Our relationship with the RCMP has been very minimal. My husband’s Dad always said, “Avoid the police, lawyers and the court system if at all possible, they can mess up your life!” Good advice. The best way to accomplish this is to obey the law to the letter, and of course all of us do that - right? On the other side of the coin though, we want the police to be available when we need them. But in rural Alberta, due to large distances from the RCMP detachment to the scattered farms in their area of control, they’re just too far away to be of much help in any sort of an emergency.
Our first contact with the RCMP was early on in our back-to-the-land experiment, probably in the late 70’s. A RCMP simply drove into our yard one day, to introduce himself, to see what was going on I suppose. Our goats immediately welcomed him by joyously bounding onto the hood of his cruiser, then the top, then the back. Goats are amazingly sure footed critters. Did you know they can walk along that little ledge at the top of a car door, with the window closed, and not fall off?
Besides our nimble nanny goats we had a billy named Conrad. He had a rack of horns that made him intimidating to most folks, even us. Our son used to “fight the monster” with wooden sword and shield which probably didn’t help to foster his softer side. Conrad added his welcome to the RCMP constable by pinning him up against the house. We apologized for Conrad's manners, rescued the RCMP and after a short but polite conversation he left. We never experienced any unsolicited interaction after that.
But we did raise the alarm when our horse harness was stolen. This was a big deal for us. We got our firewood using horses and we used them in logging both fence posts and trees for income. We could hardly believe anyone would do such a thing! But there was no doubt that it was gone from the shed where we kept it hung. So we called the RCMP to report the theft. The constable arrived the same day we called and was polite and understanding as he took our statement, but we had little hope that our harness thief would ever be found and arrested.
We worried and fretted as to what we could do. Our harness was old, not fancy but serviceable, and we needed it! Finding another affordable set would not be easy. A few fretful days passed, then one sunny afternoon when my husband wandered out behind the barn to take a pee he noticed some straps hanging from a tree several yards away...... Uh oh. There was our “stolen” harness! We deduced that Conrad was the culprit. He must have gotten wrapped up in the harness while using its hanging rack for a scratching post, carried it off tangled in his horns and rubbed it off on the tree. With no small amount of embarrassment we called the RCMP detachment to update the “case”.
We later heard that the infamous “Conrad Caper” was recorded in the detachments’s newsletter, no doubt to ensure that future RCMP investigators would be properly prepared for the real possibility that horned thieves could be hiding in central Alberta.
mltipton.blogspot.com, https://www.facebook.com/Northof543/,
April 14, 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment