Merle (Epp) Hein shot her first bear in the fall of 1960 when she was 19 years old.
She didn’t go looking for the bruin.
It was practically on her doorstep in northern BC’s Peace River country, and her only thought was to protect her one-year-old son.
“Our dog tried to chase it out of the yard, but it wouldn’t leave,” said Hein in a phone interview from her home in Penticton in late July. “I was scared, but I went back inside the house and got my husband’s 303 and went out and shot myself a bear. You do what you have to do.”
Hein was just seven years old when she, her younger siblings and her parents moved from Waldheim, Saskatchewan to northeastern BC. They cleared ten acres of land and homesteaded in the Fort St. John area.
She got married at age 17 in 1958 and went on to raise a family.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, an era when radio and television; and even a telephone, were luxuries in that isolated part of the country, she entertained her kids with tales from her own experience.
A life-long avid reader, her knack for story-telling stayed with her over the years; and now, at age 80 and living in Penticton, BC, she’s made the jump to the printed, or digital, page as a published author.
Her book, entitled ‘Memories, Moosemeat and Mosquitoes: Coming of age on a northern BC homestead’ was completed in late spring and is now available online through Amazon Books.
“My kids would say, ‘mom, you should write this down.’ I never thought anyone would be interested, but then my grandchildren started saying the same thing, so I thought, well, maybe I will write it down.’
She said she sat down at a computer and typed out her memoirs, two-finger hunt and peck-style.
“The memories started coming back faster than I could type,” she said. “I worked on it for quite a while, taking breaks now and then. And when I finished, I sat down and read it and I thought, ‘this really reads like a good story book. I did better than I thought I would.’ It recalls the years from my earliest memories in 1948 to when my husband and I left the homestead after our first-born son died in the fall of 1963.”
She said it was heartbreaking to see her son, who was only two years old at the time, pass away from pneumonia.
“In those days, we were 40 miles from town, out in the bush, and there was no penicillin.”
She said the book includes stories of good and bad times, love, hardship, hope and heartbreak. The experiences of pioneer life moulded her.
“Losing family members, finding love and starting my own family, all while building a new part of BC and learning many lessons along the way,” she said. “I am the person I am today because of those lessons.”
Hein said Waldheim was a “good town” to grow up in, and she has fond memories of her early years there.
She vividly recalls the telephone exchange in their family home.
“I guess you could say it was the nerve centre of the community at the time,” she said. “Mom and Dad ran the telephone exchange in a house on the corner of the main street in Waldheim. It was all party lines, so everybody could listen in on everybody else’s phone calls.”
She said the phone exchange officially shut down at 9:00 p.m. every night. After that there were no calls allowed except in dire emergency.
“The phone was a privilege in those days,” she said. “Not like now, where everybody carries a phone with them everywhere they go.”
Hein remembers a traumatic experience in Waldheim when she was six years old. Her family home burned to the ground, although thankfully no one was hurt in the blaze.
“I had younger siblings, including a pair of twins that were only about a month old at the time,” she said. “I had a habit of going downstairs in my pyjamas to eat breakfast. I remember when I went back upstairs to get dressed, I saw the floorboards of the second floor were on fire.
“I went back downstairs and told my dad. He said, ‘that’s not funny. You shouldn’t make jokes like that. Go back upstairs and get dressed.’
“I said, ‘no, dad, there really is a fire,’ and I burst into tears. So he went up and looked for himself, then he came back down in a hurry and ran and got my uncle who lived nearby. They tore up the floorboards all day long.”
Despite their efforts, the fire kept smouldering inside the walls, ceiling and chimney of the house, and the following day it burned down despite the efforts of the volunteer fire department. By then the family had time to remove all their belongings and no one was hurt. They then moved to a farm outside Waldheim.
The loss of the house, combined with a dry year reminiscent of the 1930s, an abundance of grasshoppers, and a dislike of the recently-elected CCF government, prompted Hein’s father and several other family members to consider a move to the Peace River country. Quarter-section homesteads were available if you cleared 10 acres of land and lived on it for six months of the year. It was a tempting offer, particularly to people who didn’t have a lot of ready cash, but had an axe.
“My dad had no idea what he was getting into,” she said. “You can’t clear ten acres of forest without heavy machinery, but we didn’t realize that at the time.”
She said the family made the move in a sickly 1928 Chevrolet sedan, which finally gave up the ghost completely just a little bit shy of their destination.
“We walked the last four miles through muskeg, surrounded by mosquitoes big enough to carry you away,” she said.
Moose meat was a staple in the early years, she added.
“We lived on moose that my dad hunted,” she said. “In our house the joke was if you wanted a sandwich you put a piece of bread between two hunks of moose meat.
“We didn’t have a lot of luxuries, that’s for sure.”
Hein said the area where they homesteaded, at Flat Rock, BC, 47 miles from Fort St. John, is good farming country now, but that’s the result of decades of hard work by farmers.
She said writing, like farming, is hard work, but also just as rewarding.