The Coming Storm: Liberators Part 9

"No, I'm looking to trade a modified Jeep that I rebuilt. I have the t.i.tle doc.u.ment." Joshua pulled out the Android to display the photos, keeping one eye on the kid with the shotgun, who had crossed the floor to look over Joshua's shoulder at the pictures.

The kid spoke up with the savvy of someone who had grown up in a p.a.w.nshop and said, "Suppose you need to get on through to Kentucky and the bridge is closed now for vehicles." Joshua nodded, and the kid continued, "What if we say 'no'? Then you'll be stuck without the carts, blankets, and everything. Sounds like you're the one in the weaker position here. We may need to talk about this price some more."

Joshua a.s.sessed the situation dispa.s.sionately, took one look at the pimply-faced kid, and said, "True, I won't overestimate the strength of my position. I need the game carts to get to where I'm going, but you need to attract the girl of your dreams-this deal could help us both."

The old man laughed out loud and slapped the kid on the back as his shoulders dropped and he turned bright red. "Ha, how did you know that? Mister, I'll give you a forty-five-hundred-dollar store credit in exchange for the Jeep!"

Joshua hated to be so cra.s.s, but he simply could not get stuck without a way to transport what he and his family needed to get through the winter. Forty-five hundred dollars for the Jeep was a pittance, but he wasn't going to accept a stack of U.S. dollars, knowing their fate. Joshua replied, "Great, I'll bring my family back with the Jeep. There will surely be something that my fiancee needs to buy with the balance."

Joshua stuck to the main roads through town. It was already 9:00 A.M. and he was feeling pressed to get on the road heading west. He caught up to the girls, who had bargained to let the boys count as one person, allowing the three adults to load up on their fill of pancakes for forty-eight dollars.

Making full use of the time, Malorie had gotten a complete rundown from an Eagle Scout with an Order of the Arrow pin about the local lay of land, flora, fauna, and so on. She was not flirtatious, but she wasn't upset over the attention she was getting, either. The Eagle Scout spread out the Kentucky map and recommended that they head west for two days' walk to the Olympia State Forest, where the population density is low and there are a lot of caves to take shelter in for the winter. He told her which fishing lures would work to catch fish in the lake there and how to identify muskrat scat, and gave her many other useful tips-he was an encyclopedia on living outdoors, and he was sweet on Malorie. "I could come with you, you know-just as far as the state park if you like. It would take just two days to help you with all of your stuff. I could even show you some good caves. There are lots of caves there."

Malorie asked for a moment to think about it. She thought about the practicalities and the liabilities. Having an extra strong back to move supplies meant that getting the boys, the food, and the supplies they had to the state forest across unfamiliar land would be faster and safer. He returned with a quart-size bottle of real maple syrup from one of the pickup trucks and then said, "Take this, it has hundreds of calories and you're gonna need them." In the end she politely thanked him for the syrup and the information but declined the offer of his a.s.sistance. She did send him away with a kiss on the cheek and a sincere "thank-you."

They loaded into the Jeep one last time. Joshua was solemn but knew that this was the right thing to do for the greater good. At the p.a.w.nshop, Megan went in to see if there was anything else that she wanted to buy with their credit. Joshua's only warning was, "No cast iron unless you plan on carrying it." Megan emerged with the two game carts, two spare tires and tubes for each cart, a small tube air pump, the blankets and mess kits, an e-tool, a thousand waterproof strike-on-anything matches, a twelve-by-twenty-four-foot tarp, a five-hundred-foot piece of paracord neatly wound up in a skein, a can of mink oil for their leather personnel carriers (LPCs), some extra bungee cords, a hatchet, a quality Henckels stainless steel kitchen knife, and two Olympia State Forest maps. She took the rest of the difference in pre-1965 "junk" silver U.S. dimes and quarters.

Out of the corner of her eye Megan peeked down the hall and saw a clothes dryer. She noticed that the kid was willing to deal, perhaps because she was an attractive woman or simply because he was very happy about his new Jeep.

"You know, you're getting a wicked good deal on that Jeep."

The kid smiled and started to blush, so she asked, "Say, would you trade my sister's toolbox full of tools here for that Gerber mult.i.tool, the flint-and-steel set, and that skinning knife with the gut hook?"

After eyeballing the high quality of the tools inside, he said, "Sure, that'd be fine, ma'am." The kid behind the counter completed the trade as the old man took a turn on guard duty by the front door.

"Kind of a strange request here, but would you let me empty the lint tray on your dryer? You know, so that I can have some tinder for my flint and steel." The kid shrugged, and Megan placed the keys to the Jeep on the counter and gave him the t.i.tle, which Joshua had signed over. The old man countersigned it, and Megan came back from the dryer with the lint to shake hands.

When Megan had walked into the p.a.w.nshop, Joshua had remained outside and taken one one-tenth-ounce gold coin from his belt and put it in his pocket. He left Malorie to strip the Jeep of their stuff while he took Jean and Leo to the picked-over chain grocery store a few doors down.

It took half an hour to pack the carts. The girls would take turns pushing the smaller "doe" cart, while Joshua volunteered to push his "buck" cart the entire way. Since it was so cold, the cooked meat that Joshua had packed at the homestead was still deep chilled and fresh. Long weapons went on top, and everyone carried his bug-out bags on his back. The boys had small book-bag-type sacks to carry some water, socks, and a few small toys. Megan asked Joshua to pray for the next part of their journey. After the prayer, they set out on their LPCs over the Big Sandy River Bridge into Kentucky.

20.

THE ZONE ONE GATE.

On October 15, 1934, with Pan at the wheel . . . we rattled across the Canadian border.

From government officials, we ascertained that Tatla Lake, five hundred miles north of Vancouver, was the northwestern frontier of existing ranches. West of it lay the little-known Anahim country, walled in on the north by the wild, unexplored Itcha and Algak ranges. Beyond the mountain barrier lay our objective, the mysterious Indian taboo land on the unmapped headwaters of the Blackwater River.

-Richmond P. Hobson, in Gra.s.s Beyond the Mountains: Discovering the Last Great Cattle Frontier on the North American Continent The McGregor Ranch, near Anahim Lake, British Columbia-October, the First Year As Claire McGregor was washing the dinner dishes, the Dakota Alert driveway alarm announced, "Alert, zone one, alert, zone one." She shouted to Alan excitedly, "Mercy! That could be Ray!"

They stepped out on the porch, hoping to see the familiar profile of Ray's pickup and fifth-wheel trailer, but instead saw the shape of an unfamiliar pickup truck with a camper sh.e.l.l. As the pickup neared the front porch, a motion-sensing security floodlight snapped on.

Claire asked, "Who . . . ?"

Alan hesitated with his hand resting on the porch rail, wondering whether he should step back inside for his elk rifle.

The unknown man waved, swung open his door, and declared, "Hi! I'm Phil Adams. I trust that Ray let you know that I'd be coming."

Alan nodded. "Yes, he told us. Come in, come in. Claire can warm you up some dinner."

As he climbed out of the pickup's cab Phil asked, "Is Ray here yet?"

Simultaneously, Alan and Claire replied, "No."

Arriving at the ranch in advance of Ray was awkward. Even though he had known Ray for more than a decade, Phil had never met Ray's parents face-to-face. And despite the barrage of dramatic news headlines, the whole concept of Phil's being there to help secure the ranch seemed odd-almost as if it was still in the realm of the hypothetical. It was, after all, a very remote ranch, and the nearest reports of civil unrest were in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. That was 350 miles away, straight-line distance, or roughly 420 miles by sea and road, or 535 miles via the highways. Further complicating the situation, the telephone network was working only sporadically, and the McGregors hadn't heard from Ray in three days. Their daughters-one living in Florida and the other living in the Philippines-were also out of contact.

Outside of a narrow littoral that benefits from the moderating influence of the Pacific Ocean's thermal ma.s.s, northern British Columbia has a brutal climate. Upon leaving Bella Coola and driving east on Highway 20, the interior climate of British Columbia comes suddenly. The Chilcotin mountain range looms up, and without realizing it, you are entering a radically different climate zone. Nighttime temperatures during winter can reach a low of negative twenty-seven degrees Celsius. And daytime highs average right around freezing in January. The cool summers and cold winters in this region, cla.s.sified as the "Montane Spruce Zone," result largely from its position in the rain shadow of the Coast Mountains and the high elevations. The low precipitation, dry air, and clear skies at night often create very frigid overnight temperatures.

The McGregor ranch was at a northern lat.i.tude where there were sixteen and a half hours of daylight at the summer solstice but only seven and a half hours at the winter solstice. The ranch was fairly close to the tiny hamlet of Anahim Lake, but the nearest good shopping and the nearest freight terminal were eighty-seven miles away in Bella Coola. To anyone outside the region, they used the shorthand of saying that their ranch was "near Bella Coola" because it took too long to explain that they were in the middle of nowhere. The ranch had 720 deeded acres with 410 acres of that in hay ground. (More than half of that had been muskeg swamp when the property was first staked in the 1930s, and then it had to be laboriously drained and cleared, originally with ditches dug by hand.) The property was off the grid, with a forty-two-year-old Lister diesel generator, and fourteen photovoltaic panels-which were useful for only nine months of each year.

The ranch house had been built in 1975, replacing the property's original homestead cabin. The house was 2,720 square feet, with four bedrooms. There was also a machine shop/shed, two large hay barns, a calving shed, an infrequently used guest cabin, and several corrals. In recent years, their income had come mainly from selling hay rather than cattle. Some of their hay was trucked to Bella Coola and then loaded on barges and shipped as far away as the Aleutian Islands.

The McGregors heated the ranch house with firewood. There was also an oil-fired backup heater that they used mainly when they had to be away from the ranch house in winter, to keep the pipes from freezing. The big Lister generator was also run on home heating oil, since they found that it burned the heating fuel just as well as diesel and was often less expensive. Their diesel and heating-oil fuel tanks had a combined volume of 2,600 gallons, and they were nearly full when the Crunch occurred. They also had a 250-gallon-capacity tank of unleaded gasoline, but it had only 180 gallons in it when Phil arrived.

A lot of the roads were unmarked, so driving directions were often based on highway kilometer markers. Typical directions would begin with something like: "You take the road going north from Marker 37 . . ." The off-highway road conditions ranged from fair to horrendous, with some notorious mud bogs in the spring and early summer. Surprisingly, some ranches were easier to access in the midwinter months, when the lakes and rivers were frozen, turning them into "snow machine" highways. Winter hospitality was legendary in the region. Because of the short daylight hours and long driving distances, a visit to another ranch was usually at least an overnight stay and might span a full week.

Seven miles from the ranch was the resort town of Anahim Lake, which had only two stores. One was called the Trading Store, but it wasn't much more than a glorified gas station minimart. The other was McLean Trading, which was a combination grocery store, hardware store, dry goods store, and butcher shop. They also sold fishing tackle and hunting licenses. The store had been run continuously since it was established by the Christensen family in 1898-originally in a much smaller building. At the time of the Crunch, it was three thousand square feet. The McLean family was celebrated for their willingness to "order in" just about anything that their customers requested, which ranged from books and canned ghee to canoes and snowmobiles. They generously made their loading dock available for locals to take delivery on an amazing a.s.sortment of trucked-in merchandise-everything from pianos to navy surplus generators, even if they hadn't been ordered through the store.

For most Anahim Lake locals, "going shopping" meant either a nearly two-hour drive (in good weather) west to the department stores in Bella Coola (population 625) or a three-hour drive southeast to Williams Lake (population 11,000).

In Bella Coola there was a Sears store, Moore's Organic Market and Nursery, Tru Hardware, the Alexander MacKenzie Comemorative Pharmacy, and a fairly well-stocked Consumers Co-op. But the nearest HBC (Hudson's Bay Company) and Walmart were in Williams Lake, which was a 206-mile drive from the ranch.

21.

IN THE 1880S.

Deyr fe, deyja frndur, deyr sjlfur i sama.

Eg veit einn, a aldrei deyr; dmur um dauan hvern.

(Translated: Cattle die and kinsmen die, thyself too soon must die, but one thing never, I ween, will die, the doom on each one dead.) -The Hvaml, an Ancient Gnomic Norse Poem The McGregor Ranch, near Anahim Lake, British Columbia-October, the First Year Ray McGregor arrived at the ranch forty-three hours after Phil, looking exhausted. Everyone was greatly relieved to see him. After lots of hugs, Ray took off his coat and draped it over the porch rail, revealing his holstered pistol.

Alan chided his son, "I thought you still had your grandfather's pistol buried in a PVC pipe out next to the sc.r.a.p-metal pile."

"I did, Dad, but I moved it a couple of years ago to a cache just north of the U.S. border. I just didn't tell you and Mom. I didn't want you fretting about it."

"Okay. No worries, son. Just glad to see you got back here safely."

The Crunch presented some immediate challenges for the McGregor ranch. Winter was fast approaching as the days grew shorter. Phil was amazed at how quickly the weather turned bitterly cold in the Chilcotins. After being acclimated to Seattle's fairly temperate drizzle, he found that the dry cold in the interior of British Columbia came as a shock. Nighttime lows in late October were around ten degrees Fahrenheit. By early November, they had their first subzero night. The Canadian radio stations reported temperatures in Celsius, so it took a while for Phil to get used to both the difference in the climate and the difference in the weather reporting.

The McGregors no longer had any prospect of being able to buy fuel. All of the gas stations in the region and even the propane distributors had recently sold out. They a.s.sumed that they wouldn't have enough fuel to run their Lister generator twelve hours a day, as they had been accustomed to do. In fact, running it just one day a week to do laundry might be too much. Nor could they run electric stock-tank heaters. As winter set in, they began a daily ritual of breaking up ice with sledgehammers.

A military immersion heater or a j.a.panese wood-fired hot-tub heater would have been ideal for this situation, but unfortunately they didn't have those, either. Claire suggested using a spare old rectangular wood stove they had stored in the machine shop to keep the main stock tank clear of ice. With the prospect of progressively colder nights and thicker ice ahead, they had to act soon.

To transfer the most heat from the stove into the stock tank, at least part of the flat top of the woodstove would have to be beneath the tank. The logical place to position it was at the end of the tank, where the ground sloped away. Obviously they would need to dig a hole, but the ground was already frozen solid to a depth of six inches. Rather than hoping for an unseasonal warm spell to thaw the soil, they simply operated the stove for twenty-four hours above the spot where they planned to dig, keeping the stove stoked continuously.

The excavation for the stove took longer than they thought, and it required considerable shoring with bricks and cinder blocks to provide access for loading wood, and enough of a slope to provide sufficient drainage for the inevitable snowmelts and rain.

Once the stove project was complete, the next task was erecting several new laundry clotheslines, both outdoors and in the sunroom on the south porch. Since they had no prospect of having their propane tank refilled, they went into extreme conservation mode-with just minimal use of the propane cooking range, and no use of the propane-fired clothes dryer.

The sunroom had once been quaint and decorous, and the place where Claire had often entertained friends for afternoon tea parties. She had always been adamant that muddy boots were banned from the room. But now the sunroom was decidedly utilitarian and crowded with clotheslines, a winter garden of salad greens in terra cotta pots on every available bit of floor s.p.a.ce, and several solar battery chargers set up just inside the windows.

Laundry days were timed to coincide with the weekly and later biweekly running of "the light plant," as they called their generator. Those days were always a flurry of activity that started as soon as the generator was fired up. The laundry had already been sorted, and the dirtiest items had already been prewashed in the laundry sink. On those same days, they did any projects that required power tools.

At the ranch, it felt as if the pace of life was simply slowing down, and they were returning to the isolation of frontier ranching life from a century ago. The newspaper ceased operation and mail delivery was halted. The local CBC station went off the air. The landline phone stopped working. And even if they had been in a cellular coverage area-and they weren't-that service would have been unavailable as well. Nimpo Lake Internet-their local affiliate for Galaxy Broadband-ceased operation once the Galaxy satellite system went offline. (The satellite system required the continuous operation of ground segment stations.) The shortage of gasoline and diesel meant that visits by neighbors and friends became infrequent and were now mostly medical or veterinary emergencies or involved problems with water systems. (Living a long way from town in times of fuel scarcity meant that neighbors had to depend on one another's help and expertise.) And suddenly, there were not enough horses to go around, and the asking prices for horses and saddles-all priced in terms of silver or barter goods-seemed astronomical.

Feeding the cattle required no power, and their water came from a shallow well that was serviced by a pump powered by their PV panels and their battery bank.

Hot water for the house had always been provided by a set of coils in the woodstove and a thermal siphon tank in the attic that had been nicknamed "the rumbler" many years before. They had a lot of books and had never become addicted to television. So, unlike many other families, the transition to Crunch living was not traumatic for the McGregors. (Alan had lived off-grid for most of his life, and Claire for all of her married life.) Perhaps the greatest change for them was the overwhelming sense of being out of touch with the world beyond their fences. They missed getting regular local news. They missed being able to talk on the phone with their daughters in their far-flung locales. They realized that there was something special about being able to open a fresh newspaper, and the absence of that made them feel wistful. The new lack of citrus fruits and coffee was often mentioned. They also had to go back to the old standby of checking their barometer each day, since they no longer had access to regional weather forecasts.

The daytime AM radio reception at the ranch had always been poor, and their FM reception began only when they had driven halfway to Williams Lake, or in the other direction more than halfway to Bella Coola. (CBC Radio One in Prince George had a translator station in Bella Coola. Alan hated the CBC, invariably calling it "a bunch of socialist propaganda.") So for most of their years at the ranch, it was only in the evenings or during predawn milking sessions that they had good AM radio reception. (Alan had enjoyed listening to the news on KOMO at 1,000 KHz, a fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel station, in Seattle.) But now, even that was gone. Apart from Phil's shortwave radio-which Alan and Claire found difficult to hear clearly-their world had gone silent.

With their cow now back at the ranch full-time, they milked her twice a day. She had recently been bred by a Dexter bull and was due to calve again in the spring. For a city boy like Phil Adams, the cow-milking routine was a new experience. He eventually enjoyed taking his turn milking, although he never became as efficient as Claire. (She always seemed to get at least one more pint out of Tessa than Phil did at each milking.) At the ranch they drank their milk raw and simply filtered. When they ran out of paper filters for their funnel, they subst.i.tuted cotton fabric squares, cut from new dish towels.

The cow produced more milk than the four of them could drink, and the skimmed cream made more b.u.t.ter than they could use, so the extra all went to five bantam hens that they obtained by bartering some extra salt blocks. The chickens were fed through the winter with milk, cream, and some oats from their cattle bins. The five hens were messy-inconsistently choosing odd places in the barn to roost each night-but the eggs that they produced were a blessing. Alan made plans to build a proper chicken coop in the coming spring or summer.

As recently as 2005, they had run up to six hundred cattle on the McGregor ranch, a number considered a "small operation" by local standards. Some of the ranches nearby controlled hundreds of thousands of acres of range pasture. But after their children had grown up and moved away, knowing the high cost of hiring ranch workers, they cut down to just twelve Coriander cows and heifers, and sixteen Coriander-Longhorn crosses (a mix of heifers and beef steers). They also had a Longhorn bull named Tex and Tessa, the Jersey milk cow, which were both often on loan to neighbors. In the two years before the Crunch, most of their income came from cutting hay. Because of Alan's numerous back surgeries, they switched to contracting out the hay cutting, keeping some of the round bales for winter feed for their own livestock. As the Crunch set in and fuel became scarce, the price of hay skyrocketed, even after being redenominated into silver coinage. A gallon of gasoline or diesel now sold for the equivalent of two or three days' wages for a laborer.

The Coriander-Longhorn crosses sold well, both before and after the Crunch. They were cold tolerant, making them a good breed for the region. They also knew how to use their horns, which meant they had a decent chance of fending off wolves, bears, and mountain lions-but they were by no means invulnerable. The Chilcotin Range had a notoriously dense population of predators.

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 a.s.sortment 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 sh.e.l.l (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 a.s.sembly, 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 a.s.sortment of containers-perhaps ten gallons in all. He had all of the usual safety equipment, including an integral helmet/earm.u.f.f/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 a.s.sortment 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 a.s.sortment 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 doc.u.ments 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 compa.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls.

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 Chretien 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 b.u.t.tstock, Phil said, "I'm sure this is ber 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 39X 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."