Chapter 8
"Actually, we discovered the diamond mine and sold all but a small percentage of it because it would cost too much to develop it ourselves. Developing it has cost millions, but it's in the black now and the shares are starting to have a decent return."
"So you're now a 'spoiled rich kid,' I suppose." Aileen smiled.
"Others think so." I grinned. "I don't know myself. All I've bought right now from the money is some clothes, a pickup truck, and I paid my tuition to the University. Oh, and I bought a little hunk of property in the Highlands, with a log cabin on it."
Paula giggled. "So where will this new car rank, as far as dollar value in comparison?"
"Well." I sighed. "That depends on several things and on your viewpoint too. First, I'd need to know how much the car we're going to buy cost so I could factor that in, but the way I look at things, it might be the most expensive thing I've ever bought."
"You bought property and a log cabin, but a car will be more expensive?" Sydney scoffed. "Come on now, tell us another story."
"Oh, that." I grinned. "We ran across a big hunk of property that people weren't buying because people felt was going to be too much trouble to open up and they thought the original owner was asking too much money."
I don't know why, but Paula must have guessed where I was going because she grinned at me and slipped to my side, wrapping an arm around my waist.
"Mom and I formed a land company, then we bought the whole thing, a hundred and twenty acres." I continued. "Then I brought in a crew of men, rented a D-8 Cat. and roughed a road into it, right down the middle with a couple of little side roads, working on it over one summer. After that, we legally sectioned it into roughly ten acre parcels and had hydro and telephone lines run in. We saved out a thirty-five-acre section at the very end that surrounds a little lake. The land company still owns that for tax reasons, as well as one ten-acre parcel next door. We have a personal agreement about the thirty-five acres; Mom has to look after fifteen acres on her side of the lake, as well as the ten-acre patch that the land company leases to Mary Joe, and I have twenty acres to play with."
"And?" Paula had a curious grin on her face as if she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"Oh, there were seven small parcels of property that we had no need of, so we've been selling those off, one at a time." I smiled at her. "So far, we've sold four of them and they've paid for our investment in the land and improvements, as well as for the cost of the unfinished log cabins. So you see, my house and the property it sits on hasn't cost me anything."
"Oh." Sydney said flatly. "I see what you mean. Wait a minute, you said you had seven parcels of property and that you've only sold four."
"Yes."
"Why haven't you sold them all?"
"Because we're looking for the right kind of neighbours." I smiled at her. "A piece of that property only goes for sale after we know what sort of people the potential purchasers are. That way we can't be accused of discrimination in any way."
Aileen sat down slowly and shook her head, then stared at Paula. "Where in the world did you find him? Are there any more like him around?"
"I doubt it, Mom." She grinned. "I may have met him in an art class, but remember, he said he was studying Business Administration?"
"I do, now that you remind me." She looked at me again, but somehow it was like she was seeing me for the first time. "But, to get back to Paula's question, and we'll discount the property as making you money, not costing you money. Your other big purchases have been tuition, which I'd personally call an investment, so that doesn't count either, does it?"
"Well, no, not if you look at it that way." I grinned. "So that leaves the cost of the pickup as the next biggest. That's got two prices on it as well, though."
"Do you want to explain that?" She got a curiously impish look on her face and I followed her eyes to see the strange look on Sydney's face.
Sydney was simply staring at me, her face completely expressionless as if she was trying to hide any emotion.
Paula jabbed me in the ribs. "Quit staring." She whispered.
"Well, she's staring at me." I smiled at her, then waved a hand in front of Sydney, as if checking to see if she was really looking at me or at some point over my shoulder.
"Well, come on, I'm waiting to find out how you made money on your truck." She said flatly.
"Oh, no. I didn't mean to imply that." I shook my head. "When I was clearing the road in with the D-8 Cat., we were following a road that had lead into the bush when it was originally logged off years ago and we came to a section that was on a fairly steep side hill. The old pickup had slid sideways off of the old road and was lodged in between a little rock bluff and a boulder that was probably twice as big as the pickup truck. It was obvious to me that someone had been in there a couple of years before, probably a firewood pirate, and had slid off the road. Then he had somehow managed to get himself into real trouble and had gotten it jammed in there somehow."
"So you just claimed it?" She stared at me even harder.
"Oh no!" I grinned. "It was actually in my way. I had to move it. So, I had a couple of the logs cut to the right length and used the Cat's dozer blade to lift it up, one end at a time. Then we dropped it down onto the logs, skidded it sideways and afterward, we towed the dang thing out of there and stuffed it off into the bush to get it out of our way, that way I could build the new roadway right over the top of where it had been. I was actually having a search done, using the serial numbers from the darn thing to try to run down the owner when he came and found me."
"So he claimed it?"
"Well, yes and no." I grinned even wider. "He was trying to play safe, just so he wouldn't have to admit to trespass or log theft and yet he was trying to blame me for crushing his pickup truck underneath my new roadbed."
"But you said you just hauled it out of your way and . . ."
". . . and stuffed it into the bush." I nodded. "You have to remember, I was running a D-8 Cat. I had a pile of logs and another one of brush piled between the pickup truck and the road."
"So he hadn't seen that you'd pulled it out?"
"Nope, and I didn't make any claims one way or another about it. I just asked him where it had been parked and why it had been there."
Aileen was chuckling now and Paula was trying her best to hold back a serious bout of the giggles.
"It's not funny!" Sydney snorted.
"Oh, I thought it was hilarious." I chuckled. "You see, we'd put up a sign when we started the roadway that we were planning on selling off the logs we'd be salvaging along the roadway, and he'd come in there, supposedly as a log buyer. But, while he was there, he was probably going to see if there was any way to try to sneak back in when we were gone for the night to get his truck out somehow, yet do it without my knowing about it. The only trouble was that the roadway had already been built over the top of where is truck had been."
Even she was grinning a bit now. "So he was playing both ends against the middle and you just let him trap himself?"
"More or less." I nodded. "I listened to him yammer for a while and finally acted like I was simply too darn busy to waste any more time about it. I asked him how long it had been sitting there and what the dang thing was worth to him, bottom of the line. He hemmed and hawed, then told me a hundred and fifty bucks. I offered him a hundred if he'd get the proof of ownership and sign the transfer of title over to me, then asked him to get out of my hair."
I paused and grinned at her, waiting for her to react and finally she bit.
"Well?" She demanded, grinning, but not wanting to because she knew I'd wait all night if I had to.
"See what being patient and waiting can do?" I grinned. "He was back in about an hour with the transfer of title all made out, all I had to do was sign it and pay him. Now by that time, I and a kid were back down the road clearing away a pile of bush to expose a really nice looking stack of logs, perfect for firewood. He saw that pile of firewood logs and offered to trade the truck for them. I warned him that the logs had to be gone by four o'clock that afternoon, but he assured me that was no problem. To make it official, I signed the paper, buying the truck, handed him the money in cash and he signed a paper for me, buying the logs and handed the money back. Then he climbed on top of the log pile to check it out even closer and saw the truck parked behind them. I don't think I've ever heard some of those swear words before."
Aileen and Paula were laughing so hard they were crying and by now even Sydney was grinning and chuckling. I just sat there and grinned for a moment.
"It turned out to be a darned expensive truck though, considering that I found it in the bush." I shook my head slowly as my face sobered. "First of all, I had to get it hauled into town to a garage; then I had to spend a bundle on it to get it fixed up the way I wanted it. In the long run, fully restored and painted, it cost me sixteen grand."
"Holy smoke! You spent sixteen thousand dollars on an old junker that you found in the bush?"
"Un huh, but the real expense was caused by the guy who owned the junker before me. He was a real sneaky bastrich and even though I'd hired a security guard, chained the entrance gate on the roadway and parked the Cat. in the road at night, he was sneaking in, cutting up my best sawlogs and hauling them away for firewood. I figure he got away with close to twenty grand worth of wood before we caught him. I had to hire a couple of the neighbour boys from up there, but they managed to get him."
"I suppose there's a story to that too, is there?"
"Yeah, we couldn't figure out how he was getting those logs out of there and not making a lot of noise. I hired those two local kids and they made a deal with me that they'd run this guy right into the hands of the cops. That was providing I could get the cops to come out where we wanted them to be waiting on the road at the right spot and at the right time, on the right night. We had to wait almost a week, but the kids were right, the guy worked by moonlight and the first moonlight night, we set it all up.
"I had a friend on the police force and I talked to him about it. He arranged to have the night off officially, then he came out with me. We actually found where the guy had his truck hidden, down the road and in a driveway, so we blocked that in with the policeman's car. Then we walked back to where the kids had said the guy would show up on the road with the sawlogs. He did too. He came out of the bush right into our welcoming arms."
"What, carrying the logs?"
"No, dragging them, he was using a darn horse." I shook my head. "It turned out that his brother-in-law raised draft horses, then trained them to work in harness to haul logs out of the bush, the same way the independent loggers did years ago. The crook had managed to talk his brother-in-law into letting him use one of his horses and a harness. I was making it easy for him by cutting and stacking the logs; all he had to do was find one of my log piles, hook a logging chain onto a couple of logs, and haul the dang things away. He'd hide them in the bush on someone else's property and arrange to get permission to cut wood there. Then he'd come back in the daylight, cut my logs up into firewood with his chainsaw, haul them off and sell perfectly good sawlogs as firewood. He was selling sawlogs that would have made good lumber, but he'd only get a tenth of their worth."
"He did that to get back at you about the truck?"
"Partly, I suppose." I shrugged my shoulders. "I think it was more because he was a lazy lout and I was making it easy for him. You see I was stacking the logs in piles, but I was stacking them back on side roads, so it would be easy for me to get at them later with the truck. At the same time, it was supposed to be harder for him, not easier. Our whole security was set up to catch someone using a truck or tractor and trailer, but by using a horse, he snuck in by the side door."
"What did the kids do?" Paula asked.
"Well, they arranged to steer him out to us by the path they wanted him to use. They got his horse all wound up, then finally arranged to spook it into going wild at just the wrong time for him." I grinned sardonically. "You see, they let him get solidly hooked onto one log, then caused his horse to start getting a bit weird and finally almost running away with the log in tow and him trying to slow the horse down."
"Wasn't that dangerous?"
"Not really. The kids knew that horses hate the smell of blood. They visited a butcher shop in the late afternoon and got a plastic bucket full of cow's blood and somehow got hold of enough anticoagulants to keep it liquid. They used a funnel and filled a bunch of kid's balloons with the mixture, then when they wanted the horse to go one way, they'd toss a balloon down and he'd head any other direction. Each time they'd do it, the horse got more frantic. Then too since it was hauling a thirty-foot long log on the end of a twenty-foot chain and the crook was hanging onto a set of thirty foot long reins, you can imagine the circus that developed. The horse could only turn so far before the log would hook up, then it would head straight as a die until it was past that blockage. The crook had to be an acrobat and a dancer not to get hurt or else let the horse go. He couldn't do that for fear of a complete runaway. You should have heard it coming toward us. We had lots of warning."
"I can imagine." Aileen snorted. "Too bad someone didn't get it on video tape."
"Hey, this is about midnight. All we had for light was a full moon." I grinned. "Anyway, to make a long story short, To stop the cross country bikers and slow down the motorcycle nuts who like to take their motocross bikes into the bush, I'd felled a line of logs, one after the other about twenty or twenty-five feet in from the edge of the property. The horse went over the logs like nothing, no problem. The harness lifted the chain, so it didn't hang up. The log, that the horse was skidding didn't make it; it stopped! Dead! The crook didn't have a clue what was going on and came out of the bush ready to kill that horse, but he walked right into the arms of my buddy, the cop."
"Ohmigod." Sydney laughed. "Caught dead to rights, huh?"
"You could say that." I grinned. "He was holding the reins of a horse that everyone knew belonged to his brother-in-law, the horse was chained to a log that was marked as mine and he was holding onto the horse's reins as well as coming out of my property. On top of that, I was right there to agree to the charges against him as a freshly caught crook. The cop started out with trespass, illegal entry of private property, theft and went from there. I think he rattled off fifteen or twenty charges against the idiot. I really didn't have to say anything except 'Yes sir.' or 'Yes, I do want to see him charged.' things like that, every once in a while. Mostly I spent my time trying to calm down the poor horse."
"Remind me not to get you annoyed with me, Mr Shy Guy." Sydney grinned and snorted with laughter again.
"Well, I am." I grinned right back at her. "But, I told you and I told Aileen, wolves are shy too, just don't try to interfere with something that the wolf or his pack thinks of as theirs."
"So, are we members of your pack now?" Aileen asked, almost shyly.
"Well, since I think of Paula as my girlfriend, I guess, you might say that to some extent." I smiled wryly. "But in my family, I'm not sure I'm the alpha leader, I think that's still Mom."
"Alpha leader?" Paula frowned slightly.
"Mmm Hmm." I nodded. "In a wolf pack, there's on lead male and one lead female. Then the rest of the pack sorts itself by a hierarchy that depends on ability and status. It's rather complex."
"Well, since you said that there are only you and your mother, oh, and this slightly mysterious woman, 'Mary Joe'(?), I'd say you must be the alpha male and your Mom the alpha female. Right?"
"I guess so." I snorted. "The way you hear Mom and Mary Joe talk, you'd wonder though."
"Just who is Mary Joe?" Paula asked.
"That's a good question. When I first saw Mary Joe, she was about six years old and about two feet tall. She's grown a bit since then." I grinned. "She's Dene. That's a native tribe of sorts. Actually that name covers a lot of tribes, but up north, that distinguishes Mary Joe's basic tribe which is actually Chipewyan from the Inuit or the Innu who are further north and further east. Mary Joe was lacking in growth hormones as kid and Mom took her under her wing, almost adopted her, got her onto hormones and stuff, then fed her right. So in a way Mary Joe is like my little sister, but not really. I dunno, more of a cousin, I guess."
"So you have a native . . . what, adopted sister?"
"Almost, but not really." I shrugged. "I forget the native word for it, but it means something like a cousin by circumstance. It just means that we took over raising her because her family couldn't. Nothing more, not really. Her problem is that she's caught halfway between the two worlds. She doesn't really fit as a native and yet she won't allow herself to become overly close to the white-man's world."
"So, does she live with your Mom or what?"
"Oh no. She has her own place, a cabin of her own on the ten-acre parcel that's next to Mom's and Mom actually pays for a lot of the cost of it, but that's because Mary Joe helps her around the house. It's a fair trade. Besides, this way Mary Joe banks her own money and lives off of what she earns from Mom."
"It almost sounds like they're dependent on one another."
"Better not suggest that to either one of them." I laughed aloud. "I wouldn't and I know how to duck away from both of them. Now, it's almost eleven o'clock and we've spent almost the whole night with me yarning away like an old woman. If you and I are going to buy you a car tomorrow, we need to roll out of bed and get going in the morning."
I was looking at Paula, who smiled at me almost apologetically.
"I don't know what I want in a car." She said quietly.
"I don't suppose it's that hard." I shrugged. "I've never bought a new car myself, but I've bought several snowmobiles and a couple of other things."
"Yes, you were telling us." Sydney chortled. "I'd actually like to come along and watch you buy a car."
"I would to." Aileen smiled. "I think it might be entertaining."
"Well, I don't mind, but I'd rather you didn't get involved." I suggested.
"Fine." Sydney grinned as if she was practising being a shark and making Paula giggle.
"I think before Mom and Sydney scare me, we should go back to be my bedroom." She grabbed my arm. "They're worrying me now."
"And you haven't seen me in operation yet." I looked at her and winked.
"It's not that, they're looking at you as if they've turned into hungry predators." She giggled, dragging me out of the room to growls from both Aileen and Sydney.
I couldn't help laughing, but I was pulling back. "What about my clothes?"
"We'll sneak out and rescue them later." She said loudly, shoving me through her door and slamming, then locking it behind us.
Inside the bedroom, she began to giggle softly. "You don't seem to realise how sexy it is for your guy to get an upper hand on a crook and tell the story about it as if it was all fun and games."
"Hey, I hardly did anything, the crook was just dumb." I laughed. "He was funny! Heck, the last time he got whopped by a couple of teenage kids and a bucket of blood, cow's blood at that."
"Oh sure, and you didn't have anything at all to do with it." She laughed grabbing my shorts and yanking on them. "Just like you let him see those logs just at the right time so he'd want to buy them and you even gave him a deadline to remove them. You got him to give you a truck for nothing and made him haul away the logs that were preventing you from taking it to get it fixed."
"I told you he was dumb." I laughed.
"Yeah, sure. And what about your land deal? You walk in there, buy the place, do a bit of work on it, then get as much out of a third of it as the whole place and the improvements are worth." She dropped her hands to her hips and looked up into my eyes with a challenging stare. "Was that because the people were dumb too?"
"Not dumb." I smiled at that idea. "They just had tunnel vision. Actually, most of them are simply too lazy to think hard. And, most people think in straight lines, they can't seem to think 'around corners' and see that the problems are really part of the solution."
"You're doing it again." She laughed softly. "Explain, but lets do it in bed. I'm actually tired."
So as we climbed into bed, I began to explain that in order to have access to the property that we wanted to build on, as well as having hydro electric power and telephone service, Mom and I needed a road. By hiring a helicopter to look at the site from the air, I could make out the old logging road that had been used to clear the land fifty years before. So I called around and found out what everything we wanted would cost, then sat down and did the basic math. The land plus the improvements were initially going to set us back five million bucks. We knew that ten acres of slightly improved land in that area were normally going for just under a million and improved access and services would add to that.
So instead of looking at the idea that five million was going to be too much for one guy to handle easily and the property would be too big in the long run, so that taxes would kill you. We looked at the idea of what one guy could handle. Ten or twelve acres is a nice size for most guys; it's a common hobby farm size out here. So since the idea of an easement through the property didn't turn us on and since we'd gotten used to living a little more isolated than most people. We bit the bullet, bought the property and improved it with the idea of selling acreages.
We knew that the first lots opened up would go like hot cakes, because there's a shortage of acreages near blacktop. We knew the road across the end of the property was going to be blacktopped and we knew that once people started living on our side road, they'd be promoting blacktop with the municipality for our road too. We didn't want the outside lots anyway, so we expected to sell the outside two lots quickly and the next two lots not long afterward. It was an almost inevitable thing that once the road was in down the middle of the property, people were going to be looking at it with the idea of buying in. All in all, it was a sure thing.
"You make it sound so simple." She snuggled against me. "What's it feel like to be a millionaire?"
"I dunno? No different than it felt like to be broke, except I don't worry as much about bears and mosquitoes." I grinned.
That brought a peal of laughter from her and earned me a kiss. She pulled back her head and grinned at me, still giggling. "You say the darndest things and take me by surprise in the darndest ways."
"Just as long as it makes you happy."
"Delirious, absolutely, positively delirious." She beamed. "Hey, when you were running that Cat. Wasn't your mom worried?"
"If she'd have known, she'd have been terrified." I chuckled. "There are some things best left unsaid or unmentioned, until after the fact."
"Hmm, you know, I think I agree." She yawned. "Remind me of this conversation in the morning, would you?"
"That's it? You're going to let me go to sleep?"
"No silly, we are going to cuddle each other, so we both sleep better. As you pointed out before, we need it."
"Okay girlfriend." I kissed her nose and hugged her gently.
She managed to smile and brush my lips with hers, then lay her head on my shoulder. I held her gently for a long time before I managed to sleep. It was finally dawning on me that if things carried on the way they had been going, I was going to be responsible for the health and welfare, as well as the happiness of another person, perhaps more than one. This was somehow becoming a very different ball game than I had envisioned and I was going to have to do some growing to fill the boots she seemed to want me to wear.