Page 36 - 1st Anthology 2011

Two Guns. Two Guns never had a Christian name, that’s how I knew him. I never knew
him in my lifetime. I never had the chance to know him. The stories I’ve heard that he
was one of the people that looked after the Beaver Bundle. It’s kind of strange to see that
Two Guns daughter was very Christian, my granny Mable. At that time my mom and dad
got married, but after a certain time they separated. During that time when they were
together, there was just Brian and me.

So my dad married another woman and my mom married another man. When that
happened it became one big happy family. So at that time, my granny Mable took me and
my brother Brian and she raised us. She would send us to school, and she raised us right
when we were young. We stayed in that little red house.

The people that stayed with us were me, and Brian, my granny and my uncle Robert. My
mom had her own place just at the north of us. She had her own house there. My uncle
had cattle and horses down the hill there, and that’s where he looked after them. We
helped along. I mean by helping along, we had to pump the water for the animals. It
never seemed like we got anywhere with it. Every time you pump, it already goes down.
He had a big of team of horses, and those horses can drink. Because the animals drank it
as fast as we pumped it. There were cattle, and when I get tired of pumping water. Brian
would take over. It was one of those days you wish you had a machine.

I noticed back then when there were all these houses, there were always three or four
houses in a group. I used to wonder why, and here I found out because of the water wells.
One well for those row of houses. There was my mom’s house, and my granny Mable’s.
There was one house just at the south of us. I only saw the foundation of it. Further on
there’s another house, that one was John Sleigh and his wife. Below there was where the
pump was.

In the 50’s that’s when they got their own pumps. It was right between my mom’s and
granny’s place. So we didn’t have to go that far anymore. So that was the reason why they
used to have houses close together. That one house, I always used to see the foundation. I
never used to know who lived there. People used to move around quite a bit in those
days. It was cold in the houses those days, now the houses we have today, are warm. You
can hear every movement. I don’t know how the old lady got everything going good. We
had two stoves, one in the kitchen and the other in the living room.

We never had to go to bed, no television. However it was nice, every day we had
porridge, get our lunches and go to school. Nowadays it’s really cold and you can’t even
go outside. Back then it was twenty or thirty below for months and it was nothing and ten
below was a Chinook. The days were so cold.

Now today everything has changed, now today it’s Celsius, and back in the day it used to
be Fahrenheit. It was a nice clean life. I’m kind of noticing the difference between
hardships. Long ago you had to do it, or you’re not going to succeed. Now today it’s so

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