Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

“He’s paying serious attention, and he’s decided we’re on his side,” Scott said, as he knelt to begin sawing the other front foot. “But don’t let up. It’s only going to get rougher now.”

  We had to tackle the hind hooves next, and Scott told me that no donkey in the world likes someone getting behind him. “That’s their biggest primal fear,” Scott said. Out in the wild, donkeys are pretty tough to kill. They’re herd animals and stick super-tight to the group, so any predator hoping for a donkey dinner has to weigh its chances of coming out alive against a mob of kicking, biting, 700-pound beasts who’ve been known to stomp lions to death. But donkeys are still vulnerable to sneak attacks; any straggler who lingers a bit to graze can suddenly find wild dogs leaping on its back and taking out its throat. This little gray donkey was weak and sick, but deep inside its DNA was a 10,000-year-old survival instinct as sharp as any Army Ranger’s, always alert to cover its six and kick for its life against anything it couldn’t see.

  Scott working on Sherman’s hooves

  Scott picked up the saw. Softly, he laid his free hand on the donkey’s back leg. “Good boy—” he began, then jerked back as the donkey’s leg shot out.

  “That’s what I mean,” he said, bending down for the saw he’d dropped. “He can break your leg before you see him move.” His own little donkey, Matilda, once dealt with a snapping dog by blasting it so hard that the dog’s leg had to be amputated.

  “Hold him tight and let’s try this again,” Scott said. I pressed my chest against the donkey’s ribs, pushing him as firmly as I could against the fence. Scott rubbed the donkey’s head reassuringly, then worked his way down its body, scratching and massaging its back bit by bit until he reached the haunches. He smoothed his hands down the back leg, easing his way toward the hoof. The donkey looked like a robbery victim, its ears sticking straight up like it was being held at gunpoint, but it remained frozen while Scott slowly picked up a rear hoof. Whether we pulled this off or not, I couldn’t have been more impressed by Scott’s bedside manner. Even though he was sweating like a blacksmith and expecting to get his ribs cracked at any moment, he continued crooning to the donkey as if he were offering a juicy apple instead of wielding a hacksaw.

  Finally, the last big chunk of hoof dropped off. Scott took a breather and wiped the grime off his face, but the ordeal wasn’t over. From his side pouch, Scott pulled a freakishly huge pair of steel clippers that looked like they’d been designed by Leatherface for use in his murder van. Scott warmed up with a few practice snips in the air, then leaned back in toward Sherman and began nipping away with expert precision, doing his best to shape the sawn stubs into something resembling a healthy animal’s hooves. After he’d pared each hoof, he pulled out a foot-long metal file for a final smoothing.

  “Done!” Scott announced. He flopped back on the grass in exhaustion, sucking in deep breaths of relief. His T-shirt and jeans, spotless when he’d arrived, now looked like they’d been dug out of a swamp. He’d barely gotten comfortable when he shot back up, alarmed by what Sherman was doing:

  Nothing.

  “Not great,” Scott said. “Not great.” We’d just put this animal through the equivalent of two hours of dental surgery, and instead of making a break for daylight, the little gray donkey was standing exactly where we’d left him. Now that his hooves were trimmed and he was free to go, why wasn’t he hightailing it out of our reach?

  The two of us watched the donkey, mentally urging him to get a move on, but after a good long while, he hadn’t taken a single step. “I don’t know,” Scott said, his voice sounding weary and resigned. “If he’s not walking by tomorrow, all we can do is make him comfortable before he goes.”

  * * *

  —

  Comfort was his wife’s department, and it wasn’t long before Tanya was roaring up our driveway in her dusty old SUV. She charged into action with her medical kit and shears, swiveling her head back and forth as she alternately crooned to the donkey and barked commands back at me.

  “Good donkey!” she purred. “Good—” She paused. “What’s his name?”

  “Um…” I knew the stakes were high and I didn’t want to blow it. We’d messed up in this department before and I was still paying the price. Two of the first goats we ever got were named for words my daughter had recently come across in books: “Bamboozle” and “Skeedaddle.” Even though Bamboozle and Skeedaddle had four acres of lush grass and tasty weeds to keep them munching, they became master escape artists that spent most of the day prowling the fence like twin El Chapos searching for places to tunnel to freedom. After a few months of successful breakouts, they didn’t even bother squirming under the wire anymore; they just took to the air, sailing over the five-foot fence and ignoring the two hundred acres of neighboring cornfield all around them to head, naturally, straight for the road, where they could wander out in front of the school bus and give me heart attacks.

  Finally, I surrendered and sold Skeedaddle and her sister, Lulu, to a farmer for his grandkids to raise and gave Bamboozle to our nearest Amish neighbors. The next morning, we looked out the window and found Bamboozle looking back at us. He’d slipped away from his new owners and trotted half a mile down the road to escape back into our yard. The girls were delighted—they adored Bamboozle and wanted to keep him—but I’d hit my limit for lunging and sprawling after him like a circus clown. Luckily, the Amish kids must have figured out a way to stop him, because after I brought Bamboozle back that time, he never escaped again. I stopped by a few days later to ask how they’d finally outsmarted him, and they looked confused.

  “Oh, you mean Fred,” one of them said. “That’s what we call him now.”

  Yes, Fred—the same name as two-thirds of the elderly uncles currently sleeping off lunch in their Barcaloungers. I didn’t know how giving Bamboozle a chill new name turned him into a chill new goat, but you’d think I would have given it a try for myself.

  Nope. Instead, we went on to name a stray kitten “Smartycat,” and watched this strictly outdoor cat become a genius at darting into the house and vanishing into sock drawers just when we were trying to leave on a family trip. Smartycat lived a good, long life with us, and when she died, she was replaced by “Evil Eye,” another stray that basically forced that name on herself because of her creepy Satanic serpent’s stare. Evil Eye was (and remains) so mean that our other cats, all half-wild scrappers themselves, are afraid to approach any of the three food bowls until Evil Eye is fed, full, and out of sight.

  So when it came to naming this sick donkey, I wasn’t going to mess around. He was already in a fight for his life, and he didn’t need me making things worse by giving him a name with even the hint of a hex. The girls had made a suggestion the night before, and after examining it from every angle, I couldn’t spot any danger. I decided to run it by Tanya.

  “We’re thinking of calling him, um…Sherman?” I said. We’d recently seen the movie Saving Mr. Banks, and we’d gotten a kick out of the happy-go-lucky, songwriting Sherman brothers. Who doesn’t love “Let’s Go Fly a Kite”?

  Tanya couldn’t care less about Disney films or voodoo hexes. She was in full emergency room mode, and for her, a name was just another surgical tool. “Good Sherman!” she crooned, clicking on her big-toothed shears. She got to work on the donkey’s stinking, matted fur, peeling it away in strips. Every once in a while, she called back over her shoulder for some item she needed from the house: Rags! Baby shampoo! Get the hose!

  “As soon as I’m finished, you’ll need to soak him down and lather him from nose to tail,” she commanded. “Give him a good shampooing. He’s not going to like it at first, but you need to stick it out. You keep cleaning him until you get all this filth off his skin.” Suddenly, Tanya clicked off her shears and turned to face me.

  “Look,” she said. “If he makes it, you can’t just stick a ribbon on his tail and leave him standing in a field like Ee
yore. He’s been abused and abandoned, and that can make an animal sick with despair. You need to give this animal a purpose. You need to find him a job.”

  A job? What was I going to do with a donkey, prospect for gold? Pioneer westward? But before I even asked what she meant, I got an idea. Nah, that’s ridiculous, I thought to myself, and kept my mouth shut. No way was I going to share this with Tanya and look even more helpless and out of my depth than I already did. Still, the more she worked on the grim wreckage of Sherman’s body, the more I circled back to this fantasy. I couldn’t let it go, and I realized why: focusing on a glorious fairy tale was a lot more pleasant than the ugly reality that was kicking us in the face.

  And that’s when it dawned on me that my incompetence did have an upside: it cut both ways. Since I had no idea how sick Sherman was, I didn’t know how strong he was either. For all I knew, there might just be a fighter in there, a fierce warrior spirit buried deep inside that was laying low until it gathered the strength to start surging through Sherman’s veins. And if Sherman found his way back to life, maybe I had something for him that was even better than a job: a wild adventure that the two of us could tackle together, side by side.

  But first we had to keep him alive.

  3

  No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care

  “Oh, crap!” Tanya suddenly realized it was nearly three p.m. “Late for school.”

  She grabbed her shears and gear and moments later her SUV was spitting gravel as Hurricane Tanya disappeared down the driveway. Every morning and afternoon, Tanya was the driver for local Amish children who lived too far from their one-room schoolhouse to make the trip on foot. After delivering them home, she had a full evening of chores with her own animals, which included three donkeys, two carriage horses, one goat, one pig, a wading pool full of ducklings, and a rescue horse she’d saved from slaughter so she could teach a teenage neighbor how to ride. She wouldn’t be able to check on Sherman again till morning.

  “What do we do now?” asked my wife, Mika. We stood at the fence, waiting to see if Sherman would move.

  Nothing.

  “Either he’s getting better, or—” I glanced around to make sure the kids couldn’t hear. “Or we’re on death watch. Tanya said at this point, it’s out of our hands.”

  Out of our hands. It gave me a sickening feeling, saying those words, because for one of the few times in my life, it was true. There was no one else to call, no further treatment to try, no friend to seek for advice. That little spark of hope I’d felt a minute ago faded away, replaced by the chest-squeezing grip of doom you get when your car spins on ice. Sherman was alone inside this tunnel, and he was either going to walk out the other end on his own or disappear into the darkness.

  I just wished I knew what was going through his mind. If there was no way to pull him back, at least we could ease his exit with kindness and care. But how could we bring him peace when we had no clue what he was thinking? Was he fighting for his life, or giving up? Did he see me as his friend, or as just another tormentor? The first rule of healing is “Do no harm,” but Sherman was making me realize that I knew so little about animals, I couldn’t tell if I was soothing or scaring him.

  * * *

  —

  Mika and I weren’t just surprised to be in this predicament. We still couldn’t believe we were in this zip code.

  I grew up just outside of Philadelphia, in the working-class suburbs where the El tracks and row houses of West Philly gave way to the big families and small backyards of Upper Darby. My only contact with country livin’ came from books; I was so obsessed with My Side of the Mountain that I ran away from home at age nine with only a Wham-O boomerang, fully intending to live in a hollow tree in the woods and hunt with a hawk like Sam Gribley did. Around one o’clock in the morning, the state police found me six miles from home in a patch of woods near Springfield Mall and hauled me back for a parental smackdown that was epic enough to put an end to any future walkabouts.

  After that night, I was rarely far from the company of at least 1.5 million neighbors. I went to high school in North Philly and became a street-court rat, spending all my time outside of class roaming the city with my friends in search of pickup games. After college, I bounced around between jobs and cities before taking a leap overseas to see what life was like in Madrid. I taught English for a while and learned enough Spanish to finagle my way into an interview for a news reporting job with the Associated Press. I had no credentials for the job, but the bureau chief in Madrid, Susan Linnee, was a battle-hardened newswoman who scorned the hothouse-flower desk editors that New York headquarters kept sending her and preferred her own method for discovering street-savvy “talent in the rough,” as she put it.

  “The guy before you, what sold me was he looked like the lead singer of the Fine Young Cannibals,” Susan told me. Luckily, the Cannibal turned out to be such a natural that within a year, he was recruited to become a war correspondent in Bosnia. Someone had to replace him, pronto, which was the only reason I got through the door for an interview. Susan grilled me for about an hour, and when my utter lack of experience became embarrassingly obvious, she abruptly stood up and called an end to the interview.

  “I’ve heard enough,” she said, sticking out her hand.

  “Okay,” I agreed, more than ready to beat it. “If you change—”

  “We’ll train you here for a week,” she continued, already steaming ahead with her plans. “Then we really need you there.”

  “There?”

  True, she had mentioned that the Cannibal was her Lisbon correspondent, but I naturally assumed they would transfer someone from Madrid and keep me at base to learn the ropes. I’d never been to Portugal in my life and didn’t know a word of the language, but that wasn’t my biggest problem. Civil war had just re-ignited in Angola, which didn’t seem like any of my business until my new boss explained that as a former Portuguese colony, Angola literally became my business at the moment I shook her hand.

  One month later, I was behind rebel lines in southern Africa, doing my best to stay alive while pretending I had any idea what I was doing. I was teamed with Guilherme, a Portuguese photographer who also spoke Spanish, so most of the time the only way I could gather information from Angolan soldiers was by way of a spoken-word Rube Goldberg machine: I’d feed my questions in Spanish to Guilherme, who would translate them into Portuguese for the soldiers, and then translate their answers back to me in Spanish so I could jot them down in English. Guilherme had his own work to do and really didn’t have time for this nonsense, so he would listen to a soldier’s long, teary-eyed saga and boil it down to “They shot lots of the bad guys.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Big picture.”

  Fine by me; the tighter the quote, the quicker I finished. Every day, I had to scout around, interviewing refugees, aid workers, and frontline fighters, then condense their info into AP news stories that needed to be sent to New York before sunset. Darkness was my deadline, because the only way to transmit from the field was with a satellite telex the size of a wheelie suitcase. You didn’t want to be up on a hill looking for a signal with that thing at night; for a roving rebel soldier with an itchy trigger finger, the only thing visible against the dark sky would be the blinking green “SHOOT ME!” lights on my console. The second I hit Send, I slammed the cover shut and scuttled for safety.

  Like the Cannibal, I managed to stick around long enough to get the hang of it. When massacres erupted in Rwanda two years later, I was assigned to embed with the Tutsi rebel army that was racing across the border to rescue civilians from the murderous militias. We were only a small band of reporters traveling with the Tutsis, and we got smaller by the day. One American correspondent was airlifted out when her photographer was shot through the legs and she had to stop the bleeding with her bare hands. A French radio journalist was stricken by cerebral malaria and barely surv
ived. My photographer left after we entered a schoolhouse and found the bodies of dozens of young children who’d been hacked to death with machetes; the next morning, he found his hands were still trembling. When the Tutsis finally chased the murderers into Congo and the fighting died down, I was desperate for a rest. Instead, I couldn’t sleep.

  It was time to go home.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe it was a bad idea to leave Lisbon, ditching a dream job in a beautiful seaside city, but it turned out I wasn’t the only one making that mistake. I returned to Philly and quit the AP to scratch out a living as a freelance magazine writer. One afternoon, I was out for a run with Jen, a friend from the AP’s Philly bureau, and she told me about a reporter from Hawaii who’d rotated in for a one-year stint. Island gal wasn’t loving her new home, and Jen didn’t have to tell me why: Philly can be cold and bitter, and that’s just the people. If you’re familiar with our monument to Frank Rizzo, one of the most brutal police chiefs in city history, or the time Santa Claus showed up at an Eagles game and we drilled his jolly old ass with snowballs, or the way Eagles fans and the Eagles themselves sang “We’re from Philly, f***ing Philly, no one likes us, we don’t care” after Philadelphia won the Super Bowl in 2018, you know it’s not the warmest and fuzziest landing spot for strangers. It couldn’t be easy for a homesick Hawaiian, so when Jen told me she was taking African dance classes, I thought I could cheer her up a little with some CDs I’d brought back from Angola.

  Jen invited me to a dinner party that weekend. When I arrived, CDs in hand, I scanned the living room, searching for the brooding, heavyset Pacific Islander. I was still looking when a breathtaking woman with a warm, welcoming smile approached, looking like she’d just surfaced off a Tahitian island with a handful of pearls. I could barely stutter a greeting because my synapses were jammed by two colliding thoughts: