World War #3

Last weekend's slaughter in Paris is not just an isolated event. It is another step in lunatic fringe Islam's war with the West. It's evolution at work. It is what war has become.

It's a dispersed war. It is no longer concentrated on massed battlefields where dug-in armies slug it out as in WW1 or highly mobile mechanized armies do battle on the run as in WWII. Now, this new war can erupt any time, anywhere.

At this point it ought to be quite clear that major technological changes were initiated and hurried along by battlefield needs. If we see technology as a plus, then war is a plus, too, right?

So what we have now is limited skirmishes launched by psychological basket cases all around the planet. 

Their contribution to the evolution of technology is significant. There would have been no pressing need to develop the high-flying drones, the satellite monitoring systems and the smart bombs fully capable of taking out targeted sites anywhere on the face of the planet and deliver a knockout punch on mobile moving targets from the edge of space.

There remains only the problem of correctly identifying moving targets from space, but rest assured there are people working on it right now. When that one is solved, we can thank the jihadis for initiating its need.

While effective in weeding out the homicidal psychopaths among us, war also costs many innocent lives, so it is unclear if it qualifies as a good evolutionary process. We can only sit back and hope that over all, it serves humanity's evolution in a positive way.

Our new Prime Minister

Our newly-minted PM might have taken the ISIS attack on Paris as a solid opportunity to back out of some less than brilliant election promises he made without being held accountable or being seen as back-pedalling.

He did not. Instead, he spent his opening rounds at the international conference posing for selfies and reaffirming his own lack of good judgement.

More mature leaders all pledged support for the French cause in the face of mindless terror, but Trudeau stuck to his guns. He reaffirmed his off-the cuff decision to withdraw air support against ISIS and import large numbers of migrants from Syria in a hurry, ignoring the chance that there might also be lunatic Fringe Islamic infiltrators among them.

The withdrawal of Canada's fighter jets gives ISIS the opportunity to brag openly that the Paris attack has succeeded in putting a wedge into the solidarity of the forces aligned against them.

It's easy to speculate that these actions accurately represent the head space of the electorate that rocketed Trudeau to power in Canada. Had he shown some ability to think on his feet, our newly minted Prime Minister's actions would have been unrepresentative of the mentality of the people who cast their ballot for a rock star instead of an experienced leader.

Olga

Not everybody is lucky enough to have an older sister. Older sisters are useful when they're around and mom is too busy doing other things.

Somehow, the responsibility of looking after the younger whelps always falls on the female offspring. Maybe that is what Mother Nature intended. Despite all the brave new attitudes and political incursions into human relationships, it would be logical to think so.

Although I didn't know it at the time, I was a lucky kid. My older sister was in the Sixth Grade when I started school and was a source of endless information, profound wisdom and guidance when I needed it most.

For instance, one bright fall morning, on the way to school, when I first noticed the beautifully colored leaves on the trees and asked her how that happened, she informed me without hesitation that it was Jack Frost who painted them like that.

The picture that immediately sprang to my mind was a little green pixie wearing boots with turned-up toes, flitting about like the hummingbirds I observed in my mom's flower garden in the spring. Clutching a painter's palette board in his left hand, paint brush in the other, he buzzed about busily tinting the leaves on the aspens and willows a bright yellow, those on the currants and dogwoods crimson, and those on the wild cherries a bright scarlet.

The elves, pixies and fairies were always on hand to answer questions people have a hard time with. For instance, they helped my sister to explain the presence of those tiny, perfect, pink, blue and yellow bells that grew in small clumps in the shade of the woodlot at the east end of the garden.

"Fairy gardens," my sister explained.

But it wasn't all about pixies and fairies. Later on, when the teacher at Ft. Pelly School assigned the arithmetic times tables, my older sister took the time to actually drill me on them until I could fire back the right answers almost without thinking. It was a task most kids would have done anything to avoid, but she did it. It was half a century before handy palm-size electronic calculators appeared, and school kids were still required to think and memorize.

Also, there were times when she would have been happier to spend alone with her neighborhood friends without her little brother tagging along, but everyone else in the family was occupied doing something more important. It couldn't have been the most productive way for her to pass her time, but she did it without complaining too much.

I have to assume that my early years would have been a lot less interesting without my older sister's input.

In her 90th year, Olga went to sleep quietly at the Gateway Lodge in Canora and didn't wake up the morning of October 20.

She was a significant presence in the lives of her family, her community and all who knew her. It was a good life, well lived.

                  --30--

Real Climate Change:

The Global Warming due to human activity panic has now morphed into Climate Change.

This allows a little less latitude for the gang with enough arrogance to actually think they can make a significant dent in how this planet's ecosystem functions.

Climate change in planet Terra's ecosystem has been going on since this sphere has cooled enough for life to take root. There are well-recorded periods of climate change within the era of human occupation. It may safely be assumed that changes will go on into the period of human infestation, human decimation and whatever else is going to happen to this species that is being accused of behaving much like a microbial infection on the face of this planet.

Terra's ecosystem changes occur for reasons only partly understood by human climatologists and not at all by the sensation-mongering global warming cheerleaders. Climate changes have been going on for millions of years before Al Gore or David Suzuki and no doubt will go on for millions of years more.

I personally witnessed one period of climate change that started when I was too little to begin classes at the nearest country school because it was 4 miles distant and we had to walk. This was during the Dirty-Thirties, a decade made infamous not only because of the US stock market crash and the poverty that followed as credit was withdrawn, but also because the rains failed. The topsoil in the central states and the prairie provinces threatened to dry up and blow away on the powerful west winds.

The memories that still reel through my mind include sand dunes piling up like snow drifts in the lee of fence lines on the eastern slope of the Assiniboine watershed above the Elbow. I recall following on my hands and knees tiny tracks up and over the pristine sand dunes, expecting to find a fat, brown June bug to play with at the end of each track.

June bugs are the adult stage of the white inch-long grubs that munch on the roots of  city lawns and farm grain fields. This leaves bare patches where lush grass used to be.

Shaped like shiny little brown Volkswagen Beetles, these bugs were hefty enough to serve as slingshot missiles and felt cool to the touch as they nestled in the palm of a five-year-old's hand. They were fun to play with and the brown bats came out at dusk to gorge on them as they took flight.

Just as the emergence of earthworms at the spring thaw feeds the first hatch of robins, no doubt the emergence of these adult June bugs makes possible a generation of well fed little baby bats.

While bald patches in a well-trimmed city lawn are an eyesore and an inconvenience, they represent a crop failure to the farmers. Also, a bare patch in the wheat field left no protective cover. This allowed the west winds to suck out bathtub-sized holes in the prairie landscape. Some of these holes were more than two feet deep, aerodynamically sculpted with pebbles, rocks and anything else too heavy for the wind to suck up and blow away sitting in the lowest part of the hole.

Among these objects were flint stone arrow heads, granite hammers and other objects that once belonged to the aborigines. I even had in my collection of debris a soap stone peace pipe and an old hunting knife with a staghorn handle that we assumed had once belonged to one of the early fur traders because the blade was metal. It was more evidence that the remains of Ft. Pelly, Ft. Hibernia, and Ft. Livingstone, which served briefly as the seat of the Territorial government, were nearby.

Every farm family in the community had in its possession a collection of stone artifacts including hammers, axes, knives, spear points and other objects that were unearthed by the prevailing winds or turned up by plowshares in the fields.

A memorable occasion for me occurred a few years later when I was walking with my father among the dunes in the sandy Pretty View area north of Verigin, SK. We came upon a freshly wind-swept clearing with an interesting layout. There was a clear patch of hard clay about as wide as the diameter of a human posterior, surrounded by flint stone chips in a pattern that suggested an aboriginal worksite. Here, some stone age craftsman was once seated cross-legged, shaping flint tools one chip at a time.

We stood there, keenly aware we were in touch with activity that might have occurred a thousand years or more earlier before being sifted over by the west wind and kept secret for us to view in the future. Nestled among sparse poplar saplings and ground juniper, it is possible that the site was drifted over again by swirling air currents after we left, for someone else to discover in a hundred or a thousand years.

The early settlers, including my family, assumed that before the coming of the white man, the inhabitants of the area were stone-age people. The evidence was everywhere.

That the prairie soil threatened to dry up and blow away during the thirties is well documented not only in history, but also in literature and film. There are some excellent documentaries showing the devastation of farm land that had been broken and stripped of cover, tilled with little regard for sustaining healthy topsoil.

Clearly, there was something there that needed to be learned by the farming industry. And it was. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration was enacted and farmers no longer took the sustainability of their land for granted.

What the casual observer witnessed, was the somewhat abrupt conversion of farmland that had been productive for a hundred years to sterile desert.

Was this climate change? Of course. But as it turned out, it was temporary.

As the '30s morphed into the '40s the rains once again grew more frequent. By the '50s, parts of the central states and Canadian prairies threatened to once again become an inland sea.

I recall pulling metre-long pike out of a pond in the middle of a farmyard. Shallow lakes overflowed their banks and new lakes grew where cow pasture had been only a couple of years earlier.

This kind of off-and-on regional climate change has been going on for millions of years before with no one panicking over it. The indigenous hunter/gatherers simply accepted what was happening and adjusted their diets from deer and buffalo to Northern Pike and Walleye. Others simply packed up their tents and went looking for happier hunting grounds.

They had no cell phones nor incredible new apps to spread panic with. There was no Al Gore to write alarming books about it and no David Suzuki to tell us that the sky was falling and that it may already be too late to do anything about it.

It would be interesting to imagine what today's global warming alarmists would have done in the Dirty '30s. It's easy to envision pro active kids from the chaotic end of our social spectrum trying to provoke vote-hungry politicians into importing camels from the Sahara.

That, by the way, actually happened during a particularly dry period of climate change in Australia. Wild camels are now seen wandering around aimlessly in that country according to local lore.

It is almost certain there would be politicians working to enact all kinds of other dumb activity such as the carbon trading fiasco that so far has failed to result in any significant changes other than increased taxes wherever it's been tried.

Mayor Rob Burton

Why is everyone so concerned with Oakville's Mayor Rob Burton comparing the Prime Minister's auxiliary group of veteran guards to Nazis? Rob is probably too young to remember the ugly little details of who did what and to whom in WWII and was probably too busy to pay attention in history class.

Burton is not a do-nothing mayor. A couple of years ago he headed up a council that pleased homeowner friends by erecting speed bumps on a busy county road that had new homes built a little too close to the traffic lanes for comfort. They were forced to remove them when all those pesky motorists trying to get to Dundas St raised a fuss.

Also, how many mayors do you know who headed a council which found the time to actually ban the city's domestic cats from the outdoors to prevent them from decimating the songbirds? This act alone earned this bunch the approval of the town's hardware merchants whose sales of mouse traps and rodent repellents skyrocketed.

The council Burton headed also protected Oakvillians from all that lethal microwave radiation when they banned the installation of relay towers to facilitate cell phone use. Poor cellphone reception can be improved in Oakville simply by walking to the corner of the yard or climbing to the edge of the roof, activities of measurable benefit to people of sedentary lifestyle.

So stop picking on our mayor whose major flaw, it would appear, is a tendency to implement radically avant-garde ideas before actually thinking them through. Our liberal politicians in Ontario have done that for years and we still re-elected them with a comfortable majority.

We Need War:

Concerned people in the social media wring their hands over all those home-grown jihadis scheming and plotting to sneak over to join ISIS or any of those other primitive militant groups currently butchering each other in the Gulf states.

This isn't just testosterone-fuelled young a-holes looking to make some kind of a quick and easy mark on this world. There's also all those young women trying to sneak off to join a society where they might be raped, enslaved and sold like cattle among the weapons-toting jihadis making war on practically everything that moves.

While people all over the civilized world view all this on 50" flat-panel high definition screens in climate-controlled homes or tune in events on the stereo in their high tech cars, their kids scheme to get away from it all and put their lives on the line for someone else's lunatic-fringe cause.

Illogical? Sure, but as usual, there's a reason. It is almost certain they are looking for alternatives to their secure, predictable, unchallenging, parents-sponsored lifestyle which they interpret as dull and uneventful.

Simply put, it's possible these kids don't know that they are secure and comfortable. Comfortable compared to what?

And therein lies the problem.

All of the participants in WWII learned what war was. The ones who did not directly participate in the bombings and killings scanned the casualty lists daily, read the headlines and watched the action on the newsreels at the local theatre. We learned to live with the uncertainty, the food shortages, the rationing, strictly regulated war time economy and the lifestyle changes it necessitated.

When the last battles were fought and peace declared, everybody knew what they had to do to achieve a peaceful, predictable society and went ahead and did it.

My generation is probably the last one that lived in a severe war time economy in North America. We knew what war was, and unless you have this knowledge, you cannot know what peace is. The current generations can bandy about terms like War and Peace without having any practical insight into those conditions.

And that's what's happening in the chaotic end of our social spectrum right now. We have several generations out there whose members cannot know peace simply because they do not know war. It's been too long since the last great global slugfest.

That is why they go looking for it among the rejects in unevolved societies.

It ought to be easy to conclude that the problem with these kids is that our social consciousness needs another solid infusion of perspective.

Evolution:

It's time to take the subject of Evolution to a level that would resonate with the social class who still somewhat derisively refer to it as Darwinism.

Let us leave Darwin's Galapagos and its unique flora and fauna alone for a moment and come closer to home. To my recollection, it was at some time during or immediately after WWII that the subject of penicillin first emerged upon the social consciousness. Hailed as a miracle antibiotic, penicillin was immediately employed, needed or not, to hasten the healing of all kinds of infections.

Following Dr. Alexander Fleming's proven formula for raiding the world of molds for healing potions, other researchers began to produce all kinds of antibiotics to try promote easy and rapid healing of all infections, real or imagined.

It took less than four years for researchers to begin to notice diminishing returns. The microbes were developing strains increasingly resistant to the overused healing potions.
Clearly, these microbes were evolving right before their microscope optics.

That's what microbes do best. Able to generate new offspring within hours, if not minutes, the process of natural selection was able to stay ahead of the game.

This alone should have served to verify Charles Darwin's conclusions on how species develop and survive, but sometimes it is impossible to convince minds set in rock-solid ideology.

If the truth were acknowledged, it's not just living things that evolve. We now know that stars evolve, galaxies evolve, and the whole universe is caught firmly in the grip of evolution. While it is not a contest of survival of the fittest, everything is on an evolutionary track to a foreseeable end.

Trump for Prez:

My choice for prez of the US of A from this side of the border would be Donald Trump. It's an easy way to antagonize all of the left-leaning media who have done their best over the years to make The Donald look inept.

For God's sake, the guy's a multi-billionaire. Unlike the vast majority of his critics, he must have done more than just a few things right in making his life's vital decisions.

Regardless of how one views Trump, one thing is for sure. Trump is not a member of that gang of media-led, politically correct, irrationally inclusive sycophants that have taken it unto themselves to tailor opinions for Americans who have none of their own. Due to advances in media technology put within easy reach of the chaotic end of our social spectrum, they have done that successfully and are in the process of going ahead and doing it some more.

It is high time to eviscerate this element from the social consciousness on both sides of our border in order to get back into some semblance of reality.

Trump strikes me as exactly the kind of individual who can get in there and stir the witches' brew that the social consciousness of America has become back into something people can once again believe in.

From here, it is easy to see Trump as the guy who can deter the Americans from continuing the painful process of electing people for attributes that have nothing to do with what is actually required for the post. 

In Canada, just to be non-traditional, we've been electing politicians for such qualities as charisma, ethnicity, skin color, sex, sexuality, and physical condition. Track record, street smarts and actual experience are of low priority.

In October, we did it again.

The Americans are currently being media-programmed by the forces of political correctness and all-inclusivity to do the same.

Trump just might be America's last chance to hang on to some semblance of significance on the international scene which is currently in a state of erosion in a rapidly changing world.

He may not have a hairstyle the lefty media can admire, but there's no question he has something most politicians today lack: the backbone to do what's right instead of just how to get elected.

Since, as a multi-billionaire, he's already independently wealthy, we know for sure that he's not after the gilded lifestyle, golden parachutes and pensions the politicians reserve for themselves.

Non-traditional Choices

The Canadian electorate has made non-traditional choices in our leadership since the '60s.

First, 20 years after the successful conclusion of WWII, we elected as prime minister a guy who contrived to avoid military service during that war. That wasn't too shocking at the time since we had on hand an influx of draft dodgers from across the border hiding out in Canada.

And having made that curious decision, we broke with the tradition for the post of Governor General of Canada. Instead of selecting someone with a solid record of service to the British Empire, or of some real significance to Canada, the powers -that-be began to offer us more non-traditional, marginally-significant people with mysterious credentials for such public posts.

Clearly, the appointments had taken on a non-traditional aura. We ordinary working people were mystified by some of the choices, but were actually too busy to ask questions and did nothing as these things were sneaked past us.

And, as a matter of fact, that is still being done. Many of those appointments are still mysterious.

We were first with a prime minister in the form of a female. While easier to look at, she turned out to be clearly a poor choice for the job at hand as events quickly showed.

It might be assumed, with some accuracy, that the Canadian electorate was kept in the dark on the choice of candidates for many of these posts. We also have to assume those choices were made by behind-the-scenes committees comprising manipulative individuals of politically-correct, all-inclusive, non-traditional headspace, making full use of electronic advances to spread their propaganda to condition the electorate.

Unimpeded by a formalized and largely unnecessary Charter of Rights and Privileges, our US neighbors carried on as usual for a while. Eventually, they succumbed to the new social order and elected a not-quite-white president. In the absence of other visible attributes, it is easy to assume that the colour of his epidermis was taken into account.

Now it seems they are polishing up a white female for that role. Hilary Clinton is making strong waves in the left-leaning media. It is possible her proponents see her as potential material largely because she is a female, the wife of a former president.

In our current social consciousness, female is in, white male is out. The white male's historically recorded past achievements are forgotten and all of society's ills are attributed to him.

Years of media sloganeering with such terms as pro-active and affirmative action are bearing results.

In Canada, the liberal party is fielding for the post of prime minister the son of a previous prime minister despite the fact he has zero political experience and shows few qualifications that might be viewed as what's needed. (Oh, yeah. He's a pretty good boxer.)

Obviously, fielding this guy shows that the liberals have enough confidence in the Canadian electorate's collective lack of good judgement to actually elect someone with such qualifications.

Wouldn't our North American voters who have been led to fall for the politically correct, non-traditional, all-inclusive sloganeering be better off if they were offered candidates who are at once (1)sexually indeterminate, (2)with multi-colored skin, (3)judgement-impaired (4)of unevolved ethnicity, and (5)physically handicapped? 

Since our democracies are at stake here, would that not get this painful, drawn-out process of politically correct, none-traditional all-inclusiveness out of the way all at once so that we could return to fielding candidates with actual qualifications for the job at hand?

Just asking.

Farming fun:

About the time when old Clifford Sifton was lighting a fire under Ottawa’s politicians to settle the west before the Americans did it for them, the advertising agencies of the day hyped it up to make migration into western Canada very attractive. 

They painted western Canada as a land of milk and honey and abundant wheat crops with all kinds of space for mega-ranching and cattle herding. Ads and posters showed spectacular four-colour scenes from prairie skies to majestic Rockies, all aimed at firing up the imaginations of land-hungry immigrants.

As we westerners already know, we’re here because our grandparents were among all those who took the bait. It worked not only on East European would-be land barons and cattle kings, but also on many members of the West European gentry, some of them with the means to properly finance such dreams.

Manor houses and country clubs ready to service upscale communities were initiated in a few choice locations. This was not exactly par for the course with the average homesteaders who arrived with nothing more than big dreams and hand tools to dig, clear bush and build very basic sod shelters for the family. 

Since railway tracks were necessary to access produce everywhere the homesteads went, many looked for work laying track to earn money to buy oxen and horses.

The British gentry who thought they could carry on their upscale lifestyle with saddle horses, fox hounds, rare vintages and polo ponies in the vast expanses of the new land did not anticipate what they would encounter by way of climatic conditions. 

They failed to consider that there was no warm Gulf Stream current moderating temperatures on the bald Prairie. It took only one or two winter seasons to inspire many of them to gather up whatever belongings were portable and scurry back to the familiar neighbourhoods of the old country.

Most of them did not hang around long enough to realize the full potential of the new lands overseas. In order to do that, it was necessary for the newcomers to have a fertile imagination and enough motivation to stay put and tough it out.

Those who stayed were generally too busy to do all of the things they wanted to do. Priorities included the need to establish schools, churches, Postal service, organize municipal government and do everything necessary to build functional communities. That was what my grandpa Casimir Bielecki had to do, and he did all those things successfully. 

His sons, Carl, Steve, John and Joe had more time at their discretion to do the things Casimir had little time for, but the onset of the Great Depression brought their rapidly evolving lifestyle to an untimely recess as credit dried up and prices for farm produce hit rock bottom. 

My father, Steve, sold a cow for $5–-that’s one whole cow, not a cheap cut of meat. He shipped a train carload of barley to the Lakehead terminals, took a $100 deposit and was informed a week later that he owed for the delivery.

That's how Generations 1 and 2 fared. We are members of Generation 3, our children Generation 4, and so on. As the years drift by, memories of our friends and relations tend to become more refined as the experience of years snaps past events into clearer focus.

Memories have a way to become more enhanced and some of my favorites are those of my father’s youngest brother, my uncle Joe. That is because Joe Bielecki is the uncle I interacted with more than with the others over the years. 

Uncle Joe liked to read and he recognized my own need to read and my interest in things technological. He passed on his mechanical magazines to me after he had read his fill. These included Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Science and Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated. He picked these up at one of the stores in Tiny, SK, a nearby CN whistle stop with about three grain elevator companies doing business with the local farmers. 

Stores in Tiny at that time were operated by Gushulak and Cymbalisty. They were there to serve the farmers who hauled their grain to the elevators and picked up their groceries and dry goods on the way home. 

While all stores were general in nature, these small country shops were the convenience stores of their day. The real stores, both department and otherwise, were in Canora, the nearby rail centre.

When the railways were built, these little whistle stops with grain elevators sprang up about every ten miles, just far enough apart to accommodate farmers hauling a double or triple box wagon load of grain pulled by a pair of draft horses. The one at Tiny was within comfortable distance by bicycle for uncle Joe to do his magazine and book shopping.

This was the late ‘30s and early ‘40s when people were still coping with the results of the Great Depression which cut off credit and wiped out a significant portion of the gains the early pioneer farmers had made. It became necessary for them to give up their tractors and Model Ts to fall back into survival mode with horses and buggies. 

Being forced to abandon his Titan tractor, uncle Carl, the eldest brother in the family, took to raising beautiful Clydesdale draft horses with reddish fur, blonde manes and feathery pasterns on their oversize hooves that made them look as though they were forever wearing their heavy winter boots.

Uncle Joe took another route. He started raising Hackneys. That’s the fancy high-stepping horses the queen uses to tow her ornate, gold-trimmed carriage on state occasions. While he had no gold-trimmed carriage, Uncle Joe was nevertheless going to travel in style.

He acquired a pure-bred champion stud, Black Diamond, to sire his herd. Beautiful horse. His services were in much demand among local farmers. When Uncle Joe rented out the stud’s services, somehow the word got around and the local farmers gathered to watch the nuptials. 

Why, is anybody’s guess, but a good theory is that the horses’ reproductive equipment, both male and female, resembles closely the human equivalent, only larger, and the farmers at that time had no high-definition big screen TV nor portable telephones to inject a little diversion into their spare moments.

Uncle Joe took his status as a gentleman farmer seriously. Besides raising Hackneys, he also had a wide variety of pigeons, including rollers, tumblers, homers, fantails, and probably spinners, or whirlers, etc. His only problem with these was the Peregrine falcons, whose favorite prey is doves, close relatives of the pigeons. 

In time, the pigeons learned that a good way to avoid the falcons’ attacks was to dive for the earth and start walking. The falcons evolved to attack in the air and didn’t know what to do with a bird that chose to walk, so they landed and walked along behind, in the hope that their intended dinner would decide to take off.

On more than one occasion on the way to or from school, we kids amused ourselves watching pigeons walking across the black summer fallow fields with a hungry peregrine marching along behind in lockstep.

On winter weekends, when the snow in nearby fields was just right, Uncle Joe would come and pick me up driving a fast team of Hackneys hitched to an articulated sleigh with a two-level box. Concealed within the box, crouched on a layer of straw, were three dogs: Smokey, a tall greyhound, and two smaller, not so swift, but much more deadly pit bulls.

If the snow layer was no deeper than a foot or so, and temperature not too low, we would head out across the fields until we spotted a coyote. That seldom took longer than a few minutes and at that point, Uncle Joe would prompt Smokey to have a peek. 

The huge hound would raise his head over the level of the box and scan the indicated scene. When he spotted the coyote–-usually a black dot on the snowy horizon–-he would bound out of the sleigh box and take off in a straight line for the coyote.

With Smokey well on his way, uncle Joe turned the two killers loose and they scrambled out of the box and immediately fanned out, one to either side of the hound’s trajectory. This worked well when the coyote decided to turn either one way or the other, in which case one of the pit bulls would be upon him in short order.

Hiyaah! The Hackneys would accelerate into a galloping mode and take off in the same general direction. We’d grab onto some solid part of the sleigh box and hang on. The chase was on!

Smokey’s bounds were a measured 22 ft between touchdowns, so he covered a lot of distance and closed on the unfortunate coyote in short order. The big hound was not a killer. He would simply overtake the coyote and knock him off his stride. As the coyote turned to defend himself, the killers would be upon him. The end was quick and merciless. One less coyote for the farmers to worry about.

This is not exactly the type of fox hunting the Brits expected to be engaged in, with a couple of dozen baying Beagles harassing a fox, but it was damned efficient and useful to the farmers who tried to raise livestock and poultry without having to share with the local predators.

And it was fun. Bloody, but fun. Something to do which I appreciated during my high school years. I spent parts of the occasional weekend with Uncle Joe and the memories that were generated survive to this day.

Smokey provided plenty of action. Uncle Joe told me about one occasion when the hound took off on his own and tackled a wolf and came back needing some patching up. Another time, the adventurous hound took off all by himself to tackle a coyote which turned out to be an amorous female and wound up coming home much later with a smile on his face, but looking quite apologetic for his impulsive behavior.

We speculated that it is entirely possible that somewhere in that part of the prairies is a sub species of extremely tall coyotes that can outrun a dirt bike.

It ought to be quite obvious that Joe Bielecki was a man with a lively imagination who did what he could to realize the full potential of what life had to offer in Canada’s early west. He was a fun guy and I was lucky enough to share some of his activities with him.

His mechanical magazines had a hand in shaping my future, as well. When, years later, I joined the business press division at MacLean Hunter in Toronto, I found immediate success as editor of Canadian Automotive Trade Magazine, Automotive Service Data Book and the Car Life section in Maclean’s Magazine.

I wound up my writing career doing technology articles, some international award winners among them.