This Side of Wild Read online

  He owned them—that’s what he was saying with his actions. You’re mine. Then, dividing the kennel into four more sections, he marked five more places, essentially claiming ownership and leadership over the entire kennel: all eight romping stomping pounds of him. Grizzlies, sled dogs, people—it didn’t matter. He owned them all. He simply had no fear.

  Then back to the house, touching up the porch post as he came to the door, up the steps, to sit, waiting for me to let him in for breakfast.

  We feed pure meat to the sled dogs—well, all dogs, as far as that goes, cut-up chunks of bloody beef heart. And the smell went out and out into the surrounding forest, and drawn by the smell, the eagles came back, started trying to steal it from the sled dogs. Some of their passes and strikes came close to Corky, so we retired him to New Mexico, where I have a shack in the mountains.

  I am sitting there now, writing this, and Corky is with me. He is older now, his hearing dampened a bit, his eyes dimming a little, but yesterday I was sitting writing and a flock of wild turkeys (I think about twenty of them) came up onto the back porch, looking for scraps, and Corky hit the glass of the back door like a snarling banshee, shoulder hair up, three teeth bared in slavering-spit Elvis grimace, and he scared them away in a showering storm of turkey poop and blown wing feathers.

  My six is still covered.

  • CHAPTER TWO •

  A Very Young Soldier, a Very Old Man, a Mynah Bird Named Betty, Nuclear War, and Gretchen

  1959.

  It was difficult, almost impossible, to bridge the age/time gap between us.

  I was eighteen, so young my brain had hardly started to function; in the army, stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, near El Paso, learning to kill my fellow man with various weapons, including missiles and nuclear warheads—living in a state of perpetual confusion mixed with a dosage of fear. We expected Russia to attack at any moment—and we found later that Russia felt the same way about us. I had without any choice been enrolled in the army’s nuclear-warhead school and had been stunned to learn the truth about all-out nuclear war; to wit, nobody walks away, and it doesn’t do any good to duck under your desk and hide, as we had been told by the media and in school.

  The man sitting across from me at an oilcloth-covered kitchen table was eighty-three. He had lived in the desert his whole life, indeed, what amounted to several lifetimes in many cultures, and he was so sun blasted and deeply wrinkled that it was easy to imagine the wrinkles going all the way through his head to meet in the middle.

  Mr. Winnike.

  Pronounced Win´-uh-kee.

  And in truth I knew little about him. He reached across the table and poured a black substance he claimed was coffee from a stained old enamel pot and smiled, a flash of incredibly white dentures in the old, brown leather face.

  “You’re here about Gretchen,” he said, the voice surprisingly strong, vibrant, almost young. “Everybody wants to know about Gretchen.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what he was talking about and shrugged. “I don’t know a Gretchen. . . .”

  “The dog,” he said. “You want to know about the dog. Her name is Gretchen.”

  “Ahh.” I nodded. “Yes. I want to know about Gretchen. . . .”

  “I knew you would come. The moment we met. Your eyes have dog in them.”

  I did not know what he meant then—I do now, as I have learned to know now—but I knew when I met him that he had some . . . some large knowledge about dogs and other animals, and maybe about life, that I wanted to understand.

  I remember when I met him.

  It had been at a Christmas party. Some family with an immense house—one floor, thirty-four or -five rooms around a Spanish-style courtyard—had invited soldiers from Fort Bliss to come for a Christmas party and dinner. It was a nice gesture, and some of us who were particularly not military in our thinking and on the raw edge of an abyss of too much open military knowledge were glad of the chance to get away from Fort Bliss and get non–mess-hall food.

  There had been some drinking, though not much, but at that time in my life I did not drink at all, and as that part of the party grew, I wandered off around the courtyard into some other rooms that were open. In one of them there came a sound like a crowd of people talking, screaming, and jabbering, and I went in to see what was going on.

  It was a strange, rather small room with large potted plants—some of them floor to ceiling. I’d started to turn and leave when I heard the sound again; it was muted, as though far off, but it sounded like a large crowd, the kind you see on the street in a political rally or a car race.

  But it was inside the room, and curious, I stepped back inside and closed the door, or tried to close it. I felt a body come against it, and when it opened again, an old man entered. He had gone beyond where I—being just eighteen—could measure age. Deep-set wrinkles, bright blue eyes that (and I know it’s cliché) twinkled, bald, with an impossibly white denture-flash smile.

  “Oh,” I said. “Excuse me.”

  “No problem.” He moved past me. “I heard Betty. He’s about to start the speech segment of his performance and I like to hear him speak. . . .”

  Betty, I thought, and him speak. Well, I decided, he’s obviously old. I had an uncle in Minnesota who would have conversations with himself, start to finish, and maybe this old gentleman . . .

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You haven’t been here before, have you?”

  “No, sir.” There was something about him that made you want to call him “sir.” Some firm but gentle dignity.

  “So you haven’t got a single idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Come here.” He moved to a back corner, beneath what looked like a kind of rubber plant, and pointed out a birdcage, which I hadn’t seen before. It was a large cage—perhaps four feet high—and inside was a strange-looking bird: black, as big as a small crow, but with stripes of color on its side.

  “This is Betty,” he said. “He’s a mynah bird. Oh, and I’m Winnike. Here’s my card.”

  He handed me a plain card, on which it said, simply, GEORGE WINNIKE, TRAINER, with an address out near the border in Zaragoza. I put the card in my pocket and pointed to the bird. “I don’t understand. . . .”

  “Oh. He heard the crowd out there, the Christmas guests, and it triggers him to answer with his version of a crowd scene.”

  “That was her—him? That whole muffled-crowd sound?”

  He nodded. “Traffic noise and all. It’s the only crowd scene he knows, so he uses it to answer whenever he hears a crowd. You know, to get somebody in here to pay attention to him.” He turned to the bird. “Hello, Betty. You’re a pretty bird.”

  “I know,” the bird said. “Betty is a pretty bird, sooooo pretty.” Then he lapsed back into the crowd sounds. I could have sworn I was listening to a large crowd outside the house. Then he hesitated. The crowd seemed to quiet down, and the next thing I heard, clearly, was the voice of the president giving a speech.

  “Seriously?” I asked Mr. Winnike. “President Kennedy?”

  “Perfect, isn’t it? Sounds just like him. He’s giving a campaign speech at some factory—I’ve never figured out which one it was—but it sounds just like him, doesn’t it?”

  Questions, I thought. I have all these questions. “What . . . ? I mean how . . . ? Why do you call him Betty? I mean, if it’s a boy, why does he have a girl’s name . . . ?”

  “Simple. When they got the bird they didn’t know which sex he was, and the people who gave them Betty said it was a girl named Betty. By the time they found out he was a male, it was too late. He already knew his name, answered to his name. So they kept it. But that is not the most complicated thing about Betty.”

  “How is it . . . ? I mean, how can he make the sound of a crowd and the voice of the president . . . ?”

  “Again, it’s not so strange. He heard it on the radio, or on television. Many birds can mimic sound—parrots, crows, ravens; they make exac
t replicas of sounds they hear. And even that is not the most interesting thing about Betty. There is still one question left to ask, and it is the most important one.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why . . . ?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why does Betty want to communicate with us, with people? Why is he calling out?”

  “He wants to have people come to him?” I said. “He wants people to be with him?”

  “And again, why?”

  I thought of myself, of what had become of me, of how I was after I joined the army. I did not have a family, not really, and the army seemed to be then a very strange place. “Because he’s lonely?”

  “Lord,” Mr. Winnike said, smiling a sigh. “Do you suppose that’s it? That’s all it is? He’s lonely?”

  Of course I didn’t know, would probably never know—if the experts were right, I would soon be dead, burned in intense white clouds hotter than the sun. Nuclear war, according to them, according to the press, was imminent. The missiles were in Cuba, ready to be fired. Yahoo.

  “Perhaps you should come and meet Gretchen; perhaps she can show us. . . .”

  And so to Gretchen.

  • • •

  Mr. Winnike—I never called him by his first name, though it was on the card; I never seemed to remember it—lived in a house down along the Mexican border that seemed run-down when I first saw it as I parked in the track that could hardly be called a driveway: two ruts in the sandy dirt that led to a small chain-link gate, which was closed. The house was clapboard, which was strange in this desert country, with faded white paint and a small second story. It was surrounded by a yard that was mostly composed of desert sand, powdered clay dirt, and brush plants on the border that had obviously been hand planted but were so old and withered that God only knew what they were originally. I could not see a leaf anywhere on the dry gray branches.

  I parked and let myself in the gate, and as I latched it behind me, I heard a screen door slam open and spring closed and turned to see a metallic-gray streak of a dog screaming toward me from the porch steps.

  “It’s Gretchen,” Mr. Winnike called from the porch. “Don’t worry. She’s friendly. Just do as she tells you.”

  A strange thing to say, I thought; how could she tell me anything? But I stopped, waited, and was surprised to see her slam to a bottom-dragging stop three feet in front of me, eyes bright on my eyes, tongue hanging to the side in a happy smile.

  She sat for just a moment, studying me, then raised her right forefoot in a hand-shaking gesture. I nodded, leaned down, and shook hands, whereupon she came around me, tucked into a perfect heel against my left leg, and gently push-nudged me up the porch steps to the screen door. She opened it with her paw and nose and escorted me into the house, where she—again working her shoulder against my left leg—escorted/guided me to one of three chairs at an old kitchen table. She gestured with her nose and a nudge for me to sit down. Mr. Winnike sat at the other end, and I was surprised to see Gretchen climb into the third chair, positioned so she was slightly between us, sitting on the chair with one paw on the table. She sighed then, looked first at me, then at Mr. Winnike, then to the stove.

  All without any signals or help or even a sound from Mr. Winnike.

  “Would you,” he now said softly, returning Gretchen’s look at the stove, “like a cup of coffee?”

  “Is she—I mean, is that a request from her . . . ?” I stopped, then nodded. “Please. I would like a cup of coffee.”

  He stood, moved to the stove, where he took the pot and two cups, which he put on the table, one for me and one in front of Gretchen. He poured coffee in both of them, filled his own, which was already on the table, then added cream and sugar from a bowl into his cup before he returned the pot to the stove and sat slowly at the other end of the table.

  Gretchen took a short lap of her coffee, surprisingly neat, then looked up at me and with a gentle paw pushed the sugar bowl over toward me.

  The coffee was profoundly black, almost tar, and so strong it seemed to jump at me from the cup. I took the sugar spoon from the bowl and put four spoonfuls in my cup, stirred it, smiled at Gretchen, and nodded. “This is good.”

  She—and it can only be called this—returned my smile, seemed to nod with satisfaction, looked at Mr. Winnike, then back to me, and back to him, back to me. . . .

  “She wants us,” Mr. Winnike said, and now he smiled self-consciously, or seemed to, “to have a conversation.” He didn’t seem embarrassed so much as just reluctant to ask something that on the face of it seemed so singular and odd.

  “I see,” I said. “A conversation. She wants us to have a conversation. If you’re going to tell me that she talks . . .”

  “Well, the truth is she does talk. Or rather, not really. But when she started to train me . . .”

  “She trained you?” I stared at him, then at Gretchen. “Dogs don’t train people. . . .”

  He smiled, as I had read in some book, “not unkindly,” and nodded slowly. “I had that same thought when it happened. Dogs, I thought, don’t train people. People train dogs. But think now, think of the mynah bird that night at the party. He was making a crowd sound and the presidential speech, remember? He was making the crowd sound for what reason?”

  “To attract . . . ,” I said. “To attract attention.”

  He nodded. “From whom?”

  “From the people at the party. From us . . .”

  “From the people at the party.” Mr. Winnike nodded, again smiling, dentures impossibly white. “Whom he had trained to come when he made the crowd sounds.”

  “But couldn’t it be the other way? Couldn’t the people have trained him to make crowd sounds so they would come . . . ?”

  And I could see it then—see how it didn’t work backward, how it could never work backward.

  “We think, we all think, people think, man thinks he is superior, always superior, and in truth it is the other way around—dead opposite. Have you ever been to Yellowstone Park? You know, on vacation with your family?”

  I shook my head. Boyhood on uncles’ farms, in the Philippines for two years, then with drunk abusive parents back in Minnesota until I could run away to the army. To initial training with personal weapons, then more training, school upon technical weapons school when not reassigned, until, finally, and the word was finally, the ultimate and all-consuming horror of nuclear-warhead school. And the impending all-destructive war with Russia when we would all—when every single living thing on the planet would be—would be . . . “No. I didn’t have that kind of family. You know. Where we took vacations.”

  He paused a moment, studying me, then nodded. “Well, if you had, you would have seen the bears working at getting into cars as they drove slowly by on the park highway, getting the food the people in the cars had for them.”

  “Had been trained,” I said, nodding. “That the people in the cars had been trained to bring to feed the bears, the cute bears, the cute wild bears that did what they had to do to train people to bring them food . . .”

  “Exactly,” he said, nodding again. He paused to take a sip of the tar-black coffee, then hand rolled a cigarette from a small packet of tobacco and wheat-straw papers, which he lit with a large wooden match scratched on the underside of the table. He drew deeply, coughed intensely—it was then that I first truly noticed he had a viciously fluid-sounding persistent cough—and gestured to Gretchen. She had been “watching” the conversation, swiveling her head from one to the other as we spoke—much like watching a tennis match—and I had noticed that now and then, at odd intervals, her ears would perk up and she would seem to almost nod.

  “I noticed being trained by Gretchen early on with her, when I first trained her to simply sit.” Another drag, which used up the rest of the cigarette so rapidly the red-hot end of it burned back into his fingers. “Although, to be honest about it, I think it had been happening all along with other dogs, horses, and even chickens.”

 
; “Chickens?”

  “Well,” he said, smiling—and it seemed impossible that his dentures could remain so flashing white with all the coffee and cigarettes he consumed. “Maybe just one or two, and a rooster . . .”

  He closed his eyes and fought a cough, then opened them but did not look at me. Instead he softened his gaze and passed his eyes over Gretchen, then out the window, out and out, not looking at anything in particular except perhaps a far time and place that didn’t exist any longer.

  “I have been training animals for a long time,” he said at length. “Fifty, sixty years. Dogs for hunting, for working stock, for companions; horses for work and show or just to gentle them. Trained almost every kind of animal that walks or crawls except cats. Not a way to train a cat—they got no give to them. All take. Even trained or half trained a couple of snakes for a fat man who came through El Paso making a movie about snakes. And I know in the end that they all, even the snakes, trained me as well. Think of it—when a rattler sets to buzzing, what’s he doing? A kind of talking, a warning—he’s training you, teaching you to get away.”

  He reached now and ran one of Gretchen’s soft ears through his gnarled, bent fingers, like silk through barbwire. “And I never saw it until I started with Gretchen. Got her to sit one day. The same day, she looked a long time at me and at a piece of cookie”—and here she perked up, ears more alert with the word “cookie”—“in my hand, and she saw the cookie and my eyes and then she sat. Clean and down. As much as if she’d said, ‘I’ll sit and then you give me that piece of cookie,’ and she did and I did and it was the first time I knew I had been wrong all along. I never trained one animal. Not once . . .”