by Wendy Dudley
As I made my way back to the house, hoping to find my bed still warm, I crowned myself queen of the hill. But I also detoured into a grove of saplings, where no one could see me from the road, not even a schoolbus full of kids. And there I pulled down my blue longjohns and squatted. "Just in case," I said. "Just in case the trickster comes back."
Chapter Seven
Donkey Love
I have always thought coyotes were better suited to their Aztec name, coyotl, which carries an echo of their musical yodels.
I had yet to meet a donkey, but I knew I wanted one after reading Marguerite Henry's delightful Brighty, the tale of a scruffy burro wandering the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. As a toddler, I even had a donkey pajama bag. It was scarlet red with the biggest blue ears any donkey has ever seen. They were held up with stiff wire, but I bent one into a drooping flag just to make him look different. Ever see a donkey in torrential rain? Believe me, their ears droop!
As an adult, I cherished Derek Tangye's books about Minack, the flower farm on the rugged coast of England's Cornwall, where he lived with his wife, Jeannie, a score of cats, and their donkeys, Penny, Fred, Merlin, and Susie. Derek died in 1996, but he left instructions for Merlin and Susie to be sent to England's Donkey Sanctuary, where they are being cared for until their death. The Minack chronicles honour nature, solitude, and animal companionship—the very things I hold dear.
And of course there was Eeyore of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books, though I've often felt Eeyore was too gloomy to be a real donkey. The ones I've rubbed ears with are anything but downcast. They're comics, full of mischief, spirit, and merriment.
"You know, you really should get that pasture down. It's a bit of a fire hazard."
I stood in silence, surveying fields that had not been grazed in two years. Besides being dry tinder for a grassfire, it also gave the place an unkempt look, as if no one lived here. Only the small barn was visible from the road, and it stood empty and lonesome.
"I think I can help you," Lyle said. "I've got two donkeys that I'll loan you." Donkeys? Real donkeys? I was thrilled, yet hesitant. Here was another dream coming true, but the reality of having living, breathing livestock on the place also scared me. What special care do donkeys need? How will I know if they are sick? What if they get out? The what-ifs tumbled in my mind, leaving me blithering an excuse about why I couldn't accept Lyle's donkeys.
"That's so nice of you," I said. "But I was thinking of just taking a scythe to the grass. I'm not really set up for animals yet."
Lyle shrugged his shoulders and smiled, too polite to ask what else I needed to house donkeys. I had a barn, fences, a paddock, a livestock waterer, and fields of grass, rosebushes, and thistles. Everything a donkey dreams of.
Lyle looked down, scuffing the ground with the toe of his boot.
"Sure, scythes are good," he said. "They'll do the job." That night, I phoned my friend Mary. She lives in the city, but grew up on a farm in central Alberta.
"I was offered donkeys today, but I turned them down. I think it's too soon for that responsibility. What do you think?"
There was silence at the end of the phone, followed by a giggle or two. Mary thought I was nuts. She also thought Lyle must think I was nuts. "Why sweat it out with a scythe when you can have animals do the work?" she asked.
"I don't think it would be that hard to take care of a couple of donkeys. You've got water, you've got lots of grass. I'm sure they'd be OK."
I got off the phone and went downstairs, where my books were still stacked on the floor. I found Brighty of the Grand Canyon and Derek Tangye's Donkey in the Meadow. I flipped through the pages, smiling at the drawings, as I had done so many years ago. A real donkey—I could have a real donkey.
I phoned Lyle and apologized for my irrational behaviour.
"Bring the donkeys," I said. "It'll be fun."
"No problem. Just give me a few days to catch them and then I'll bring them over."
Like an expectant parent, I rushed about, preparing
to receive my two charges. I swung open the barn doors and cleaned out the mouse nests. I filled a stall knee-deep with sweet-smelling shavings. I scrubbed the livestock waterer. I checked the fencelines, removing fallen trees and tightening sagging strands. I bought curry combs, brushes, mane and tail combs, insect repellent, a hoof pick, and a bag of carrots. If they had sold donkey receiving blankets, I would have tossed one in.
And then the big day arrived. It was 28 August, my birthday. My friend Barb was over, and I was just about to serve my homemade chicken stew when the doorbell rang.
"You expecting anyone?" Barb asked.
"Not that I know of."
I wiped my hands on the dishrag and went to the front door. Seeing Lyle's face through the small window, I thought it strange that I hadn't heard him drive down the lane. When I opened the door, I was greeted by a beautiful black donkey. Lyle had parked his truck up by the barn, walking the jenny down to the house as a surprise.
"Oh, she's gorgeous," I cried. "And she's so big."
This was no miniature donkey. What stood before me was a reincarnation of Brighty, a large donkey with a white muzzle, raccoon eye rings, and a silver belly.
"And what is your name?" I asked, my fingers tickling her chin.
"Her name is Sally," Lyle said. "The other one is Cisco, and I'll bring him over tomorrow."
"And what does Sally like best?"
"Hugs," said Lyle. "She likes lots of hugs."
It was a birthday I will never forget. I kept going to the barn to see if it was true, that a donkey was now living in my meadow. And of course Sally was still there, cropping the shoulder-high grass, her big ears flicking at the flies. Even the barn was smiling. Perhaps for the first time, I really felt like I was living in the country.
Chapter Eight
Longview, Way Out West
A friend flies in from Ontario twice a year to take in the Longview Hall concerts with Tom Russell and Ian Tyson. We stand outside for an hour to be among the first inside for front-row seats.
Having been raised on cowboy music —I can still hear my dad yodeling "My Swiss Moonlight Lullaby" —I take great delight in living in the geography that shaped such classics as Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds." Every year, when autumn begins to turn the field grasses red and the aspen leaves yellow, Mom and I head south to Longview, where Ian packs them in at the local community hall, just a crow's call away from his ranch.
The East Longview Hall sits in a field on a tight curve of highway in the middle of nowhere. Established in 1927, it's a simple structure but a grand one compared to the original Pig Pen Hall, so nicknamed because it was built using the stalls from a hog barn. On this given night, the field outside the hall is a parking lot of pickups, the trucks lined in a row as if they were tethered to a picket line. There are out-of-province licence plates from British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Montana, and even a few from Ontario. There's something about hearing a Tyson concert in the midst of cowboy country; it's as if his ballads are playing to the ghost riders and cattle phantoms still roaming the coulees, as if their spirits are gathered on the porch, catching the musical tributes drifting through the crack beneath the door.
Outside the hall, the sky is a riot of colour: a rainbow of mauves, limes, oranges, reds, and yellows smeared across a heavenly canvas. It's what Ian would call a Charlie Russell sunset, in honour of the western artist who roamed the foothills' valleys, painting scenes of longhorn cattle, dew-soaked cow camps, shaggy buffalo, and lean cowhands. The hills twinkle with amber lights from farmhouses and barns, and a strong breeze sweeps down from the mountains and across the cottonwood flats. This country, with its yellow plains, accordion-folded hills, fescue grasses, and blustery, snow-eating chinooks, is home to the working cowboy. Ranchers have settled here since the turn of the last century and their families still live here, riding the same trails over summer ranges dotted with elk and deer. History echoes up the valleys, where robbers hid out, where whisk
y runners stashed their goods in hidden shacks, and where Harry Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid, worked as a cowhand. This is fertile fodder for many of Ian's songs, and it is the backdrop for Longview, one of my favourite places.
About a half-hour's drive south from our place double that if the snow is blowing sideways Longview is a humble village, kneeling at the toe of a steep hill with an eagle's view of sawtooth mountains that stretch south to Mexico. To be here is to be Way Out West. When visitors arrive and want a glimpse of real cowboys, this is where I bring them, promising a snorty remuda of pickup trucks with scruffy stock dogs hanging their heads over the tailgate. The ranches sprawl beyond the cliffs above the Highwood River, and golden eagles spiral and tumble on the winds that whip the rocky outcrops.
The Longview area has starred in such blockbusters as Legends of the Fall and the Oscar-winning Unforgiven, but it remains a shy celebrity, proud of its smallness. One day I walked into the village post office and asked how many people call Longview home. "About 310," the woman said. "Somebody thought it was 306, but I don't think so." I waited for her to laugh. Surely she wasn't serious about haggling over four people, but her mouth remained as straight as the town's main street.
Folks in Longview take their home to heart, and so they should. After all, this is the apple of Alberta, its collection of frame buildings called Little New York during the 1930s oil boom. A few fields over were Little Chicago and Little Philadelphia, oilfield communities built around tarpaper shacks. During those heady days of gushers and dance halls, Little New York flourished, with butcher shops and barbershops, a dry cleaner's and a theatre, confectioneries, machine shops, and an ice-cream parlour all lining its rutted dirt roads. Today, the Twin Cities Hotel, open for business since 1938 and still honouring the names of Little Chicago and Little New York, stands as a landmark of the town's past.
After the boom, most of the oil-related businesses shut down or moved on, but the ranching families stayed, their names as western as Owen blister's The Virginian, the classic novel about a cowboy who worked at the Bar U Ranch, just a few hills south of Longview. There are the Cartwrights down along Pekisko Creek, the Bews on the banks of the Highwood River and Sullivan Creek, and the late Guy Weadick's Stampede Ranch on the sunlit flats west of Longview. In 1912, Weadick founded the world-famous Calgary Stampede rodeo. Boasting one of the largest remaining tracts of native grasslands in North America, this is ranching country at its best.
As for the village of Longview, it's a town that's on the way to somewhere else. The people who work here don't say much unless asked. But miss the stop and you miss a cast of characters. One warm fall afternoon, I stepped inside the town's tack shop and began chatting with its owner, Wyatt Barett, who whispered that he was making a saddle for actor and polo enthusiast William Devane. Across the street, Wayne Grouett builds stagecoaches and bronze-artist Janet Blackmore, a woman who's as comfortable wearing cowboy boots as she is touring New York's finest art galleries, runs the rustic One Horse Gallery. Up the road is Memories Inn, where a red vinyl chair used by Clint Eastwood hangs from the ceiling and where the walls are a photo gallery of other famous faces who have dined here Paul Newman, Sam Elliott, Jon Voight, Meredith Baxter, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris, and Gene Hackman. Just east of town lives Scott Hardy, one of North America's finest silversmiths, whose belt-buckle customers include Garth Brooks, Dwight Yoakam, Alan Jackson, and Andre Agassi. Down the road is rancher John Scott, a professional wrangler who promotes Alberta's scenery as one huge Western movie lot. He's mustered livestock for Unforgiven, Little Big Man, Shanghai Noon, One More Mountain, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and Lord of the Rings, and in his early days, he doubled as a stuntman for Roy Rogers and Patrick Wayne, son of the swaggering Duke.
One of the town's most recent additions is Ian Tyson's Navajo Mug, with its diamond willow railings and adobe-coloured exterior, where you can buy a cup of Gunsmoke or Outlaw coffee, view prints of Charlie Russell's paintings, and pick up Ian's music tapes. The Navajo Mug is itself a fragment of history. The 1909 steep-roofed café was once a one-room schoolhouse as well as a stopover shelter for cowboys driving cattle north from Montana. Its wooden floorboards have also felt the stomping feet of a church congregation and the heeled boots of a saddlemaker. Ian now owns the building, naming it the Navajo Mug after his popular song "Navajo Rug." Longview, which he fondly calls "a dinky little town," has been his home for the past twenty-five years or so. His ranching neighbours faithfully fill the Longview hall to hear him sing songs about their way of life stories about Spanish mustangs, wet saddle blankets, rodeo riders, and sagebrush-scented winds. The concerts are organized by T & D Productions, the dynamic duo of Twylla, Ian's wife, and Delilah Miller, who owns a bridal shop in nearby High River. It's a hoot to buy your concert tickets there, politely leaving your shoes at the door and tippy-toeing among satin gowns and crisp, black tuxedos.
Back at the hall, the evening is old, the concert almost over. Ian is singing "The Gift," his tribute to Charlie Russell and the land he painted. Outside on the porch, an old border collie waits patiently for someone inside. The stars have punched holes in the coal sky, and a moon hangs high on the horizon, pouring its light on the willows in the sleeping coulees. Ian worries about losing these rangelands to development, but at the same time he's optimistic that the western way of life will always be here, as long as there are cattle to cowboy and horses to ride. I hope he's right, because I always want to think of Longview as being Way Out West.
Chapter Nine
A Horse and a Half
I love to sketch horses in a storm. They stand with their tails tucked between their legs and their heads lowered, the fury sifting around them.
Sally and Cisco were enchanting, living up to their reputations as delightful donkeys and cunning guard animals. As soon as the sun peeked over the neighbour's barn, Cisco greeted the day with his baritone bray. It came from deep in his belly, his diaphragm heaving as his nostrils flared. Opening his canyon of a mouth, he would grumble a few grunts and then inhale, all the time building pressure. Then he'd let go, bellowing like a bull in a field of cows. You could hear that bray more than a mile away.
I soon pitied the dog or coyote that ventured too close. A horse may flee from a dog nipping at its hocks, but a donkey is fearless, chasing its quarry beyond the fence or rearing up to strike it dead with a blow from its front hoofs. Believe me, size matters little. Many times I rescued month-old kittens that strayed from the barn into the donkeys' paddock, and one day I watched in absolute horror as Hud, my blind cat, innocently wandered into longears' territory. Sally and Cisco pretended to graze, but their eyes were fixed on this intruding feline. As I scrambled under the fence, Sally broke into a trot, her mammoth head only inches from the ground as she approached her whiskered prey. I screamed at Hud to run, but to where? He was blind. He couldn't see. Poor Hud, he zigzagged across the paddock, bumping into trees and fence rails while trying to find a way out. Now both donkeys were in pursuit. Hud kept darting from left to right, as if he were dodging a bullet, but the donkeys cornered him, pinning him against a fence plank. As Cisco reared, poised to strike like a deadly snake, I shouted a blood-curdling "NOOOO!"
I don't know how Hud found those precious spare inches, but he did, mashing himself between two fence boards beneath the cattle chute. It was like watching a mouse flatten its body to squeeze through a dime-sized hole. Scaling the fence, I ran to his side, lifting him into my arms. His aged body was shaking and his heart was pounding, but his limbs were intact.
It is said a donkey won't kick unless it knows it can make contact with its target. If that is so, then Sally and Cisco were only out to give Hud a scare. They gave me one, too!
With these two warlocks, it wasn't long before I noticed our fields empty of coyotes. It's not that they moved out, they just learned to walk on the other side of the fence, beyond the donkeys' reach. Finally, the days of dropping my pants to mark my turf were over.
Sally and Cisco w
ere easy keepers, their bellies growing round and their coats turning black and glossy with the summer grass. I brushed them daily, grooming deep into their ears where nasty bugs liked to bite. Surrendering to the massage, their lower lips would droop like a bloodhound's ears, and their eyes would soften with the gentleness of a morning mist. There's nothing like having a few donkeys to soothe frazzled nerves, their manana philosophy rubbing off on the owner.
I offered to buy Cisco and Sally, but Lyle needed the extra money they brought in. Cisco was well known in these parts, passing on to future generations his charm and magnificent bray, and Sally had many years ahead as a breeding jenny.
"Do you have anything else for sale down there?" I asked, having yet to visit Lyle's Old-MacDonald-style farm, where he kept horses, pigs, ducks, goats, sheep, and an assortment of cattle.
"Well," he said. "I've got a couple of mules."
"Mules?" I asked. "How old are they?"
"One's over a month. The other was born about three weeks ago."
I didn't know a darn thing about mules, other than that they were half-horse and half-donkey, but I was tickled by the thought of owning one. These were the marvellous animals I had watched haul wagons of borax on Death Valley Days, a popular program in our home in the days of gathering around the black-and-white television with our Saturday night plate of pork and beans. Somewhere, tucked away in a cardboard box, I have a model of that famous mule train, and on my laundry room walls are two tin signs advertising 20 Mule Team Borax. I even have vintage videos of Francis, the Talking Mule.
They were amusing animals, all right, and I loved their Roman noses and cornstalk ears, and when they yawned they looked silly, like moose, but what I knew about them could fit in my back pocket. Ignorance isn't a good thing to pack along when thinking about buying a mule. If I had known then what I know now, I would probably never live with one, but then my life would be so dull.