Ross Mayer's great grandfather was the first of Ross's ancestors to come to Canada and settle in the region where Ross was born and lived all his life. The great grandfather came with nothing but the clothes on his back and began working for a logging concern as a lumberjack. He worked as such for many years, living a frugal life, saving what little he could, until he was finally able to purchase a small piece of land that no one else wanted. He cleared the property by himself, piling up the rocks and stones at the location he had chosen for the stone cabin he intended to build. He left a life in the old country that had no prospects and was ravaged by a plant disease that made farming impossible. He had no family members remaining alive due to a horrible pandemic and starvation. The small piece of land he purchased bordered a beautiful, fresh river. He was ripe with hope and worked tirelessly, all hours of the day, sleeping little. Hunting and fishing were good in the area and he was ever grateful for his full belly and good health. He had a gift for dealing with people, a kind, trustworthy face, and he gave gifts of food and animal skins to the local natives, not as any form of tribute or payment for safety, but because he genuinely liked everyone he met. He always saw the good in people and was generous. He was the first white in the area and when a few more whites arrived, his caring, helpful nature, caused them to consider him a spiritual man, not like any sort of narrow-minded, dogmatic, religious leader but as a good, forgiving spirit who put others before himself. A small community gravitated around him and they worked together. He married a native woman and they had many children together.
This was the man that Ross's great grandfather chose to be and he was fully aware of that. He had been a child like any other, reaping his own share of trouble, always blaming others for his own faults and ill luck. When he was thirteen years old, he beat a woman to death, in order to steal a scrap of food from her child, victim of his ravishing hunger. The child died soon after, lonely, hungry and sick. His crime haunted him ever after, chasing him onto the ship that brought him to Canada where he hid as a stow-away. There were other stowaways and they were all found dead or if barely alive, put to work on the ship in the worst conditions that usually resulted in death due to excessive malnutrition and physical exposure. Yet he found a sort of justification for this treatment of him, and accepted and even wanted punishment. Slowly, without him being aware of it, for certainly in the conditions he suffered he had no time or strength to think or daydream, and his sleep, though he was physically beyond physical exhaustion, was insufficient, broken, vacant of dreams, such that his brain was not able to perform the necessary reparative and healthy functions that occur in that state. Still he was haunted by the horror of his crime. He wouldn't believe in God or the Christian teachings prevalent in the culture he was surrounded by, though he could never admit this to others or to himself. He was angry at God for the suffering and unfairness of the world. In spite of this, the suffering he felt gradually, ever so gradually, cleansed his spirit and caused a change to grow in him. He suffered horribly what was the lot dealt him, made into a mindless skeleton that was consuming his own organs to survive, so numb to the pain that he was hardly able to feel it anymore, but the spiritual cleansing continued unconsciously. Eventually he was thrown overboard because he was thought to be dead. Miraculously this happened close to the wilderness shore, though far from the ship's destination. He drifted unconscious and while he was being pushed about by the waves, he became stuck between rocks and a man waded out to him and dragged him to shore. Suddenly he began breathing again, like a baby taking its first breath, and life was restored to him, a new life with a clean spirit nourished by the manure of guilt.
Ross's great grandfather soon realized there was something very wrong with the man who had dragged him from the water. The man was apparently speaking English but made no sense at all. He obviously had an infection working its way up his left arm. The veins in his arm were swollen and bright red. The man was delirious from fever. He didn't eat and had nothing to share with Ross's great grandfather. He had loosely tied Ross's great grandfather by the wrists and ankles and muttered about having eaten human flesh the previous winter. This was a very isolated place and there was no one around for miles and miles. Somehow Ross's great grandfather was regaining some strength. The land was ripe with berries that gave life-restoring energy. The man had a rifle and suddenly began shooting it at Ross's great grandfather who, luckily, with quick reactions and a powerful will to survive, dodged and evaded the carelessly aimed shots. Ross's great grandfather untied the rope around his ankles and wriggled out of those around his wrists while this was happening. When the rifle ran out of shots, it was relatively easy for Ross's great grandfather to overpower the man. The man was struggling to breathe. Unbeknownst to Ross's great grandfather the man was having an allergic response to an insect bite and his windpipe was swelling and closing in on itself. Ross's great grandfather took the gun and left the man to his own devices, actually wishing there was something he could do to help him but there wasn't, and by the time Ross's great grandfather left, the man had no pulse at all. Thus began Ross's great grandfather's trek that brought him to the land he eventually acquired and the place where he started the family industry that over the generations grew into ups and downs of great wealth.
The river bordering the land Ross's great grandfather bought fed into a huge lake. The center was fairly circular approximately seven miles in diameter, and there were eight long bays, all more or less the same length and width, each about twenty miles long and a half mile wide. Hundreds of islands populated the lake, some larger, some smaller. The water was icy cold and crystal clear. Fish could be seen swimming over the clean rock bottom. The lake was part of a vast water system of lakes and rivers that went in an enormous arc around Hudson Bay and across Canada, east and west. An ancient, dense forest of mostly old trees and thick bush covered the land for thousands of square miles: tall, broad pine, clusters of maple that turned a brilliant red in the Fall, birch and oak, with cedars leaning over the shoreline and stony beaches littered with driftwood.
In time Ross's great grandfather purchased the logging business he worked for and bought more land in the region. When Ross's grandfather and brothers were grownup, they had learned and adhered to the economic and work principles that guided their father and eventually all the lands around the lake belonged to them. After Ross's great grandfather died, his children continued and grew his business interests, adding other types of industry to the original logging interest. Mining became the most important among road building, boat and vehicle construction and parts, agriculture, trading post and general supplies. In fact all the business conducted in the region was owned by the Mayer family. New-comers rented or leased their homes from the Mayer business holdings because the terms were always undeniably fair and generous to anyone the Mayers dealt with as were all prices the lowest available in the country. So under the rule of Ross's grandfather's generation, the business concerns increased exponentially and amalgamated under one umbrella company, thanks to the grandparents all honestly getting along famously well with each other. But hard times did not spare the family and came upon them concerning the generation following, a generation of children of which only Ross's father and Ross's uncle survived of twenty-eight babies born, for reasons suffered and grieved, never understood. Was God exacting pay for the fortunes of the grandparents' generation? These were thoughts, and dreaded, lurking suspicions, fogging the minds of the bereaved parents.
Ross's father and uncle watched the deaths of their siblings and cousins in trepidation, also with intense concern for the punishment of God as they understood it, while making attempts to appease God's apparent anger. The native population was also experiencing an epidemic of disease entirely new to their race. Many prayers were said amid an increasing loss of faith. Ross's uncle was ten years younger than Ross's father and was of a weak physical constitution. Ross's father and uncle were close and shared their thoughts and feelings, working well together with the family business. Ross's uncle finally died in middle age from a diagnosis of consumption. He never married. Ross's father had two children, Ross and younger Jeremy. Ross's mother died from an infection after giving birth to Jeremy and the two boys were raised by a nanny who had six children of her own. Ross's father died when Ross was nineteen and Jeremy died in a bear attack a year after that.
Ross continued to run the business on his own. He worked very hard and actually paid his managers substantially more than he took from the business himself, most of whom were the children of the nanny who raised him. The managers were well aware of this as the company books were honest and open to them and consequently they gave full loyalty to Ross, contributing all their ability to the well-working of the company. All company profit was given annually to the children of the region on the occasion of their birthdays, divided amongst them equally. A daycare and school were also funded and run by the community mothers.
Ross had no sense of status or social hierarchy. He routinely worked with the labourers of the various businesses and personally made sure that he knew every individual who worked for him. He liked all of them. But this generous, kind, friendly attitude that was loved by so many of those who knew him could also backfire. In the culture beyond Ross's influence, greed and the concomitant lust for power, ruled, and seeped into the mentality of all those who were within reach of its invisible, unrelinquishing grasp. The company had been written about in the national financial magazine and attracted the attention of a clever team of thieves who came to Ross's town ostensibly looking for work. Ross's completely unruthless character led the thieves to consider Ross an easy mark. Ross's wife, Mary, was taken hostage and the largest ransom in history up to that time was demanded for her exchange. She was pregnant, in her second trimester, taken while innocently hanging her laundry up in the yard on a beautiful warm, sunny day. She disappeared and nothing was heard for four days when a note was delivered by the regular mail saying that Mary was alive and well and would remain so, provided all conditions were met, first and foremost being that no one other than Ross was to know of this going on. Ross had no way of determining whence the letter came and awaited further news, vainly attempting to keep his extreme stress from being noticed and coming up with hopefully plausible excuses as to why Mary was not seen doing what she usually did out and about. Mary was a baker and the other bakers who worked with her asked about her when she didn't show up to make the bread that she would normally produce daily. Friends wondered why she had not met them for tea as she normally would, and so on. The people who worked with Ross knew right away something was very wrong, despite his acting otherwise. When Ross received the instructions, also by post, for the ransom delivery, he had no idea what to do because the only money he could get hold of at the time, was destined for salary and wage payout. Ross went to the destination where he was to leave the ransom money empty-handed, and left a note saying that he was putting up the company for sale in order to meet their request. This resulted in him receiving a few days later a note in Mary's shaky handwriting saying that her kidnappers did not believe him. Her earlobe with the earing she always wore in it came with her note. She also told him that she had suffered miscarriage provoked by a severe beating. Ross broke down when his main manager, Kayliff Whitewater by name, asked him why he intended to sell. Kayliff came up with the plan. Payday was in forty-eight hours, there was enough time. All the funds for salary and wage use would be taken in cash by Ross to the new drop-off location stipulated in the letter from Mary. No one would be told about this. Meanwhile Kayliff would use his dog, the best nose in the region Kayliff claimed, to get Mary's scent and Kayliff with his dog would find out where she had been taken. Ross would not come with them. He would be no help in his emotional state and could arouse suspicion whereas Kayliff and his dog would appear ordinary. They knew Mary had been taken while hanging laundry as the job was left only partially done. The best example of Mary's scent was obtained from her dirty underwear sorted for laundry.
So the plan was put in motion. Ross delivered the funds to the drop-off location and Kayliff with his dog followed the scent still lingering from Mary. They had to follow this plan, Kayliff insisted with Ross, because the kidnappers would not be content with what was given to them and demand more and then later more, until finally they deemed Mary's life to be a liability and not an asset and she would be killed. Kayliff's dog truly had the most gifted nose and was as silent as was his master. The scent was lost several times, but then with systematic patience, found again. Mary had already been trailing blood. The kidnappers had taken her by foot many miles to their camp site. They had no dogs with them. On the second night Kayliff and his dog caught up with them and lay, hidden undetected, in wait. Kayliff was armed with a bow and poison arrows. The opportune moment came when two of the men arrived back at camp with the heavy luggage bag full of paper money. Mary was a short distance away, gagged and bound to a tree. The three thieves became fully focused on the task of counting the money and making sure none blew away in the breeze. Swiftly, Kayliff shot and the first man fell forward into the pile of money with an arrow deeply embedded into his back. Before either of the other two had hold of their guns, the second man got an arrow through his neck. The third man had time to fire a random shot and then he too fell with an arrow through his heart. The poison would begin work immediately even if they were already dead. Kayliff and his dog freed Mary, gathered the money back into the bag, and returned to Ross. The company people were paid on time as usual. Only a few bills were lost to the wind.
Later, Kayliff returned to the dead thieves with a couple other men who were in his confidence. In the darkness of a black, moonless, heavily overcast night, the bodies were taken, arrows removed, castrated, and the private parts tied on string around the men's necks. Then they were hung, execution style on tall poles at the local train station with a sign beneath warning anyone with evil intent to stay away or suffer a similar fate. Everyone heard about what happened to Mary but never learned any of the details about the ransom or about how she was rescued. The big city authorities far to the south found out about what happened but they were too understaffed to care about justice delivered in a community far beyond their jurisdiction or the jurisdiction of any policing authority. A journalist from a big city newspaper came and took photos of the kidnappers which were later published in the newspapers and sold out all copies of several editions.