Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  “Stain, I mean,” I was trying to keep my voice calm, but we were nearly on top of the thing and I was desperate to see if we could keep Sherman moving and avoid another open-road tug-of-war. “See that stain? No, that—”

  By then it was too late. Chili meandered along, moving so pokily that Sherman had plenty of time to see through my trick and realize that the same terrifying shadowland he’d endured the day before was going to swallow him up in just 3, 2, 1…

  And we were through.

  “Amazing,” I said. “You should have seen the fight he put up the last time.”

  “He seems happy today,” Mika pointed out. “Look at the way he keeps shaking his mane.”

  She was right; every once in a while, Sherman would waggle his head as if shooing flies, but there were no bugs around. It was more like he just enjoyed the feel of the breeze. I’d been so focused on troubleshooting, I hadn’t noticed how different he looked, with his head high and his eyes searching around the road with interest instead of suspicion. As we turned off the pavement and onto the gravel road, Sherm quickened his step and pulled next to Chili instead of trailing behind. Together, the four of us walked side by side down the gravel road and into the woods.

  “Tanya’s right,” I said. “He’s like a prisoner who’s been in solitary. Now he’s out in the world and everything looks weird and dangerous. But if he sees something once, he figures it out and remembers.”

  Chili Dog leads Sherman on his first triumphant creek crossing.

  Alongside the gravel road is a creek, and after about a quarter mile, there’s a dip in the roadside that makes the creek easy to access. When we got there, Mika led Chili down to the water. I knew we were throwing a lot at Sherman, but I had a reason: he was going to confront scary new things everywhere he went, so maybe it was better to forget long distances for now and focus on one scary thing at a time. Colorado’s white water was going to be quantum forces more intense than this, anyway, so the sooner we started, the better.

  We’d never had a reason to take any of the goats into the creek before, but Chili was a champ. Mika plunged in and Chili followed, wading through the shallows and scrambling over stones like a wild ibex. Chili was having a blast, but Sherman’s entire body had turned into a living neon sign flashing a single message: You’ve GOT to be kidding. He’d come down the bank willingly enough, then stopped at the water’s edge. I stepped into the current and pulled the rope taut, applying pressure, but I could tell we were done for the day. There was nothing in the Eastern art of gentle persuasion that would ever convince Sherman to give it a try.

  Let him pull you, I reminded myself. The rope was long enough for me to hold on and still reach Chili and Mika, who were now on top of a midstream boulder, so I waded toward them, leaving Sherman on the bank. Behind me, I heard a clatter.

  “He’s going for it!” Mika called. “C’mon, Shermie!”

  I was dying to turn and see, but checked myself. I was afraid if I looked, I’d ruin whatever was going on back there. The clattering and splashing got louder, then a snout thumped into my spine. I kept walking, eyes front, doing my best to pretend it was no big deal. Only when Sherman climbed up on the boulder beside us did we descend on him, scratching his head and ruffing those long ears, letting him know what an amazing leap he’d just taken.

  *1 Chapter 3. Remember?

  *2 Actually, there’s a proud tradition of biologists going full method actor in the name of science. Redouan Bshary of Switzerland’s University of Neuchatel, for instance, produced groundbreaking research on monkey distress signals by crawling through African jungles in a leopard skin.

  *3 Yes, intended.

  *4 “Cats performed poorly and barely looked at humans, potentially owing to their rather solitary lifestyle,” reported animal cognition researchers.

  *5 Remember Johnny, the little white goat that Nancy Sweigart borrowed for her granddaughter to run with? Chili is Johnny’s dad. Johnny was a spare goat I’d brought to the races that year.

  10

  Bag Man

  Tanya had a soft spot for Sherman, but not that soft. She knew better than I did what I was asking from her with this scheme of mine—and from Sherman. Tanya had a farm and a business to run, and no time to coddle—let’s be real—a bumbling amateur who was going to plunge everyone around him into a world of injury, frustration, and failure. When she came by to give me the news face-to-face, I knew right away what she’d decided. The trailer was a dead giveaway.

  “Behold!” she said, sliding out of her truck and opening her arms, showman-style, toward the stock trailer she was hauling. The trailer shook with thumps and thuds, and then Tanya threw open the latch and out strolled Flower, Tanya’s big riding donkey. Compared to scruffy gray Sherman, Flower was a breed apart: she was tall and athletic, with a chestnut coat as glossy as a mink stole and white rings around her deep brown eyes that made them glow as if she’d just emerged from hair and makeup for her cover shoot.

  “Wait till Mr. Sherman gets a load of her,” Tanya said. She walked Flower over to the gate and turned her loose in the little meadow. The sheep edged away, not sure what to make of this horse-sized stranger, and Sherman followed their lead, using the lambs as a buffer between himself and this curious thing he’d never seen before: another donkey.

  “That’s what I thought,” Tanya said. “He doesn’t even know what donkeys look like. Let’s give them some time to sniff each other out.” We went inside to have a coffee while Tanya explained her brainstorm.

  The day before, I’d told her on the phone about the Chili Dog Initiative. Tanya was impressed, but after mulling it over for a while, she realized I was missing the big picture. Creek or no creek, goat or no goat, there was one crucial lesson that I could never teach Sherman on my own: how to be a donkey.

  Sherman had grown up alone, so he’d never been part of a herd that could teach him how donkeys behave. Instinct will take you only so far; after that you rely on fellow creatures as role models. Sherman had never learned Basic Donkey, and it showed: just two minutes ago, we’d watched him literally becoming sheepish. Lawrence and Chili and the rest of his new barnyard family had really stepped up as companions, but what Sherman needed now was a different kind of playmate, one that could teach him the donkey equivalent of horseplay. If I wanted Sherman to trot across the countryside like a natural-born donkey, he needed to learn from one.

  “So you’re on board?” I asked.

  Tanya stuck out her hand. “Let’s go to Colorado,” she said, and we shook on it.

  * * *

  —

  Ultimately, the Man-on-Mars challenge was just irresistible. Tanya could play the whole chess game out in her imagination, seeing every move I needed to make in her mind’s eye, but unless she was there to show me, there was a good chance I’d get things wrong and she’d never know for sure if it really was possible to transform sick Sherman into a long-distance racer. Plus, Tanya had a power card she could play anytime she felt Sherman was in over his head: she was the only person I knew with a horse trailer. I’m sure that somewhere on this boundless earth there’s another volunteer who could drive me and a donkey six thousand miles round-trip from Middle-of-Nowhere, Pennsylvania, to Miles-from-Anywhere, Colorado, but who that person was and how I’d find her, I had no idea. If Tanya and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on Sherman’s training, she could put the freeze on this operation at any point by pocketing her truck keys and walking off the job, leaving Sherman and me stranded at home halfway across America from the starting line.

  “Let’s check how everyone is getting along out there,” Tanya said.

  We headed to the meadow and found that in the ten minutes we’d been gone, Flower and Sherman had decided to audition for their own segment on Modern Love. Granted, it was donkey-style, which meant a lot of mock kicking and snapping teeth at each other’s necks, but Tanya pointed out that no
matter how much it looked like fighting, both donkeys kept circling back to each other. Switch this scene to a high school, and we’d be watching two flirty teens thumb-wrestling in the lunchroom.

  Tanya grabbed her saddle from the trailer while I got Sherman haltered and roped. I turned to help Tanya with saddle, blanket, and bridle, but even though Sherman is tall, Tanya is not, and all that stuff is heavy. Yet she heaved it around so fast that she finished as quickly as I did. I didn’t know how we’d get not one but two donkeys through the gate without Lawrence hurtling past us, but Flower made that job a lot easier: Lawrence wasn’t too keen to tangle with those big hooves, so he kept his distance. All of Sherman’s nervousness, on the other hand, had vaporized; when Tanya led an obedient Flower down to the road, Sherman latched on behind.

  “This is for you,” Tanya said, handing me a riding crop with a plastic shopping bag knotted on one end. “Your own donkey guidance system.”

  Today, Tanya was planning to test Sherman out with some real donkey skills. And that, she explained, would require a lot more from me than just dragging a goat down the street in front of him. Historically, donkeys lead and owners follow. Donkeys like to be in front, because their No. 1 survival instinct is to scan the world ahead and make their own decisions, step by step, about where to place each hoof. That’s one reason mountain men and other wilderness wanderers out there in the crazy places love donkeys so much; you might get drowsy, your horse might blindly follow orders, but donkeys are super-vigilant and will slam on the brakes, hard, whenever a patch of trail seems sketchy or a harmless-looking stick turns out to be a rattler.

  Everything I’d been doing with Sherman, in other words, I’d been doing literally ass backwards. Sherman should be out front, not facing my back. We were able to get away with it while we were slowly trudging along, but if I ever expected Sherman to ramp up to a run, I had to give him the freedom to pick his own path. Otherwise, we’d be the worst combination of running partners: overcautious meets overcontrolling. We’d be two enemies bound by a single rope, waging a battle as he challenged where I was going and I wondered what he was doing back there and why he wasn’t following.

  The alternative? “Ground driving,” Tanya explained. “You get behind him and steer from the rear.” That’s how the Amish train a young horse, she said; before you hitch it to a buggy, you stay on the ground and walk behind it, teaching it to respond to the reins and to voice commands. For Sherman, instead of reins I’d be using Tanya’s bag-on-a-stick. We’d be going wireless: if I shook the plastic bag next to his right or left eye, Sherm should turn the opposite way.

  “Should,” Tanya emphasized. “Or he might bite it out of your hands and snap it in half. We’ll see.”

  Tanya swung up into the saddle and clucked Flower into a walk. Without thinking, I began to pull Sherman along behind them. Tanya reined up.

  “Really?” she said. “Already?”

  “Right,” I apologized. “Sherman goes first. Got it.”

  “Maybe I need a bag-on-a-stick for you too.”

  Tanya wheeled Flower around behind Sherman and began herding him forward. “You keep still,” she told me.

  This time I stayed put. Sherman and Flower walked on while I waited, playing out the rope until it was completely uncoiled and about to jerk out of my hands. Then I fell into step behind everybody, trailing at a distance. Tanya kept driving Sherman along until she felt that he—and I—had the idea.

  “Now we’re going to switch,” she told me. “I’m going to push out ahead and you’re going to move up here—” She pointed toward Sherman’s haunch, right where she’d told me I was in danger of being kicked. “This is your sweet spot.”

  “My sweet spot? You said never stand there.”

  She pointed straight at Sherman’s butt. “No, that’s the kick zone. This”—her finger moved six inches to the left—“is your sweet spot.”

  I looked to see if she was goofing, but she was all business. Donkeys have terrific peripheral perception, Tanya said; they can rotate those big eyes backward and tune those antenna on the tops of their heads in any direction, allowing them to run forward while still keeping tabs on every movement to the rear. It’s a great early-warning system against creeping predators, Tanya said. And for our purposes, it’s also the perfect tool for ground driving; by positioning myself just outside Sherman’s leg range, I could give him free rein to run while still signaling directions from behind.

  Tanya trotted past Sherman and took point. Sherman jogged to catch up, and that’s when I saw my chance. While Sherman was focused on Flower, I hurried toward his butt and stepped into—maybe?—my sweet spot, somewhere that I hoped wasn’t too left, too right, too close, too far. Sherman’s left eye fixed on me, but he kept his head forward and continued trotting. Tanya and Flower led us past the Barely-a-Puddle, and then we turned onto the—

  Oof! I slammed into Sherman, who’d suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. He jumped when I sprawled into him, coming down hard on my foot with his hoof. Pain sucked the wind out of me, leaving me too breathless to speak and driving out every thought except Get this goddamn beast off me! I managed to shove Sherman aside and free my foot, then sucked in air, trying to bite back my seething.

  “Flower!” Tanya scolded. “Big baby.” Flower was backing up warily, her face inches from the ground like a bloodhound on the scent. Tanya urged her forward, but Flower wasn’t having it. She walked left, then right, snaking back and forth like a drunk getting street-tested by a cop. “Sorry about the pileup,” Tanya said, still trying to wrestle Flower back on course.

  “She’s worse than Sherman about water,” Tanya explained. That’s for sure; even Sherman had walked past this spot without a problem yesterday, never noticing that a tiny stream trickled under the road through a culvert buried two feet underground. Tanya got Flower going again, but those few moments of magic we’d just enjoyed seemed to be over. Flower had recovered from her little panic attack, but Sherman hadn’t: he’d seen enough for today and turned for home. I tried hauling back on his rope, but he was determined.

  “Tanya, little help,” I called.

  Tanya wheeled Flower around and came back. She got Sherman turned in the right direction, then trotted Flower forward to lead. I crowded in behind Sherman, tucking myself into that sweet spot and trying to block him from U-turning again. Sherman must have sensed he was surrounded: this time he set off smoothly. We jogged along beautifully, both of us comfortably in stride. Sherman drifted a little to his left, so I did too, happy to get out of his way as long as he was moving. He edged over more…and a little more, until I realized I was nearly squeezed against the side of the road. I jumped up on the grass embankment to avoid getting pinned, and that’s when Sherman pivoted and bolted for home, tearing the rope from my hands. The little sneak had conned me.

  “I got him,” Tanya called. She’d been watching over her shoulder, and once again she rode to the rescue. She cut Sherman off, then slid out of the saddle. I grabbed the rope and reached in my pockets for some treats, figuring she was going to reboot him with a little soothing, but instead she took Sherman firmly by the halter and turned him around in the right direction.

  “Nope, we’re not bribing him,” she said. “We don’t reward him for quitting his job.”

  Then she turned to me. “That was your fault. You quit first.”

  “No, he—” I began to argue, then saw that she was just getting started and shut up.

  You’re not his dictator, she began.* You’re not his slave driver. You’re his leader. Sherman has watched out for himself his entire life. He’s not used to relying on someone else, and he’s never, ever going to rely on you unless you deserve it. Seriously, why should he follow your orders if you’re not paying attention? That’s how a herd works: it doesn’t matter if you’re in the lead or bringing up the rear, you have to prove you’re on the ball. Donkeys operate on one
frequency—trust. They do nothing on faith, but everything on certainty. They can be dying of thirst, but if they’re not sure about the water, they won’t touch it. If the hay smells iffy, they’ll go hungry. And if you’re not covering their flanks, they’ll do it themselves.

  So that trick Sherman played back there? Tanya continued. He tested you and you bombed. The herd leader has to anticipate trouble and avoid it. Instead, you moseyed straight toward the rake and stepped on it. For a donkey, a mistake like that can be death. In Sherman’s world, a wolf lurks behind every bush, a mountain lion crouches in every tree. You’re teaching him that his job is to run past those bushes and under those trees. Well, what’s your job? Aren’t you supposed to be watching out, protecting him?

  “That thing in your hand,” Tanya said, meaning my bag-on-a-stick. “Use it. Take charge. Show Sherman you know what you’re doing.” She swung back into the saddle, then added a final tip: “When Sherman knows he can trust you, it will change everything. You’ll see a difference in him you won’t believe.”

  * * *

  —

  Tanya meant what she said about taking charge. Instead of herding Sherman forward, this time she walked Flower around us and kept going, leaving me to figure things out for myself.

  “Walk on,” I told Sherman, echoing the command Tanya used for Flower. “Let’s go. Walk on.”

  Sherman was just as no-nonsense as Tanya. Paying no attention to me, he turned toward home. I jumped in front and headed him off.

  “Nope,” I said, spreading my arms to block him. “We’re going to walk on.”

  Sherman paused. I stepped toward him, arms still wide, crowding him so he had only one choice: turn around or knock me over. He edged right, then left, and so did I, stepping closer each time. Sherman backed up…then slowly pivoted. Ahead, Flower had eased into a trot. Sherman’s head jerked high, as if noticing for the first time that she was gone, leaving him in no-man’s-land—home far off in one direction and his new friend about to disappear in the other.