A Recipe for Bees (11 page)

“We’ll feed them outside. I’ll take the meals to them. There’s not room in here, in any case.”

Karl shrugged and nodded but didn’t listen to her. He brought hired hands home and made them coffee himself, despite her objections. The Indians. The scruffy, high-smelling white boys who made sheep’s eyes at her behind Karl’s back. The shearers who travelled from sheep ranch to sheep ranch, from the state of Washington to southern British Columbia and on up to northern B.C., following spring. The Indians were generally quiet and avoided
looking her in the eye. They tagged along behind Karl and Olaf like dogs as they went from one job to another on the ranch. Even Karl, who invited these men into his house, wouldn’t have expected them to walk by his side.

Years before, while they sat fishing across from reserve lands, Manny had told Augusta stories about Indians, stories about the drunks—like Tommy Joe and Jack Moses, who’d gotten themselves pie-eyed and into a fight in 1919. Tommy Joe took after Jack Moses with a shotgun and ran him down to the river, where Jack threw himself into the water, hoping to escape by swimming the South Thompson. When he came up for air, Tommy Joe shot him in the head, killing him. Tommy Joe got just three years in jail for his crime. They were both Indians, after all. If Jack Moses had been white it would have been a different story.

The Indians had different manners, different expectations about how things were done. When Augusta was a child, Indian women came round to the farm selling huckleberries and blueberries from large baskets decorated with designs that looked like trees or deer faces or feathers. The berries were warm and juicy from the horse ride down the trails on hot summer afternoons; they stained Augusta’s hands purple and tasted of heaven. Sometimes the Indians opened the gates and walked right through the farm, with their horses and dogs, on their way up the mountain to pick those berries, following old Indian trails. They seemed to have no regard for private property. Manny let them get away with it for the most part. The one time he did get all fired up and stood at the gate in the way of a group traipsing through the back pasture, it came to nothing. The Indians stopped a moment and stared at him, then formed
two streams of bodies that went around him, engulfing him briefly before passing on.

The young minister at Augusta’s church in Courtenay gave sermons, now and again, on the damage his white grandfathers had inflicted on the Natives, how they forced Indian children into residential schools, splitting families and forcing whole generations into dependency, and how the church now had to support the Natives’ fight for the land stolen from their forefathers. “What are they ballyhooing about?” Rose said after one of these sermons. They were all having tea and sandwiches, as they usually did after church, in Augusta and Karl’s apartment. “They don’t have to pay taxes, they get welfare. They’ve got a house on the reserve if they want it. More than I ever got. I had to work for what I got. And look at me. No house to show for all that work.”

“We did take their land,” said Augusta.

“I didn’t take anything from them. Do we have to go on paying for the mistakes people made a hundred years ago? They should be thankful the government treated them as well as they did.”

Augusta had half agreed with her at the time, though now, as she made tuna sandwiches for lunch beside Rose, she thought how that kind of thinking made her no better than a hive of senseless bees, acting on instinct, buzzing angrily about, protecting their honey even as they robbed other hives. A hive was so like a nation in miniature, complete with customs officials and border guards. Augusta could pick a guard bee out by its authoritative stance. It sat back on its haunches, on its four back legs, and raised its
front legs and antennae to scrutinize every bee passing through the tiny entrance to the hive. The guard bees could tell their nestmates from bees of another hive by scent and by behaviour. Each hive had its own customs; different races of bees had different dialects to their dance language. Often bees from other colonies were simply stonewalled, prevented from entering a hive by guard bees blocking the entrance with their bodies. If a wasp tried to get in, the guard bees
shimmered
, vibrated back and forth very quickly, to intimidate the foreigner. If the invader was an ant, they fanned their wings and showed their behinds to it, kicking at it. If the threat came from a mouse or skunk, or even a human, the bees flew angrily at the creature, or lighted on it to pull at its hair; then they tried biting—anything to avoid stinging, because stinging meant the guard bees’ death.

During the poor times, when honey flow was slow, more guards were posted at the entrance to the hive to prevent robbing by bees of adjacent hives. When there was a lot of nectar coming into the hive, there were fewer guards and they acted out their duties with less conviction. There was more threat from raiding towards the end of summer, when the voluptuous scent of ripening honey surrounded the hive. The robber bee hovered in front of the hive, zigzagging back and forth, casing the joint, and then landed at the entrance before running quickly to try to get inside. Then the guard bee attacked, running up to grapple the legs of the robber, and the two bees tumbled around, each trying to sting the other. The guard bees were willing to sacrifice their lives to protect the honey in the hive then, because another, larger colony of bees was capable of
taking all the honey they’d worked so hard to collect, and without that honey the hive would die come winter.

Even so, guard bees did let foreign workers in, especially novice foragers and deferential bees who had become lost or had drifted to this new hive on strong winds. But the new workers were only accepted after a diligent and lengthy inspection. Guard bees combed the body of the outsider with their front feet and antennae, assessing the stranger’s willingness to submit. The guard bees weren’t above accepting bribes. Newcomers hauling loads of pollen and nectar were readily admitted. If Augusta wanted to unite two colonies, all she had to do was lay a single sheet of newspaper on top of one colony, then set the box of the second colony on top of it. As there were no floors to these bee boxes, all that separated the two hives was that sheet of newspaper. By the time members of both communities ate through the paper, they had become accustomed to each other’s scent and they wouldn’t fight.

“Esther invited us over for lunch next week,” said Augusta.

“She invited you.”

“She invited us both.” Augusta cut the sandwiches and set them on a plate on the table. “Karl,” she called out. “Did I tell you I saw a lot of sheep on the train ride today?”

Karl had moved into the living-room to watch television. “What was that?” he asked.

“Sheep. Everyone along this one stretch of track seemed to have sheep. On little five-acre plots.” Late in their marriage, the land around Augusta and Karl’s farm was slowly dissected by buyers she and Karl had called “acreage people” with enough contempt to make her now feel foolish.
They were acreage people because they came from the city and played at farming, babied their livestock like pets, and let their pastures go wild. Worse, they kept too much to themselves. Augusta would have called them acreage people in play, rather than contempt, if they had let themselves be known to her, if they had waved or smiled when they passed her on the road. But no, they kept to themselves as they would have in the city, not knowing that the culture of the country was different, not knowing they had affronted her without even talking to her,
by
not talking to her. Now, when Augusta walked down the streets in Courtenay, she acted like those acreage people; she rarely waved or stopped to chat. There were too many people living too close by.

“Not enough room for sheep to move around,” said Karl, turning from the television. “Makes no sense having sheep on this island. With all the rain, they’d have no end of footrot.”

“And there were goats along the highway on the drive home,” said Rose.

“There were a couple of men with dogs herding goats,” said Augusta, “just like you did with the sheep. Although there were only about thirty goats. You hardly see a thing like that any more.”

Karl and the hired men, aided by border collies, had once walked a thousand or more sheep down the highway on their trek to the mountain pastures. It seemed inconceivable to Augusta now, but then, in the fifties, the highways were still relatively quiet. One of the hired men walked ahead of the sheep, carrying a red flag to warn oncoming cars, and if a car did approach, Karl, walking the sheep from
behind, would send a dog up the flock. Guided by his whistles and hand signals, the dog would force the flock to one side, to let the car by. Many people simply parked their cars and watched the flock pass. It was a living river of bodies: an amazing sight, a thousand animals controlled by a handful of men and dogs.

Karl and his father hired herders for the summer, and they all slept in tents in bachelor’s bliss on the mountainside, watching sheep, watching for bears, trading stories with the look-out men who watched for forest fires from their lonely cabins. It was Karl who cooked for them, for the most part; he sometimes traded jobs with Pete and brought the horse down for supplies, as it gave him the chance to see Augusta. Later in the summer, lambs fat on alpine grasses were cut from the flock using a corral-and-chute system set up on the mountain, and they’d be driven, on foot, down to the nearest rail stockyards. From Queest Mountain, the lambs went to Malakwa to load; from Hunters Range they went to Salmon Arm. Once loaded onto stock cars, they were shipped to the Vancouver yards and from there to slaughterhouses.

Most of the time Augusta stayed behind, alone, on the Whorehouse Ranch. The summers were her quiet time, without Olaf or his wretched dog. She sat and drank coffee whenever she wanted, which was almost every morning. But she worked too: feeding and milking the cow, and feeding the pigs if they had them. The rest of her day was spent in her garden: tilling, planting, weeding, harvesting, and canning. They would depend on that produce through winter. But tending these crops was no chore for Augusta; here in the garden, her senses tingled. She went barefoot,
ate sweet strawberries warm off the plant, and dug her fingers into soil, into living earth. If she didn’t own the house she kept, at least she could call this bit of land her own. She had bought it with sweat, invested in it with care. Her soul bloomed here with the flowers, and the smell of tomato plants and lavender quieted her. Here she was at rest.

The only flowers in the garden on her arrival were ratty weeds blooming insolently in the vegetable plot over the heads of carrots, potato plants, and cabbage so infested with cabbage moth that it looked as though some angry soul had peppered it with buckshot. She dug into the dry sandy soil around the house and made rectangular beds with two-by-fours, and brought in wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of sheep manure to fill them. Planting a flower garden on her arrival at the end of August was a risky thing to do, because it was only with luck that the weather held long enough for her to get a few velvety snapdragons, a scattering of stubborn petunias, and a patch of hardy shasta daisies that sprang up triumphantly, rooting themselves there to bloom for years after.

Olaf couldn’t see the sense in it. “Flowers aren’t good for anything,” he said. He was wrong. The garden filled her, extended her, made her more than she was without it. There was so little in that bachelor’s cabin that she could call her own. The garden was her place, and she filled it with prettiness: lilac bushes cultured from saplings given to her by Mrs. Grafton, tulip, daffodil, and iris bulbs that she’d brought from home, and in the shade around back of the house, bleeding hearts split from her mother’s plant.

On occasion Karl came down from the mountain with the pack horses to get salt for the sheep or supplies, or to
oversee the haying done by hired hands or, later, to harvest the silage corn, turnips, and beets. On their first anniversary he surprised Augusta by coming down for no particular reason. He took her into town for pie and coffee at Yep Num’s café, and to a movie called the
The Egg and I
. It was the first of the Ma and Pa Kettle films, in which a young city couple try their hand at egg farming and befriend old Ma and Pa Kettle, poor country folk with too many kids. As they were driving back home in the International, Augusta said, “Why don’t we keep some chickens? I could sell eggs.”

“We used to. Bitch kept getting them.”

“My father never would have kept a dog around that killed chickens.”

“Dad won’t get rid of Bitch. She’s his pet.”

“We’re going to do without eggs and a little income because of that dog?”

“We can buy them.”

“Your father foots the bill for eggs when he could have his own, because of that stupid dog?”

That was it—their one date for the summer.

Sometime in September, depending on the weather, the parade of sheep would march back down the highway to the Whorehouse Ranch, where they were pastured for the winter. Karl hauled feed out to them each day on sleighs: corn silage; swede turnips; and hay of mixed alfalfa, wild grasses, and alsike clover. During lambing, dried sugar-beet pulp was added to the ewes’ feed.

Come lambing season, the cycle of work began all over again. They trimmed the sheep’s hoofs and clipped the wool around the udders and flanks to make nursing easier,
and the lambing pens were prepared. Once the ewes began lambing, Augusta and Karl and Olaf took shifts during the night, checking for births or complications. There were ewes that died giving birth, lambs lost. Sometimes a ewe that had lost a lamb would not accept another ewe’s orphan. Karl would then put a sheepdog in with both the ewe and the foster lamb, and within a day or two the ewe would grow protective of the lamb and accept it, because of the dog’s presence. At other times, when there were twins, Karl would leave one lamb with its mother; the other he would clothe in the skin of a lamb that had died, and place it in a pen with the dead lamb’s mother. The ewe would smell her offspring on this changeling and nurse it. Once the ewe had accepted it as her own, Karl would remove the dead lamb’s hide.