Author: admin

Deer have become a pest in the north-east in the absence of an apex predator. As a farmer-to-be, I’m happy to fill that role. Looking into the rules around deer hunting, I find a heavily state-regulated season. Two types of guns are each allowed a month, with another month for bow and arrow. Hardly a regime designed to deter deer. A friend speculates that the rules have been designed by the gun lobby to make it easy to hunt deer. My daughter notes that the incentive to have two different types of gun certainly points to that influence.

A hunter from the neighborhood knocks on our door and offers to lease our land for hunting for $180 a year. He presents himself as a steward of the land, one who leases a few contiguous properties to keep out the “bad hunters” who scare away deer and shoot the babies. He even plants corn on my neighbor’s land to draw in deer. It occurs to me that he and I may not have the same interests vis-à-vis deer. Then again, I can view him as a follower of the Mesolithic practice of maintaining semi-wild feedlots for semi-domesticated herds like the Sami do in contemporary Scandinavia. So I take his money and buy a couple of orange hats.

I feel very special that Frontier has sent a van and a truck to hook us up with fiber optic. In this DIY house of inexpensive and/or repurposed materials, the modem and router feel out of place. Internet is faster here than in the city. I don’t feel confident I can keep up with the previous owner’s hacks, and I’m nervous about a professional plumber’s or electrician’s judgement.

The installer up in the bucket also keeps beef cattle. I admire his economic diversification. He gives me a lead on horse manure. Chasing down the lead, I run into a lamb farmer in the next village. He is a fellow downstater and immigrant. He cautions me against the perfidy of local contractors, and gives me tentative directions. The manure man is very conscientious; his product is not yet composted enough to kill seeds that passed undigested through his horses’ guts. I should come back in a month.

Each time the land is sold, divided, mortgaged, leased, bequeathed, a few sheets of paper get added to the stack. This is how we came to receive a half inch stack of papers. Included are a few last wills and testaments: desires expressed to be buried next to someone, funeral expenses paid. When the land passes from us, we will add to the stack. Each transaction relies on the previous: we are selling you this piece of land, which was given thirty-one years ago to us by… If you are a few acres short, you may have to go back a few generations to make your claim. Claims that are attached to stakes and stones, as you can see above. Measured once upon a time in chains and links. This is why you buy title insurance, in theory. In practice, you couldn’t walk away with the pond you dug, could you, if a distant cousin showed up?

The oldest date is from 1863. The people before that didn’t so much believe in stakes and stones.