been to the zoo and saw the lion's keeper petting the very tame lions. So we decided to pet them ourselves. As we were petting them one of the lions began to purr in a loud snoring-like sound. Jonnie was deaf and his hearing aid batteries had run down. So I shouted in his ear, "Did you hear that?" Just as he said "What". One of the lions let out a loud roar. Jonnie said, "I heard that". We leaped over the outside fence of the zoo in a single bound. Kids, don't try this yourself! 

But the most frightening experience with an animal occurred when a schoolmate invited me to go up into the mountains with him to check his father's trap-line. His father was a government trapper whose job it was to help maintain a balance of deer and mountain lions. But that's not the story. We checked a number of traps along the train and my friend Larry carried a single shot 22 rifle in case it was necessary to put some not quite dead animal out of its misery. As we rounded a corner of the tail we came upon a very big and very live and very angry mountain Lion (cougar) in a trap. Larry noticed it was being held in the trap by only three toes and we beat a hasty retreat. Not hastily enough because we had gotten only about a hundred feet away when the Cougar ripped his toes from the trap and headed straight for us. I had time to climb part way up a small tree. Instead of running or climbing a tree Larry took careful aim and shot the Cougar in the eye. This didn't even slow it down and it continued to bound toward us. Just as it reached Larry, it fell dead on his feet. Larry looked around and saw me in the tree. He said "I hate to tell you this Kenny, but cougars can climb trees better than you can. I climbed down and asked, "but weren't you afraid Larry?" Larry just put my hand on his chest and let me feel his pounding heart. Larry's father later said the cougar had weighed 140 pounds. The next weekend Larry asked me if I wanted to go out on the trap-line again with him. "Gosh Larry, I'm going to be awfully busy the next few week-ends." Thank heavens the island didn't have any Mountain Lions. 

For some reason the neighbors in the vicinity never hunted the deer on the island but drove up into the mountains to hunt. As a result there were a large number of deer on the island and they sometimes crossed the river and ate our crops. We put two extra wires on tope of the fence but they still managed to jump over and into our bean field. The beans climbed stings that were wrapped around an upper and lower wire. If you broke a string the entire row would fall up to the next post and would be almost impossible to put back up. So when a deer got into the field and broke a string the sound of it crashing down would frighten the deer and cause it to race through the field knocking down more rows. It almost made me wish we had a few Cougars to chase them off the island. If my brother David caught one in the field it ended up in our smokehouse.

The game warden watched for buzzards and discovered them eating the remains of a deer minus the body and put two and two together. He pounded on our back door, clad in his immaculate green uniform wearing a red hat with a Chinese pheasant feather in it. At this point he demanded to look in our smokehouse. My mother informed him he would have to get search warrant. He loudly told my mother he didn't need a warrant. "Oh yes you do," my mother said as she picked the 12 gauge shotgun that stood beside the door. The game warden looked at my mother and the gun and said he would be back. As he was nearing the front gate, my brother David clipped off the top of the feather in his hat with his 22 rifle. I'm not sure the game warden even noticed and just jumped in his truck and was off in cloud of dust. As it turned out the smoke-hose was full of ham and the deer was in the cold storage locker in town. My mother had never fired a gun in her life, the gun was empty and she didn't even know where the trigger was. In any event the game warden never returned.

Today we have no pets. Going between two homes its not feasible to have a pet. My heart aches when I hear a dog whining for hours while the owner is at work. Fortunately our neighbors dog at our weekend retreat spends most of its time with us. While not a substitute for Ring it's a very nice dog and chases sticks, an activity which Ring was too smart to waste his time doing. Intellectually I know Ring and the Island as I knew it are both gone. But still when I am out on our deck and I hear the little stream gurgling over the rocks, the birds singing in the trees, I close my eyes and once more that small boy eagerly explores my Island.