The Annals of Country Life

It’s remarkable how adept animals are at communicating, if only we learn to watch and listen.

When people come to the house, the dogs bark in a very particular way that varies depending on whether the people arrive by car or by horseback. If there is a bobcat on the rocks behind the yard, they growl in a way specific only to the presence of bobcats. Raccoons seem to make them angry. Deer get a different reaction, very excited, but not upset in any way. And occasionally, something in the dark of night, when the cooling air slides down the hill, makes our Boxer’s hair stand up along his back and causes him to walk around stiff-legged, muttering to himself. My old collie, many long years ago, only growled once in his life, on a street in New York, at a man who looked to me like a lawyer or businessman, but it was such a serious growl, and so out of character, that I crossed the street. And the most horrifying sound I ever heard come out of a dog came from my father’s Bullmastiff when someone made the mistake of punching my father. The sound that dog made as he ran the hundred yards to where my father lay on his back was truly apocalyptic, berserk, not a roar or a growl, but an insane screaming sound, and I have no doubt that if the young man who did the punching hadn’t gotten back in his car he would have been killed. This morning, our Boxer’s reaction was so radical, so very different from any other signal he has ever given, that Darleen and I both went out into the backyard.

Darleen has better vision than I do, so she saw him first: a black bear standing in the dark early morning shadows of a pine about forty yards above the house. He—or she—wasn’t much of a bear, no more two hundred pounds at the most, but a bear is a bear and always lovely to see.

He watched us all, Darleen and me and the dogs, with interest, but no concern, before ambling along the side of the hill and eventually out of sight. Darleen thought he looked very young, perhaps a yearling, and judging by the size of his ears relative to the size of his skull, I think she was probably right.

It occurred to me, after he was gone, that I probably should have yelled or done something else to encourage him to move on. Bears are lovely to see from a distance; up close and personal, they can lose some of their picturesque charm, and as they are among the most opportunistic of animals, if they think they can get away with it, they will happily march into a home to help themselves to vittles. The problem is that they usually don’t bother with such niceties of behavior as opening the front door. They just rip it off its hinges. Hell, sometimes they don’t even bother to wipe their feet on the mat. Reports have been circulating from a nearby community that there have been several break-ins (if that’s not anthropomorphizing too much), and my friend Dan Bronson, the retired screenwriter and inveterate jogger, asked my advice just the other day about protecting himself after several bear encounters. (My advice, for the record, was pepper spray, which research and experience show appears to be far more effective than a firearm. The late gun writer and big-bore advocate Elmer Keith became a big-bore advocate in part because he was charged, over a hundred yards, by a grizzly whose heart had been turned into hamburger by four bullets. A bullet may kill a bear, but he may not get the news right away; pepper spray will make him long to be elsewhere.)

In any event, in my delight at seeing the bear, I forgot all about yelling or anything else. On the other hand, I did take the garbage to the dump this afternoon.

Do you remember the great comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson? It ran from 1985 to 1995 and captured to perfection the essence of a little boy and his stuffed tiger. I had a stuffed panda bear when I was a little boy—a condition that hasn’t changed, since Darleen claims I still have the emotional development of a seven year old, and I still have the bear—and I speak from experience when I say Watterson’s genius was his ability to recreate the intricate richness of a little boy’s life with an imaginary playmate. I was reminded of Hobbes, the stuffed tiger, when Darleen rescued a pounce of kittens. (A “pounce,” by the way, is the correct term for a congregation of kittens, and is about as perfect as any word can be.)

There were nine kittens from two different litters left at an abandoned house down the road from us. Six of them were too old and too wild to ever be properly domesticated, but we were able to get them neutered and to place them with people who needed or wanted barn cats. The other three we kept. They came from a mother whom we also rescued and named Grace (because she once was lost, but now was found) and the kittens we obviously named Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith and Hope are normal bouncy, pouncy kittens, but Charity…

All cats have incredibly rich and vivid imaginations. In fact, they are probably the creative fiction writers of the animal world. (I base this on the fact that Darleen frequently tells me—usually with a heavy sign, sometimes accompanied by a rolling of the eyes, sometimes with outright annoyance—that I have a rich and vivid imagination, especially when it comes to things like balancing the checkbook.) They invent games amongst themselves and individually with their stuffed toys, a sort of mirror image of Calvin and his tiger. But Charity takes this creativity a step further. I would call her a demented homicidal psycho jungle cat except that she’s as loving and affection as she can be.

All three of the kittens play games with their stuffed toy mice, games where the mice attempt to escape or, variously, to attack, an event which causes extraordinary feats of athleticism and courage. But Charity doesn’t even need a toy. She’ll be lying quietly on the floor, ostensibly dozing, and all of sudden unseen monsters from hell will start creeping up the hallway and Charity’s tail will turn into a bottle brush, her back will arch like a Halloween cartoon, and she’ll start dancing down the hall, either in flight or in attack depending, I suppose, on the invincibility of the monster. Sometimes these monsters are so dangerous and terrifying that she’ll go right from dozing to frantic flight, and good luck to you if you happen to be between her and the bed she wishes to hide under.

Her most extraordinary routine is a game of her own devising that she plays under the kitchen bar-counter where we eat our meals. There is apparently something there, where I always sit, that must be caught, but that has supernatural powers of evasion. She crouches down, staring intently at the…thing…on the floor. Her tail lashes, then the hindquarters engage with the little wriggle cats do before they attack, and then comes the pounce, high and arching, coming down with a whap of the front paws. But whatever it is invariably escapes and, quicker than thought she’s after it, leaping into the air, whapping her front paws against the counter, down on the floor again, but it races past her and she spins, striking out with a single paw and, almost before the strike is complete, she’s leaping into the air again, sometimes doing complete back flips in her frantic efforts to catch…the thing. Whatever this…thing…might be, it never goes anywhere, but Charity never catches it either, and the game may continue for five minutes at a time.

At least, I think it’s a game, a sort of Calvin and Hobbes kind of imaginary game. I hope it is. I’m beginning to get a little nervous about sitting there.

Watching the news these days is enough to send anyone with two functioning brain cells into a spiral of depression. The recent elections, the steady stream of lies from both politicians and the press who are supposed to keep the politicians honest, various factions slaughtering each other in various parts of the world, every mother’s son trying to develop his own atomic bomb, moronic Taliban members shooting little girls because they don’t want to be morons also, drug lords butchering entire families because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time…

And then, just about the time you begin to think God really didn’t get it right, you have one of those experiences that give you hope.

A bobcat has been working the hill behind our house. We saw him—he looks like a muscular young male—several times today, hunting back and forth through the boulders and oak trees, padding silently along through the tall grass, his camouflage so good he vanished with the mere cessation of movement, then appearing again with just the flick of an ear or turn of head. Cats, all cats, move with such exquisite economy of motion that it’s hard to imagine them ever doing anything clumsy. They occasionally do, of course. I once saw a bobcat make a pounce at some little rodent, miss, fall on his head, and do a complete and completely ungraceful somersault down the slope. But it’s not the norm.

I didn’t get down to the barn to clean stalls until late afternoon, and when I finished, I stepped outside and out of the corner of my eye I saw movement in the southwest pasture. It was one of my neighbor’s semi-feral cats hunting gophers. I am greatly in favor of anyone or anything that  hunts gophers on my property, goddamned gophers, the most pernicious pest in the West, undermining fences and pathways and trees and even—or so I’m told—foundations of buildings, killing everything man plants for food or beauty, creating tunnels that cause the horses to stumble, digging homes around the bases of the trees so that watering during the summer months involves endless hours of work with a shovel just to get the water to the damned tree, and reproducing at a rate that is truly awe-inspiring. When they’re not killing my roses, they’re clearly having x-rated bacchanalian orgies on a massive scale. You kill one, and fifty mourning family members come to the funeral, get drunk, and start having indiscriminate group sex. I imagine their burrows as having mirrors on the ceilings, red velvet wallpaper, heart-shaped beds, video equipment, and copies of Fifty Shades of Grey and The Story of O. So my neighbor’s cats are welcome on my property anytime. I stood still by the barn door, not wanting to interrupt him or her in his or her work, and out of the corner of my other eye, I saw movement on the hill, but very close to the house, literally just outside the chain link fence of the dog yard.

It was the bobcat again. The two felines were over a hundred yards apart, and unaware of each other’s presence or my presence, so for about five minutes I stood and watched two of the world’s greatest predators going about their crepuscular business and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps, just possibly, after man has finished with the slow and sordid process of annihilating himself, perhaps there will still be cats going about their sleek and deadly work. That thought cheered me right up. Of course, the damned gophers will still be there too, having sex.

All of my younger equestrian life I was told horses have far better defensive senses (hearing, vision, smell) than dogs, and I was aware of it, but not in any dramatic way. (To qualify that statement, their vision, while extraordinarily sensitive, is not particularly acute.) But about twenty or twenty-five years ago the truth of that statement was made abundantly clear.

I was deer hunting in the Toiyabe Range in central Nevada at about ten thousand feet. This is vast and remote country and we had ridden in—a full day’s ride—with our outfitter and his wife and their dog, a German shepherd, fully trained for Schutzhund work. Schutzhund, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is the sport originally developed by German trainers and breeders in the early 1900s as a means of testing a dog’s ability for police and military work. It has evolved into a demanding sport enjoyed around the world, and our outfitter’s wife was a serious competitor. She and the dog would remain in camp while we hunted, and in the evening, when we rode back, we would be greeted by the deep warning bark of the dog long before we could see the tents.

One evening we had come back early and were sitting around the fire enjoying a little water-of-life, watching the last pink glow of the day. I happened to be facing the picket line where our horses were tied with their nose bags on. Suddenly a dozen heads came up and the little herd focused intently on something down the trail. They remained focused, not even eating. Instinctively, I glanced down at the magnificent German shepherd. He was dozing peacefully at his mistress’s feet. I waited to see what would happen.

Probably three full minutes went by, and suddenly that massive dog leapt up and starting barking. Two minutes after that another outfitter rode up the trail leading two pack horses and two hunters. They stopped and chatted for a moment, refused our offer of a drink, and rode on, but what remained with me was the memory of that lag of time between the horses’ awareness and the dog’s.

So when I came out of the house to feed this morning and saw my horses all focused on something beyond the barn, I stopped and looked. The house sits on a rise above the barn, so I had a better vantage point than the horses, but it still took me about a minute before I saw them, a pack of five coyotes gliding through the untended land beyond my property line. The fence on the edge of my property is a quarter of a mile from the house and the coyotes were another two hundred yards out in the high brush, but the horses had seen or heard or smelled or sensed them.

I don’t worry about my horses, but a pack of five coyotes would make short work of my Boxer who is long on courage and love, but short on any true aggressive ability, so I hustled him back into the house and watched the pack as they hunted their way down the valley. Why they were still out and about so close to sunrise I couldn’t say. Perhaps they had had a bad night of hunting. Perhaps it was two parents teaching their pups. Perhaps some irresistible smell had drawn them down the mountain in the last pre-dawn hours. Perhaps—and I know coldly scientific types will sniff at this, but I have seen wild animals at play, both singly and in groups—they were just enjoying themselves for their own reasons.

Whatever. It was lovely to see. And it reaffirmed the lesson: always trust your horse.