This Side of Wild Page 6

I often think of her and see her sitting at that old kitchen table with the oilcloth cover and thick, thick black coffee in a stained cup, which she loved, and I smile when I think of what she would do if I made my voice as positive as possible and said softly, “Snake.”

  A soft negative movement, left to right, and then her paw pushing something positive, like the small red ball she loved so much, across the table to me.

  • CHAPTER THREE •

  Hollywood and the Woman/Dog Who Knew Hemingway; Then Four Hundred Sheep and Floating Louise and the Coyote That Made Louise Hate Me

  My life turned to Hollywood oddly enough, and it proved a strange place to live and a surprising place to run into an animal that could and did change my life.

  And yet . . .

  I came to Hollywood from the north woods by way of having been a farm worker and a soldier and working in aerospace as a field engineer—none of which prepared me for what could only be called the madness of the natural workaday world of Hollywood.

  Consider: I went from helping to design and track satellites with huge dish antenna at a take-home pay of five hundred dollars a week to proofreading (the only job I could get) articles in so-called men’s magazines on what kind of car you could drive that would “help to favorably impress the ladies,” along with articles on what kind of clothes to wear, what kind of hair color to use, what kind of toothpaste to brush with, what kind of cigarette lighter to use, what kind of food to order in restaurants, what films to see, what films to talk about, how to talk about them (the whole James Bond craze was starting then), when to talk about them, and why to talk about them. . . .

  For two hundred and eighty dollars a month.

  It’s what I thought I had to do to learn to write, or at least to make a start, so I found a tiny apartment for two hundred dollars a month—which left eighty a month for food, water, air, and any and all other necessities—and went to work. I read god-awful, horribly misspelled articles (this was long before computers or spell-checkers came onto the scene) until my eyes nearly bled while trying to learn to write at night with the help of three editors. (“Start,” said Dick Ashby, a wonderful old editor who worked slowly with me, “with a simple declarative sentence. Then do another. And another. Soon you have a book.”)

  It was something close to a living nightmare. I swear I had roaches that I had to ask permission from to use the bathroom and/or the kitchen. And to add to the misery, they were my only company.

  A month went by, then another dragging, roach-filled, red-eyed month, head swimming from working each night until I passed out, having my work torn apart by the three men the next day, cycling endlessly, it seemed, rolling from office to grungy home back to office. . . .

  Until finally Ray Locke (who wrote screenplays and gentle Southern-based stories when he wasn’t editing and teaching me) took pity on me and invited me to a small party at his home, where I met Brette Howard (who called herself Lady Brette). . . .

  And Faulkner.

  Lady Brette was old, ancient, or so it seemed to me, with gray hair losing its battle with age and gimlet-looking eyes that showed she was nearly blind through glasses so thick they could almost have been made with the proverbial Coke-bottle bottoms. Bent in every conceivable way by time, she had two things that fought the age: absolutely perfect white teeth that flashed from the wrinkled old face like beacons of youth and a voice that was so beautiful, soft, low, and Southern, it seemed to have been dipped in honey.

  Though she was very old, the teeth and the voice made her beautiful in some wonderful way. I met her sitting in a corner of Ray’s living room, sipping some kind of amber drink and petting a small dog in her lap.

  “Hello,” she said. “The dog’s name is Faulkner. . . .”

  I told her my name. I was completely enchanted by her but in a strange way, as if there was something about her I would never understand but would always think about, always remember, always want to tell people. The dog was small, curly-haired, and it occupied her lap rather than sat in it. “After the writer,” I said. “The dog—his name.”

  She nodded. “A small joke,” she said. “I knew him and helped him to work on a story called The Reivers.”

  “You help writers?”

  She shook her head. “Not all. Just the weak ones. I knew Hemingway as well.”

  “Did you help him?”

  “No. He was too hard-boiled and had a bad future coming. . . .”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Faulkner,” she said, smiling. “The dog, I mean. He’s psychic. He knows things. Sometimes I think he knows all things. . . .”

  “But how does he communicate? Does he speak?” The overall bluntness of much of my life, the enforced reality of it, kept me from completely believing in things like psychic abilities, especially those from animals or other possible fairy tales. Still, I knew there were things beyond anything I understood, and I was not completely negative.

  “He speaks to me with his eyes, body language. We have been together all his life, and so we know . . . We know each other so well.”

  “Does he say anything about me?”

  She hesitated for a moment and then said, “You will never be satisfied or content, and a girl or a woman named Gretchen wants to speak with you about steak, and soon you will take a long trip to a place that smells truly awful.”

  Like that. Just rattled it out. Not to speak or argue about it or even discuss it, just let it come and then dropped it, and it floored me completely. I didn’t know about the being happy or content part, but she couldn’t possibly have known about Gretchen unless she or the dog were truly gifted, and I didn’t find out about the stinky place until later that night, when I got a call from a half uncle named Art who had a sheep farm/ranch in northern Minnesota. He had four hundred ewes due to lamb. Most of them threw twins, some triplets, and his problem came because he had gotten last year’s wool bonus check, and it seemed that it was the same amount of money that they wanted for “one of them new Chrysler automobile cars.”

  And so he bought a new car.

  A new Chrysler automobile car.

  That had a circular speed-oh-meter (as he put it) that went all the way around to one hundred miles in a single hour.

  One hundred miles an hour.

  So he had to try it, and at eighty-seven miles an hour the Chrysler decided to abandon the road in favor of a small curve in the Necktie River, where it flipped end for end, cleanly breaking Art’s back and throwing him clear before sinking in about twelve feet of stinking mud and sludge locally called turtle poop.

  He was calling now from a circular-frame hospital bed in his small living room, where he had to reside for the next couple of months, and would I please come and help him get through lambing?

  The long trip. From Hollywood to northern Minnesota.

  The stinky place: Nothing smells like a sheep barn with four or five hundred sheep crammed in. The waste turns to raw ammonia, which blinds you and almost literally rips your nose off your face.

  Faulkner and Brette were dead right.

  And so it was; I flew from Los Angeles to Bemidji, Minnesota, and Art sent an old man named Louie—older than weather, older than dirt—the forty miles to pick me up at the airport in an ancient truck, and in two days I was in the middle of lambing.

  Somewhere, in some time long ago—wild sheep living on wild pastures with wild rams breeding wild ewes—there must have been tough, wild lambs being born, where mothers protected lambs, could protect their offspring and shelter them and teach them to live. . . .

  Then man took over with genetic-breeding concepts and altered the animal to produce more and more wool, thicker and fatter meat, and virtually no brain at all, and the upshot is what we have now: ewes that have to be almost literally hand carried through lambing, coddled and sheltered, or many of them would simply walk away from the lamb when it was born.

  The end result is that lambing on any sizable farm or ranch is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, sleep
ing in your clothes, grabbing a sandwich now and then, dozing standing in a corner or lying on straw and hoping it is free of sheep urine and manure. Which it usually isn’t.

  Art had a system that he had worked out over the many years he had been farming, and while it was relatively simple, it still demanded a staggering amount of stamina.

  It was spring, late March, with alternately cold and wet weather—now and then a chance of light snow. The sheep—there were four hundred and fifty or so—were kept outside in a small forest-sheltered pasture to the rear of a large metal barn. The barn was divided into twelve smaller pens, each with a thick layer of fresh straw for them to bed in.

  The problem with the sheep was that in the shock and pain of birthing, if she was left in the herd, she would often lose track of her lamb and the lamb would die.

  So a twenty-four-hour watch was kept on them by sitting outside under the eaves of the barn, and when a ewe began to go into labor, she was quickly taken into the barn and put in the first pen, alone, where she would have her lamb and be left with it for a day or two. Then she would be moved to the next pen, with one or two other ewes and their lambs and then a third pen with five or six ewes, so in the end she knew her own lamb even in a crowd of them.

  That’s if everything went smoothly.

  If, however, things got out of hand—say, a ewe died or couldn’t feed her lamb or didn’t want to feed her lamb, or the lamb died or didn’t want to nurse on the ewe—then a can of cheap hair spray would be sprayed on the lamb’s back and squirted into the ewe’s nostrils so she would smell the odor and think it was her lamb, and the new pair had to be watched continuously for two or three days to make sure it all worked while watching outside for the next ewe going into labor while moving them from pen to pen while not sleeping or resting. . . .

  It was, very nearly, physically impossible. True, Art had an old and very experienced man—Louie—to help him, although Louie was so shattered and warped by arthritis that he could barely move and kept going in and out of a kind of semi-senility when he became exhausted. He would watch and know precisely when a ewe was starting labor—had a wonderful knowledge of sheep—but could barely move. And then Art had me—eager, enthusiastic, willing to help but with energy more like a chicken with its head cut off. Louie would point at a ewe, and I would streak out to bring her into the barn—except that they all looked alike, and in the dark or soft rain I would get the wrong one and frequently get dragged on my face in the muck for my effort.

  Had it been just the two of us with the flock, I am sure it would have been a complete disaster. But Louie came with a helper, partner, friend, second brain: a border collie named (he must have wanted the similarities in names) Louise, and she quickly—after watching me for a moment and seeing how useless I was—took over completely.

  When I first saw Louise she seemed to be floating about two feet off the ground, levitating. Louie brought me from the airport and I changed clothes in Art’s house, admired his bed (he was very proud of it), and went to the barn, where the sheep were beginning their cycle. Louie, in broken English (he had about a ten-ton Scandinavian accent) had tried to explain the procedure to me as we drove from the airport, but most of what I heard was: “Ven dey cam to sick ve bring dem into barns.”

  As soon as I was dressed in old clothes, Louie dragged me to the back of the barn and we settled in to watch.

  Except . . .

  I was seeing things.

  It was a misty, cold evening, just dark, with a heavy low-lying fog, and even with the light on the back of the barn, it was impossible to see anything. More correctly, impossible to see any sheep.

  Instead, floating about two and a half feet off the ground, lying wrapped in a tight little ball with her nose tucked under her tail, was a small black-and-white border collie—dozing in midair. Before I could say anything, she stood—still in midair—took a step to the side, and dropped, vanishing down into the fog. Seconds later she came to the barn door, pushing a reluctant ewe who was starting labor. Once she delivered the ewe, she took a step away from me, hopped up onto the nearest sheep, and ran back across the backs of the ewes, jumping sheep to sheep until she was about in the center of the flock, where she sat—apparently in midair—carefully watching around her for the next sheep.

  It was all so cooperative. She sat on the sheep, or, if she felt like resting, actually lay on them, curled in a ball, watching—or, I think in reality “sensing” (I don’t see how she could have actually seen them in the fog)—the sheep until one started labor. They didn’t seem to mind her being up there. Indeed, they almost seemed to like it, pushing together to make a more firm bed when she lay down, and if I meddled and tried to get out there and drag a ewe in from the pen, Louise would straighten me out by pushing me away with her shoulder and taking over.

  My job was soon relegated to working in the pens, moving the sheep from one to the next to let them learn to recognize their lambs before it got more crowded. I was little more than a clerk, and that was fine, and Louise and Louie and I worked those sheep and got into a rhythm so that Louise was doing all the work and we just supported her. It was like a dance, a dance in the stink of sheep and the smell of newborn steam coming off the lambs and the sounds of them, mothers and lambs, finding one another and love.

  And it seemed that it would go on or had gone on forever and that there had always been sheep and lambs and birth.

  And then the coyote came.

  At first I thought it was a wolf. They were coming back from having been hunted down for bounties, but as she came in the dark and I turned on the lights in the back of the barn, I could see that it was a large coyote. I would find later she was a female.

  She hit the back of the flock, tearing ears and udders, indiscriminate and savage, throats, stomachs, rear ends, disabling six or seven sheep in less than two or three minutes—a horrible attack. Louise tried to intervene, but the coyote shouldered her aside, tore at her neck, and went back to the sheep. It is not politically correct but true that I had seen and heard of single coyotes or wolves killing forty sheep in one night without eating any of them.

  Art had a gun, a pre–Second World War surplus clunker of a thing, which he kept in the barn. I grabbed it, swung it up, swore at the sights on it, which were rusted and crude, saw the coyote in the dim light, mixed with sheep and Louise, and took quick aim, let the army training kick in. I squeezed one round off and heard:

  Thwock, tick! Two hits. God, I thought, not Louise. Please, God, not her.

  And it wasn’t. She had gone right when I fired slightly to the left, and I caught the coyote fair in the front of her neck, killing her almost instantly. The bullet had gone cleanly through and struck a ewe in the backbone, killing her almost as fast as the coyote.

  I ran from the barn out through the herd to make certain and saw that the coyote was really dead, as was the sheep, but I ran smack into what makes border collies the incredible beings that they are.

  Louise grabbed at the coyote’s neck, growling, and having made certain that it was dead, tried to bring the sheep back to life. She pulled at the ewe, trying to lift her to her feet, nudged at her ribs in a kind of crude CPR, smelled for the dead ewe’s breath, found none, went back to CPR, and when that failed, started dragging the ewe to the barn, where Louie was emerging.

  I leaned down and grabbed at the ewe’s leg to help, thinking that possibly we could save the lamb, but Louise would have none of it. She looked at me, at the rifle, growled, bared her teeth at me, at the rifle. She seemed to blame us both and was not about to forgive either one of us—me or the rifle.

  Ever.

  The spring, and lambing, wore on and on for two, three, four more weeks with no sleep and Louie watching and Louise sleeping on the herd and me moving animals from pen to pen. When there was a moment’s rest, I would try to pet Louise, but she never allowed me close again, would dismiss me with a soft growl and a push with her nose or shoulder.

  I had done a bad thing. I had don
e the worst thing, the very worst thing.

  I had killed one of the flock. No. I had killed one of her flock.

  No matter that it was an accident, no matter that I killed the coyote that was savaging the flock, savaging her flock, or that I loved dogs and sheep and all animals except perhaps mosquitoes and wood ticks . . .

  I would not be brought back into the fold, into her fold, her family. I could be around, could help in the pens, but we could never be close again.

  I had gone too far.

  And I still miss her.

  • CHAPTER FOUR •

  On Birds, and Bees, and Rest Area Non-negotiated Hostile Existence

  Much is made of the inability of the wildness of nature to blend into and mix with what man has done to the world. There was an enormous amount of worry involving the Alaska pipeline and caribou and whether or not the pipe would act as an iron barrier and stop the normal migration patterns of the caribou. In that event there was no need for concern. The caribou indeed seemed not to notice the pipeline at all. In truth, in almost all cases of the meeting of the two worlds—wild and so-called civilized—there rarely seems to be much difficulty. I was sitting on the side apron at Los Angeles International Airport some years ago, waiting in a long line of commercial jets, which were roaring and snorting flame, and looked out the side window of the plane and was amazed to see a scruffy coyote stalking an even grubbier-looking jackrabbit in the grass divider between the runways. Neither of them seemed to notice the giant silver beasts around them. I watched the two until we were out of sight, taking off—both still intent on their drama, as oblivious to the planes as if they were alone in the forest primeval.

  Nor was that the only evidence that the wild has supplanted the tame. One hot summer desert day, I was riding my horse on the edge of an ancient dry lake bed, slightly higher on the old shoreline, when I looked out to see at some distance—perhaps half a mile—a jackrabbit ripping out across the dusty bed, leaving a dust line like a bone-dry contrail. Behind it, gaining slightly, came two other lines of dust, made by two hungry coyotes, and they were clever enough to work the rabbit from side to side, each of them working out to the edge to keep him from turning, manipulating him toward the center between them, slower and slower until . . .