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.
