After their children moved away Alan and Claire McGregor had stopped raising a vegetable garden. And while the larder was well stocked by local standards, aside from beef, they would be lacking many staple foods by the following spring.
They contacted a neighbor who was famous for her sprouting and traded a quarter of beef for an assortment of sprouting seeds and sprouting jar lids (stainless steel screens mounted in Mason jar lids).
As Phil, Alan, and Claire helped Ray unpack his pickup and trailer, a bit of a show-and-tell session began. Each item that they carried into the house or shop seemed to have a story behind it.
Once they had unloaded the trailer and parked it alongside his father’s stock trailer, Ray planned to put his camper shell (which had been stored in the barn) back on his truck.
He had two almost identical Stihl chain saws, both with twenty-two-inch bars. One of the saws was stored in a factory orange plastic case, and the other was in a plywood box that Ray had constructed himself. For these saws he had a spare bar, a spare recoil starter assembly, and seventeen spare chains (although a few of them had been resharpened so many times that they were nearly worn out). He also had a lot of two-cycle fuel mixing oil and chain-bar lubricating oil in an odd assortment of containers—perhaps ten gallons in all. He had all of the usual safety equipment, including an integral helmet/earmuff/mesh face mask, and Kevlar safety chaps. He also had innumerable pairs of gloves, plastic wedges, files, tape measures, rolls of flagging tape in various colors, and other chain saw accoutrements, all stowed in a set of mesh bags mounted to the inside walls of the trailer.
The largest items in the trailer were his enduro motorcycle and a hydraulic woodsplitter. The motorcycle was a KTM 250 XC and had a two-stroke engine, so its gasoline had to be mixed. Ray had repainted the orange parts of the bike with brown truck bed liner paint three years earlier, but the rough-textured brown paint had held up remarkably well, with the original orange color appearing only in a few small spots. The KTM was considered street legal in both the U.S. and Canada, although he had let its registration lapse while he was in the United States.
The log splitter was a Swisher brand twenty-two-ton model with a Briggs and Stratton engine. One of the tires on the splitter had a chronic slow leak, but the machine was otherwise reliable and it cycled fairly quickly.
Ray spent a lot of time showing them his old-fashioned logging tools. Some of these had been acquired while he was living in Michigan, including a large assortment of axes, sledges, mauls, and wedges; a bark spud; a “Swede” bow saw and extra blades; and a pair of cant hooks for rolling and moving large logs.
Ray also had a well-stocked steel tool chest and a handmade plywood carry chest for his assortment of Ryobi eighteen-volt DC battery-powered tools. His father used the same brand, so they could share batteries.
In his pickup, there wasn’t much to show for his “career” work as a historian, just two cardboard boxes, mostly containing back issues of history magazines. Claire was surprised to see that he had very few photocopied documents for his research; in recent years he’d used a scanner rather than make hard copies. All of his actual writings since high school fit on just one memory stick. He pulled out a compass and an altimeter that had been salvaged from a B-24 in a Kingman, Arizona, boneyard back in the 1950s.
Ray quickly recounted an inventory of his guns: In addition to a Remington Nylon 66 .22 rifle and a Winchester Model 70 .30-06 that he’d left at the ranch, Ray had the shotgun and the Inglis Hi-Power that he’d retrieved on his trip home. Phil was fascinated by the Inglis pistol. This was Canada’s military-issue version of the venerable Browning P35 Hi-Power. Ray demonstrated how to attach and detach the shoulder stock, and the operation of its tangent rear sight, which was graduated out to an astoundingly optimistic five hundred meters.
At this point, Claire said, “I’ll leave you to carry on with the Big Boy Toys, so that I can get dinner on the table. “
Laying out all of the ammo that he carried in from the pickup, plus the ammo that he’d left stored at the ranch, he counted fourteen ammo cans, more than half of which were filled with various shotgun shells.
As Ray was closing all of his ammo cans, Alan asked, “What about you, Phil? I guess we need to know what gear you have available to help us keep the place secure. I just saw you tote in your gun cases with hardly a word.”
Phil nodded. “Yeah, I suppose you should know.”
They walked down the hall to Phil’s bedroom—which had once been occupied by Ray’s sisters—and he opened the closet. The top shelf of the closet was sagging under the weight of the tidy phalanx of nineteen ammo cans.
He pulled out the two black plastic Pelican waterproof cases and set them on the bed. He flipped the latches on the smaller one and swung it open.
Alan let out a whistle and said, “That’s enough to get Jean Chrétien rolling in his grave.”
Resting in the gray foam of the gun case was a DPMS clone of the Colt M4 Carbine and one detached green plastic magazine.
“This one is semiautomatic only, and has a sixteen-inch barrel instead of the military-issue fourteen-and-a-half-inch barrel. But it’s otherwise functionally much like the U.S. M4 or the Canadian C7.”
Ray corrected him. “C8, Phil. The C7 is our service rifle, but the C8 is the carbine.”
“Right. Thanks for the reminder.”
Looking back down at the rifle case, Phil went on. “The scope on the Picatinny rail is a Trijicon TA01 with a ‘donut of death’ reticle. That’s tritium-lit, so it’s a day/night scope. I also have both a Bushnell red dot and a PVS-14 ‘Gen Three’ night vision scope for it, packed in foam in one of the taller ammo cans. That scope can be used three ways: mounted on my M4, as a handheld monocular, or with a head mount. It may turn out to be the single most important piece of gear for securing the ranch.”
Tapping the carbine’s buttstock, Phil said, “I’m sure this is über illegal here in Canada, so I suppose we’d better find a good hiding place for it.”
Ray chimed in, “The magazines, too. They’re banned here, as well. We can’t have anything larger than five rounds for a rifle, or ten rounds for a pistol.”
“That law stinks. I’ve got about thirty-five spare magazines, ranging in capacity from five rounds to forty rounds. But a dozen of them are my designated ‘go to war’ magazines—just like that loaded one, there in the case: thirty-round PMAGs. I like the foliage-green ones.”
He swung the first case closed, and then opened up the larger one. In it was a Savage Axis stainless steel bolt-action chambered in .223 with a 3–9X scope, a takedown stainless steel Ruger 10/22 rifle with standard sights, and a stainless steel Ruger Mark II .22 target pistol.
Alan clucked his tongue and said, “We’ll have to make that Ruger .22 pistol disappear, too.”
“Is that a .308?” Alan asked, pointing at the larger rifle.
“No. It’s only a .223. Basically a varmint rifle, but it is insanely accurate. I suppose it would do for deer if I aim for the head.”
“If you want to pot a deer, then you can borrow Claire’s .243 Winchester. Her gun is a little Remington Model 7, about the size of that Savage.”
Pointing up at the green-painted steel ammo cans, Phil said, “As for the ammo, there’s quite a mix: 5.56mm, mostly ball, some match grade, about two hundred rounds of tracer, and a half dozen boxes of .223 Remington hollowpoint varmint loads that I can shoot in both my bolt action and my M4. But the 5.56mm NATO ammo I can shoot only in the M4 because of a mismatch in chamber dimensions, which can cause pressure problems in the bolt action. By the way, just the opposite is true in .308s, where you can shoot 7.62mm NATO in a .308 Winchester, but not vice versa.”