She took my arm, and I paced myself to her gait as we walked through her den to follow the kids. Judith was a sweet old lady, a bit too frail to walk very far, and always seemed so lonely. She was in her late seventies, and her health was questionable at best. I had met her three months ago when I’d been asking around for some kind of dog to help manage the goats. Word of mouth led me to her door, and her Catahoulas.
Catahoula leopard dogs were reputed to be ideal herding and hunting dogs. They were supposed to be very smart, and fiercely loyal to their packmates. The trick, I was told, was to make sure they recognized their two-legged packmates as dominant. They sounded like exactly what I wanted. Better yet, Judith had let me know that one of her bitches had puppies on the way. Now two months old, those pups were weaned and ready to leave their mother. We had visited more than a few times in the last several weeks so the dogs would get used to us, and we were ready to take one home.
When I opened the back screen, Judith and I found Zachary sitting on the ground giggling, while six puppies crawled all over him, tails wagging so hard their entire bodies swayed with the activity. Each one whined with pleasure as they tried to climb his body, licking any exposed skin in a frantic competition for his attention.
Megan stood to the side, cooing over another pup she cuddled to her cheek. “All right, guys. We need to pick one and get home.”
Zachary latched on to a particularly energetic black and white speckled puppy. He and Megan replied at the same time, “This one!” And each of them had a different dog.
“Sorry, guys. Pick one or the other.”
Judith patted my arm and shushed me. “Take them both. You’ll be doing me a favor. I can’t afford to feed all these little mouths, and the kids will take good care of them.” She turned to the two of them. “Won’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Four pairs of puppy dog eyes looked my direction, and only two pairs actually belonged to the puppies. I knew when I was beaten. “All right. Let’s get home.”
August, Year 3
“Leeland, the dogs are in the garden again!”
At the sound of Cindy’s complaint, Mark and Brad looked at me and grinned. “Go on,” Brad told me. “We’ll finish up here.”
“You sure you got it?”
“Go! You don’t want to get Cindy mad at you.”
“Thanks.” I stripped off the leather apron and hung it on a peg beside the forge, then trotted to the garden. Sure enough, two gangly, six-month-old speckled pups were chasing each other around the well-tended rows of garden vegetables, scattering cucumbers and winter squash as they ran. Cindy chased them around, trying to shoo them out of the garden, but it appeared they thought it was all part of the game, and they chased around her as well.
Cindy saw me and threw up her hands. “They’re going to ruin the garden!”
“Ginger! Oreo! No!” The pair immediately stopped and looked at me. “Sit.” They hadn’t learned too many commands yet, but they knew no and sit well enough, and my tone told them they were in trouble. They plopped their tails in the dirt immediately and, as I advanced, they cowered, half-rolling into a submissive pose. I approached the gate and opened it, giving them the only other command they had learned well-“Out!”
Tail tucked between her legs, the black and white Oreo came through first, obviously fearful of my tone, but more afraid of disobeying. The red and white Ginger was less afraid, but seemed eager to please. Both of them came directly to my side and sat panting. “Good girls.” I didn’t think they would understand if I fussed at them for the damage their rampage through the garden had caused, and I didn’t want to confuse them by scolding them after they had followed my commands so well. Cindy didn’t see it that way, though.
“They are not good girls. Just look at what they did!” She indicated the damage to the vegetables.
“I’m sorry, Cindy. How’d they get in?”
“They jumped the fence again.”
I sighed. Ken and I had originally built a four-foot-high chain-link fence around the garden to keep out the goats. The dogs had learned to jump that a month ago, so we’d replaced it with a six-footer. We had assumed that would be tall enough to keep them out. So much for assumptions.
“I’m really sorry, Cindy.” I entered the gate to help her salvage what we could from the damage.
“No.” She stopped me as I approached. “I’ll take care of this; just get those dogs away from here!”
I’d never seen Cindy so angry. “All right. I’m really sorry-”
She cut me off with a raised hand. “Just go.”
I hurried away. Some days, I regretted bringing the puppies home. Ostensibly, they had been Debra’s birthday present, and she had loved them. But we soon found that two gangly, four-legged furry balls of youthful energy were sometimes more than we’d bargained for. “Ginger. Oreo. Come.” I took them back to the house to look for Zachary.
I found him in the barn, milking the nanny goats. “Zach, are you about done there?”
“Yes, sir, this is the last one.”
Grabbing a length of rope from a hook on the wall, I tied the makeshift leash to their collars and watched as he moved the pail and released the nanny from the milking stanchion. When he stood up, I stuck out my hand for the bucket of goat’s milk. “Here, then, let me take that.” I traded him the bucket for the dogs. “Would you please take the girls out to the woods and wear them out? They got in the garden, and I think Cindy’s about ready to fix Catahoula stew for dinner.”
His eyes lit up as he handed me the bucket. “Sure, Dad.”
“I know how much you hate playing in the woods.”
Mouth upturned, he shrugged. “Yeah, but if you’re gonna insist.”
“Just make sure you keep them away from Cindy and the garden.”
“Yes, sir.” And with that, he became a fading blur, running with the pups toward the tree line at the edge of the property. I turned to take the milk to the house and reflected again on how much life had changed for us-how it had slowed down, allowing us time to realize what was really important, things like allowing a young boy to enjoy time with his dogs.
I frowned, remembering other things were important, too. Just a few years ago, we would have been shopping to get him ready for his next year of school. Now, there was no school. We were still too busy with day-to-day survival. I mulled that over on my walk to the house and, the more I thought about it, the more dour my mood became.
Debra interrupted my musing as I arrived at the back door. “What’s got you looking so down in the dumps?”
“Just thinking about how much everything’s changed. I mean, Zach should be in school. Megan should be getting ready for college. I would be back at the shop…” That, of course, made me think of my parents, and though my grief had lessened considerably in the last two years, my chest still tightened with emotion, further darkening my mood.
“Yeah, maybe.” Debra took the milk pail from me. “But we’re alive.” She raised her eyebrows, and I had to concede the point. “And every day above ground’s a good day, right?”
“I suppose.”
“So yeah, we’ve lost some things. But it’s not all gloom and doom. We’re regaining a lot of lost ground, and we’ll get the school going next fall. It’s not like we’re going to let civilization completely fall apart. We just need time to regroup.”
I took a deep breath and got my emotions back in check. I could always count on Debra to snap me out of it whenever my temperament took a dark turn.
Nodding, I smiled at her. “Thanks for the pep talk, coach.”
“Any time, kid. Now, go get back in the game.”
I kissed her lightly and headed back to the forge, where I could hear the whoosh of a bellows forcing air across the coals and the steady pounding of Mark’s hammer on hot iron as he and Brad continued to work. I rounded the corner of the barn and watched the two of them for a moment. Debra was right. Things weren’t all gloom and doom.
Mark, while still a quiet man, was no longer the solemn, taciturn giant who never spoke to anyone. After a year with us, he had finally opened up enough to begin to mingle and had married Jennifer Yarley, a young Mormon girl. They moved into the old Kindley house down the road and had recently announced that Jenny was pregnant. Brad had moved into another nearby home and built himself a smaller forge that he used to pound out more intricate projects in his spare time. I had taught him about making knives, and he showed a particular interest in Damascus steel. Because of my own interest in knife-making, I had always kept several books and articles on the subject as part of my “survival library,” and I let him read everything I had. Making Damascus required time and finesse, folding and layering different types of steel into patterns that both strengthened the blade and pleased the eye. It was something I had never had the patience for. He began to experiment on his own and was soon producing blades that were works of art I would never be able to match.
Each morning shortly after sunrise, he and Mark came to stoke the forge, or both forges if we needed them on that particular day, and prepared for the day’s projects, while I taught the morning’s self-defense classes.
Everyone kept us pretty busy repairing hand tools and pounding out nails. Nails! I got so tired of making nails! Everyone had to have nails by the hundreds. We spent nearly half of each working day with some aspect of making nails, melting scrap iron into billets, roughing out various sizes, driving roughed nails through sizing holes in the homemade anvils, then trimming and tipping them into finished product.
I would be the first to admit that much of the problem stemmed from the fact that I really didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. I had made the forge with the idea that knives would soon become a much sought after item. I figured that with a little help, I could soon be producing viable barter goods. But I soon found that though a smith was definitely in demand, knives alone wouldn’t keep me going.
George Winstedt, the local carpenter, came to me as soon as he heard about my forge and requested five hundred nails. No big deal, I thought. I worked out a method for making nails from scrap metal and had his nails in a few days.
Until that time, I simply hadn’t realized how much we needed nails. Anyone making repairs on a house or barn, anyone building… well, anything, soon discovered how much they needed them. It wasn’t long before they found out where to get them. Therefore, Mark, Brad, and I stayed very busy making them.
We repaired or reshaped garden tools. We made more nails. I actually learned to shoe a horse, and that wasn’t nearly as easy as they made it seem on those old westerns. We made still more nails. We also made meat cleavers, rotisserie skewers, horseshoes, axe heads, and other items for trading at the local market.
And of course, we made more nails.
But it wasn’t all like that. Some of the projects were enjoyable. The work I truly enjoyed came gradually. It derived from the attrition of brass cartridges for bullets. As they disappeared, more and more people began inquiring about knives, skinning knives for the hunters, as well as simple utility and butcher knives for the populace in general. Then the real fun began.
My students were the first to begin ordering combat knives and daggers. It was only logical, as the Kali that I taught was a molding of empty-handed, knife, and stick combat techniques, and I constantly surprised them with impromptu demonstrations of what I called iai knife techniques. Iai was the Japanese art of the sword quick draw. When I cocked my leg back for a side kick and magically had a knife in hand from a hidden sheath on my leg, they were usually quite impressed. I used these tricks to stress some of my personal philosophies.
“Never let yourself be taken by surprise,” I told them on one particular occasion. “Just because an opponent appears to be unarmed does not mean he is unarmed.”
I scanned their faces. “If you go into a situation expecting that the worst will happen, and you prepare yourself beforehand, then you deny your opponent the split-second of surprise he may be counting on. This, in turn, may give you the advantage since, when you don’t react the way he expects, he’ll have to readjust his actions to the new situation, which takes approximately half a second. Plan your attack with this in mind, and you might walk away from a fight that would ordinarily kill you.”
A week after that particular class, a group of bandits attacked one of the outlying homes. They were fought off, but at the cost of one Rejas citizen and nearly three hundred rounds of ammunition.
Seeing the possible end of the ammunition supply in sight, everyone wanted throwing knives and hideaways for backups. Then came the natural progression to swords and machetes. Finally, we were making arrowheads and crossbow bolts, spears, pole arms, and nearly any other hand-held weapon imaginable. My kind of toys.
They were crude at first, but functional. As our skills at the forge got better, so too did the quality of the products we made.
There were several more encounters with wandering bands of raiders in the next few months, and no one downplayed the necessity of self-defense. Firearms hadn’t disappeared, but bullets became increasingly valuable as more casings were lost in the field, damaged in accidents, or otherwise rendered unusable. Many people in town had presses and dies for reloading, but they had long since run out of extra casings and required the spent brass to be brought to them.
No one had access to the machinery necessary to manufacture precision parts, such as bullets. Even if we had, we didn’t have a reliable power source with which to run said machinery. Until we got the power station up and running, precision machining was a pipedream.
I had mixed feelings on that. As an experienced machinist, I yearned for precision manufacturing to reenter our lives. Automotive parts, gun parts, parts for wells and gas pumps, hundreds of little things that everyone had once taken for granted, all required tighter tolerances than we could presently hold. So I longed for the old conveniences along with everyone else. On the other hand, I was certain that once the call went out for machinists, I would end up drafted into wearing yet another hat, and there weren’t nearly enough hours in the day as it was.
Since I’d been clued in by Zachary, I began to notice how much time Megan spent with Eric’s son. Apart from occasional smiles and lingering touches in class, she and Andrew kept their romance pretty subdued. I noticed that the two of them often disappeared together after classes, though, and Megan often didn’t show up at home for a few hours afterward. I knew it was getting serious when she started referring to Eric as “Pops.” Andrew seemed a nice enough young man, and a fair student, but it bothered me that I had barely even noticed him until my ten-year-old son pointed out his relationship to my daughter. Then, one morning, Andrew asked to see me privately.
“Mr. Dawcett?” He seemed nervous as he pulled me aside after class. “Could I speak to you for a minute?”
“Sure, what can I do for you?”
“Well, um, I was wondering if I could… I mean…” He took a deep breath and held it a second before he practically exploded. “Mr. Dawcett, I’d like to ask your permission to court your daughter with the intention of marrying her and the assurance that my intentions are fully honorable, and I’d like you to know I would always treat her right, and I’d never do anything to hurt her, of course, I probably couldn’t hurt her even if I wanted to, but I’d never want to, sir, and I’d do my best to make sure she always had whatever she needed as long as it’s within my power, and I’d never do anything to disrespect you or her, and I swear I’d treat her right. Did I already say that? Oh, yeah, but it’s true, and I’d be truly grateful if you could see your way clear to give me your consent to court her.”
By the time Andrew blurted all that out, I was out of breath. I didn’t know whether to laugh at his nervousness, thank him for respecting me enough to ask my permission, or to try to get him to loosen up a little. For a few seconds, I simply stared at him in surprise.
He licked his lips nervously, shifting from foot to foot, and I finally rea
lized that if I didn’t say something soon, the poor boy was likely to implode.
“You want my permission to date, er, court Megan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if I understood all that, you intend to marry her if she’ll have you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What would you do if I said no?”
The poor boy’s mouth fell open. “Sir?”
“What if I tell you I don’t want you to see my daughter, and I forbid you from ever coming around here again?”
“But… you can’t, I mea… you wouldn’t, would you? Sir?”
I simply stared at him.
“But we love each other!”
Still, I remained silent.
Finally, Andrew straightened his shoulders. “Mr. Dawcett, Megan and I have spoken about this a few times. We know how we feel about each other, and we both know that we want to continue seeing each other, and we felt you and Mrs. Dawcett deserved to know. But with all due respect, sir, if you were to tell me I couldn’t see her anymore,” he paused and swallowed nervously, “well, I guess I’d end up sneaking around behind your back. I ain’t saying it’s right, but I don’t think I can just stop seeing her. It’s like I said, I love her.”
I raised my hand to rub my chin, and nearly laughed aloud when he flinched at my movement. “Well, Andrew, if you’re determined to see her no matter what I say, then I guess I’d better not forbid you, huh?” I grinned at his dumbfounded expression.
“Hell, son! You don’t think I’m going to try and tell that girl she can’t see you, do you? She’d probably hurt the both of us!”
Andrew shook his head as he finally realized he’d been had. “Yes, sir, I guess she probably would.”
“Just one thing, Andrew.”
“Yes, sir?”
“If you’re planning to marry Megan, I think you’d better learn to stand a little stronger for what you believe in.”
“Pardon me?”
“If you never planned to stop seeing my daughter, you didn’t have to pretend you needed my permission to see her. You’re both adults. I appreciate you wanting to let me and Mrs. Dawcett know, and I definitely approve of your motives, but it would have been just as good if you’d simply told me your intentions as a matter of respect, rather than go through all the rigmarole of pretending that anything I had to say would make a bit of difference in the matter.”
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