(1:13:03) Alice – Well I didn’t like mice, but at Healy Creek I didn’t have to worry about it because we didn’t have mice at Healy Creek. (At Windy) we caught 16 mice in three nights with one trap. It never gets that hot in Banff, but it did that summer. It was hot and I was so scared that a mouse was going to get down my neck. Here I am sleeping underneath these covers, because I was so scared a mouse was going to go down there. Ole would dump it (the mouse) in the slop pail because he had some water in there and 16 mice in three days…Well they could walk in and out of the walls. So Dorothy and Ed (Carleton) had this mother cat and they loaned it to us and by God she just about cleaned that place up. She did a really good job and then we gave her back.
(1:14:14) Alice – (At Healy Creek) our cabin was nice and tight…But we got a gas washer so we made a hole through the wall for the exhaust…and we had a plug that we would stick in when we weren’t using it. Well one time we forgot to put the plug in. So anyway we were sitting there one night and we could hear this noise underneath the sink and here Ole was going to get it. I said, “Don’t open that door because he will run out and he’ll get in the front room.” And I am sitting in the middle of the kitchen table! But no, he never listens. So he goes and he had my bread board of all things and he is going to whack this mouse when it ran out. So I’m sitting at the table and the only thing there was a tobacco can, and sure enough he opened the door and the mouse popped out. He was going to get in the front room. I flung that tobacco can, turned the mouse around Ole with his one swing got him on the way back! If I hadn’t turned him, he’d have been in there. Yes, I was more scared of the mice then I was of bears. Well at least a bear is big and he’s not going to climb up your pant leg!
(01:15:32) Ole – We were bringing the horses in one spring. Slim Haugen, Wilf Taylor and I. I had my hand up above my head (while they were sleeping at the Windy cabin). I used to smoke in bed and I thought damn it, “I burnt my finger.”…But I didn’t have a cigarette in that hand and I looked and here’s teeth marks. A mouse bit me. That’s when Wilf Taylor standing up putting his socks on in the morning and said “Did a mice bite you?” So I had to show him my finger. That’s as close as I got to being eaten up by wildlife!
(01:17:17) Ole – Catching a ten pound trout [was one of the highlights of his warden career]. That was up in Horsehoe Lake by the Red Deer River up from Scotch Camp. Five of us walked in there that day from Scotch Camp. Ten miles up and ten miles back in one day. There were lots of high spots (in his career).
(01:18:01) Alice – An interesting place was Pacific Rim because it was so totally different from the mountain parks. You know, there was just so much there to learn. I used to love to go beach combing and picking up shells or something. Somebody would come along, so I would take them to the beach and then forget that I had to go home and make supper. They’d finally say, “Don’t you think we’d better be getting back, Ole will be home pretty soon?” I could have stayed out there all night! It was so interesting
(01:18:38) Ole – But everything in Pacific Rim was a high spot.
(01:18:39) Alice – And the people that lived there. It wasn’t a big town. There again they were friendly.
(1:19:12) Ole – Tommy Ross and Jimmy Simes came back from that ski school in Alta, Utah and they made uniforms for them. They were a lighter green then this one, to tell the truth I don’t know where the heck that uniform is at.
(1:19:58) Alice – We (Alice and her friend) worked there (at a small hotel) one summer and we were everything. I was the waitress but I also had to do the rooms. We had to do the washing. We had to do the ironing. We were getting tired of it. I think we were getting paid $40 a month for all this. We decided we’d never get anyplace up in this country [northern Alberta]. So we decided we are going to go to Edmonton and work. It was 200 miles away and we had never been in the city before. So we went and we actually even walked off the street and got a job waiting on tables…So anyways we told them that we could come back but we didn’t. We decided no that’s not for us. Audrey, my girlfriend, she had taken a course at the Vermillion School of Agriculture. She’d actually taken one year there and she worked at the same time. The kids used to do that. So she phoned them to see if there were any jobs down there. They said, “Well, they could use the two of us right now because they were having some kind of a banquet the next night.” So we got on the bus and down we go. Then they only had one job at the college but the hospital needed someone, an assistant cook that was it. So anyways, she took the assistant cook, because she’d been doing the cooking at the hotel. She was just a farm girl. And my job was to help the pastry cook. Grease the pans, measure the flour, and do all this little petty work and she did all the mixing up. Well that was fine. And then on her day off, I had to do it. So I made one mistake and she told me about it. I never forgot and I never made it again. Then we checked the menu. We had a dietician. We had to make this darn custard sauce. We hated making that because you had to cook it just right. Till it coated a silver spoon, this kind of stuff. But it went with this desert. So anyway…we made the custard sauce. Mildred, she was not a young lady, and she came barrelling in there, looked at the menu and she said, “Well we can’t have that for desert.” So we just looked at her. “Because” she said, “You have to make the custard sauce the day before” and she didn’t think that we’d made it. We said, “Well, we made it.” It just shocked her, “You made it?” And we did a good job of it! I think that sold it because what she said had a bearing on whether I was going to get another job or not….
