Page 37 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Getting wood for our cookstove was always an interesting time for me. We couldn’t burn anything in the range except juniper because pine and pinon had so much pitch in them they would clog up the draft around the oven. We needed juniper for the quick, clean fires for cooking biscuits, for example, and oak for the slow-burning fires for baking and ironing. Oak was very scarce, but the hills surrounding the cabin were covered with dead alligator junipers — so called because the bark is in little squares like an alligator hide.
The amazing thing was that I could push them over, even very large trees. The trunk of the tree did not rot, and for that reason provided good wood for fence posts. But for some reason that I do not understand, the roots of the tree rotted off. With a rocking motion back and forth, we could fell unbelievably large trees. After they were down on the ground, we gave them a gentle push and they went plummeting down the hillside to the cabin.
We had a saw which could be used as a one-man or a two-man saw. When the family was there, two people could take care of the wood situation in a hurry, yet when I was alone I could use it to saw the juniper into the proper length for the range.
When we cut pine, we had to chop it up, but with the juniper we only had to split it. We laid it on the sawed side and one stroke of the axe would split it apart. We sorted the wood by sizes and stacked it along the entire length of the north side of the cabin. Chips were gathered for building fires, and an ample supply was kept in the cabin where it remained dry.
That summer George traded his old Model T truck (left on the road to the sawmill) to Mr. Johnson for a mare. Old Diamond was named that because she had a white diamond in the middle of her forehead — a perfect diamond with the exception of a place at the bottom where it appeared that the paint had run.
Diamond had to be ridden to a tank about a mile north of the cabin twice a day for water. Only two drinks a day had to suffice her but having been born and raised in this arid western country, that was enough for her.
In August we could have set our watches by the rain. Every day it rained within ten minutes of two o’clock — before or after. We planned our day around it — to arrive where we wanted to go before the rain started, or to be back home by that time. Otherwise we planned to go after the rain had ceased, leaving everything smelling clean and fresh.
We enjoyed taking drives around the country side, and I especially enjoyed taking Mother as she couldn’t climb the hills as we could.
Once Mother, Sally and I went in my car over to spend the day with Dixie and Sam. By this time they had left Dad Moore’s place and moved onto a homestead of their own near Coyote Peak. We left their cabin just before sundown, which would have given us plenty of time to get home before suppertime, but the battery fell out of my car. Darkness came quickly in the mountains as I’ve said so many times, and with darkness came the cold. Sally was