11/5/07 The Ranch

The morning we arrived at Bob & Ali's ranch, Bob was out ... hunting.. he came home with a coyote he shot.
They bought this (little tiny) 100 acre ranch 6 years ago and it sits right next door to Ali's parents 3000 acres ranch
(where she grew up) they currently are raising sheep, apparently they lost about 100 sheep to the coyotes this
year (their entire profit), hence the dead coyote. We visited for awhile, got the tour of the beautiful house that the
completely rebuilt their first year here (while the lived in the basement of her parents house), and met the goats
and chickens. Ali cooked us green day old eggs (but not ham) and we watched the 100 or so birds in their front
yard. My favorite was a magpie it was black and white and 3x as big as the little chickadees, beautiful!

After a while, Bob took off to pick up a local boy who was gonna set some beaver traps for them. There is a religious
community nearby, the Heuterites, they are about 125 folks (in this group) who live in a big apartment style building,
they are farmers, have a baptist style religion, are not permitted to leave the community (although some do and they
can come back later if they decide to). They keep to themselves, don't socialize outside the community, although
many of the young boys do work PT for the local farmers. Unlike the Amish, the Heuterites are all about efficiency
and mass production, very nice folks but the women and the animals are not regarded very highly. They get an 8th
grade education and no more and are paid a very minimal wage as food and housing is provided, socialism in Montana.
Emil showed up with his thigh high boots, 17 yrs old, very nice and we got to ask him all sorts of questions about
the community he lives in. He will probably leave one day, as his 2 older brothers have (one has returned though)
as he wants to go to school and is interested in the medical field.

So off we went to trap beavers.. apparently the beavers are very destructive, they take down a ton of trees,
divert the creek, and flood the basement, an inconvenience, hence the traps. It seems that the farmers and the
animals have different agendas about exactly what should be. Emil not only traps the beavers but he skins and
stretches the pelts too. A friend of Bob's showed up later with 8 beavers that he trapped that were destroying a
tons of trees on his property, it seems that whatever was supposed to be controlling the beaver population wasn't.

I just finished reading Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, one of the characters in the book was a wildlife
biologist who studied coyotes and said that they don't feed primarily on calves or sheep, they may take one or tow
but mostly they eat smaller animals, but that was not the case on this sheep farm, interesting..

Wherever you go in Montana, men are talking about hunting, everywhere. Usually there is snow here now, I think
it's delayed for us, gratefully, and the lack of snow is not good for elk hunting, the elk don't run without the snow. The
weather is warm, high 50's in the day, maybe even 60, down to 30's at night mostly. But no rain and no snow, yet.