Cape Breton's Magazine

it was going downhill, running at the edge of the woods. In the summertime they used to have a fire there, and wash the clothes and everything--you know, a nice area just on this side of where the brook was, And then when this (big snow) came, you couldn't get the cattle out to where we used to water them. The cattle couldn't travel through that. We had to water them in the bam. And the older boys, they dug down where the brook was. And when they got (down), there was nothing but gravel--it was as dry as a bone. The sheep, they'd eat the snow, you know; we weren't worrying about the sheep. The cattle, they wouldn't eat the snow. The same with a horse. We had to start keeping the kitchen stove going day and night, melting the snow. My god, it takes a lot of snow to make a bucket of water! said, "How'd you get along?" The winter was pretty well over, you know. She said, "We saved all the cattle. We had a hard time on account of running out of feed for them." "Well," he said, "you did bet? ter than people around Mira. They lost cat? tle- -and they were only about 12 miles from Sydney--on account of they couldn't get the feed to them." She said that she considered that we did all right--"We saved the cattle...." Then as we grew bigger and could handle the farm business, people started leaving The Rear. And we used to do the hay on their place, and store it in some of the bams, and haul it home. We fared off all right. But we were getting bigger and stronger, and we could handle it. We had lots of disasters. I'd be 8 at that time. I used to go out on top of the snow--the crust would hold me up because I was light--and I used to cut the tops off the small trees. I'd take a bunch of them home and pile it in with the sheep. Sheep were under the barn--that was their home, like. And they'd come out. They would just get a small batch of hay with that. And they'd eat this little spruce that I was throwing in, along with the hay. And we brought them through the winter, with very little as far as hay feed and that. The weather wasn't very cold at all, A lit? tle blustery at times. But it wasn't a real cold winter. But it was the darn snow, (What about your firewood that winter?) Firewood--you see, young people like that, they don't look ahead. We used to just work some in the woods, used to make pit timber and that. And we'd haul a load of wood home as we needed it. You know, with the horse. We only had about a week's wood when that big snow came. And we couldn't get the horse out.- We had to haul the wood out on our backs--yokes that'd be big e- nough to put on our shoulders. That was on account of not providing wood ahead. Pos? sibly if my father was living, he'd look after that part. When the spring

Cape Breton's Magazine