Hunting Stories
One night Exzbya Fronsway and John Prentice ( son of Michael ) went jacklighting for fresh venison on the Mississippi near Loney Chutes. When dawn arrived the hungry meat hunters went ashore for breakfast. Fronsway pulled the deer out of the canoe and skinned a hind leg and cut off a haunch of the ham. He had a little bake kettle and he fried the meat in it with a loaf of bread. They were just about to eat when who should come walking up over the portage but George McAlistar our brother. ( Brother to Isabella, Joe’s wife; Henry’s maternal grandmother.) He was the first appointed game Warden. Of course young Prentice, he saw the prison bars right off but it didn’t faze the Indian. He said, “ Good morning, Mr. McAlistar, in it; have you had your breakfast, in it?”
“ No, by jinkers, I didn’t.”
“ Get your dish, in it; there’s lots of venison in the pot, in it. Eat your fill then go home and shut your mouth, in it.”
On another occasion John Prentice and Peter Stringer went jacklighting deer. Prentice paddled while Stringer sat in the bow armed with a double barrel muzzleloader. Buckshot was in one barrel, a ball in the other. Nothing. Then towards morning Prentice eased Stringer up to a “ great big deer that stood mesmerized.” Prentice waited for Stringer to shoot. And waited. Finally, out loud, Stringer asked, “ which trigger do I pull for the right barrel?” The buck took off and John Prentice was in one bad humour having paddled Stringer around all night.
Speaking of Peter Stringer, he attended School Section (SS) #1 Carlow for one year. It was the first school in that country and Joe Stringer was instrumental in building it for he donated a piece of land on the south end of his lot 21,con.5, one quarter mile east of Boulter P.O. He hewed log pines there and built a school in 1876. Peter Stringer cut the wood and kept the fires going for the one winter that he attended. Henry’s mother Marian was 15 when the school was built; Stringer was 17. Peter Stringer, Henry’s uncle, with just one year of formal education, went on to be “ as good a bookkeeper as ever put a pen into a ledger. He kept the municipal books, the cheese factory books, ran Fort Stewart Post Office, and operated a general store in Fort Stewart.”
Go West Young Man?
When Henry Taylor’s older brother Jim was 16 he went west to visit his grandfather Robinson Taylor to see if he would like to settle there. “ The day Jim arrived it was a hot day in the summer and he was awful dry for a drink of water. Well, one taste of that alkali water turned him off and Jim returned to Raglan where he described the bush and surrounding hills as the poor man’s coat.”
In 1906 Alex Taylor bought part of the Conroy Farm on the marsh and moved his family there. Two year old Henry walked the one mile to his new home.