I don’t know why Mother chose me to help her carry lunch out to the haymaking crew in the west quarter. She could have chosen either of my two older sisters, Gertie (Trudy) or Alice. Perhaps they were in charge of the house and my younger brother Benny. Maybe Benny was too young to carry something or to come along—I don’t remember. I carried a small metal calf pail. It had a handle and some things inside, wrapped in a towel. Mother carried a large galvanized milk pail. It also had things inside, wrapped in a towel, including a large two-quart sealer of coffee with cream and sugar, and some cups.
It was likely late July or August. I don’t remember how old I was—five or six or seven? Not more than seven because we left the farm for British Columbia in the spring of 1948, when I was eight.
It was almost a mile from the farmyard, along the road, to the northwest corner of the west quarter. As we walked along and got closer to the two large hay sloughs or hay meadows, separated by a grassy prairie knoll and a large poplar grove, we started seeing activity and horses moving.
First we could see Aunty Lydia. She was sitting on a horse rake, driving a team of horses and raking hay. She was making windrows, tripping the rake by stepping on a steel pedal that engaged a cog in the centre of the large-spoked steel wheels on each end of the rake. That lifted the row of semicircular steel rake teeth, dropping the hay it was carrying. Then the teeth dropped and the raking started over. When she judged a windrow to be long enough, she drove at a right angle to the windrow and made bunches of the windrowed hay, raking it toward the centre of the windrow into large mounds.
Now we could see Dad, standing on the back centre of the hay buck driving two teams of horses, each team hitched by a fairly long chain to one end of the hay buck. With one team on each side of the piles of hay that Aunty Lydia had rolled up, Dad soon gathered three or four piles in front of him and headed to the hay chute and the slowly lengthening stack of hay.
On top of the haystack were Uncle Arthur and another man. I thought the other man was Grandpa Lutz, but Grandpa Lutz moved to British Columbia in 1945, when I was five. So, if this event occurred in 1946 or 1947, the other man was likely Ed Bablitz.
We carried our pails past Aunty Lydia to the haystack on the prairie knoll, not far from the poplar trees. Soon Aunty Lydia drove her team and the hay rake toward the trees. Dad had pulled his last load of hay up to the haystack, one team on each side of the haystack. The hay slid up the hay chute, pushed up in the front of the stack to the topping men on top.
Then, Dad backed up both teams slowly at the same time until the hay buck rested on the ground. Now both teams made a sharp circle away from the haystack and stopped again, with the other side of the hay buck behind them. Dad climbed over the hay buck to stand on the back side. Then Dad drove both teams and the hay buck on the prairie, toward the trees.
Aunty Lydia was unhitching her team too. Dad led her horses and tied them to the trees as well.
The men on the haystack came down, leaving their pitchforks pushed into the hay at the top of the stack. Uncle Arthur liked to joke and tell stories and make people laugh. They were laughing as they walked with us to the trees. Uncle Arthur was a great storyteller.
The lunch consisted of large, thick homemade bread sandwiches and slightly-more-than-warm coffee. Mother and I, I’m sure, ate considerably less than the haymakers. There was cake or cookies or perhaps a jelly roll (Mother liked making jelly rolls) and more coffee in a quart jar in the pail I had been carrying. There was banter and laughter. Dad said they’d finish the two meadows by supper.
It wasn’t long before Dad was helping Aunty Lydia hitch her team to the rake again. Uncle Arthur and the other man had gone back and, using the hay chute, worked their way up to the top of the haystack and began levelling, tramping and topping the hay.
Aunty Lydia was off to rake hay and make more piles.
Dad got one of the teams and walked them over to the hay chute. It was a wooden ramp affair, sturdily built, about 10 feet wide, I believe, on skids. The solid, vertically boarded ramp went up from the ground at about a 30-degree angle, ending perhaps eight feet off the ground. The two side-end timbers or poles, made from carefully chosen, straight, thick, peeled poplars continued on about another eight feet past the solid ramp boards. The hay buck, was probably 14 feet wide. It could slide up on the sturdy, braced-from-the-bottom pole timbers, pushing the hay higher, up toward the topping men. Their job was to level, tramp or compact the hay and to top the stack with a nicely coned, rain-resistant layer. Dad told me years later that Uncle Arthur could really make a perfectly topped haystack.
Dad somehow hitched the team to the hay chute and pulled it forward about 10 feet. Then he unhitched and walked the team back to the hay buck. Soon both teams were hitched to the hay buck. Dad asked me if I wanted to ride on the back with him.
I was excited as I stood beside him, hanging on to the top board of the hay buck and watching as he easily manoeuvred and guided both teams, one with each hand. He picked up the piles, then headed for the stack with a large mound of hay in front of us. The horses had to pull harder as the weight of the load increased and sliding the hay over the grass became more difficult.
The horses knew the routine. With a team on each side of the hay chute, we started up the ramp. “Hang on!” said Dad, and I did. The hay slid up the ramp and dropped quietly and neatly into the hole below the chute—the empty area that had just been created when Dad moved the hay chute forward.
“Whoa!” hollered Dad loudly, at the precise second he pulled on the reins. The horses stopped. The hay had disappeared in front of us and we were high up on the chute! It was magical and exciting and smooth—a simple process designed to put up a lot of hay in a short time. (But a few months later, it would be much more difficult to pull and pitch the hay, one forkful at a time, into a hayrack on a bobsleigh parked beside the stack, possibly loading a hayrack every second day.)
Dad let the horses stand and rest for a minute. Then he said, “Back, back, back,” as he pulled on the reins. The hay buck slid slowly down the ramp as the horses backed up until it reached the ground and stopped. “Whoa,” said Dad. Then he pulled on the left rein of the left team and the right rein of the right team and said, “Giddup.” The horses circled tightly around, the heavy ring and chain on each end of the hay buck sliding around on the thick steel rod that was securely bolted to the bottom frame of the hay buck. The hay buck, which was built in the shape of about a five-foot-high triangle if you looked at it from the end, pulled and worked in the opposite direction.
“Whoa,” said Dad again and he turned as the horses had finished turning and straightened.
We were now standing on the front side of the hay buck. With the horses standing, Dad somehow held on to all the reins while we climbed over the hay buck to stand on the back side.
If you have been able to follow all of this, the former left-hand team was now the right-hand team, and vice versa.
We were ready to go again. I liked the smell of the curing hay, which sometimes smelled like mint from the wild mint growing among the slough grass. Years later, farming on my own, I enjoyed making hay, especially cutting hay and the smell of the grass. I said I was canning summer.
Aunty Lydia had several more piles—the last ones in the meadow—for us to pick up. She was tidying up, picking up small scattered bits of hay and dumping them on the flattened grass runway the hay buck took to the stack. Then she was off to the other side of the knoll and the poplar trees.
We gathered up the last three or four piles of hay and the small piles she had dumped on the runway and soon we were sliding the hay up the chute again. After it was unloaded and we had turned around once more, we headed up to the other slough where Aunty Lydia already had several piles of hay gathered.
Suddenly we heard shouting from Aunty Lydia. “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” A short person, she was standing up on the rake, pulling hard and sawing on the reins. Her team was trotting, their tails swishing straight up and down, running toward us.
“Wasps!” cried Dad. “She raked into a wasp’s nest!”
He turned our teams toward Aunty Lydia’s runaway rake and team. Dad brought his teams closer together and shouted, “Whoa!” Our now very alert and somewhat edgy teams stopped as Aunty Lydia’s team came toward us.
Dad and Aunty Lydia were shouting, “Whoa!” Aunty Lydia’s team was slowing down; the horses’ tails weren’t pumping anymore. She got them stopped not too far in front of us. Dad moved our teams and the hay buck slowly closer and stopped.
They conferred again. The wasp’s nest was somewhere in the area of the furthest pile that she had just come from, she told Dad.
“Leave out that part and rake on the other side of the slough,” said Dad, motioning beyond the still-standing tall green island of uncut grass in the very wet centre of the slough. It had been too wet to cut with the horse mower just a few days earlier.
“The horses should be good now,” said Dad, looking at the much more relaxed team. “If not, head them toward me or the haystack.”
Aunt Lydia nodded and off she went, in full control. She was a small, but strong and feisty, determined lady.
We left out the far pile where the wasp’s nest was and picked up the nearer piles. Dad began a new hay-sliding runway to the stack.
One or two loads later, something else happened. On our way back to the haystack with a buck-load of hay, a softball-sized stone got picked up by the hay buck. It began rolling along and sliding around just in front of my feet, in the centre, open part of the hay buck.
I began kicking and poking at the stone with my shoe. I don’t know why I wanted it out of there; it wasn’t bothering anything or anybody.
Suddenly, my shoe went under the flat 2x6 or 2x8 at the bottom of the hay buck. I hollered in pain, unable to pull my foot free.
“Whoa!” shouted Dad and the teams stopped. Dad could see my shoe and foot trapped under the hay buck. He lifted the heavy hay buck and it moved only very slightly, but I pulled my foot out.
“Are you all alright?” asked Dad.
I nodded, even though my ankle was hurting.
“Why did you put your foot in there?” he demanded.
“I was trying to get that stone out,” I said, pointing to it, not far from where my foot had been caught.
Dad picked up the stone and threw it underhand away from the runway. He gave me a quick cuff on the back of my head. “Don’t do that again!” he added.
“I won’t,” I said, blinking back tears as Dad started the horses again.
I don’t remember if I walked back home with Mother soon after that, or if Mother had already gone home and I walked home by myself.
The haying got done. There was no mention of the wasp’s nest or another near-runaway.
It had been a memorable afternoon.