Those boots were made for walking, but Bill Risling did not expect they would walk away from his fence line. He knows they did not shuffle off by themselves.
For the past 14 years, Risling had been assembling a collection of cast-off cowboy boots to decorate the fenceposts bordering his farm, near Scott, Sask. “I had about 60 of them, stretching out for half a mile,” he said.
Most of Risling’s boot collection disappeared around Dec. 5. “A friend was helping me put up Christmas decorations in the front yard and he looked at the fence and said, ‘Bill, did you know your boots are gone?’ “
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When they walked along the fence, they discovered a dozen badly worn boots in a pile. “Whoever took them was selective,” Risling noted. “They took the better ones. The shafts were still good on some of the boots, so maybe somebody thought they’d be worth putting new soles on.”
The boot display “set a western atmosphere” for the Risling farm, where he and his wife, Valerie, raise grain, quarterhorses and cattle on five quarter-sections. “It was a landmark,” he added.
Well-known sight
“A couple of times, even when we were in Saskatoon, if I told someone we lived a mile north of Scott, they’d say, ‘Oh, where the boots are on the fence?'”
Risling had hoped to obtain a box of “trade-ins” from a Calgary boot store; enough old boots to festoon the whole mile-long fence at the southern boundary of his property.
Shortly after he discovered his boots were missing, Risling put an ad in a local newspaper asking that the boots be returned.
He hopes his plea makes the thief feel like a heel, because he’s unabashedly sentimental about the boots. Some were his own, well-worn size 10s, and some were donated by friends and neighbors. “Even some people I didn’t know would just stop and drop some off in the approach,” Risling said.
There are many people around who would recognize the boots, he pointed out, and it would look suspicious if a collection of distinctive western footwear suddenly showed up on another fence line in the Scott, Wilkie or Unity areas.
Risling is optimistic that the culprit will think better of it, and return the … er … booty. They can just drop them off in the driveway, he said.
