by Wendy Dudley
"What is it to this fencing?" I snapped. "How do you get the kinks out of the wire and get it to stop spinning all over the place?"
Trying to stifle a snicker, the clerk explained that I was missing a few gadgets, such as a fence-stretcher to keep the wire taut. I could almost hear him slap his knee when I told him I was rolling the wire spool along the ground, and not from the back of a truck, the civilized way to string a fence.
"You doing this on your own?" he asked.
"Yeah, it's just me out there."
"Tough job."
"No kidding," I replied.
I did finish that fence, but it's a pathetic sculpture, banned to the bush and fortunately out of sight. The wind can't even pucker a whistle on its sagging lines. I have since built several more fences, all of them sad affairs, with Y-shaped tree branches propping up lazy wires and aspen poles woven between strands to temper the slack.
I had the first posts in for a cross-fence when Ralph, my neighbour, pulled over and suggested I wait until the weekend, when he was renting a fence-post pounder. Do the posts in the boggy area by hand and leave the rest, he said. When Ralph dropped by several days later, he couldn't help but notice how my posts zigzagged like a drunken nomad.
"They're not in line," Ralph remarked.
"Yeah, I know. I'm not sure how that happened."
"Oh well," he said. "I guess we'll call it a drifting fence." "Sounds good to me," I replied. "Sort of poetic, don't you think?"
That fence was supposed to keep the mule and donkeys from wandering onto the power cutline, but if the creek is low, the mule slips around the corner post, barges through the dense willow like a moose in rut, and flicks her tail as she makes the great escape to the forbidden pasture. You can almost hear her bray a tune about murmuring cottonwoods, starry skies, and those fabulous unfenced spaces. Another Cole Porter fan!
Chapter Eighteen
Tale of Two Dogs
Australian shepherds did not originate Down Under. They arrived in Australia in the 1800s with Basque sheep herders from western Pyrenees. When American sheepmen began importing Aussie sheep, the Basques came along with their dogs.
It was the night before Georgie and Maggie came to live with us, and I was as giddy as a six-year-old. Actually, we didn't know two dogs would be moving in, but just the thought of one squirming pup had me dancing in my slippers.
The week before, I had picked out a forlorn, freckle-faced pup, the type every dog book warns you not to buy. She was a scrawny runt, hiding from the world like a hedgehog curled up in a tight ball, so shy she refused to leave her cardboard box. I pleaded with her to step outside and join her sister, who was napping in my mother's lap, but she clearly wanted nothing to do with us.
Always a sucker for an underdog, I reached into the scruffy box and gently picked her up. Her tiny body shook with fear, and she dribbled a stream of urine down the front of my sweatshirt. "That's OK," I cooed, looking into her sad brown eyes.
These were the only two pups left in a litter of border collie and Australian shepherd crosses. They were blue merles, their coats flecked with salt and pepper as if someone had splattered them with buckets of white and black paint. In the sun, their wavy coats had a silver sheen, like a blue roan horse. Looking at their pleading faces, I couldn't believe some rancher was ready to shoot them because they were rangy mutts, not of pure blood.
The piddlin' pup was no longer shaking; in fact, she was now licking my face, melting with each slurp my initial reluctance about housing a dog who was part border collie. They're wonderful dogs, so smart and so loyal, but I've met too many neurotic ones, crazy from confinement and lack of work.
"They're herding dogs. And we don't have anything here for them to herd. They'll go nuts," I said to Mom. Training them to bring home the mule and donkeys was out of the question. We might as well sentence them to a quick death, what with the mule's murderous eye and the donkeys' lethal hooves. But Mom was missing canine company. When I was growing up, we were never without a dog to bring along its laughing face and wagging tail on hikes and car trips. Many times Mom had mentioned she wanted another dog, but until now we had put it off, knowing how a dependent pup changes a household.
Listening to my concerns about how to collar so much energy, the dogs' foster owner explained that this mix of breeds, while still requiring daily workouts, would also settle for a soft couch. As if on cue, the pup, still cradled in my arms, resumed licking my face, until I was slimed from forehead to chin, until I forgot my fears about owning a stir-crazy stock dog.
Mom was still petting the other pup, a truck of a dog, with a handsome face, square shoulders, and a broad rump. Now we had a dilemma. Which one should we pick the shy runt with the sweet, rascally face, or the bold, confident one with the white blaze? As usual, we were split on the matter.
"The shy, thin one will probably end up being sickly, you know. She'll need a lot of work," Mom said.
"Precisely. That's why we should take her," I said. "No one else will want her. No one else will understand her or spend the time to understand her."
My mother fell silent, but I knew what she was thinking. Just what we need, another special needs animal on the place. We already had a blind cat, a colicky mule, a scared-of-his-own-shadow ginger feline, a fat donkey, and a geriatric grey tabby. And now we were contemplating a scraggly, fearful pup.
Well, we didn't have to decide today. We told the foster mom we would return in a few days for one of the pups; we just weren't sure which one.
When the big day came, we were still undecided, so we dropped by for one more look before heading to town with our list of doggie items. Both pups recognized us, and, like the twins they are, they waddled in tandem to the gate. They sat down together, their rumps hitting the lawn at the exact same second. They cocked their heads at the same angle and gave us the same longing look out of equally blue eyes. They dared us to pick one over the other. We couldn't do it.
Mom and I climbed into the truck and drove to town, the silence in the cab filled by our common thoughts.
"We haven't got much longer to make up our minds," I said. "Are we getting one pup, or are we getting two?" No answer.
When we parked in front of the pet store, I repeated the question. "Well, are we buying one leash or two leashes?"
"Guess we're buying two," Mom said. And that was that.
While our decision made for the two happiest pups in the world, it was met by a barrage of criticism from dog experts. Taking two pups from the same litter was a sure way to court doom, they said. Our dogs would never bond with us, only with each other. At some point, they would even turn on one another, like sisters from Hell.
Because they were herding dogs, they would run away and join a circus of coyotes, chase cars until one day they were squished beneath the tires, harass the neighbour's cattle, nip our heels, destroy our house, freak out during electrical thunderstorms, and run circles around us until we came to our senses and got rid of them. We ignored it all.
Initially we thought of naming them Kanga and Roo, to honour their Down Under roots, but the cute combination would have a tragic ending if, for whatever reason, we lost one of them. We'd be left with only half the word, a constant and sad reminder of the missing companion. So we named the bold one with the white blaze Maggie, short for magpie, those squawky birds that have a knack for knowing at 4 AM which is the bedroom window. Maggie grew into her name, barking at the break of dawn like her rowdy namesake.
The freckle-faced runt we named Georgia, after the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, a solitary and a radical who loved to walk the desert with her dogs, preferring their company to most people's. Georgia was eventually shortened to George, a suitable tomboy nickname for a dog whose cute face belied a keen taste for grouse, mice, and fresh animal droppings.
They were good pups, only once chewing forbidden items my leather martingale and riding gloves. I would never have known about the latter, except that I found the uneaten snaps on the carpet in the m
iddle of the mud room where they slept at night. They were true twins, doubling our pleasure and our trouble.
Chapter Nineteen
Mouse Tails and Tales
Deer mice have the sweetest faces. Thier eyes and ears are larger than those of most mice and voles, and their white chins give them an angelic look. The deer mouse was Walt Disney's model for Mickey Mouse.
I picked up what was left of the mouse, a disgusting pair of mangled hind legs and a hairless tail. "Yuck, why can't you guys eat the whole thing?" My question was directed to the four whiskered faces now sunning themselves on the back deck: Tristan, Fergus, Hud, and Kip, my feline quartet. Stretched out across the warm wood, they blinked and twitched their tails in perfect harmony. No one was about to fess up to the shredded entrails. "Guess it was a team effort," I said, before tossing the mouse guts into the bush.
When I first began discovering half-eaten carcasses, some of them with only the head missing, I was confused. I couldn't imagine a predator being so wasteful. Who was committing such mutilation? These were gruesome sights, conjuring up images of sacrifices and decapitations in the middle of the night. One day, while I was washing the breakfast dishes, the mystery unravelled. Through the kitchen window, I watched the barn cat stroll up the lane, his demeanour as lazy as trees on a hot summer day. Without a flinch, a leap, or a pounce, he bit what seemed like empty air, but he kept on moving, not skipping a step, his back as straight as a carpenter's square. Curious about what he was up to, I went outside and walked over to where I witnessed the mighty gulp. There, lying upside down in the grass, was the corpse of a copper-coloured field mouse. Its flesh hung red and raw, and already a couple of flies were buzzing over its remains. Less than twenty feet further up the lane, there was another murdered mouse. Again, only the head was missing.
It had been a good summer for the local rodent population. When I walked through the fields of long grass, it was as if the ground was fluid, moving with scurrying mice, moles, and voles. The hawks, owls, and coyotes were having a field day, swooping and pouncing, their efforts paying off with mouthfuls of mice. Obviously the barn cats were also savouring the boom, chomping their favourite cuts and leaving the rest behind, the overstocked buffet allowing them to be selective diners.
My neighbour Lyle, however, had a different take on the matter. "You know, there's a reason why the cats leave the tails."
"Why's that?" I asked, thinking I was about to hear a scientific dissertation concerning the bitter taste of certain body parts.
"Because they use the tails later, for toothpicks," he said, his expression flat as a prairie sky, until seconds later it cracked, detouring into a laugh. I groaned at his joke, finding it as disgusting as the sight of stringy innards, but perhaps there was something to his rib-tickler. My cats are now aging seniors and, along with developing stiff hips and inflamed gums, they have lost several of their teeth. They're built more for comfort than for speed, but if they're lucky enough to snare a mouse, they consume the tail. With gaps in their gums, they no longer need toothpicks!
But in those earlier days, my cats were like tigers, their tabby stripes invisible in the grassy shadows, their bright eyes burning in the darkness. I'm sure they invented their own games, pretending they were sleek cheetahs or long-maned lions. Ready to stalk. Ready to kill. Ready to guillotine some poor wee mouse.
"Nature can be so harsh, so raw," I said to Lyle. "It shows no mercy for the small or weak."
Lyle smiled. He didn't have to say a word, because I already knew what he was thinking. After all, he was the one who warned me about not naming my ducks, only to have me whimper when I found their bodies shredded by a coyote. Now he was listening to me whine about the ruthless murders of meadow mice.
I like mice. I even had one as a pet when I was about nine years old. His back and face were the colour of coffee, and his belly was a soft, creamy white. I called him Rawhide, and he'd run up and down the sleeve of my blouse, sometimes piddling while he scampered between my elbow and wrist. When he died, I buried him in our backyard in a small box padded with layers of Kleenex. The entire family attended the simple funeral, held under a shady umbrella of elm trees that cast filigreed light across the lawn. Such a grand farewell for such a little guy.
So, while I wasn't about to turn our house mice into pets, I wasn't the type to jump on a chair and squeak and squawk at the sight of one scurrying along the baseboards. But I have to admit that the pitter-patter of mouse feet in heating ducts drives me to distraction. It's like someone incessantly tapping their fingernails on a countertop, or the drip-drip-drip of a leaky faucet. Before long, it's the only sound I hear. It drowns out the passionate poetry of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," the precious strings of Pachelbel's "Canon in D," and even the boldness of Beethoven. So I was not amused one evening when, minutes after settling into a steaming bath, I detected the unmistakable sound of mouse claws scratching their way through the maze of heating ducts. My orange cat Fergus heard it too. Sitting on the edge of the tub, he stopped dabbing his toes in the suds and looked up at the bathroom ceiling. Hark! The tippy-toeing of mice! With gazellelike speed, he leapt from the tub to the floor and in a flurry raced throughout the house, hot on the rodent trail. Darn! I thought I had taken care of all points of entry, from outside vents to squirrel-chewed holes, but every fall at least one mouse finds a sliver of a crack to squeeze through. Mind you, things have improved since my first winter here, when the mice moved in for a winter conference. I found split sunflower seeds under the stove, in the drawers, under the kitchen sink, in the cupboard, and just about anywhere else the mice could stuff the secret cache they had stolen from the outdoor bird feeders. Over several days, I screened the vents, squirted foam into cracks, and packed steel wool into the spaces around the water pipes. Gradually, our uninvited mice guests all but disappeared, and the few that tunnelled in rarely made the great escape. It's hard to trick four sets of cat claws!
But this Duct Mouse—that's as close as I came to giving him a proper name—was persistent. During the day, he was quiet, but come night, he put on his dancing shoes, tapping out his rhythms along the tin runways. And then, just as I was ready to cross over into a sound sleep, he would head to his private kitchen for a buffet of cracked corn and sunflower seeds, or whatever he was finding down there. He would begin to chew. And chew. And chew. It was like having a woodchuck in your ear. This went on for a week or so, until one night the cats crowded around a heating vent in the corner of the living room. With their whiskers tense and their tails twitching, they sniffed the air around the register. I stopped what I was doing and listened. I was sure I heard a pitter or a patter from the vent.
"What is it, you guys? Has that mouse finally come up for air?"
I pushed aside the feline audience and lifted the register. Peering down the dark tunnel, I couldn't see anything, so I turned on the light, catching a glimpse of something small. An eye looking right at me!"
I slammed down the register and jumped back. "There really is a mouse sitting there, and it stared right back. It didn't even move," I said to the cats who were mewing with anticipation, each one bunting the other out of the way. Hold it a minute. It didn't move? Unless it was dead, a mouse wouldn't just sit there. It would at least blink, wouldn't it? With a beaming flashlight clutched in one hand, I delicately removed the register. The mouse was still there and, yes, its red eyes were staring at me, but I laughed as I reached in and held it up by its tail. Dangling from my fingers was a scruffy toy mouse, its eyes scarlet red and plastic. Who knows how long it was sitting there, or how it even got there, since it would be impossible for the cats to bat it through the register's narrow slats. And why did my cats all of a sudden take an interest in that vent, when the only creature on the other side was a lifeless, dust-covered toy?
I don't have the answers to these questions, but I never heard from the Duct Mouse again. Perhaps the mouse was a shape-shifter, turning into a toy to save its own life.
Chapter Twenty
/> Wise Old Trees
Down by the Creek, there is a huge spruce swirling above a bench of duff and needles. It is a lovely place to sit and watch the winter wrens.
My friend Steve eyed the skeletal remains of the ancient spruce, its knuckled backbone still standing years after its limbs had shed their last fingers of needles. Its trunk was lean and tall, reaching towards the sun that gave it life for so many years. Its wood was dry and grey, bleached by years of heat and high winds. Searching for seasoned firewood, Steve asked if he could cut it down. Studying its gnarled skin with reverence, I shook my head.
"No, not that one. It's one of my favourites."
During summer storms at night, I watch that old tree from my bedroom window, its stark branches flashing silver-white as lightning floods the valley, gusts of wind tearing at its trunk. It stands naked and soaked, its boughs no longer there to shed the pelting rain. The following morning, against a glorious sunrise, its arthritic fingers turn pink, orange, and mauve as the new day's warmth stretches along the creek. I think of the life this tree has lived and the wondrous things it has seen. No, this tree is not for the taking.
Steve smiled and moved on; he had long ago recognized my sentimental bonds to the natural world, whether found in heartbeat or heartwood. As a child, I skipped through knee-high snow in search of the perfect Christmas tree, dragging it home through the bush to decorate that special spot in our cabin. But as an adult, I stopped cutting the Yuletide tree, no longer able to justify ending its life for a few days of celebration. For decades that tree fought for sunlight and water, each year of success marked by a growth ring. To chop it down in mere minutes seemed a callous insult.