Pigs and cows and chickens could not have been the only animals about. Redmondville was a fair distance from any sizable town and the bush encroached close up on the farms,including the one we lived on.The bush was quite thick in most places and you could easily gotten lost just a few steps in.
We were never allowed to go down the road behind our neighbors trailer.It wasn't much of a road to begin with,but it ended just a short way from the blacktop.There was a pile of dirt there,and often a big muddy puddle,likely enough to drown a small child.The road went on into the woods,but was really only a path at that point.Anytime I asked what was down that road,I was quickly redirected.But I really wanted to find out.I wanted to go down that road.
It would be reasonable to think that there could have been bears down that road.Certainly it's the kind of road where you could easily find bears.There may well have been wolves around then too.I don't remember seeing or hearing any though.And I've always heard it said that there were woodsmen or bad men living in the woods. More likely the adults were concerned about hunters.Hunting has always been big in rural New Brunswick,and every year of my life I've seemed to hear of at least one hunting accident.My mother would not only have feared a stray bullet,but she would not have wanted us to see a dead animal either,or,for that matter,a gun.
One night ,after dinner we all got into the car and went for a short drive up the road.In which direction,I could not tell you,but it wasn't far from home.We were going to see if we could see a beaver.We never did.We walked out into the bush,a fair way off the road,and it was rough going.Before long we came to this big pond,or perhaps it was a small lake.The water was still and dark and there were all sorts of grey trees that seemed to be broken off and dead.They were in the water,and all around the water's edge too.There was a lot of deadwood lying all over the ground too and it was hard to walk around without tripping.This was the place where beavers lived.I could recognize it easily today,but I'd never been to such a place before then.We waited around for some time,but we never did see a beaver.
Whenever I was outside in the driveway I would always hear chainsaws running.It's the one sound I've come to associate most closely with rural New Brunswick.Log trucks passed up and down the road in front of our house too,and there were a lot of little cross roads where wood was piled up for the trucks to pick up. Redmondville was a place seemingly made out of wood.Wood and old broken down automobiles.
At some point my father bought an old dodge truck.It was a sort of a midnight blue,with blotchy paint and very rusty in places.It would have been a late 1940's model and it seemed very old even then.That was most likely because it had received a lot of hard use.It burned oil,a lot of oil,and it seemed to rattle and shake when you were anywhere near it.There was a sort of stick coming up out of the floor,which my father used to drive the truck.But when it wasn't being driven,when it was still running though,that stick shook all over the place.That truck fit right in with our surroundings.It was a very blue collar vehicle,and my mother never drove it.My father had a car too,a Valiant,which was a much nicer car,and better to ride in too.But we did go into the woods a few times with the truck.We hauled some wood and we went to some places the car could never have gone.We drove it all the way down to the beach a time or two as well.It really wasn't all that far away,but it looked very different from the land around our home.
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