Because I forgot to bring hand cream or a hat, sun targets in on me like frostbite. The dog, horse, and I move through sagebrush in unison, a fortress against wind. Sheep ticks ride my peeling skin. The dog pees, then baptizes himself at the water hole—full immersion—lapping at spitting rain. Afterward, he rolls in dust and reappears with sage twigs and rabbit brush strung up in his coat, as though in disguise—a Shakespearian dog. Above me, oil wells are ridge-top jewelry adorning the skyline with ludicrous sexual pumps. Hump, hump go the wells. Hump, hump go the drones who gather that black soup, insatiable.
We walk the fuselage of the valley. A rattlesnake passes going the other way; plenty of warning but so close to my feet I hop the rest of the day. I come upon the tin-bright litter of a former sheep camp: Spam cans flattened to the ground, their keys sticking up as if ready to open my grave.
Sun is in and out after the storm. In a long gully, the lambs gambol, charging in small brigades up one side, then the other. Ewes look on bored. When the lamb-fun peters out, the whole band comes apart in a generous spread the way sheep ranchers like them. Here and there lambs, almost as big as their mothers, kneel with a contagiously enthusiastic wiggle, bumping the bag with a goatlike butt to take a long draw of milk.
Night. Nighthawks whir. Meadowlarks throw their heads back in one ecstatic song after another. In the wagon I find a piece of broken mirror big enough to see my face: blood drizzles from cracked lips, gnats have eaten away at my ears.
To herd sheep is to discover a new human gear somewhere between second and reverse—a slow, steady trot of keenness with no speed. There is no flab in these days. But the constant movement of sheep from water hole to water hole, from camp to camp, becomes a form of longing. But for what?
The ten other herders who work for this ranch begin to trail their sheep toward summer range in the Big Horns. They’re ahead of me, though I can’t see them for the curve of the earth. One-armed Red, Grady, and Ed; Bob, who always bakes a pie when he sees me riding toward his camp; Fred, wearer of rags; “Amorous Albert”; Rudy, Bertha, and Ed; and, finally, Doug, who travels circuslike with a menagerie of goats, roosters, colts, and dogs and keeps warm in the winter by sleeping with one of the nannies. A peaceful army, of which I am the tail end, moving in ragtag unison across the prairie.
A day goes by. Every shiver of grass counts. The shallows and dapples in air that give grass life are like water. The bobcat returns nightly. During easy jags of sleep the dog’s dream-paws chase coyotes. I ride to the sheep. Empty sky, an absolute blue. Empty heart. Sunburned face blotches brown. Another layer of skin to peel, to meet myself again in the mirror. A plane passes overhead—probably the government trapper. I’m waving hello, but he speeds away.
Now it’s tomorrow. I can hear John’s truck, the stock racks speak before I can actually see him, and it’s a long time shortening the distance between us.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
He turns away because something tender he doesn’t want me to see registers in his face.
“I’m moving you up on the bench. Take the sheep right out the tail end of this valley, then take them to water. It’s where the tree is. I’ll set your wagon by that road.”
“What road?” I ask timidly.
Then he does look at me. He’s trying to suppress a smile but speaks impatiently.
“You can see to hell and back up there, Gretel.”
I ride to the sheep, but the heat of the day has already come on sizzling. It’s too late to get them moving; they shade up defiantly, their heads knitted together into a wool umbrella. From the ridge there’s whooping and yelling and rocks being thrown. It’s John trying to get the sheep moving again. In a dust blizzard we squeeze them up the road, over a sharp lip onto the bench.
Here, there’s wide-open country. A view. Sheep string out excitedly. I can see a hundred miles in every direction. When I catch up with John I get off my horse. We stand facing each other, then embrace quickly. He holds me close, then pulls away briskly and scuffles the sandy dirt with his boot.
“I’ve got to get back to town. Need anything?”
“Naw … I’m fine. Maybe a hat …”
He turns and walks his long-legged walk across the benchland. In the distance, at the pickup, an empty beer can falls on the ground when he gets in. I can hear his radio as he bumps toward town. Dust rises like an evening gown behind his truck. It flies free for a moment, then returns, leisurely, to the habitual road—that bruised string which leads to and from my heart.
FRIENDS, FOES, AND WORKING ANIMALS
I used to walk in my sleep. On clear nights when the seals barked and played in phosphorescent waves, I climbed out the window and slept in a horse stall. Those “wild-child” stories never seemed odd to me; I had the idea that I was one of them, refusing to talk, sleeping only on the floor. Having become a city dweller, the back-to-the-land fad left me cold and I had never thought of moving to Wyoming. But here I am, and unexpectedly, my noctambulist’s world has returned. Not in the sense that I still walk in my sleep—such restlessness has left me—but rather, the intimacy with what is animal in me has returned. To live and work on a ranch implicates me in new ways: I have blood on my hands and noises in my throat that aren’t human.
Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals. We’re both humbled by and imperious with them. We’re comrades who save each other’s lives. The horse we pulled from a boghole this morning bucked someone off later in the day; one stock dog refuses to work sheep, while another brings back a calf we had overlooked while trailing cattle to another pasture; the heifer we doctored for pneumonia backed up to a wash and dropped her newborn calf over the edge; the horse that brings us home safely in the dark kicks us the next day. On and on it goes. What’s stubborn, secretive, dumb, and keen in us bumps up against those same qualities in them. Their births and deaths are as jolting and random as ours, and because ranchers are food producers, we give ourselves as wholly to the sacrament of nurturing as to the communion of eating their flesh. What develops in this odd partnership is a stripped-down compassion, one that is made of frankness and respect and rigorously excludes sentimentality.
What makes westerners leery of “outsiders”—townspeople and city-slickers—is their patronizing attitude toward animals. “I don’t know what in the hell makes those guys think they’re smarter than my horse. Nothing I see them do would make me believe it,” a cowboy told me. “They may like their steaks, but they sure don’t want to help out when it comes to butchering. And their damned back-yard horses are spoiled. They make it hard for a horse to do something right and easy for him to do everything wrong. They’re scared to get hot and tired and dirty out here like us; then they don’t understand why a horse won’t work for them.”
On a ranch, a mother cow must produce calves, a bull has to perform, a stock dog and working horse should display ambition, savvy, and heart. If they don’t, they’re sold or shot. But these relationships of mutual dependency can’t be dismissed so briskly. An animal’s wordlessness takes on the cleansing qualities of space: we freefall through the beguiling operations of our own minds with which we calculate our miseries to responses that are immediate. Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how our bank accounts describe us. What is obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional résumés but what’s bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary tics and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed—we’re finally ourselves.
Living with animals makes us redefine our ideas about intelligence. Horses are as mischievous as they are dependable. Stupid enough to let us use them, they are cunning enough to catch us off guard. We pay for their loyalty: they can be willful, hard to catch, dangerous to shoe, and buck on frosty mornings. In turn, they’ll work themselves into a lather cutting
cows, not for the praise they’ll get but for the simple glory of outdodging a calf or catching up with an errant steer. The outlaws in a horse herd earn their ominous names—the red roan called Bonecrusher, the sorrel gelding referred to as Widowmaker. Others are talented but insist on having things their own way. One horse used only for roping doesn’t like to be tied up by the reins. As soon as you jump off he’ll rub the headstall over his ears and let the bit drop from his mouth, then just stand there as if he were tied to the post. The horses that sheepherders use become chummy. They’ll stick their heads into a wagon when you get the cookies out, and eat the dogfood. One sheepherder I knew, decked out in bedroom slippers and baggy pants, rode his gelding all summer with nothing but bailing string tied around the horse’s neck. They picnicked together every day on the lunch the herder had fixed: two sandwiches and a can of beer for each of them.
A dog’s reception of the jolts and currents of life comes in more clearly than a horse’s. Ranchers use special breeds of dogs to work livestock—blue and red heelers, border collies, Australian shepherds, and kelpies. Heelers, favored by cattlemen, are small, muscular dogs with wide heads and short, blue-gray hair. Their wide and deep chests enable them—like the quarter horse—to run fast for a short distance and endow them with extra lung capacity to work at high altitudes. By instinct they move cows, not by barking at them but by nipping their heels. What’s uncanny about all these breeds is their responsiveness to human beings: we don’t shout commands, we whisper directions, and because of their unshakable desire to please us, they can be called back from chasing a cow instantaneously. Language is not an obstacle to these dogs; they learn words very quickly. I know several dogs who are bilingual: they understand Spanish and English. Others are whizzes with names. On a pack trip my dog learned the names of ten horses and remembered the horse and the sound of his name for years. One friend taught his cowdog to jump onto the saddle so he could see the herd ahead, wait for a command with his front feet riding the neck of the horse, then leap to the ground and bring a calf back or turn the whole herd.
My dog was born under a sheep wagon. He’s a blue heeler-kelpie cross with a natural bobbed tail. Kelpies, developed in Australia in the nineteenth century, are also called dingoes, though they’re part Scottish sheepdog too. While the instinct to work livestock is apparent from the time they are puppies, they benefit from further instruction, the way anyone with natural talent does. They’re not sent to obedience school; these dogs learn from each other. A pup, like mine was, lives at sheep camp and is sent out with an older dog to learn his way around a band of sheep. They learn to turn the herd, to bring back strays, and to stay behind the horse when they’re not needed.
Dogs who work sheep have to be gentler than cowdogs. Sheep are skittish and have a natural fear of dogs, whereas a mother cow will turn and fight a dog who gets near her calf. If kelpies, border collies, and Australian shepherds cower, they do so from timidness and because they’ve learned to stay low and out of sight of the sheep, With their pointed ears and handsome, wolfish faces, their resemblence to coyotes is eerie. But their instinct to work sheep is only a refinement of the desire to kill; they lick their chops as they approach the herd.
After a two-year apprenticeship at sheep camp, Rusty came home with me. He was carsick all the way, never having ridden in a vehicle, and, once home, there were more firsts: when I flushed the toilet, he ran out the door; he tried to lick the image on the screen of the television; when the phone rang he jumped on my lap, shoving his head under my arm. In April the ewes and lambs were trailed to spring range and Rusty rejoined them. By his second birthday he had walked two hundred miles behind a horse, returning to the mountain top where he had been born.
Dogs read minds and also maps. Henry III’s greyhound tracked the king’s coach from Switzerland to Paris, while another dog found his owner in the trenches during World War I. They anticipate comings and goings and seem to possess a prescient knowledge of danger. The night before a sheep foreman died, his usually well-behaved blue heeler acted strangely. All afternoon he scratched at the windows in an agony of panic, yet refused to go outside. The next day Keith was found dead on the kitchen floor, the dog standing over the man’s chest as if shielding the defective heart that had killed his master.
While we cherish these personable working animals, we unfairly malign those that live in herds. Konrad Lorenz thinks of the anonymous flock as the first society, not unlike early medieval cities: the flock works as a wall of defense protecting the individual against aggressors. Herds are democratic, nonhierarchical. Wyoming’s landscapes are so wide they can accommodate the generality of a herd. A band of fifteen hundred sheep moves across the range like a single body of water. To work them in a corral means opposing them: if you walk back through the middle of the herd, they will flow forward around you as if you were a rock in a stream. Sheep graze up a slope, not down the way cows do, as if they were curds of cream rising.
Cows are less herd-smart, less adhesive, less self-governing. On long treks, they travel single file, or in small, ambiguous crowds from which individuals veer off in a variety of directions. That’s why cowboying is more arduous than herding sheep. On a long circle, cowboys are assigned positions and work like traffic cops directing the cattle. Those that “ride point” are the front men. They take charge of the herd’s course, turning the lead down a draw, up a ridge line, down a creek, galloping ahead to chase off steers or bulls from someone else’s herd, then quickly returning to check the speed of the long column. The cowboys at the back “ride drag.” They push the cows along and pick up stragglers and defectors, inhaling the sweet and pungent perfume of the animals—a mixture of sage, sweet grass, milk, and hide, along with gulps of dust.
What we may miss in human interaction here we make up for by rubbing elbows with wild animals. Their florid, temperamental lives parallel ours, as do their imperfect societies. They fight and bicker, show off, and make love. I watched a Big Horn ram in rut chase a ewe around a tree for an hour. When he caught and mounted her, his horns hit a low branch and he fell off. She ran away with a younger ram in pursuit. The last I saw of them, she was headed for a dense thicket of willows and the old ram was peering through the maze looking for her.
When winter comes there is a sudden population drop. Frogs, prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and rabbits go underground, while the mallards and cinnamon teal, as well as scores of songbirds, fly south because they are smarter than we are. One winter day I saw a coyote take a fawn down on our frozen lake where in summer I row through fragrant flowers. He jumped her, grabbed her hind leg, and hung on as she ran. Halfway across the lake the fawn fell and the coyote went for her jugular. In a minute she was dead. Delighted with his catch, he dragged her here and there on the ice, then lay down next to her in a loving way and rubbed his silvery ruff in her hair before he ate her.
In late spring, which here, at six thousand feet, is June, the cow elk become proud mothers. They bring their day-old calves to a hill just above the ranch so we can see them. They’re spotted like fawns but larger, and because they are so young, they wobble and fall when they try to play.
Hot summer weather brings the snakes and bugs. It’s said that 80 percent of all animal species are insects, including six thousand kinds of ants and ten thousand bugs that sing. Like the wild ducks that use our lake as a flyaway, insects come and go seasonally. Mosquitoes come early and stay late, followed by black flies, gnats, Stendhalian red-and-black ants, then yellow jackets and wasps.
I know it does no good to ask historical questions—why so many insects exist—so I content myself with the cold ingenuity of their lives. In winter ants excavate below their hills and live snugly in subterranean chambers. Their heating system is unique. Worker ants go above ground and act as solar collectors, descending frequently to radiate heat below. They know when spring has come because the workers signal the change of seasons with the sudden increase of body heat: it’s time to reinhabit the hill.
In a
drought year rattlesnakes are epidemic. I sharpen my shovel before I irrigate the alfalfa fields and harvest vegetables carrying a shotgun. Rattlesnakes have heat sensors and move toward warm things. I tried nude sunbathing once: I fell asleep and woke just in time to see the grim, flat head of a snake angling toward me. Our new stock dog wasn’t as lucky. A pup, he was bitten three times in one summer. After the first bite he staggered across the hayfield toward me, then keeled over, his eyes rolling back and his body shaking. The cure for snakebite is the same for animals as it is for humans: a costly antiserum must be injected as quickly as possible. I had to carry the dog half a mile to my pickup. By the time I had driven the thirty miles to town, his head and neck had swollen to a ghoulish size, but two days later he was heeling cows again.
Fall brings the wildlife down from the mountains. Elk and deer migrate through our front yard while in the steep draws above us, mountain lions and black bears settle in for the winter. Last night, while I was sleeping on the veranda, the sound of clattering dishes turned out to be two buck deer sparring in front of my bed. Later, a porcupine and her baby waddled past: “Meeee … meeee … meeee,” the mother squeaked to keep the young one trundling along. From midnight until dawn I heard the bull elk bugle—a whistling, looping squeal that sounds porpoiselike at first, and then like a charging elephant. The screaming catlike sound that wakes us every few nights is a bobcat crouched in the apple tree.
Bobcats are small, weighing only twenty pounds or so, with short tails and long, rabbity back feet. They can nurse two small litters of kittens a year. “She’s meaner than a cotton sack full of wildcats,” I heard a cowboy say about a woman he’d met in the bar the night before. A famous riverman’s boast from the paddlewheel days on the Mississippi goes this way: “I’m all man, save what’s wildcat and extra lightning.” Les chats sauvages, the French call them, but their savagery impresses me much less than their acrobatic skills. Bobcats will kill a doe by falling on her from a tree and riding her shoulders as she runs, reaching around and scratching her face until she falls. But just as I was falling asleep again, I thought I heard the bobcat purring.
The Solace of Open Spaces Page 6