Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

16. Good Fences

North of Newell, South Dakota

October, the Second Year

Four miles north of town, Ken and Terry Layton turned east on Parilla Road. The day was warming up, but the earlier chill in the air made it clear that winter was coming.

Two miles down Parilla, they came to a house on the south side with a mailbox marked in faded paint, “NORWOOD.” Even before they arrived, a pair of mixed breed cattle dogs began barking at them. A large ranch house that looked like it dated from the 1960s or 1970s was located twenty yards from the road. Behind it there was a hay barn and a combination shop/tractor shed. There were various other outbuildings and corrals on either side. They could hear cattle mooing in the distance.

As they approached the gate, they heard a shout coming from inside the closest outbuilding, a woodshed: “Identify yourselves!”

Ken answered, “Kenneth and Terry Layton.”

A teenager carrying an M1 Garand rifle and a large revolver in a cross-draw hip holster stepped out of the building, and declared, “Hello! I’m Graham. My dad is expecting you. Come with me, please.”

Graham was lanky and had oily brown hair. He was wearing a heavy brown Carhartt stockman’s jacket, black jeans, and hiking boots.

As they walked, Graham asked, “So, you’re from Chicago, and you’re a car mechanic, and you worked doing security for a farm last winter in Iowa?”

Ken laughed. “You seem to know all about us.”

“We were briefed,” Graham replied matter-of-factly.

As they walked up to the porch, he shouted, “They’re here!” Then, in a quieter voice he said, “If you folks will excuse me, I got to get back to my guard post.”

The front door swung open to reveal a tall man in his late forties, wearing a large-frame Glock pistol in a Kydex hip holster. He was wearing denim pants and a plaid flannel shirt. The man said, “I’m Carl. Please come in.”

He motioned them in the door. “You can put your rifles and packs under the coatrack.” Before leaving his pack, Ken pulled out the letter of introduction, which was protected in a Ziploc bag.

A tall, big-boned woman stepped out of the kitchen. She was also carrying a holstered Glock, but it had an unusual green polymer frame. “Hi, I’m Cordelia,” she said with a friendly wave of her arm. She motioned the Laytons to sit on a couch.

Ken reached across to Carl Norwood’s armchair and handed him the letter.

Carl flipped his eyeglasses up onto his forehead with practiced ease, and took a few minutes to read the letter from Durward Perkins. He held the letter just six inches from his nose, explaining, “I can never find my reading glasses, and I never got bifocals, since I can’t use those shooting with a scope.”

The Laytons sat quietly while Carl Norwood read the letter. At a couple of points while reading, Carl chuckled. Finally, he flipped his glasses back down and handed the letter to Cordelia. He seemed impressed, commenting, “It sounds like you handled yourselves very well when those looters came at you.”

Ken replied, “Well, that was mostly Terry’s work. When it happened, I was late to the party, rolling out of bed. I just added a bit of accompaniment.”

Terry giggled. “Yeah, accompaniment in Bass Staccato, as our friend T.K. would call it.”

Carl grinned broadly. Then he put on a serious face. “Let me give you the layout: It’s just the three of us here—my wife, my son, and I. All our relatives are in Texas and Oklahoma, and we haven’t had word from them since the Crunch. We’ve got 320 acres, mostly paid for—although I’ve no idea what the situation is with mortgages these days.” After a pause to reflect, he went on. “We’re running 120 head of Angus, Herefords, and Bald-Faced Blacks.”

Terry cocked her head, and asked, “We’ve only been around Brown Swiss, and some neighbors had Jerseys. What’s a Bald-Faced—?”

Carl jumped in. “If you cross a Black Angus with a Hereford, they throw a cross called a Black Baldy or what we call a Bald-Faced Black—a black cow with a white face. They’re known for their hybrid vigor. They do really well in this climate, and the cows make really good moms.”

Terry nodded.

Carl Norwood continued, “We have a creek running through the property that by God’s grace runs year-round. We cut hay on about thirty-five acres, and the rest is grazing ground. It’s mostly good ground, and we’ve reseeded a lot of it in a pasture blend. The hay ground is mostly seeded in LG-31 Orchard Grass. A lot of our neighbors have had problems with Knapweed and Leafy Spurge, but we’ve managed to keep those sprayed out.”

Ken and Terry both nodded, as Carl was now speaking in terms that were familiar to them.

“We’ve got three good saddle horses, two geldings and a mare. We also have a semiretired twenty-five-year-old mare, Molly. Her back isn’t up to any heavy loads these days. The other three saddle horses are all less than ten years old, so they have a lot of good years ahead of them. Two of those three are bombproof. We also have Andre—‘Andre the Giant.’ He’s half Fjord, one quarter Percheron, and one quarter Heinz. We use him for all the pulling around here. He’s saddle-broke, but he’s so tall that he’s not comfortable to ride.”

Ken asked, “Okay, I’m stumped. I know what Percheron draft horses and what Norwegian Fjords look like, but did you say ‘Heinz’? What’s a Heinz?”

Carl answered with a laugh, “That’s like a mutt dog—Heinz 57 Varieties.”

“Tell them about our firewood and fuel,” Cordelia urged.

“Oh, yeah. We heat and cook mostly with wood. We have enough wood laid in for this coming winter. I’m out of gas for the chain saw, but we have friends that swap firewood for beef. We have a pickup, an SUV, and two quads, but again, no gas left to run them. We only have about 480 gallons of diesel left on hand and we’re keeping that in reserve for cutting, baling, and hauling hay. I’d like to switch to haying with our horses, but I haven’t found a hay mower yet. I also need more horse collars, hames, and other harness bits. A lot of the horse-drawn mowers either got melted down for scrap iron during World War II, or turned into yard ornaments. Most of those are rusted junk. So I’m still searching. You know, I had the chance to buy any one of several restored horse-drawn mowers that a guy from Wyoming brought to the Antique Tractor Pull that they held every September in Newell. But the Crunch of course brought an end to all those events. It’s now just strictly local commerce. Our world got a lot smaller.”

After a pause Norwood continued, “At least I had the common sense to switch our propane delivery contract to ‘keep filled,’ back when there was the big fight in Congress over raising the federal debt ceiling. So when the Crunch came, our propane tank was almost full. For the last year, we’ve been closely shepherding that supply. Right now, we’re at about 70 percent. We’ve mainly been using that while we’ve been learning to cook on the woodstove. Believe me, that was quite a steep learning curve. Anyway, we won’t starve, and we won’t freeze. Hauling water is a pain, especially when there’s snow on the ground, but we’ll live. We’ve been able to trade butchered beef or cattle on the hoof for just about everything we’ve needed. The big surpluses around here are wool, mutton, lambs, and sugar beets. Since this is mainly sheep country and we’re one of the few cattle outfits, we’re in a fairly strong position for bartering. Eating mutton gets boring in a hurry.”

After another pause he added, “With the power out, we get our water from the creek, and parts of each year from runoff from the roofs on the house and barn. The cattle now get their water straight from the creek. I fenced off the part of the creek that’s upstream of the footbridge out back to prevent any contamination of the water. We run everything we use for drinking through a copy of a Big Berkey filter. It uses ceramic filter elements.”

“Down in Newell, and out on a lot of farms and ranches, people are using water from the Irrigation District ditches,” Cordelia said. “That water comes from the Belle Fourche Dam. Luckily, there’s a manual emergency gate up there. Without that, the people in Newell would have been without water. The ditch doesn’t go through our property, but we’ve got our creek.”

“So, what about your security situation?” Ken asked.

Carl sighed and said, “In a word, our security situation stinks. I’m afraid we’ll get targeted by looters. We’re far enough out of town that we can’t depend on the Vigilance Committee. We also don’t have any neighbors that are within line of sight. So we can’t depend on their help, either. The big problem here is that there’s two main ways into the ranch—from both Highway 79 to the west and from Highway 212 to the east. And of course our house is so close to the county road that it hardly gives us any warning time.”

Terry asked, “So what are you doing for security?”

“We have a big padded swivel chair set up in the corner of the woodshed for whoever’s on guard duty. It’s chilly in the winter, but we’ve got several washed wool fleeces—one to sit on and two others tied together like a serape to drape over you. That corner of the shed has a pretty good view up and down the road and, if you swivel around and look out the other way, you can see two sides of the house and most of the barnyard. We’ve got four walkie-talkies. They’re just the cheap kind—FRS band, from Walmart. I got a 12-volt charging tray that can charge two radios at a time. That is connected to a pair of 6-volt tractor batteries that are wired in series. Those batteries are trickle-charged off a 20-watt photovoltaic panel that I bought a couple of years ago from Harbor Freight company. That’s our only electricity here at the house. I really wish I had a few more panels. With more charging capacity, we could do a lot more than just run the CB and recharge the radios and a few flashlight batteries.

“Recently, Graham and I have been trading off with twelve-hour guard duty shifts, but we’re starting to burn out. At the rate we’re going, we’re just getting exhausted. We don’t have enough time to properly take care of the stock, and there’s no way that next year we’d have the time to cut hay or put in a garden. The past two weeks, we’ve been concentrating on security, and that has forced us to let other things slide. The good news is that we’re pretty well armed, and all three of us are good, safe shooters.”

“That’s right,” Cordelia interjected. “We’re all experienced hunters, but none of us have any military or police SWAT-type experience. We’ve got two .30-06 rifles with scopes, and Graham has a Garand, which is also a .30-06. Plus a Kel-Tec .223, a half a dozen bird guns—12- and 16-gauge—several .22s, and a .17 HMR, which is our ground squirrel gun.”

Ken asked, “What’s the depth of your ammo supply?”

Carl answered, “We’ve got more than 500 rounds of 06, and that includes eighty rounds of the black-tipped armor-piercing. That’s all loaded in eight-round Garand clips. We’ve got just over nine boxes of .45 ACP, and five boxes of 9 millimeter for Cordy’s Glock. We’ve got only about 200 rounds of .223 for the Kel-Tec, but I consider that gun kind of secondary. In open country like this, .30-06 rules. For the shotguns, we’ve got just over twenty-six boxes of shells, mostly 12-gauge. But those are all pheasant and quail loads—we don’t have any buckshot or slugs, so that makes our shotguns useless for self-defense—”

Ken interrupted, “I can teach you how to cut shotgun shells. I saw a YouTube video on how to make cut shells, back before the Crunch, and my buddy Dan Fong and I did some experimenting. When you cut a shell—it’s a scoring cut that doesn’t quite go all the way around—it makes the whole front half of a shotgun shell go down the bore, so that it hits someone like a slug, and then it fragments. It’s a very neat trick, but it’s strictly for single shots and double-barrel guns. You don’t want to have a shell come apart inside a pump or a semiauto. That could cause a jam at the worst possible time.”

Carl looked surprised and said, “Thanks, I’d appreciate seeing how to do that! I’ve got a short-barreled side-by-side 12-gauge we could try that with.”

Ken said, “Sorry, I jumped in there. To get back on track, how’s your supply of ammo in other calibers?”

Carl answered, “We’re in the worst shape on rimfire ammo—less than 300 rounds, including just two boxes for my .17 HMR. My only excuse is that it’s such a long drive from here to any of the big sporting goods stores down in Rapid City that I didn’t have the chance to stock up. That’s a major regret, a huge regret. When the Crunch hit, I got fixated on finding grain and salt for our stock, and propane cylinders for our lanterns. Instead, I should’ve bought ammo first, before it all disappeared off the shelves. I never thought that I’d see the day when el-cheapo .22 rimfire ammo was like gold.

“Oh, I’ve also got several boxes of .30-30 ammo that’s left over from a Marlin lever-action that I traded for a saddle a few years back. I figure that ammo will always be good to trade.”

“Well, with cold weather coming and people wanting to get deer, maybe you can trade that .30-30 ammo for some more .22 Long Rifle ammo,” Terry offered.

Cordelia said cheerfully, “That’s a great idea.”

Ken raised a finger and asked, “How old is your son, and how does he fit into the security arrangements?”

Cordelia answered, “Graham is sixteen going on twenty-six. He’s been homeschooled and he’s really sharp and very levelheaded. He’s shot two deer in the past two hunting seasons: one in the neck and one in the head. Just one shot each. I expect that he’d be up to it, if it ever comes to a real us-or-them kind of shooting situation. His one drawback is that he only weighs 140 pounds. He just needs to fill in so that he can help with the heavy chores.”

Ken asked, “How are you set for handguns?”

“We’ve got only three: my Glock 21, Cordy’s Glock 19, and Graham’s .45 revolver,” Carl answered. “His is an old Smith Model 1917 that belonged to my dad. It shoots .45 ACP just like my Glock.”

Terry interjected again, “So two of your guns also have commonality with our Colt 1911s.”

Norwood nodded.

Terry turned to Carl and asked, “So what’s your worst-case scenario?

He answered with a sigh, “That would be if the bikers that hit Belle Fourche decide to pick on us.” After a pause, he added, “I don’t expect you to stop an army, but I do want to be able to maintain round-the-clock security.”

Ken said quietly, “Understood.”

“We don’t heat any of the outbuildings,” Cordelia told them, “but we have a spare bed that we use out in the barn during calving season we’ll bring in and put in Carl’s office. The computer and phone and fax machine can’t be used these days, anyway.”

Carl added with a grin, “No more tax paperwork to do, either.”

They all shared a laugh.

Only a few days after they had arrived at the Norwoods’ ranch, Ken and Terry were like part of the family. The guard schedule was broken into three eight-hour shifts. Ken, Terry, and Graham took most of the shifts, with Carl helping as needed.

Their main security upgrade was to reorganize the woodshed, stacking the split wood for better ballistic protection. They also cut more advantageous gun ports. The firewood itself provided most of the ballistic protection, but they supplemented it with scrap steel and five 30-gallon drums that were filled with fist-sized rocks and gravel. There was no shortage of rocks on the property.

There was already a bridge across the creek that was intended for the cattle. It had been in place for decades but it sat 100 yards south of the house, which was too far for their current purposes. To provide a safe and convenient way to draw water in buckets from the creek, Carl had constructed a new bridge shortly after the Crunch set in. It was a footbridge thirty yards from the house, and was constructed mainly with 4x4s and 2x6 planks. At the center of the span, Carl had built an extended platform with a notched railing so that whoever went to the bridge to draw water would have a safe place to stand.

Typically, they put the water in four 5-gallon plastic water cans and wheeled them back and forth to the house in a twelve-cubic-foot EZ-Haul garden cart.

The next day, Graham showed them the cattle facilities. There were two large connected corrals, each sixty yards square. There was a pair of small bullpens, also adjoining. There was also a tall connecting alley built of planks, with a veterinary squeeze chute and cattle truck-loading ramp at one end. It had a swinging Y gate panel that could shunt cattle to either a high ramp or a low ramp, depending on the deck height of the arriving vehicle or trailer. The ramps themselves were inexpensively built with earth and used railroad ties. Graham mentioned that the entire property was cross-fenced, allowing for efficient grazing. This also kept the cattle out of the hay fields until after the last cutting.

“We got two hay cuttings last summer, which is unusual for here without irrigation, so we have more than enough hay for this winter,” Carl told them.

“How do you deal with all the manure?” Terry asked.

Pointing his thumb at the barn, Graham answered, “We rig Andre up with a horse collar and an old road scraper. Anything in the corners of the corrals, and in the bullpens, we get by hand with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. Before the Crunch, we used the tractor for most of it, and it was a breeze. But nowadays we can’t spare the fuel.”

Terry sighed. “Sounds like countless hours of fun.”

“Yeah, the manure scraping and hauling takes up a lot of our time. Especially now that we’re penning all the stock up every night, year-round, to prevent rustling, there’s a lot more manure to deal with. Between that and hauling water to the house and doing laundry by hand, the manual labor takes up several hours of our time every day. When the grid went down, it put us back in the nineteenth century.”

As they walked toward the pair of bullpens, Graham asked, “You folks been around bulls before?”

Ken answered, “Yeah. We know to never turn our backs on a bull. Like they say, a bull is a bull.”

“Yes, please do be careful, sir. You pour just a smidgen of grain in either feed trough, and you can get Earl to move where you want him, without any prodding. Just make sure that the connecting gate is latched before you start to shovel manure.”

“Understood.”

Pointing to a large manure pile just south of the larger corrals, Graham said, “There’s no market for our manure these days. Even though we offer it cheap, nobody wants to burn the fuel to come this far out of town to haul it.”

Terry nodded, agreeing. “Fuel is precious, and that’s changed the way people do business. It has changed a lot of things.”

Looking at the enormous black bull in the pen, Ken asked, “What can you tell me about your bull?”

“He’s registered Angus. His name is Earl, which is short for Earl of Aberdeen. He cost Dad $24,000, and that was two years before the inflation kicked in.”

Ken let out a whistle. “Wow.”

Terry chimed in, quoting something that Durward Perkins had told her. “Well, they say that genetically your bull is half of your herd.”

Graham said, “That’s right, ma’am. But pretty soon we’ll be line breeding, using Earl to cover, at least with our next batch of heifers that are coming up. He sired them. So Dad has made arrangements to swap Earl for a dis-related bull that belongs to a man over near St. Ogne. His bull’s genetics aren’t quite as good as Earl’s, but at least his bull has a ring in his nose, and he’s broken to lead. They say he’ll follow you around like a pup. That’s quite an improvement over Earl, who is the classic range bull.”

Terry nodded. “Enough said. We’ll be careful.”

Graham continued, “The only problem is finding a way to transport the bulls, to do the swap. We’re out of gas, and so is the man with the other bull. Oh well, we still have about six months to figure that out.”

Terry asked, “So how are you going to get the cattle to come into the pens when the grass is up, after you’ve run out of grain?”

“Well, we don’t need to use much grain. They come into the corral each night, pretty much like clockwork. It was Mom’s idea to remove the salt blocks from all the pastures, and only give them salt in the corrals. So they have an inducement to come in every night. The cattle have gotten into a habit. Also, our dogs know the routine. They help herd any stragglers in each night. After we run out of grain, we can always use sugar beets. Those work just as well as grain does.”

With the relative luxury of just eight-hour guard shifts, Ken and Terry had more time available than they had the winter before when they were working for the Perkinses.

With several common interests, Terry and Cordelia became fast friends. Terry demonstrated to the Norwoods the method that she’d seen the Perkinses use for mass production of beef jerky. Because the Norwoods had nearly run out of granulated salt, they simply placed a new fifty-pound white livestock salt block in a six-gallon food-grade plastic bucket and added water to form a salt brine. To support the drying rack suspension wires, Ken and Graham used drywall power screws, driven by hand with a Phillips screwdriver.

The Laytons were taught how to tack up and ride horses. They became good riders, but both had trouble learning how to throw a lariat. They also learned how to trim and rasp hooves, and the basics of horseshoeing.

Ken and Terry also spent many hours with the Norwoods, passing along some of the training that they had received from Todd Gray’s retreat group. This included a lot of gun handling, small unit tactics, range and wind estimation for long-range shooting, and immediate action drills. Ken particularly enjoyed mentoring Graham in handgun shooting. Because ammunition was in short supply, most of their training was dry practice. For safety, this instruction was done beside the woodshed with the woodpile providing a backstop.

Graham’s revolver, a Smith & Wesson Model 1917, was a veritable antique but still serviceable. Graham carried the gun in an old cavalry holster that had long before had its original full flap narrowed to just a retention strap. The holster’s butt-forward configuration—originally designed to accommodate cavalrymen carrying both a saber and a revolver—was awkward, but Graham made up for this with plenty of practice. He became lightning fast at reloading the revolver, using spring steel full-moon clips that each held six cartridges. Ken observed that these were faster than any mechanical speed loader that he had ever seen used.

In his years of high-power rifle competition, Ken had considerable exposure to M1 Garand and M1A rifles. So in addition to long-range marksmanship with iron sights, Ken was able to teach Graham some of the intricacies of M1 Garand bore cleaning, gas system maintenance, and greasing of the rifle’s bolt camming surfaces and the hammer.

Ken particularly stressed the importance of repeated cleanings when using U.S. military surplus .30-06 full metal jacket ball and AP ammunition from the 1940s and early 1950s. Much of this ammunition, he warned Graham, was corrosively primed. Ken also took the opportunity to cross-train the Norwoods on handling and fieldstripping their HK, CAR-15, and Colt Model 1911 pistols. The Norwoods reciprocated, teaching the Laytons how to fieldstrip all the guns in their collection.

As winter set in, they got into a regular routine for manning the OP at the woodshed. Remembering the brazier that they had used at the farm in Iowa, Ken, with Carl’s help, constructed a comparable one. The base was a six-foot length of scrap six-inch-diameter well casing pipe. Rather than laboriously cutting off the pipe with a hacksaw, they simply dug a hole with a posthole digger and buried fifty inches of the pipe. This also had the advantage of creating a brazier that they knew would never accidentally tip over. The brazier itself was a mini grill that had been designed for backyard barbeques. It was brazed onto the top of the well casing pipe using a torch from the workshop of a friend who lived nearby, on KLT Road.

Several times that winter they had encounters with refugees. Thankfully, Parilla Road was a side road that received little traffic. The refugees were often seen pushing or pulling a variety of handcarts. These included garden carts, wheelbarrows, perambulators, deer hauling carts, toy wagons, and even a wheeled golf bag. Some of the refugees were persistent beggars, and a few were even stridently antagonistic.

After the first such encounter, Ken mentioned the “safety through anonymous giving” technique that Durward Perkins had used in Iowa. The Norwoods weren’t Christians, but they were moral, and they could see the need for charitable giving. In December, Ken contacted the bishop at St. Mary’s Church in Newell. Two days later, with the help of three men from the church who came in a pickup, they butchered an older cow, a steer, and a steer calf. The latter had been born partially lame the previous spring.

The three men from the Catholic church arrived in a ubiquitous “mobile butcher” pickup with a small boom hoist arm mounted on the back. This arm had a hand-cranked cable hoist. Not wanting to waste any ammunition, they stunned the cattle with a pneumatic captive bolt pistol that was administered to the cows’ skulls, just as they passed through a mechanical squeeze chute. They were then dumped from the chute and quickly “stuck” to bleed out. The oldest man in the group was an experienced butcher, so they made quick work of gutting the cattle and using a meat saw to remove their heads. The hearts and livers went into an ice chest. The guts, lungs, forelegs, and heads went into the manure scraper, to be hauled to the garbage pit for burial. The carcasses were hoisted onto the truck and hauled into Newell with their hides still on.

That afternoon, the meat was butchered into small cuts and hauled to the church and stored outdoors in several old chest freezers that would soon be buried in a snowbank that was formed each year by snow sliding off the church roof. Carl also donated 300 pounds of corn-oat-barley blend cattle feed to the church. When soaked in water and cooked, it made palatable breakfast mush.

Carl painted a sign for his gatepost that directed refugees to the Catholic church, which was located on 6th Street in Newell.

For handling bands of refugees, the Norwoods developed an SOP: Using the Motorola FRS walkie-talkies, whoever was on OP duty at the woodshed would alert those in the house that strangers were approaching. They would then be greeted at shouting distance from behind the small firewood pile on the ranch house’s front porch. Meanwhile, the OP sentry would remain hidden and quiet. In case there was any trouble, the OP sentry would then be the ace in the hole—standing ready to engage anyone at the gate in a close ambush.

After they put up the sign directing refugees to St. Mary’s Church, their interaction with them became more brief and blunt. Usually, Ken or Carl would simply shout, “Read the sign…. May God bless you. Now move on!”

On December 22, Graham rode his horse into town to attend a Christmas party hosted by some of his homeschooling friends. When he returned the next day, Graham gave an update on the security situation in Newell. “There’s a concrete company at the south end of town that used to make pre-cast septic tanks and outhouses for the State Park Department and the Forest Service. Nobody’s heard anything from the owners of the company. I heard that they went to go double up with some relatives in Montana. Anyway, there’s all these vault toilet buildings sitting around, unused. So an ex–telephone lineman with the Vigilance Committee figured out a way to turn them into pillboxes. They set up a generator and used a wet diamond saw to cut gun ports. They hauled two of the vault toilets on trucks to each of the three roadblocks, and set them up on either side of the road. I saw the setup on Highway 212. They have it just east of the KLT Road junction. It is so sweet. They used a bunch of those modular highway concrete center divider things, and laid them out to constrict the road into three S-curves. Cars have to take the new S-turns really slowly. And all the time, they’re in the line of fire of the pillboxes. It’s devastating.”