The Blue Mule was a 1971 Ford F-150 4X4 lovingly cared for by our next door neighbour in The Sticks, Challs.
Challs was a lot like Dad in that he was... and probably still is... and avid Outdoorsman. They hunted and fished together a lot. I went with them a lot, too.
He also kept his house, yard, and equipment very well. Very handy, organized and energetic - and young. Things Dad really wasn't.
The Blue Mule was in absolutely showroom condition from the day we moved to the Sticks, to the day I left for the Army, 11 years later. Challs was always puttering with it, wheel off doing the brakes, or painting the undercarriage, or just washing it.
It was summertime in the Sticks, and, since I have to guess, I'd say I was about 10. My older sister Kat and I were playing aggravation out on the front lawn.
In the late 70s, aggravation was a board game for 2 to 4 people consisting of a set of four marbles for each player. The object was to get you marbles to your home setting using moves around the board from a roll of the dice - wilst your opponent sent you back to your start by landing on you.. It's rather a lot like the Trouble® board game my youngest loves to play with us - except for the clicky-poppy-dice-dome thing.
It was probably the precursor to that, as a matter of fact, but I, as usual, digress.
Challs rolled up during the game, and shouted out the window of the Blue Mule "You guys want a coupla crows?"
Well, Kat and I just looked at each other and dropped everything.
Kat loved animals. Pretty much more than people. That would become more obvious as time wore on.
I suspect it was she knew were she stood with animals, and they didn't disappoint her very often.
In reasonably short order we had the crows set up in a portable pen fashioned out of milk crates, complete with nesting materiel, water and food dishes, and the usual newspaper liner for waste disposal. Kat had come up with the names Po and Blue for them. She claimed the names were a literary reference - but a reference to what... well, I've never figured that out.
The names worked tho. Po was the older of the siblings; just about ready to fly, much more stand-offish and really good at faking self-reliance. Blue, not so much. it took a couple weeks to coax him...
Um. Parenthetical point. To this day I don't know what sex those birds were, and at age 10 I had no way of knowing. I'm pretty sure we just assumed they were males and went with it.
Anyway, it took weeks to coax Blue into the air, and then only for short distances. We had a pretty big back yard, and we started teaching them to fly as soon as they'd regained some strength... and some trust.
Every day Po would watch us teaching Blue. He'd watch from 12 feet up one of our pine trees.
And every night he'd fly back down to sleep in the crate, safely tucked away from the neighbourhood cats.
We had them until around mid August. It may have been later in the summer than that, but it doesn't really matter. They'd just about outgrown their milk crates when we took them to Wasa Lake. We took them to set them free.
Having set up our camp, I took the crates and opened them, and just left the crows to make their own decisions. They both flew up to the same tree. Typically, Po was up several feet higher. We left the crates in view for them during our stay.
One of the cool things about B.C. Provincial parks was that the larger ones had amphitheaters and Interpretive services, where summer students would be employed by BC Parks to lead campers on guided hikes through a given Park.
A couple days in to our camping trip one of theses hikes came by the campsite. I was sitting at the rough-hewn picnic table. The guide pointed out the crows low in the tree, and stated that it was unusual for them to be so close to people.
Couldn't help myself.
I had to.
I stood up and walked toward the tree and held up my hand.
Blue flew right to it and landed on my palm.
The Parks Guide's eyes nearly fell out of her head.
Yes, yes. We eventually let them know.
By the end of 6 days of camping, the crows had got the idea, deserted the tree, and made off to start their proper lives.
After at least four hours of confusion, building, and resourcing, and scrambling around after Challs had handed us a pair of crows, Kat looked at me, and said "It's your turn."
She hadn't forgotten we were in the middle of a game. She was like that.
