animalstories

Stalking the Wild Parrot Fish

2010-04-01T15:20:00.000-07:00

Parrot fish come in a variety of sizes, from minnow-sized baby manahoc (I'm not sure of the spelling here, but it's pronounced mah.NYAH.hahk) to adults up to two feet long. They have beaks like parrots, hence their name. Many closely packed teeth line the outside of their mouths. They use their teeth to wrench away the algae from coral, thereby helping to maintain the reef's health. In the process they also ingest small amounts of the coral which emerges from the other end as sand. That's right. They poop sand. Over the centuries, their gastrointestinal activity helps to maintain the beaches. Think about that the next time you sunbathe on the beach.

Not only do the parrot fish help clean the coral of algae and restore our beaches, they taste wonderful. They have this white flesh that flakes beautifully when barbecued. Their heavy scales blacken and char over the charcoal, protecting the flesh inside. It is a perfect fish to barbecue.

And on Guam the weather is always wonderful. Warm, humid, so your skin and hair are always in great shape, moderated by gentle tradewinds. The water was always clear, always a little warmer than Hawaii's. If visibility was only sixty feet, that was a poor day.

With that kind of weather and water, scuba diving was a natural activity. Once I learned to dive, I took up spear fishing, although I never became any good at it.

One young man from the Trust Territory (I think he was a Palauan) really made me look inept. For equipment, he had a piece of rebar ground down to a point and a rubber thong sandal. That was his Hawaiian sling. For a game bag he had a pillow case. He had goggles so he could see, but no snorkel. Certainly no scuba tank or regulator. I had those plus a two-rubber spear gun, interchangeable barbed and trident heads, game bag. Compared to him I looked like I came from outer space.

He usually brought in two to three times as many fish as I did. Not to put too fine a point on it, he made me look ridiculous. If I'd had any pride at all, I would have given the whole thing up and played bingo.

I finally did give up spearfishing (although I resisted the lure of bingo) after a stalk on the reef near Gun Beach. I came up on a huge cloud of parrot fish and saw an exceptionally large specimen, totally ignoring me, munching on algae, creating sand. He looked delicious. Slowly, cautiously, I glided through the water exercising all of my guile and skill, moving my fins just enough to give me some forward momentum. Quietly, lethally, I glided through the water. Picture Elmer Fudd “appwoaching the wascaly pawwot fish.”

The trident head was on. Both bands in place. Locked and loaded. Didn't want to lose the big guy. Ready, aim, FIRE.
A huge cloud of mud erupted as parrot fish fled everywhere. GOT him.

But when the mud settled, I didn't have the big guy. I had the little shrimpy guy behind him. He was so tiny my trident head tore him to pieces. There wasn't enough left for a cat snack. Apparently the big guy knew I was there all the time. I just wasn't worth the effort of responding to until I actually fired. Then he dodged my spear and I nailed the little guy behind him.

Eternal vigilance. That's how you get to be a big fish.

My Sister-in-Law's Turkeys

2010-03-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

I have two sisters-in-law. One of them raised turkeys and the other one didn't.

One day my turkey raising sister-in-law's husband was telling me about how intelligent the turkeys were.
“That's 'cuz you raise sheep,” I replied. “Anyone who raises sheep is bound to think turkeys are intelligent.” I think this is a just observation. In my opinion trivets are smarter than sheep.

But then he told me some stories about their turkeys and I had to admit that maybe they had a brain cell or two in that cavity above their wattles. For one thing, the turkeys hitched rides on the sheep. Apparently they could charm the sheep into trivet mode, and then ride around the farm sheep-back, two birds per sheep. Eventually the sheep had raw backs from the turkeys digging their talons (claws? toenails?) to maintain their balance. But the sheep never seemed to lose their enthusiasm for turkey toting.

One day he claimed the turkeys discovered they were sharing their pen with a rattlesnake. They went into defense mode instantly. They lined up single file and the lead turkey struck at the snake with a set of talons (claws? toenails?) and immediately retreated to the end of the line. His place was taken by the next turkey who repeated the performance. I can't remember now whether the turkeys actually killed the snake or he simply went away because large birds were being mean to him.

I was very impressed, not because turkeys demonstrated they were smarter than sheep – that was a given – but because the birds had the discipline to follow a plan. I know some people who could learn from that example.
In fact, I'm one of them.

Ken

Cockroach Cake

2010-01-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

Joanne doesn’t like me to tell this story, so naturally I will. Aesthetic concerns keep me from putting it on page one of this collection of memories, but the temptation is strong.

After Joanne taught at George Washington Junior High School for a year, she transferred to George Washington Senior High School. The math and science staffs took turns bringing in goodies for Friday snarfing. When it became Joanne’s turn, she decided to make an angel food cake.

She got out her bowls and the ingredients, and soon she was ready for Mr. Mixmaster. Unfortunately, a large cockroach had taken up residence in the mixing machine and when Joanne turned it on he dropped into the batter. It is hard to tell who was more surprised, Joanne or the cockroach. Joanne had the better of the deal because she at least survived whereas in a matter of a half second the cockroach disassembled into unrecognizable parts.

What to do? After some thought, Joanne continued mixing until the cockroach was thoroughly assimilated into the batter. Then he was baked like four and twenty blackbirds and set before her colleagues. Joanne ate the first piece. Nobody detected an extra portion of protein in the cake, nor did Joanne see anyone picking pieces of mandible from between their teeth.

Teachers will eat anything put before them in the staff room, but often they don’t know it.

Appreciation for a Goddess

2010-01-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

Molly did her own share of terrorizing. She wasn’t the innocent, persecuted victim she pretended to be. One day our landlords, the Perez family who lived on the ground floor of our house, brought home an amiable, large footed German Shepherd mix puppy. The pup greeted everyone with joy and gladness, sure that no one meant him harm. And then he met Molly. She meant him harm. She met him with outright fury, fanging and slashing viciously. The puppy hastily retreated, having lost the fight before he even knew he was in the arena.

For the next few months Molly tormented the puppy every time she met him. And she went out of her way to meet him. But from one thing or another, Molly and the puppy did not encounter each other for six months. Finally, one afternoon, Molly caught scent of the dog around the corner and charged only to meet not a cringing puppy but a fun loving young giant of a dog who was not in the least afraid. Molly went from fifth gear to reverse in a tenth of a second, leaving paw hide on the pavement, and then attempted to climb a concrete post. She actually got about four feet up the post before she realized that cats can’t climb concrete posts. She made a mighty leap from the post to the stairwell and disappeared into the house and hid for the rest of the day, reflecting on life’s basic unfairness.

Eventually we left Guam for Spain and had to leave Molly behind. Molly went to live with Lyn Walker. Lyn had a two-bedroom apartment, one for Lyn and one for Molly. At last, someone appreciated a goddess. But Lyn left the island as well and Molly moved in with Bob and Marcia Hartsock. Since the Hartsocks never let anyone drive on their couch, Molly lived to enjoy a comfortable old age.

Molly and the Pig

2010-01-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

Still on the subject of life’s imperfections, there was the time we had the shipping strike. Almost everything Guam uses is shipped in or flown in. Molly had become accustomed to eating a certain dried cat food. The bits came in the shape of little dried starfish. We were happy because the food was relatively cheap.

We were less than happy, though, when the island ran out of little dried starfish and Molly wouldn’t eat anything else. We tried everything. Canned tuna, canned salmon, fresh fish, smoked oysters, carrots with butter on them, but all to no avail. She wrinkled her lip and turned up her nose at all our offerings, and she got thinner and thinner. Finally, she even began to get smaller. She got down to about three pounds, did our incredible shrinking cat. But still she wouldn’t eat. One day she stalked into the house with something furry in her mouth and spat it out at our feet. The furry object, a shrew by profession, squeaked and ran away. Molly, meanwhile, gave us a “see-what-you-made-me-do” look and stomped out of the house, making as much noise as a three-pound cat can make.

Fortunately, the shipping strike ended and the little dried starfish reappeared before Molly disappeared.

But even without food shortages and surgeries, Molly found life difficult at times. For instance, there was The Pig. There was this wild pig, you see. Well, not really a wild pig, but a tame pig belonging to someone, we never knew who, that just ran at large through the neighborhood streets raiding garbage cans. We couldn’t outwit the pig. Firmly fitting garbage can lids posed no particular problem. We tried waiting until the garbage men were almost to the house and then quickly ran out with the cans. We’d run back in and hear the crash as the pig, appearing out of nowhere, tipped the can over and gorged himself on our garbage.

The pig just didn’t outsmart the Harrises. He outsmarted the whole neighborhood. Granted, we weren’t Harvard faculty, but you’d think we could outwit a pig, collectively if not individually. But no, things came to such a sad pass that our son, Eric, went to the village commissioner to complain. The commissioner’s advice was short and succinct. Eat the pig! But we didn’t do that. We didn’t know who the owner of the pig was or how he would react to his next fiesta entrée disappearing into his neighbors’ gullets.

What did the pig have to do with Molly? Well, pigs, you see, are omnivorous with a curious taste for cat food. Every time the pig saw Molly he would think, “FOOD,” and chase her. Fortunately for Molly, she always reached the nearest coconut palm before the pig. On several occasions we would come home to find Molly up a palm tree, waiting for us and wondering what had taken so long. She grew to really hate pigs.

One day we were on the southeast side of the island for some obscure reason and we came across someone’s idea of a zoo. The zoo had carabaos, a pony or two, one poor fruitbat hanging upside down trying to get some sleep if only people would let him alone. And a wild boar. At least, that’s what the sign outside the cage said. Inside the cage was a little black piglet hoping somebody would scratch him behind the ears. Joanne granted his wish, and gave him a belly rub as well.

Having done her good deed for the day, we returned home. Molly greeted us and Joanne reached down to pet her. But the cat recoiled from Joanne’s hand and her face wrinkled in revulsion. As far as she was concerned, we had been consorting with the enemy and she wouldn’t come near us until we had changed clothes and boiled our hands.

Travails of a Goddess

2009-12-23T10:39:00.000-08:00

So continues the saga of the life and times of Molly, feline goddess of Guam.

Even for deities life is imperfect, and one day she got sick. I don’t know what it was, something like cat fever. We thought she was going to die. This happened right at the time we were finally going through culture shock. Things on Guam had stopped being wonderful and there wasn’t a good thing anybody could say about the place to us. (This happens to most people, I understand, after about six months. It certainly did to us.) We felt so unhappy about our cat and displeased with the universe in general and Guam in particular that we made plans to give Molly a burial at sea. We didn’t even want her corpse on the island.

I guess that wasn't very reasonable.

Molly recovered. And so did we. As Molly regained her health, she became the epitome of beauty, at least as far as the local toms were concerned. Toms in profusion came to serenade her. She sat on the headboard and sang back to them. On good nights it was only a duet. Sometimes it was a Wagnerian chorus. No problem, we thought. Cats only stay in heat a day or two, and then it’s all over. But not Molly. Molly loved her state of passion and it seemed she might stay that way permanently. We decided it was time for Molly to visit the vet.

The veterinarian was Filipino, and it had been our experience that, in general, Asian medical practitioners were uncomfortably fatalistic. Joanne devised a test. When we made an appointment for Molly, she asked him, “How many cats die from this surgery?”

“Die? Why should any of them die?” the vet replied. This was the right answer. There is no reason for a cat to die from spaying. More cats die from yowling than spaying.

The spaying went without remarkable incident. Well, Molly did get loose and hide herself under the refrigerator. I didn’t know cats could make themselves that flat. Molly was a small cat, but even so….

Molly, Picasso's Cat

2009-11-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

In 1970 we took jobs as teachers on the island territory of Guam. Every new teacher had an assigned sponsor to help get settled in a house and find their way around. We were no exception. We also had a sponsor.

Our sponsors had a female cat who had given birth to a litter of kittens just a few weeks before our arrival. Lucky for us, huh? We agreed to take a kitten and dropped by to make our choice. Joanne picked up each kitten in one hand and held her up over her head. Most of the kittens whined and complained, all except one. This very small specimen of feline attacked Joanne’s nearest finger and began to play with it. She, we decided, was the keeper.

We took her home when she was old enough to leave her mother and named her Molly. For no real reason. However, when we got her home we noticed that she was the strangest looking thing in the shape of mortal cat. Her ears were too large for the rest of her body and she seemed to be nothing but bones and joints, loosely held together by calico fur. She looked like Picasso’s cat.

Molly feared nothing and attacked everything. She snagged her sharp little kitten claws caught in chair cushions, curtains or clothes. Shaking her loose from my shorts while trying to put them on became a morning ritual.

She moved to Agana with us when we left Sinajana. She really related to the entire three-bedroom second-story apartment. She loved it there. There was room for a cat to PLAY! She used to sit in the center of a small throw rug and attack anyone who was foolhardy enough to step on it. Our daughter, Pat, would stomp at the cat with her bare feet while the Molly assaulted her toes. Sometimes our son, Eric, would chase Molly around the house and the cat’s claws would dig up ringlets of wood as she rounded the corners full bore. Then Molly would turn on Eric and chase him around the house. At least Eric’s toenails never dug up ringlets of wood.

We spoiled her. We had pets all of our childhood days and all of our married lives. There was always a cat, a dog, a goat, a burro, someone. When we first got married and living in an el cheapo apartment in Hollywood, we trapped a mouse, Poquito. Poor thing got caught in our frying pan, filtered down through the stove and stunned himself on the wall when he missed the doorway trying to escape. But now, all of a sudden, we had only this one, small, imperious cat and she basked in our collective affection and esteem. She deserved it, of course. She knew that. She was a goddess.

But even for goddesses live is imperfect. More later on.

Chinese Health Food

2009-11-08T18:17:00.000-08:00

We spent Christmas of 1971 touring Taiwan with the Guam Science Teachers. That's how we happened to be at the Lungshan Night Market, just a half mile or so from Chiang Kai Shek's presidential palace.

The Chinese have a theory of health consonant with their theory of the universe. The universe is composed of contesting opposites, yin and yang. Don’t ask me which is which; I never could keep them straight. Sicknesses come in two varieties, hot and cold. When one is afflicted with a cold disease, a head cold, for example, one eats a hot food. Dog, for example. When one is afflicted with a hot disease, a fever, for example, one eats a cold food. Snake bile, for instance. Poisonous snake bile. The more poisonous the snake, the better the bile. They import poisonous snakes into Taiwan for bile harvesting.

So here we are wandering around the Lungshan Night Market with our mouths gaping as if we had just come into town on a wagon load of pumpkins. We saw a dentist lugging his chair on his back. When he got to his assigned place, he set up shop. We saw an acupuncturist at work. (I won't vouch for how sanitary his needles were.) There were fabrics and foods and it was like an Arabian Nights scene. Only everybody spoke Chinese.

We stopped by a smallish man who stood by stacks of wire cages. He bowed to us. We bowed to him. Then we bowed to each other some more. After demonstrating how flexible our spinal columns were, the Chinese vendor grabbed a piece of stiff wire about a foot long with a hook bent into the end of it. He opened one of the cages and poked around for a few seconds. Finally he brought his hook out with a black snake hooked over it.

The snake looked at us for a few seconds and decided he didn’t like what he saw. So he spread his hood. Joanne and I were in front, of course. We all of us suddenly realized that this Chinese guy was poking a cobra in our faces and instantly retreated three giant steps. If there were any children or pets behind us, they died. Two dozen people running backwards can cause a lot of havoc. Sorry about that.

The vendor offered to kill the snake for us and let us sample cobra bile, but we had just eaten a big dinner and we none of us saw the need to kill a perfectly good cobra just so we could lose our dinner in the streets of Taipei.

More Buck Fever

2009-10-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

This is a very short story to demonstrate that I am not the only one in this family who gets buck fever. I am thinking particularly of one dive, probably in 1973 or 74. It was a beautiful day with warm, clear water and soft trade winds. Actually, a rather typical day on Guam. Joanne and I were diving on a reef dotted with larger coral heads. Suddenly she found a lobster peeking at her from a deep hole in a dead coral head.

She dropped her spear and grabbed the lobster’s antennae with both hands. Forget the sugar plum fairies. Visions of lobster with garlic butter danced in her head. She tugged on the antennae, but the lobster refused to cooperate. Instead, he dug in and would not be prized loose. And there Joanne sat a few feet under water, unable to let go of the antennae to get her spear gun because the lobster would simply disappear. She reminded me forcibly of the possibly apocryphal tale of the monkey with his hand inside a jar clutching a banana. But it would have taken some time for the monkey to starve. It wouldn’t have taken Joanne very long at all to run out of air

Joanne tugged on the lobster for ten minutes before it finally occurred to her that she wasn’t going to win. She might break the animal’s antennae off, which would damage him greatly, and she still wouldn’t get lobster tail for desert. Two antennae would look pathetic on the dinner plate.

It was buck fever all over again. But at least we didn’t hurt ourselves or each other.

Satan's Cat

2009-10-22T10:36:00.000-07:00

It was outside of a bar in Torremolinos in 1975, near the beach, where Joanne and I met Satan’s cat. Just like that. Satan’s cat was neither small nor large, but he gave off an aura of a saber toothed tiger. Missing left ear. Right eye, gone. Several major scars adorned his face and front end, none on the back. Satan’s cat obviously faced his troubles squarely. And loved it. Even a casual inspection from ten yards away assured you of his gender. He swaggered down the middle of whatever path he chose, this gato del Diablo, this jefe of Andalucia. He was an El Máximo.

Neither Joanne nor I would have approached him with anything short of a .357.

Suddenly two Dalmatian pups bounded out of the bar and, sighting the cat, decided it would be fun to chase it up a tree or, even better, in front of a car. They charged, but the cat, rather than fleeing, sat down in the middle of the road and eyed the young dogs speculatively. I could almost hear him think, “Shall I blind the one on the right and castrate the one on the left, or vice versa?” The cat did not run, but waited calmly and with fell intent. I smelled brimstone. The cat smelled blood.

The pups realized that something wasn’t quite right and stopped bounding and prancing. They surreptitiously looked at each other. Neither would retreat first, but for damn sure neither would attack first either.

So there the three sat in the middle of the street. They would be there yet, but the pups’ owner came out of the bar and called them to follow him. The pup followed their master. Gladly. Quickly.

And Satan’s cat went on his way, his afternoon paseo undisturbed.

The Swimming Bolt Cutter

2009-10-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

I am a man of many gifts. For instance, when I go scuba diving, I present more than just a menace to myself. Sometimes I am a clear and present danger to others as well.

We used to night dive a lot. All you needed was your usual scuba gear and a flashlight that wouldn’t short out in salt water. Usually the lights were encased in a waterproof plastic box with a handle for ease of carrying and a switch in case you actually wanted to use it. Such lights in these distant days were known for their bright light and high price.

Night diving was fun. The water always warm, the weather never cold. One New Years Eve we dove off Agat, speared some parrot fish which we cooked on a small hibachi and dined in style, fresh fish accompanied by white wine, white rice and kim chee. Such style. Such elegance. We needed only Guy Lombardo. Or Don Ho.

But one particular night Joanne and I went diving off Tumon (TOO-mahn) Beach. We were armed with spear guns and nightlights and cruising over the coral reef which, at that time, thanks to the Crown of Thorns starfish, was mostly dead and alga encrusted. We found a little fish, bright yellow, about the size of a saltshaker, sound asleep on top of a rock. Down for the count. Joanne picked him up gently in her hand and there he suddenly woke to his great danger. He vanished. Disappeared. I’m sure he left behind a little pile of fish poop in Joanne’s hand.

Since we were fishing instead of sight seeing, we cruised on slowly, two stealthy, menacing predators desperately seeking some fish that didn’t come frozen in a box. Suddenly I came upon another fish soundly sleeping on top of a rock. Only this one wasn’t little and yellow; he was BIG and algae colored. (Underwater at night, everything looks algae colored.) He looked to be as long as my leg. Things underwater look much bigger than on the surface, but if he looked bigger, so did my leg. This fish was as long as my leg.

Greed invested every cell of my body. Simply put, I came down with a case of “buck fever.” “Buck fever” is a deer hunting term referring to your state of mind when you see your first buck, or your biggest buck with the greatest rack, and you don’t even notice your dog, your pickup or your spouse standing behind the deer until after you’ve fired. In this case I cocked my spear gun and let fly, taking direct aim at his head, never giving a second thought to what would happen if I missed, or if I hit him but didn’t kill him.

As it turned out, I scored a direct hit. And woke him up. I stunned him a little, because I had taken a sizable chunk out of his head. He shook himself, creating a big cloud of mud, and began to swim ponderously away. He had a mouth made of two platelike structures, suitable for eating coral. You could hear him grind the plates together. He puffed up like a bladder. You guessed it, I had just shot a huge puffer.

I hadn’t even checked to see what kind of fish I was trying to kill. Even if I had killed him, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to slice and dice him. There is a singular toxin in the puffer’s gall bladder, and if even a drop of it contaminates the rest of the fish, someone is going to die. Perhaps a whole restaurant full of somebodies. The Japanese think this fish is a great delicacy. They eat some curious foods in Japan. Even in Japan you have to have a special license to chop up a puffer. I had just speared a fish that I wouldn’t have the nerve to eat even if I had killed him.

Joanne swam over to see what the cloud of mud was all about, and the fish slowly swam towards her, without aim or purpose, still stunned by the impact of my spear. We listened to his grinding mouth as the puffer slowly moved through the water. Directly toward Joanne. He could certainly bite off and swallow a finger, probably at the elbow, and not even notice it. Slowly the fish approached Joanne. Slowly Joanne laid on her back on the reef and used her spear gun and her fins to gently guide this swimming bolt cutter over and beyond her. We listened as he ground his way into the night.

At that point we aborted our dive. We decided we’d had enough adventure that night and we didn’t want to wait around until the fish came back.

More on Shell Collecting

2009-10-18T08:14:00.000-07:00

Guam, about 1972.

One evening while sitting down to dinner, we heard a knock on the door. We opened it to greet a group of people we had never seen before in our lives. They were Howard and Sharlene McCord and family from the hamlet of Meadow Vista, just a few miles east of Auburn, the wide spot in the road we called home before moving to Guam. Howard was a meteorologist sent to the Naval Station to do whatever it was meteorologists did out there. Sharlene was a primary school teacher. They had heard of us, somehow, back in the States and resolved to look us up when they arrived on the island.

We invited them in for ice cream. While they took no ice cream they did accept our offer to show them around the beach and do some snorkeling. They loved snorkeling and soon set out to complete their shell collection.

However, instead of bringing home living animals to kill them so their shells could be attractive paperweights, Howard set up a salt water aquarium where the mussels lived together in harmony. I remember sitting by the aquarium one for a half hour watching Howard’s snails. They had their personalities. Some were energetic and moved rapidly, for snails. Some snails were jerks who seemed to take delight in bothering the others, and some were, well, sluglike. Watching the snails play for a half hour was epiphanous. I learned that I really needed to get a life.

One day Howard noticed that some of his cowries were dead. The only symptom was a small hole drilled in an empty shell. Then he learned that the miter shells we found all over the reef were carnivores. They didn’t devour green algae like the cowries and conchs. They wanted flesh, snail flesh. Their MO was to drill a hole in their prey’s shell, kill them (venom? I don’t know) and eat them, leaving only the empty shell. Howard quickly evicted his antisocial tenant and restored harmony to his aquarium. Attention shell collectors: you don’t have to kill your specimens if members of your own collection are willing to do it for you.

Shell Collecting on Guam

2009-10-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

Shortly after we began scuba diving people told us of the “poisonous cone shells.” Yeah, right, venomous sea shells. It turns out that this time the urban mythologists were right. There really are venomous mussels. And their toxin is deadly. It will kill a reef fish instantly, but it takes minutes to hours to kill a human because humans have so much more mass than reef fish. The mussels first stick an eye out of the small end of the cone and scout the territory. If they find a target, they withdraw their eye and stick out their proboscis, their nose, which then becomes an honorary blow gun. They snort their dart out, and whoever is on the receiving end of the dart dies. Now here is where it gets tricky for the cone fish. He has to withdraw his nose and stick out his stomach, retroverting it to envelope and digest his prey. It takes a couple of hours for this digestive process to occur, during which the cone shell is helpless.

Not many people on Guam collected cone shells. However, we had many Korean laborers on the island and you could find them on the weekends at the beach, boiling water over an open fire and dropping in mussels we called “Top Hats.” After the animals were cooked, the Koreans would eat them and canned kim chee and beer. We tried it ourselves and found that if you put enough catsup and mustard on the shell fish, it was quite palatable. Of course, with enough catsup and mustard, you could eat a sponge. And that just about described the texture of the boiled shellfish.

We have never regarded sponges as a great delicacy and, beyond that, don’t like the idea of boiling animals while they are alive. I’m told it doesn’t hurt them. Says who?

So, giving up on sponges as a source of protein, we were still interested in completing a shell collection, minus the cone shells. Many people on Guam collected shells. Some had spectacular collections, but the best ones came from living animals. Once the animal dies, the shell loses its glisten. The shell is, after all, a living part of a living animal and it needs nutrition. Without a living animal to provide it, the shell loses something. Being rolled over and over in the surf doesn’t help.

I lost my ambition for shell collecting on one diving expedition in shallow water. I’d found a large spider conch and held it in my hand, ready to store it in my net game bag, when it stuck its eyes and looked at me. Then it extended a claw-like appendage from its shell and flipped out of my hand to freedom. I figured that anyone who wanted to live that much deserved what he got and I would help him survive. I picked him up and hid him away from other divers. I don’t know if my puny efforts at conservation were effective, but over the years I sequestered half a dozen such conchs.

I concluded that a conservationist was someone who had already completed his shell collection.

The Crown of Thorns Starfish

2009-10-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

We lived and taught on the island of Guam from 1970 to 1974. That was where we encountered this curious animal, the Crown of Thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci, who destroys living coral. He doesn’t mean anything by it. That’s just the way he gets his food, by dining on the small animals who live inside their coral caves. The once vibrant colors of the reef become the fetching grey of concrete. The reef soon becomes covered with slimy green algae. The algae don’t mean anything by being slimy and green, either. That’s just the way they are. The best you can say for the algae is that the dead coral is no longer grey.

With the coral reefs dead, the fish soon disappear, first the one who directly depend on coral for the sustenance, and then the other fish who consume the coral eaters.

But there is worse.

Guam is a part of the Marianas Islands chain, a group if islands built almost entirely of coral and protected from instant destruction by the coral reef. And the Pacific Ocean around the islands is very deep. How deep is very deep? Try seven miles, the depth of the Marianas Trench not too distant to the east.

For we who lived on Guam, the plague of coral eating starfish posted a problem. We had to take strenuous counteraction. Either that, or pray and practice our dog paddle.

Not everyone on the island saw the Crown of Thorns as a problem. One sailor on the Naval Station took the opposite view. One graffito found on a men’s room wall exhorted, “Go, Crown of Thorns!”

But most of the divers and snorkelers with whom we associated felt very differently about good old A. planci. Search and destroy parties were organized to locate, gather and dispose of the pest. But you had to be careful because any animal that could munch coral could do serious damage to the bod as well. If one of them nails you with a few spines, the result will be colorful scarred pits. The spines themselves can be up to two inches and extend downward from the up to 30 arms the animal may possess. Most Crown of Thorns starfish are around a foot in diameter, but they have found a few elsewhere measuring over 30 inches.

Some people tried to chop the animal up. But they were informed as they were happily chopping away that all they were doing was creating new starfish. Starfish have some great regenerative properties.

The next solution worked. Not a silver bullet or a stake through the heart, but burning alive. Hey, it worked for the Inquisition. Why not for us?

However, the sound and the smell of this splendid solution were yucky in the extreme. It was so unpleasant that few people wanted to do it. There was something so basically satisfying about chopping them and chopping them and chopping them.

Fortunately, the infestation ended by itself, although there have been other major invasions throughout the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, most notably on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef currently. Guam’s plague doesn’t even merit a mention among those people studying and dealing with A. planci. Our Crown of Thorns invasion was just a minor episode in a long line of inconvenient cosmic events.

It was just one of those things, just one of those crazy things.

Under the Rainbow

2009-09-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

Gossamer. I was driving eastward on Cruzon Grade in Nevada County, facing the morning sun. It must have been in the fall. As I understand it, that's Gossamer Season.

Gossamer, as in gossamer wings or the fabric of Lady Caro Lamb's dresses, has the reputation of being sheer, elegant and flimsy. Sheer and elegant to be sure, but never flimsy. Gossamer is spider web and there is no natural substance with a greater tensile strength.

There comes a time in every young spider's life when he has a choice. Leave home or become dinner for mama. (This is a choice she spiders must make, also, since mama is an equal opportunity diner.) The young spiders seek out the highest point they can find, even if it's only on top of a flower or a blade of grass. Then he squirts out some streams of silk from some of his spinnerettes, and they harden as soon as they are exposed to air. The strands become “wings” to carry the baby spiders away from their ravenous mothers.

The young Cruzon Grade spiders are fortunate because they don't have to launch themselves from flowers or grass blades. They have cedars 60-, 70-, 80-, 100-feet tall, all an escaping baby spider could wish for. A couple of squirts, and they're aloft, going wherever the wind takes them. (They don't have much control over where they go, and I imagine some of them end up in the middle of a river or a lake.)

On this particular day there were thousands of those little guys making an arachnid exodus. The breeze was just enough to keep them aloft, but not enough to take them anywhere. The morning sun shone through the silk shrouds and acted as a crystal. The light rays separated and the spider silks became a curtain of shimmering rainbow colors.

And so I found what was at the end of the rainbow. Well, under the rainbow. Thousands of spiders. Who knew.

Showing Class

2009-09-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

North San Juan, California, 1980s.

Of all the vegetables in our garden, we were proudest of our tomatoes, which grew in columns seven feet tall made of construction wire, the heavy gauge stuff with the six inch squares. The Sweet One Hundreds seldom got to three feet, but sometimes the Early Girls and the Early Boys made it all the way to the top.

We loved our tomatoes, but so did the horn worms. We usually treated the annual horn worm infestation with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and, at need, hand picked them. I found hand picking difficult because the worms were so exactly the color of the plant they were devouring that I couldn't see one unless I got it stuck up my nose.

One fine day I found a horn worm right in front of me, practically begging, “Please pick me and feed me to your chickens.” He was the biggest horn worm I have ever seen, He would have been Mothzilla if I hadn't picked him.

I threw him into the chicken pen and a big red hen rushed up to eat him. But the worm reared up and clacked! I didn't know they could make a sound, but this guy did. He made himself as big and as loud as he could. The chicken slammed on her binders and retreated momentarily.

But she recovered her composure and ate the horn worm. The worm had no chance, but he gave it his very best shot. I learned something from that. Even when all is lost, when your cause is hopeless, when you have no chance in Heaven or Hell, you can still go out with style.

You can always show class. Even if you're only a worm.

Rauzzini

2009-08-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

Pierre Lapin went the way of all rabbits. No one was quite sure what happened, but one morning he was not in his tree.

Some time later Carlysle replaced him with a pygmy goat. The goat also needed a name and inspection revealed that he had been “pruned.” Castrated, if one is to be indelicate about it. Carlysle immediately thought of Mozart.

Well, not Mozart really, but the castrato, Venanzio Rauzzini. As every schoolboy knows, Rauzzini was one of Mozart's favorite castrati. The relationship leaped to Carlysle's mind, and so the newest resident at Chez Carlysle was christened Rauzzini.

Like his predecessor, Pierre, Rauzzini was determined to live in the house with Carlysle and Cadence. The humans were firm in their desire to not share their living quarters with a goat, but Rauzzini was much more intelligent than a rabbit, wily, cunning, sly. Effective. And there was so much in the house to tempt a goat, cat food, potato chips, musical scores. There was so much paper in Carlysle's house, books, pamphlets, magazines, and scores, hundreds and hundreds of musical scores, art songs, Broadway hits, motets, Medieval chorale music, orchestrations. Very tempting to a goat's palate, especially one named Rauzzini.

He'd take advantage whenever a visiting student or performer left the door even slightly ajar. Carlyle's house was in the Victorian style, two stories, two stairwells, and many small rooms. It even had a dumb waiter, which Rauzzini never found. (If I ever write the screen play, Rauzzini will find the dumb waiter.)

Many were the hunts, the “hallo-o-os” raised by small groups of people as they chased after and tried to locate the well hidden pygmy goat. I recall chasing him down once myself, my voice lesson interrupted by the escapade of a goat. I had no idea there were so many rooms in that house, but I had a chance to visit them all. And once I had located Rauzzini, and dragged him from under the bed, I still had to find a way to get him outside. He wouldn't lead. Carrying a wriggling goat down steep stairs is not one of the safest things I have ever done. I'm not sure who was the angrier when I deposited Rauzzini outdoors.

Carlysle once tried to show me what a clever goat Rauzzini was. He was going to have the goat run back and forth on the driveway in front of the house. But first he had to show the goat what was wanted. Carlysle ran back and forth on the driveway in front of the house by way of demonstration. Rauzzini sat down and watched Carlysle run back and forth. I guess he wanted to study the technique.

Carlysle eventually ran out of breath and decided that if Rauzzini could run back and forth, he wasn't going to do so on that particular day. So everyone but the goat came in and we sang songs for a while.

Rauzzini eventually crossed over to where the weather is always fair in that great goat pasture in the sky. Carlysle had this final accolade for him. “Rauzzini had great taste. He only ate first violin parts.”

Pierre Lapin

2009-08-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

Nevada City, California, 1980s.

I have a friend, call him Carlysle, who lives with his girlfriend Cadence in an old Victorian house on two acres of hilltop surrounded by cedar trees. He has nearby neighbors, but he only sees their houses when he drives up his winding driveway. He's also near several large shopping malls and a freeway, but he can't see or hear them either.

His house will never be featured in Sunset and no one would ever mistake it for a movie set. But it does have one thing, music. Cadence is a performing musician, singer and teacher. Carlysle also sings, plays a little piano and is currently working on the cello. There are lessons or rehearsals in progress and hot and cold running performers are in and out at all times in the old Victorian house. There is no time for distractions like freeway noise and mall lights.

Every now and then Carlysle does strange things. Once he brought home a rabbit. It might have been for Easter, but it wasn't a dead rabbit, something useful, something you could cook for dinner. My, no, this was a live rabbit and so, of course, he had to have a name. Carlysle named him Pierre. Pierre Lapin.

I don't suppose Carlysle gave much thought to where Pierre would live. He knew it wouldn't be in the house with Cadence and him, but he had no suitable hutches or other kind of outbuilding that might do. It was cold in those spring evenings, so Carlysle set up a cardboard box with some rags for warmth and some food for sustenance in his carport. (It would have been a carport, but there was no room for his car since it had an accumulation of other miscellany that grown over previous months. There was barely room for Pierre, and he was not a big rabbit.

Pierre did manage to make it into the house a time or two, but each time he was firmly put back into his box in the carport. Otherwise, he had free range of the large yard. However, dogs roamed the neighborhood, as well as raccoons, cats, and other predators who might be interested in a rabbit entree. Pierre survived several onslaughts but after one particularly perilous occasion, made himself very scarce. It took Carlysle several hours to find him.

Enough was enough, my friend decided. He resolved to put Pierre's box where it would be safe from all the predators. He put the box up in a black oak tree about eight feet off the ground.

But rabbits don't climb trees, not even gifted rabbits. But Carlysle had a plan. He got some ducting, the same kind of tubular material used to vent laundry dryers, and wrapped it around the tree several times so that it led gently from the ground to the box.

“Carl,” I said, “I don't want to hurt your feelings, but that is a genuinely stupid idea.” You see, I knew all about rabbit behavior and Carlysle didn't.

Apparently Pierre didn't know much about rabbit behavior, either, because he walked right into the ducting and waltzed up to his box. A tunnel is a tunnel, right?

MORAL: Just because an idea is stupid, doesn't mean it won't work.

Crow

2009-08-09T10:26:00.000-07:00

Auburn, California, 1960s.

We've all seen race prejudice in humans before, but I have only seen one race prejudiced horse in my entire life. His name was Crow.

Crow, an appaloosa stallion, was a part of Betty Veal's horse business. People wanting to raise their own appaloosa foal would bring their candidate mare to Betty's ranch, pay their stud fee, and Crow would “cover the mare.”

There was only one thing wrong with this otherwise splendid scheme. Crow did not like grey mares, any of them. He liked bays, seal browns, sorrels, duns, buckskins, grullas, palominos. But he would not cover grey mares. He wouldn't even rouse himself to make the attempt.

What was Betty to do? Tell her customers to keep their money because their mares didn't meet with her stud's aesthetic standards? Refusing or returning someone's stud fee is a disagreeable prospect for anyone in the horse breeding business. But to have your stud become the laughing stock of the county is simply not acceptable.

Betty gave the matter considerable thought. She was a well-educated woman, a successful nurse. She figured that if she couldn't outwit her own stallion, she had better give up horses and take up needlepoint. It turned out to be no major feat to trick Crow.

Crow was particularly fond of one mare. When next Betty had a grey mare to breed, she hid the animal behind a building. Then she stood Crow's favorite lady, decked out in baubles and bangles with cornflowers woven into her mane, just around the corner from the grey. Crow rose to the occasion, as he thought, but before he realized what was happening, Betty had whisked him around the corner and he had covered the grey. Blecch!

I grew to really respect Betty's determination to accomplish a mission. If you have never assisted at a horse breeding, permit me to tell you that a stallion ready to “do the job” is an awesome sight. He rears up, three quarters of a ton of male animal ready for one thing and it isn't taking a walk.

But Betty accomplished the deed, and the grey mare got covered. The wonderful thing was, the trick worked several times. Crow never caught on. And every time it worked, Crow eyed Betty reproachfully. “Aw, ma, you did it again. Durn it.”

But I wouldn't try this trick witåh just any stallion. Crow was actually a pretty good guy.

Sam

2009-08-03T14:40:00.000-07:00

Auburn, California, 1960s.

Sam was a gelding we had, part of our menagerie, a huge, sweet gentle brute. Sweet, gentle, kind. He bucked a lot, thereby demonstrating that nobody is perfect.
He was “cinchie.” that was the problem. If you tightened the saddle beyond what he thought proper, he panicked.

Sam was supposed to have been born an appaloosa. Appaloosa is a color type. If your foal is brightly colored, he's worth some money. If he is not so brightly colored, or even lacks the color pattern entirely but has some other distinguishing characteristics, you might be able to do something with him. But if your foal is a clean miss, no appaloosa qualities whatever, you've got dog food on the hoof. Sam was dog food on the hoof.

I don't know what appaloosas are like today, but back in the sixties, they sometimes had ugly heads. Alexander the Great rode a leopard spotted appaloosa named Bucephalus. “Bucephalus” means “cow head” in Greek. Sam didn't have a cow head. He had a suitcase head. Ina Robinson, his breeder, named him “Samsonite.” When we acquired the horse as a two-year-old, his name had been shortened to Sam.

The huge foal grew to be a huge young gelding, 17 hands 2 inches tall. But he was still a teenager. There was a lot of air between the ground and his belly. And sometimes between the saddle and the rider if you didn't get the cinch right. Sam's front legs were close together because his chest had not begun to develop. One rancher friend expressed it well. “So, who cares if his front legs come out of the same hole. Why waste a hole?” But as Sam grew into a real horse, he developed a real chest as well, but the front legs still came out of the same hole.

Joanne used Sam as a trail horse for a while. It had its advantages. For one thing, you ride above the dust raised by the other horses. I'd ride Legend, 15 hands (a ten inch difference there), gasping and wheezing on a hot, windless, breezeless summer day, sneezing dust out of my nose, and Joanne would be serenely above it all, safe on her tall horse.

On the other hand, she sometimes got scraped off on branches the rest of us rode under. Once she got a branch stuck in her boot. She kicked her feet free of the stirrups and hung on like. Sam went on down the trail leaving her dangling like a large, outraged bird while the rest of us proceeded on our dusty way. Joanne chose the correct option, though. Better to dangle from a tree than to come off over Sam's rump. He was a sensitive guy with an energetic way of showing his displeasure. You had to be careful.

Joanne used to brag that she had been thrown too many times to count. But one day Sam panicked because a stirrup touched his cinch and Sam augured her into the ground. Now she says she's only been thrown once. All the other times she just came off the horse.

Sam got over his cinchie ways when he was about five and we sold him to a little girl who was going to use him as a jumper. It wasn't fair, really. There was still so much air between the ground and the horse's belly that all he had to do was lift his feet to clear most obstacles he'd encounter in the jumping arena.

The girl renamed him “Tiny Tim.”

Ralph and Ken's Bear

2009-07-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

I taught with Ralph Henson for many years in the wilds of the San Juan Ridge. I am the "Ken" in this story. We were teaching eighth grade that year, and we took the class on a field trip to Yosemite. (His idea, not mine. I would have gone to Reno. Everyone needs to know about fleshpots.) We had hiked from the valley floor to a camp site near the foot of Half Dome by a flowing river.

The kids set up their tents near a fire pit while Ralph and I set up our tents by the river. We camped there two nights. On the first of them a bear snuffled at my tent and I reflected on what a poor barrier a nylon dome tent made against a determined bear. Or even a negligent one. I also said a prayer of thanks that I didn't have any Fritos with me.

But the next night provided Ralph and me with our brightest, shiningest hour. We had climbed Half Dome that day, and then climbed back down again. What else are you going to do? We were all fairly tired. Ra;lph and I retired to our tents as the kids began to turn in. A few stayed by the diminishing camp fire to tell ghost stories. It looked like the end of a good day.

I hadn't been secured in my nylon mushroom for very long when I heard a whisper. “Ralph. Ralph.”

Ralph and I both came out of our tents to see what was amiss, and there stood Jolene, one of our eighth grade girls, let's call her Karen. “Ralph,” she continued at the whisper, “there's a bear in our camp.” And just to verify her story, a bear stood up behind the girl. The bear, a female, had left two cubs behind to terrorize the children's camp while she followed Karen.

Ralph, thinking quickly, picked up some pine cones and threw them at the bear, shouting, “Go away! Go away!” The bear decided we didn't have any bacon and were very rude besides, and went away.

Meanwhile, Karen bowed her head and said, “All right, Ralph,” and slowly turned away. It made perfect sense to her that she could come to Ralph and complain about a bear in camp and he would throw pine cones at her and tell her to go away. That Ralph. Sometimes he was in such a bad mood. By the time she had turned around, the bear had gone. Karen never knew the bear was there.

Ralph and I took off for the kids' camp armed with nothing more than good intentions. Authorities recommend we don't shoot bears but frighten them away with noise, like banging sauce pans with wooden spoons. We didn't have a sauce pan and wooden spoon. I don't know what we thought we were going to do.

When we arrived at the kid's camp, what a sight greeted our eyes. The she bear and her cubs wandered around the camp as though they owned it. Four girls jumped up and down on a fallen tree shouting, “Bear, bear, bear.” Two boys climbed a tree, but the tree was so small that the top bent down. Josh, the unfortunate bottom boy, kept hitting the bear with his own bottom. Fortunately, this confused rather than irritated the bear.

Many of the other campers, meanwhile, ran around like Keystone Kops, running into each other, cursing, screaming. One boy, Kyle, who had retired early, came out of his tent wondering what all the uproar was. Daniel decided to settle some old scores and smacked Kyle in the nose with bloody, satisfactory results. There was Kyle bleeding all over the place and people were screaming, “My God, the bear got Kyle!” Actually, the only thing the bear got was the marshmallows in Kyle's backpack. He had to carry his stuff back home in a trash bag. He did not have a good day.

And through it all, three sleeping beauties, eighth grade girl children who had brought some funny looking cigarettes with them, slept peacefully through the whole affair. “Bears? What bears?” they asked the next morning.

Amid all the pandemonium, the bear decided that she wasn't going to find any bacon anywhere and she really didn't want to have her cubs hanging around eighth graders anyway. She and her tribe left leaving behind 25 bug-eyed kids and a trashed backpack. And everybody had a good bear story to tell.

Bear Scat

2009-07-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

Back in '86 and '87 I taught 2nd and 3rd grades at tiny Malakoff School. One of the really neat things about working at Malakoff School was our location, east o' the sun and west o' the moon. This meant, among other things, that I didn’t have to constantly ask permission in triplicate every time I wanted to take the class for a walk. In the spring, after the snow melt and the dogwood blossoms burst, we spent many afternoons just walking around in the woods. If pressed, I’d call it P.E. or science – but nobody ever pressed.

And there were such wonderful places to walk. To the east, through the Optimist Camp grounds lay the old “potato farm.” I don’t know what it really was, but an old cabin and an old garage were slowly rotting into the ground at one end of a large meadow. Maybe somebody actually grew potatoes there. Maybe it was an old homestead once owned by Hiram and Clara Potato. As you looked at the old buildings, you could really let your imagination run wild.

Or we could hike south along Humbug Creek. The trail crossed the creek twice on the skeletons of two ancient bridges. Twin 12 by 12 beams spanned the creek and the heads of rusted 20-penny spikes peeped up here and there, but the boards which lay across the beams and furnished the floor of the bridge had long since vanished. When the first-graders first attempted to cross on the beams, they did so on their hands and knees. But after a few attempts, they skipped over like everyone else.

My personal favorite walk was to the west. We’d cross onto California state park land and skirt a meadow that used to graze livestock. A spring fed a concrete basin with water year round and, if we could just keep still long enough, we might see a representative of the wild community come in for a drink. It never happened with us. Keep seven- and eight-year olds still? Maybe on some other planet.

If we followed trail down, we’d come near the old townsite of Derbec. There’s nothing there now but the remnants of someone’s apple orchard. Beyond the apple trees we could find a small lake, really a pond. It froze over in winter and we could send a log out to the middle and try to slide rocks and hit the log. Or in spring, we could float a log out to the middle and try to hit it with rocks. This was so much more interesting than watching Sleeping Beauty on videotape.

One spring afternoon our entire student body, all 14 first-, second- and third-graders, walked to our pond. Along the way we found a large pile of bear scat right in the middle of our trail. It was a large pile, about the size of an NFL football. Using the deductive powers of a trained mind, I concluded that the large pile of bear scat had been left there by a large bear. I noticed that the scat was very fresh. So I concluded that the bear might still be nearby.

We walked on to the pond clustered closely together, as though we were bungeed. We were hoping the bear might be unable to decide which juicy kid to eat first, and starve before it made up its mind. When we got to the pond, we saw a huge track where the bear had gotten a drink. I made another Holmesian deduction: the bear was a female. I could tell by the little bear track right beside the big bear track where a cub had also gotten a drink. I made one other deduction from the available evidence. I deduced it was time to return to the classroom. Do you see how all these deductions leap to the trained mind?

(A really well trained mind would have returned to the classroom after finding the bear scat, and not pressed on to the pond.)

We did not see the bear on our way back to school, and the next morning I made a plaster cast of her paw print. The kids used the cast to make their own paws and we did bear math, bear art, read and wrote bear stories, and the whole thing worked out exactly as I’d planned.

The birthing

2009-06-21T14:22:00.000-07:00

As you might have suspected, there is more to this story of breeding Legend to Monandan. Unfortunately, the cover took. I remember thinking, it couldn't get worse. Could it?

It got worse. In due course, Legend’s time for delivery arrived. We regularly checked her nipples for waxy deposits, colostrum. I began to have second and third thoughts about the wisdom of our actions. After all, Legend was not a girl, but a grown mare, a matron. Was pregnancy really the right thing to do?

We had pretty well decided on what night she would deliver, based on our studies of Legend’s udder and the calendar. That fateful night we put her in a smaller pasture next to the house. I woke up every 45 minutes to check on her and make sure that she wasn’t trying to do this mad thing alone. I didn’t need to worry because when her time came, she walked to that part of the pasture closest to the bedroom window and bellowed, “You got me into this, boneheads, now get me out!”

Joanne and I quickly put on our clothes and met Legend at the pasture gate. She lay down and Joanne shined a flashlight on the delivery area. We could already see front feet and a nose presented. This was a help, because it wasn’t a breech birth and we didn’t have to call the vet. However, we could also see that this wasn’t going to be particularly easy. Legend lay on a slope so that her head was uphilol. That was good. She was going to let gravity work for her. As it turned out, gravity worked for all of us..

Soon enough of the foal was presented so that Joanne and I could get our hands on it. Every time Legend had a contraction we would pull. In the meantime we murmured words of encouragement. Running through my mind were positive thoughts like: I am so stupid! How could I do this to my friend? We’ve made the Tevis Cup ride together. A hundred miles in twenty-four hours. We’ve ridden cross-country from Barstow to Las Vegas and slept in adjoining stalls at the fair grounds. She helped me sing for my drinks in Goodsprings, Nevada. We’ve even jumped off a cliff together. “Oh, Legend, my friend, how could I have been so goddamned stupid, I’m sorry, push, baby, push!”

While Joanne and I pulled at the foal's hooves every time Legend had a contraction, I noticed that its front feet were delicately folded together with its nose resting on them so as to present the smallest front possible. The hooves were very soft, rubbery, like cuttlefish, so that they wouldn't tear anything on their way out. Well, not very much anyway. When the foal came, he slipped out all at once. Joanne and I probably took ten or fifteen minutes off Legend’s delivery time.

It was a boy, a colt. A slimy little guy, slick with afterbirth. We slid the foal uphill toward Legend’s head and she began to lick him clean, clearing the sack away. This is the way it happened, and if it grosses you out, don’t blame me. Blame God. If this is intelligent design, I’ll take vanilla.

Very soon the colt raised its head to Legend and made a strange little sound in the back of his throat. Legend repeated the sound, the only time I ever heard her make it in her life. The imprint was completed. They knew who each other was.

Joanne and I left the two together and returned to the house to remove some really filthy clothes and shower.

By good daylight the foal was running around the pasture enjoying the first morning of his life. He was totally lacking in color and all other Appaloosa characteristics. He was a thoroughly sound mongrel colt. Dan and Joan couldn’t boast of the color, and so they named him Montanden’s Secret. But the Daniels' disappointment aside, it was clear that the colt and his mother thought he was the finest creature ever born. Joanne and I were pretty proud of ourselves, too. What a way to start a day.

Breeding Virgin Horses

2009-06-13T14:51:00.001-07:00

We were living in Auburn, Placer County, California at the time. We had five fenced and cross fenced acres upon which we grazed and raised our horses, cats, dogs, and sometimes other livestock. Among our horses was my very good friend, Legend, an Arab-American Saddlebred cross. She was about fourteen years old and had never had a foal.

Our neighbors, Dan and Joan Daniels, lived over the hill on their own five acres. They were going to make their fortunes raising Appaloosa horses and had acquired some very nice mares from Utah. But they had no stallion and so had to trailer their mares to stallions on other ranches and pay a hefty stud fee. This was not cost effective. A successful horse ranch needs a resident stallion, even though they are assertive and unreliable at best.

So Dan and Joan picked up an untested young horse, Montanden. Monty, as he was called, had never bred a mare for reasons that are peculiar to the Appaloosa trade. Appaloosas have certain physical characteristics, striped hooves, white sclera, mottled skin around the eyes and rectum, and Appy foals are checked rigorously for these distinctive qualities. It’s embarrassing, if you’re the foal. But the most coveted characteristic of them all is the color, either the rump patch or the leopard skin pattern. With brilliant colors the animal is worth beaucoup bucks. Without any color at all, he’s dog food.

Monty was untested, a virgin stallion, because nobody was going to entrust their mare to a stud that might not throw color. And until Monty had some foals on the ground, nobody knew for sure what he could or couldn’t do. It’s like an acting job in Hollywood; you can’t get a job unless you’re in the union, and you can’t get in the union unless you have a job. What to do? What to do?

The Harrises and the Danielses put their pointy little heads together and came up with a splendid idea. Why don’t we breed Legend to Monty? Neither has ever been bred; it will be an experience for both of them. Moreover, maybe the foal will be brilliantly colored and be worth thousands!

On the day Legend showed up in heat, Joan and Dan brought Monty calling. In the horse world it is sometimes difficult for a mare to distinguish between passionate love making and outright rape. So we decided we would use breeding hobbles to keep the mare from changing her mind in mid event. The Danielses hauled out enough leather straps to harness three horses, and decked and festooned poor Legend from head to tail and side to side. She looked like Gulliver in Lilliput.

At last the poor mare was ready and Monty was decorated with a leather-and-chain headstall positioned, with Joan on the end of a rope and armed with a whip. So there we were, four humans, two horses, and whips and chains. And not a clue in the crew. Joan pointed Monty in the right direction and the stallion stood on his hind legs and charged, nailing Legend in the ribs. A second try scored on her left ear. A dozen more tries produced a very frustrated stallion, but finally, with the help of all human hands, Monty found the right place.

It was then that Legend decided to object. She took off running, she entangled in the hobbles, Monty entangled in the hobbles, and both of them entangled with each other. Monty bounced off of Legend and came down to her left side just as Legend decided to run through a pile of junk wood I had stacked for later burning. Boards flew everywhere, rusting nails pointing out. Once through the wood pile, adding large pieces of wood to their leather ensemble, the horses headed for a barbed wire fence. I imagined a small child at a spelling bee standing in front of a large audience saying, “stupid, H-A-R-R-I-S, stupid,” to resounding applause.

Dragged down by large pieces of lumber and stumbling over each others feet, the horses stopped just short of the barbed wire fence. Very quietly we approached them and began the grand disentanglement. Once peace and order had been restored, we decided that if this covering did not take, there would not be another. Forget the horses, the humans weren’t up to it.

But the cover did take and Legend found herself in a family way. Well, thought I, that’s over. It’ can’t get any worse, can it?

The Duck Blind

2009-06-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

When Joanne first attended the University of California Riverside in the fall of 1954, she brought her two horses, Sheba and Legend, with her. Naturally. Since the two horses wouldn't blend in very well in the apartment Joanne shared with three other young women, she boarded them at a ranch owned by Ken and Joy Haiks in West Riverside.

For some reason I've never understood, West Riverside lies just north of Riverside on the other side of the Santa Ana River. The Santa Ana River, at that point, is nowhere near the city of Santa Ana. Not even in the same county. Go figure.

The horses loved it at Haiks' ranch. There was plenty of room and it had a duck pond. During the months when the flies got numerous and bothersome, Sheba immersed herself in the pond. All you could see was nostrils and eyes as she swam in circles. The flies then moved their swarm to Legend who never put it together that she could go swim the duck pond too.

Haiks didn't keep a pond for the purpose of raising ducks. But he loved the fact that ducks would come there because then he could shoot them. If only he had a duck blind. If only.

Pastures tend to be devoid of cover. The cows and horses take care of any ambitious grass searching for height. Haiks devised an ingenious duck blind. He used Legend. Legend was still learning how to be a horse, and she didn't realize that what Haiks was doing was not acceptable. You ride horses, jump them, have them pull your carts. They do not tap dance, cook your dinner or answer your phone. And they do not stand still while people hide behind them and shoot shotguns.

Legend didn't know that, so she became Haiks' duck blind. I hope that she got extra oats out of that.

That's life. If you don't learn to swim, you may end up as somebody's duck blind.

The Nest

2009-05-31T10:55:00.001-07:00

The Nest

North San Juan, 1990s. When we drove through the front to come home to our North San Juan house, we had to get out of our car, work our way through a pack of unaccountably fat dogs considering they were telling us that they hadn't been fed in days and days and days, and walk around to the left side of our two car garage to reach the deck that led to the front door some thirty feet away. And each time we did that, and we did it at least once and usualloy several times a day, a Cassin's finch hen would burst out of her nest screaming, “Oh my Gawd, they're here, the Barbarian Bird Eaters are here, fly, fly for your lives!”

Well, she didn't actually say that as she shrieked and squawked to the top of her little bird's lung capacity, but that's what she meant. And she did that every time we tried to get into our house through the front door. She was a very emotional bird, and very tiresome.

For all of her emotionalism, she knew how to build a good nest. She and her mate used it each year when they returned in the spring. Each year with a few minor repairs the nest was good to go. She hatched out at least two clutches a year, sometimes more. For a three year period, this pair of finches were our primary source of red birds for our garden.

She couldn't even get a drink on her own. On several occasions we watched her cock fly to a perch over the water source, survey the scene and chirp out an all-clear before she fluttered out of a tree to drink her fill. Who knows what other duties he had besides impregnation and water watch, but she appears to have been a demanding mistress.

After three years Joanne had had enough of being dive bombed and shrieked at. The hen had already hatched out a clutch and the fledgelings were sort of on their own, flying competently if not gracefully, and with only the odd feather sticking out, and so one day she tore the nest down.

The hen was understandably upset because this time the Barbarian had actually struck. Her home/maternity ward was nothing more than a scattering of sticks and twigs.

The hen quickly organized her family into a construction brigade and she, her long suffering spouse (probably grumbling all the while), and her two most recent fledgelings set about rebuilding the family mansion. They built a structural wonder. You wondered if it would stand up under a finch fart let alone a heavy wind. Sticks stuck out at all angles and the deck underneath was littered with wisps of straw. Definitely not up to her standards. But it was also a wonder that she even got any nest up at all.

That was the last year she ever built a nest at our house. And it was the last of the red birds at our house. I didn't miss her attacks of hysteria and I didn't miss tripping the light fantastic around fresh bird poop on the deck. But I did miss the red birds themselves. They were beautiful.

Lucky, the Cutting Horse

2009-05-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

Auburn, California, 1960s. When we lived in Auburn, Joanne taught math and science at Colfax High School. Our friend Claudia also taught at the high school, Home Ec. But this story isn't about either Joanne or Claudia. It's about Claudia's horse, Lucky, a quarter horse mare, a cutting horse who had developed navicular in both front feet and had to be “nerved. “

Cutting horses are bred to isolate a selected calf from a group of them and herd them to a predetermined destination. Since the calf will usually have entirely different ideas, this will require an extremely agile horse. Whether stopped or moving, a good cutting horse can go in any direction, forwards, backwards, sideways, up, down, on four legs or two, and do it instantly. Cutting horses are among the greatest athletes on earth.

Lucky received her cutting horse training from fillyhood and became a champion, but it's tough being a cutting horse. Her front feet gave out from the constant pressure and torquing of sudden stops and direction changes, and she was nerved at age six. When a horse is nerved, certain nerves in the pastern are severed. No more pain. No more feeling of any kind there. No more roar of the greasepaint and smell of the crowd. Lucky went from being a contender to Claudia's private saddle horse.

Lucky was an acceptable riding horse, but you had to be careful, because she never ever lost her early cutting horse training. The first rule to riding a cutting horse is to be careful what you tell her to do, because she will do it instantly. The second rule is to not fall off if you violate the first rule. If you accidentally ask her to do a 360 on her hind legs, that's what she will do. Sorry about you.

Claudia was a very good rider and could be relied upon to maintain a light rein and a firm seat and not give Lucky any unintended directions. I'm not nearly that good.

I only rode Lucky once, but it was memorable. I can't remember why, but we were somewhere near the Auburn airport. For some reason, someone had to ride Lucky back to our place rather than trailer her. For an even more mysterious reason, that someone had to be me. I don't really understand how all this happened. Story of my life.

It was like riding a powder keg with a fizzing fuze. Sit very still, Ken. Relax. Don't put your heels into her sides. Don't neck rein right or left. Don't break wind. It was one of the longest rides of my life, considering nothing happened. She was very good to me, but she was way too much horse for me.

We got back safely and Lucky once again roamed our pasture where she was an honored guest. It was here, in our pasture, that I saw Lucky display a stunning ineptitude. We had grown a little corn, harvested the ears, and pulled the stalks out. We threw the stalks over the fence into the pasture for the horses. They loved them. Lucky picked up a corn stalk and began to munch on it. The motion caused the root ball end of the stalk to rustle in the glass. It scared the liver and lights out of her.

She backed away and, naturally enough, the other end of the corn stalk followed her. That was enough. She took off around the pasture, corn stalk clenched in her mouth, running madly with a=tghe rootball waving in the breeze and slapping her on the rump. She was frightened, but she never stopped chewing. Chewing and running. Running and chewing.

Eventually she bit through the corn stalk and the root ball dropped off. But she never put it together that she was running from her own dinner. You don't have to be a genius to be a cutting horse, just smarter than the average calf.

Night on Bald Mountain

2009-05-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

One August around 1963 or 1964 Joanne and I rode into Desolation Valley and camped by Phipps Lake at the foot of Phipps Peak. According to Google sources, Phipps Peak is 9,234' above sea level. And what a view. To the west you could see the coast mountain range and to the east, pretty as could be, Lake Tahoe and then the high desert heading towards Utah. I don't think we could actually see Utah, but we could see a really long way.

Joanne rode her large Thoroughbred type gelding, Sam (a shortened form of Samsonite because his original owner thought he had a head resembling a piece of luggage) while I rode Legend. We had enough food for ourselves and grain for the horses for a couple of days camp out.

Phipps Lake is but one of many tiny lakes. I'm sure that in Minnesota they would be called ponds. But each tiny lake provided home to golden trout. Golden trout are really rainbows who live at a high altitude and develop an oily, salmon-like flesh. The trout in Phipps Lake didn't like worms and salmon eggs were blech, but they adored helgramites. We were lucky enough to find a few and enjoyed a golden trout dinner.

At 9000+ feet spring comes late and lasts only a few weeks at most. We were lucky enough to be there for Phipps Peak's spring. We even found heather blooming, and wild daffodils blooming around tiny little elven pools. On the second day of our camp out we rode around the area for several hours, stopping here, gaping there, and at last decided to return to camp. That's when I learned that Sam and Legend were two different horses.

Sam wanted to return to camp the way we had come, following his hoof prints back to camp. If we wandered around lost on the way up, he wanted to wander around lost on the way back.

Legend, however, had a different idea. She wanted to go back to the trailer parked some miles away on a flat just west of Highway 89. And she wanted to go straight. If that meant jumping off a cliff, she would have wanted to do that.
Neither of these horses had really great ideas for getting back to camp, but Sam's was far safer. I can truthfully say that Legend never had a good idea in her life, and you could really get damaged if you let her do the thinking for the two of you. I know. And I'll tell you all my sad story soon.
But meanwhile we had spent a couple of nice days. We had come up with three other riders the first night, but they left the following morning and we were by ourselves. Joanne was in charge of making our beds which she did by laying our sleeping bags out side by each and then setting up our saddles at the heads. Then she spread a clear tarp over the whole thing, thereby improvising a tent. Stirrups dangled down to each side and everything smelled of horse, but I've smelt and slept worse.

The sun went down, darkness came, we put out our fire and went to bed. One good thing about sleeping in a shelter improvised from clear plastic tarp, you can see the sky. One bad thing about sleeping in a shelter improvised from clear plastic tarp, you can see the sky.

The night started out clear. The stars twinkled and did all of that start stuff. But soon a wind came up and clouds covered up our lights show. Not to worry. Another lights show came along. Thunder, this time, and lightning. Winds to bend the tall trees surrounding the glad where we camped. Lightning striking all around us. Did we tie the horses securely? Or are we going to have to walk home carrying our saddles? And it went on and on. Rain fell. Wind tugged at the tarp.

There is this one thing about me. When things get tough and more than I can manage, I drift off to sleep. And that's what I did here. If we were going to be killed by lightning, I didn't want to be around when it happened.

The next morning was crystal clear. We saddled up and returned to the flatlands of Lake Tahoe as though nothing had happened. And in nature's overall scheme, nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

A Meditation on Scottish Deerhounds

2009-05-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

My wife and I got most of our two Scottish Deerhounds, Mary Lincoln and Merry Andrew, from a friend in Auburn. Scottish Deerhounds are keen of eye, fleet of foot, and possess the uncanny ability to gratify their desires while they ignore yours and all the while make you love them for it. What would be graceless intractability in any other dog becomes charming eccentricity in a Scottish Deerhound.

Scottish Deerhounds are a large breed of sight hound. Imagine an eighty pound Greyhound with grey, shaggy, wiry hair. Alternatively, imagine an Irish Wolfhound who is a hundred pounds lighter and doesn't take the world so seriously.

Since the woman who gave us our dogs breeds deerhounds, she must also show them. This involves some travel. Deerhounds like to lay down and nap. Next to running, sleeping is their favorite sport and they might indulge themselves twenty hours a day. Even more if the weather is bad. And when they nap, they like to maximize the floor space they take up. That instinct lies deep within their DNA. Since it doesn't take very many horizontal deerhounds to overflow a Camry, it follows that any deerhound transporter needs a larger vehicle. At least an RV, if not a U-Haul.

Our friend and her dogs were in Southern California and stopped for the evening at a dairy farm. She let two dogs out. They saw a coyote in the distance and immediately gave chase. Silently. They don't bay like beagles.

The coyote saw two large, hairy beasts coming at him and took off. Deerhounds can cruise at 30 mph and the coyote had no chance. But he gave it his best shot. He juked and jived, zigged and zagged, cut left, cut right, and flat flew as fast as he could. But no matter what he did, the deerhounds got closer and closer. Finally he thought to himself, “Nuts, you guys win. Kill me now.” And he rolled over onto his back and submitted.

The deerhounds tagged him with their noses and went off looking for something else to chase. The coyote was left sniffing his arm pits and wondering if there was something wrong with his deodorant.

That was all good entertaining for everyone, but sometimes a deerhound's activities can be an embarrassment. It was spring in Northern California, near Easter. Our friend was en route to or from somewhere and decided to give the dogs a break at a well known restaurant, rest stop, restroom, shady place and picnic area. The parking lot was filled. The grounds were oozed with families, men, women, children, chihuahuas, Charley's Aunt, they were all there.

The deerhounds got out of the RV, sighted a rabbit, and they were off. Their owner tried to call them off, but good luck with that. Calling deerhounds off a target will exercise your vocal cords and raise your frustration level, but that's all.

Soon the dogs returned, one of them proudly dangling a dead rabbit from his mouth. The performance was witnessed by shocked mothers and crying children. Our friend retrieved the rabbit and said, “I'd better take him to the vet.” Then she and her dogs hopped into their vehicle and drove away. Expeditiously, I might add.

Understandable. What was she going to say to a bunch of kids who just watched her dogs kill the Easter Bunny? “Sorry, kids, no eggs for you this year.” Or how about, “Eggs are bad for your cholesterol.”

Our friend and her dogs proceeded down the road leaving some very upset people behind. She was lucky. I understand they lynch people in some states when their dogs kill the Easter Bunny.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Skoshi and the Rooster

2009-04-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

OK, I lied. I found a few more animal stories lying around. I'll post them as well.

Auburn, California, Summer, 1968.

Skoshi was a very old dog. He had grown old in our service as our “chicken dog,” guarding the henhouse from intruders and making sure that the chicks survived their chickhood. We never lost a chick if Skoshi was on the job.

But now he was old and spent a lot of time sleeping in the sun. We didn't have many chickens then, just a banty rooster and his hen. The hen had laid a clutch of eggs. They never hatched out, but she sat on them anyway, for weeks. She never went out to eat or scratch or preen. She never did anything, just sat there on her infertile eggs.

Now roosters are like the males of most other species of animal. They aren't worth a damn without their female(s). In this case, our hen moped and so did our rooster.

On this particular summer afternoon Skoshi sat on the small bluff overlooking the house and the rooster sat at his side. As it neared 3:00 in the afternoon the rooster lost heart and climbed onto the branch of an oak tree where he roosted a night. The limb came very near a bedroom window and in the bird's younger days he used to like to crow into it at 4:00 in the morning. “It's four o'clock and all's well! Bring on the hens!” But without even one hen he went to bed early and slept late.

Joanne was working in the garden when she saw the bird climb onto his branch. “All right, enough's enough,” she said. She went into the hen house, grabbed the hen, and threw her clucking and squawking under the oak tree. The rooster, miraculously rejuvenated, leaped down and began the chase. Great were the noise, dust and feathers for a while, but it soon settled down and the two birds scratched contentedly in the garden.

Skoshi dozed on. We didn't have a hen or chicks for him. Meanwhile, Joanne threw the hen's eggs as far into the pasture as she could. Boy, were they ever rotten.

Last Post

2009-03-25T08:22:00.001-07:00

I find that I'm running a little thin on animal stories for now, and so I intend to let the subject drop. I'm going to leave these stories up for a month and then either delete the blog or add more stories, if any more have occurred to me.

I hope you have enjoyed these stories, but this will probably be my last entry here.

Ken Harris

Beanblossom

2009-03-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

In March, 1961, we were living in El Monte and actively involved with children, jobs, and, whenever we could find the time, horses. Equestrian Trails, Inc., or ETI as we all knew it, was a large statewide organization dedicated to procuring, retaining and maintaining riding trails throughout rapidly urbanizing Southern California. Work at the local level was done by individual local chapters called “corrals.” We belonged to Corral 36. ETI corrals provided our social lives with trail rides, barbecues, entry-level horse shows and gymkhanas.

Barstow’s ETI corral annually put together a week-long trail ride from Barstow to Las Vegas. I had a little vacation time coming from Occidental Life and so took a week off to make the safari with my wife’s sorrel mare, Legend. Joanne had been conditioning the mare to make the 100-mile-in-24-hours Tevis race from Tahoe City to Auburn. There was no question in my mind that an animal able to cover 100 miles over the Sierra Nevada mountains in 24 hours could easily go 130 miles from Barstow to Las Vegas in one week. Legend would probably think she was on vacation as well as I.

We had a neighbor who regularly made this ride and through a cost sharing arrangement with him I was able to get Legend to Barstow. We couldn’t have made it on our own because we had neither horse trailer nor pickup to pull it with. We arrived in Barstow after dark and threw out our sleeping bags and I drifted off to sleep assuming everything was well.

It wasn’t.

It was a strange, but throughout her life most horses hated Legend on sight. They struck at her with their forehooves, slashed at her with their teeth, squealed insults at her. True to form, the other horses in the van on the way to Barstow brutalized Legend so that by next morning she was hunched up like she was standing in a blizzard. Her urinary bladder was stopped up. Or her kidneys. Or something.

Her condition put me in a quandary. The horse transportation had already departed and if Legend were too sick to make the trip to Las Vegas she and I would be stranded in Barstow without shelter, food, love or money. On the other hand, if we attempted the ride and she broke down, then we would be stranded in the desert, same situation except more cactus and no telephone. I decided to go for it and began the ride on a borrowed horse leading Legend at the gentle walk. By now there were about a dozen riders.

We ambled along for a half hour when Legend decided to urinate. And so she did. And did. And did. After a while she commanded quite a bit of attention from everyone else. If I had known she was going to present such a virtuoso urinary display, I would have sold tickets in advance.

I say that other horses did not like Legend. There was one exception. Beanblossom, a large, rangy buckskin gelding with a forceful personality, homely to look at but more intelligent than most humans I’ve dealt with. Not that Old Bean ever misbehaved. He was very well trained and did whatever his rider wanted, but you had the idea that he was well aware that he had options and was just going along with the gag.

Beanblossom had been a range horse and I think there was a lot of mustang in him. He had been trained by a teenage male who had some curious training tactics. For instance, he would approach the horse, whip out a hidden loaded water pistol and squirt him in the face. Most horses would have responded badly, but not Old Bean. He thought it was a great joke. He immediately took to holding a last mouthful of water when he drank and then sneaking up behind someone and letting him have the whole liter. Beanblossom had quite a sense of humor and it made him famous throughout the Barstow area.

Beanblossom’s owner, if such a horse can be said to have an owner, was Jobert Williams, an Armenian-Cherokee American who had been a bull rider, run his own undercapitalized saddle shop which failed, and was the mover and shaker in a local fast-draw gun club. I would never have the nerve to go into business for myself and you couldn’t get me into the same corral with a bull, let alone on his back. And I don’t believe in playing with guns. Talk about the odd couple. Nevertheless, we got along great together and so did our horses. We rode most of the 130 miles together.

A truck carried our sleeping bags and other gear and met us each night at the new camp site. More importantly, the truck met us twice a day, at 10:00 and 2:00 with beer for the humans and water for the horses. Well, there was one day when the terrain was too rough for the beer wagon. The horses knew when 10:00 had arrived as surely as if they had tuned into a satellite, and when it became apparent that water was not to be forthcoming, they made their displeasure known.

A motorized chuckwagon provided civilized food. So in the evenings we didn't have to eat meat that had been wrapped around a stick and undercooked over an open fire. Instead, we sat around the open fire and pretended we were real cowboys. And cowgirls. We would talk about things that concerned riders. One evening the subject was tethering.

Most of the riders used the Horseman’s Knot to tether their horses. It’s a nifty little hitch made with a couple of quick flips of the wrist. The beauty of the Horseman’s Knot is that a horse cannot free himself by pulling back on the rope, but the rider can untie it by simply pulling on the loose end. One tug, a flying mount, and you’re on your way out of Dodge leaving the sheriff in a cloud of dust, spluttering and gnashing his teeth. Joe Williams didn't use the Horseman's Knot because Beanblossom had figured it out. Easy, easy, easy.

But, me, I didn’t know how to tie the Horseman’s Knot. Joanne had tried to teach me several times, but I have this problem, have had it all my life. Joanne says I’m stubborn, but I think I’m just unable to tie knots. “Well, I never use the Horseman’s Knot. I just use a bowline.” I didn’t mention that I used the bowline because it is one of the two knots I know how to tie. “I’ve never had a horse get away from me yet,” I added.

Everyone burst out laughing. That puzzled me because I didn’t think it was one of my better one-liners. Then I looked behind me. You guessed it. There stood Legend, looking for me, dragging her lead rope behind her. Apparently my heralded bowline had simply dropped off and Legend had come to me for advice.

Two days out of Las Vegas we crossed into the Great State of Nevada and camped at the town of Goodsprings. We were 12 miles east of Sandy Valley and 7 miles north of Jean, to locate this place precisely for you. In 1961 Goodsprings was as close to a ghost town as you could get and still not be haunted. There were around 20 old houses in varying states of disrepair and two others were actually occupied.

Goodsprings also sported a weathered hotel that looked like it was falling apart. But it had a well-stocked bar. Unfortunately, I had very little money with me, so the abundance of alcohol was really irrelevant. Then I had a happy thought. I sang my repertoire of Tom Lehr songs and Jobert added a few golden ditties he’d picked up on the rodeo circuit and that provided a few drinks while my trusty steed stood by the campfire. I would have invited her into the bar with me, but I was afraid she would fall through the floor.

Meanwhile, I can tell people I’ve entertained in Nevada, in a hotel just outside of Las Vegas.

The night after Goodsprings we camped at a hobo jungle near a railroad track. The campsite provided an epiphany for Legend in the form of an artesian well. She had never seen water just come out of the ground like that. She wouldn’t even go near it. I had to fill a bucket with water for her so she could drink.

That night we made sure all the horses were secured to the picket line and that the pickets were firmly anchored into the earth. I especially double checked my bowline. We thought the midnight special might come by and frighten the horses into pulling their pickets. The visual of a dozen horses connected by 50 feet of chain running through the desert was not a pretty one.

Jobert also made sure Beanblossom was tied and double tied because Old Bean would think it a great joke to untie himself and all the other horses and go into Las Vegas without us. But we weren’t as careful with our beer cans, and Beanblossom found one. He worked it to where it lay between his front hooves and then gently kicked it from left hoof to right hoof. And then back again. Click click click. Click click click. We all lay awake listening. Click click click. Finally, our ride leader, a heretofore gracious lady, could stand it no longer. “Williams, take that goddamned beer can away from your goddamned horse!” she screamed. Jobert did, but Beanblossom gave him his innocent, “what did I do?” look.

We finally made it to Las Vegas in time to participate as a riding unit in their Pioneer Days parade. But our horses, so surefooted over sand, rock, and shale, stumbled and slid all over the pavement. Luckily, no one was hurt, but it wasn’t our fault.

Eventually we fetched up at the Clark County fair grounds where Joanne met me. She had found a sitter for our two little ones, probably her long suffering mother, and came up to spend a wild night on the town with me. Legend had her stall, a very nice one with new straw for bedding. Joanne and I had the stall next to hers, and we had clean bedding straw as well. Jobert and his wife and Beanblossom were in stalls across the aisle. Life was good.

Copyright Ken Harris 2008

Pegasus

2009-03-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

Pegasus

This is the saga of Legend, the flying horse. We lived in Auburn, California in the mid-1960s, and involved ourselves with the Tevis Cup One Hundred Mile ride group. Joanne and I had both done the ride and we wanted to keep our horses in condition. On weekends would take twenty-, thirty-, forty-mile pleasure rides. In the spring we took these occasions to clear and remark the trails after the harsh winter months.

That's what we were doing one day when we found ourselves on a steep hillside. Usually when I tell this story, it’s a cliff. But the slope wasn’t ninety degrees, it was more like seventy. It was certainly too steep for ballroom dancing. The slope had a few oak trees growing on it, but you couldn’t see their sides, only their tops.

Wendell Robie was the guiding light for the Tevis Cup ride and, as I stop to think of it, figured in several of our misadventures. He was in the lead, followed by Joanne on her horse, Country Girl, followed by me on Legend. We came upon a pine tree that had fallen over during the winter rains leaving its rootside uphill of the trail and the topside dangling out into the air. Wendell rode around the obstacle. A horse is perfectly capable of negotiating a seventy degree slope if the rider just gets out of his way and lets him do it. Joanne didn’t want to go around the tree, she wanted to jump it. And jump it she did.

Legend got ready to jump the tree from a standstill, but I didn’t want her to. I wanted her to go around the obstacle, not over it. I pulled back on the reins and turned her out facing the slope. I figured we would go off the trail and down the slope, around the tree and up the slope, the way Wendell had done. I had forgotten my earlier jumping lessons at the Arroyo Seco Stables in South Pasadena. I had forgotten that to Legend could and would jump from a standstill.

She did jump from a standstill.

I wish you could have seen the look of amazement on legend's face when she saw nothing but air beneath her feet instead of firm ground. I saw it, and I wish you had been there instead of me. As soon as I realized we were airborne, I let go of the reins, kicked my feet clear of the stirrups and tried to abandon ship. But the higher I went, the higher she went. My ship wouldn’t let me abandon her. I don’t know what she thought I was going to do, but she clearly expected me to save us.

Fortunately, we landed in the top of an oak tree where we parted company. If we had augured into the ground I wouldn’t be writing this story now. We filtered through the tree and fell to earth, taking branches with us, and landed one on each side of the trunk.

Joanne tells me I was knocked unconscious, but that isn't true. I was merely laying face down wiggling fingers and toes, rejoicing in the movement of each digit. It took a while. After all, there are twenty of them. Legend had a scrape above her left eye and I didn’t get a scratch, although some years later a chiropractor looked at an x-ray and asked me about my whiplash.

The rest of the crew continued with clearing the trail, but Joanne and I repaired to a sandy beach on the river and fished what was left of our lunch out of the saddle bags. Our friends said that if I’d do it again they’d bring a cameraman along and do a cigarette commercial. Then we could all split the money. I have such good friends.

Meanwhile, I learned two important lessons. One: horses can’t fly. Two: I can’t either.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Jumping With Legend

2009-02-20T11:34:00.000-08:00

Jumping with Legend
© Ken Harris 2008

Joanne was taking English riding lessons from Bobbi Williams in 1957. That’s where you bounce up and down in the saddle like you had springs in your pants. I was not really gifted in this activity.

Bobbi had heard of a splendid scheme to improve indifferent riders by teaching them to jump. The supposition was they would be too busy just trying to stay on their horse to worry about niceties like balance. They would automatically become better riders if they never succeeded in taking a jump. Assuming they survived.

By the end of several weeks of this untender tutelage, I had not fallen off my horse even though I looked as if I stayed stayed in the saddle by duct tape. But I had been riding school horses, not our own true Legend. I made the comment that although I had not been riding long, I had not yet been thrown. What follows is confirmation of my theory that not only is there a God, but she doesn’t like loudmouths.

Most sensible horses will stop in front of a jump if you haul on the reins hard enough and roar “whoa” in their ears. Some horses will ignore you and jump anyway. Legend did both. She came to a complete stop. And then she jumped. She went up and up and I went up and up and up. We came down on the other side of the jump, so I guess you could say we took the jump. We just came down about ten feet apart.

Legend would do that. She would take a jump from a standstill. Just to prove something to somebody, we did a repeat performance, but differently, five minutes later. This time she went up and forwards and I went up and backwards. Gravity exerted its inevitable effect and this time we ended up on opposite sides of the jump.

Joanne reminded me that I still hadn’t been thrown. Falling off doesn’t count.

Singing for my Tevis Cup Supper

2009-02-12T09:26:00.000-08:00

Singing for my Tevis Cup Supper
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

The Western States One Hundred Mile endurance ride began in the 1950s when Wendell Robie of Auburn, California, gathered together with some trail riding friends. The topic under discussion: whether modern horses and riders were as tough as the Pony Express horses and riders of the 19th century. They knew roughly where the old mail trail from Tahoe City to Auburn was, over the Sierra Nevada mountains, and they decided to try if they could make it over that trail inside of twenty-four hours. They decided to make a race of it.

It was a wild, wooly, uncurried experience at first, but by the time Joanne made the ride in 1961 and I followed suit in 1963, the ride was much more under control. There were vet examinations on the day before the race, enforced rest stops along the way with entrance and exit vet checks, and a vet check immediately upon finishing. Additionally, a team of vets checked the first ten finishers on the morning after the ride. There were horseshoers at the major stops and each rider brought his own pit crew to nurture the horse during the rest periods. The local radio club monitored the trail in case any riders fell off the trail or got lost.

It should be noted that there were no medical doctors in attendance. Care was taken to be sure horses weren’t hurt, but if humans were stupid enough to try to ride a hundred miles over rugged mountain terrain in 24 hours, they deserved what happened to them.

For a while Joanne and I served on the Board of Directors and she always devoted a weekend to being a vet secretary while I rode the drag from Michigan Bluff to Auburn. This was the last 40 miles, rough ones, through lava flows, river fords, and all done in the dark with terminally tired riders.

Awards ceremonies were held on the evening following the ride. Buckles were handed out and people got very emotional about their horses. Sometimes entertainment was provided. It came to Wendell’s attention that I sang folk songs and accompanied myself on the guitar. He invited me to provide the music for the evening, free of charge, or course. He didn’t give me any guidelines on what he though was suitable entertainment, but in retrospect I realize he had something like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or Tumbling Tumbleweeds in mind.

Of course, I sang nothing of the sort. I took a rollicking little tune, a song about an Arab who introduced camels into California named Haji Ali, known to one and all as Hi Jolly, and substituted my own words.

I presented the result on the night of the awards dinner. I’ve lost the words, but I can remember some of them. I touched on how easily you could get lost in the forest.

“Our trails are quite clearly marked,
At least, that’s what they say.
You can’t get lost unless you’ve really tried;
But when our trails you’ve ridden
And you see how well they’re hidden,
You’ll wonder how you ever made the ride.”

The humor of the verse comes from the fact that the trail was marked with yellow ribbon. But so were last year’s trail and the trails before that. Nobody ever took yellow ribbons down. They just put up new ones. I think Wendel had an interest in a yellow ribbon factory, because over the years we put up a lot of yellow ribbons. And we never took any down. So, a Virginia or Massachusetts rider might come along and discover, “Hello, I’m in the Yellow Ribbon Forest. Can the Yellow Brick Road be far away?”

Another verse dealt with all the expert advice old timers gave to new riders.

“There’s Robies and there’s Tellingtons
And Moyles by the score,
And every one has told you how to ride.
They advised you night and day,
But you made it anyway,
So you can be forgiven for your pride.”

The more verses I sang, the louder the laughter, and the grimmer Wendel’s expression grew. The chorus, as I remember, finished with:

“Call me a chicken drover,
But if I ever do this over,
Lock me up and throw the key away.”

The audience laughed, they cried, and finally they gave my song a standing ovation. Judging from Wendel’s granitic look, I wouldn’t be invited back, but if I left immediately, I might make it out of the parking lot alive.

I was right. I was never invited back.

How the Rooster Lost His Spurs

2009-02-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

How the Rooster Lost His Spurs
Copyright Ken Harris 2009

From the title you might think this is a children's fable or a Native American myth, but it isn't. Instead, it's a story about two real roosters among our flock in North San Juan in the late '80s.

We had several flocks of chickens during our time in North San Juan. They were Leghorn crosses or Rhode Island Reds. We always tried to have a rooster in the flock to keep order in the hen house.

But once we somehow managed to acquire two male birds at the same time. This situation was not conducive to order because there is room for only one rooster in a small flock. The two males were vicious to each other until one decided that a subservient life without dignity was better than none at all.

Once the two birds decided who would rule the roost, some interesting physical changes occurred in each one. The winner's comb grew larger and redder while the losers shriveled significantly. The dominant bird's spurs grew long and sharp, while the inferior bird's spurs shrank to nubbins.

Life for the dominant male was pretty good – until trouble came up. Trouble arrived to the flock in the form of the neighborhood bobcat, the one who included our henhouse as a part of his territory. One snotty, cold, dark winter's night the bobcat decided it was just too unpleasant to hunt, and so he would visit our henhouse to see if he could discover a breach. And when the Great Bobcat visit, it's time for the Boss Rooster to stand up to be counted.

In this case, the rooster successfully defended his flock and survived to tell the tale, but it cost him his spurs. He tore them off trying to beat the bobcat off through the fence. We could see the disturbed ground and torqued chicken wire where the battle had occurred. It occurred to me that being Cock of the Walk might not necessarily be a good thing.

The bobcat revisited from time to time, and the rooster died, whether from bobcatitis or some other dread disease. Thus came the promotional opportunity for the inferior bird. Everything changed for him and he responded with increased testosterone. His comb grew long and richly red and sharp new spurts quickly appeared on his heels.

Soon he, too, lost his spurs. But he survived and shortly after that we trapped the bobcat in a humane trap. Then we put a bullet in his head. The rooster went on to rule his flock of hens for years. Timing is everything.

Another Op'nin', Another Blow

2009-01-26T09:39:00.000-08:00

Another Op’ning, Another Blow
©Kenneth Harris, 2008

We lived in Auburn, California from 1962 to 1970. For much of that time I worked for Intercoast Life Insurance Company, home office in Davis. For all of the time we lived in Auburn we were involved with the Western States Trail Ride.

The Western States Trail Ride occurs once every year on the Saturday following the “Hunters Moon,” which occurs in the hot days of summer. Starting out at o-dark-hundred, riders attempt to take their horse from Tahoe City to Auburn, over the Sierra Nevadas, in 24 hours.

But there's more. Each year the trail has to be reopened, rediscovered, or relocated after the winter snows and rains. This involves hardy horsemen riding out on many weekends armed with hatchets, bow saws, yellow tape to mark the trail, and lots of muscle and good will. My horse, Legend, and I were usually part of the trail crew and, in general, I enjoyed being a part of it all.

One day in 1968 sitting at lunch in the safety of the insurance company home office with a co-worker named Dave de la Cruz, I nattered on about the joys of riding in the mountains. I didn't mention anything about hazards and hardships, just the pleasure of communing with nature. Dave said, “Gee, I wish there was someplace like that we could ride. Dixon is so flat.”

What could I say? Dave lived in Dixon. Dixon is in the Central Valley. Dixon is flat. I don’t want to downgrade the place, but it is pool table flat.

What could I say? I could have said any number of things, but what I did say was to invite him and his wife to go riding with me on the following Saturday morning. I had thought of a ride across two canyons from Michigan Bluff. We would go down a steep canyon and out of it, across Deadwood Ridge, into and out of another steep canyon to Last Chance Mine, and then turn around and come back again. By the time we returned to Michigan Bluff we would have ridden a distance of 20 miles or so, but have involved ourselves 7,500 feet of ascent and descent. Beautiful country, but you needed strong horses and strong butts. Iron horses and iron butts would be even better. I was looking forward to it.

It never occurred to me that Dave and his wife, used to the loamy flats of Dixon, might not be able to make a ride like that in good style. Or at all.

Fortunately, the matter never came up because we didn’t make that ride. We would have had to trailer over mountain roads, paved but steep and curvy, and we needed to leave by 8:00 o’clock. Dave, and his wife, and his car, and his trailer, and his horses, arrived at 10:00 o’clock. Two hours late.

They arrived in an elderly station wagon that could barely pull the steep hill up to our house. When Dave opened the hood to his vehicle to see why he was having such power difficulties we saw sparks flying from loose and cracked wiring. He had eight cylinders, all of them firing about forty percent of the time.

A Michigan Bluff ride was out of the question, but we could trailer down to Robie Point, just outside of Auburn, and then ride down the Old Stage Coach Road to the American River, follow a few trails for a while, and still get back in time for a late lunch. And this became our new plan.

We trailered to Robie Point, the de la Cruzes with their quarter horses and me with Joanne’s pet horse, Ringwraith, since my pet horse, Legend, was unavailable. (We had acquired Ringwraith just after we had read The Lord of the Rings. Ring was a big, strong animal with very dark brown hair. His ears lopped, which made him look as though he would love to stomp a hobbit. Consequently, strangers gave him a wide berth. But Ring was really a nice guy, mainly, I think, because people left him alone.)

When it came to trailering, Legend and I had spoiled each other. I would put food in the trailer manger, lower the tail gate and rump chain, point Legend in the direction of the food and in she would walk. I would fasten her halter to the manger by means of a breakaway chain, drape her lead rope over her back, hook the rump chain back up, and close the tailgate. When it came time to unload the horse, I was supposed to unsnap the chain from the halter. The horse’s head is free, it backs up, feels the rump chain, and waits until the universe is in better order. But with Legend I had got in the habit of doing things in reverse order. In this case I first did the tailgate, then the rump chain, then tried to unchain the halter.

Wrong!

Ring felt the rump chain give and backed up. But his head was still confined, held by the breakaway chain. At that point he lost his head. And I almost lost mine. He swung his head back and forth wildly while I tried to undo the chain. His head hit mine accidentally and split it open above and to the side of my right eye. Popped it like a grape.

Eventually I gained control of Ring’s head and backed him out onto the street. Now we had a slight complication. Blood had stuck my eyelids shut and I couldn’t see. I asked Dave to hold my horse. He said, “No.”

His wife added, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

I realized I had a problem, maybe two or three.

I pried my eyes open so I could see at least a little bit, tied Ring to the trailer and then washed the blood off my face with water from the nearest garden hose. I dripped back to my horse, untied him, climbed into the saddle and said, “Let’s go.”

Just then the guy who lived in the house with the garden hose came out and asked, “Are you all right?”

But for some reason my company felt we ought to return home. I took stock of myself and saw that I looked like I had fought on both sides at the Battle of Shiloh. I looked like I had all of my blood on my clothes and none in my body. Even I realized we didn't need to go on a ride. The morning had already been perfect.

When we reached home Joanne drove me to the doctor’s office for some fancy whipstitching. The doctor was a horseman and treated the whole episode with jovial manner while I had unkind thoughts. When he was through, Joanne pointed out that there were still a few bits of flesh sticking out at odd angles from my face. Not to worry. He snipped them off with scissors. That part of my face wasn’t numbed, but I was fairly numb all over anyway.

We had a light lunch and Joanne took the de la Cruzes out for a gentle ride in an area we called Big Hill. Not mountains, but rolling hills with oak trees and magpies. It was a nice ride. They rode for half an hour, but when Joanne asked them which direction they wanted to go next, they said back to the trailer. They were exhausted. I hate to think what would have happened if we had tried the Michigan Bluff canyons. We’d still be there.

Lesson one: Just because someone says he can ride doesn’t mean he can ride.

Lesson two: Just because someone says he can unload a horse doesn’t mean much either.

The Great Horse Race

2009-01-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

The Horse Race
Copyright: Ken Harris 2006

The time: a winter morning in 1957. The place: the trail between the Arroyo Seco Stables in South Pasadena and the Rose Bowl.

Bobbi Williams kept Bonny Pico, a racing Thoroughbred, for her own pleasure. Bonny Pico had raced several times and won or placed on those occasions. But she was temperamental and often “blew her cool.” Very soon into her career she tangled herself up in the starting gate and damaged her legs. She was was still temperamental after her accident, just not so fast. She frequently “flew into alt,” to use an old, old phrase. If you weren’t careful with her, you would fly even “alter” before you hit the ground. Not many people besides Bobbi rode Bonny Pico: she required an experienced or firm hand, usually both.

We three, Joanne, Bobbi and myself, decided to ride to the Rose Bowl for breakfast. A recent rain had “gifted” us with a muddy trail. Bobbi wanted to ride Bonny Pico and give her an opportunity to run. It must be miserable to be a race horse in a rental-schooling stable. Always wanting to run, never getting to? It must be like an AA member working in a bar.

On this fine day Bobbi wanted to let Bonny Pico out a bit on the trail to the Rose Bowl. She volunteered to give us a half mile head start. Sheba, the little Arab mare, and I formed a second “racing team,” if you could call us that, and Legend, a 3/4-Arab, and Joanne formed a third. Sheba, while willing, couldn’t match Legend for speed. Soon Joanne and Legend immediately left Sheba and me behind with globs of mud on our faces.

We stood no chance of catching them, but we tried our best. A few minutes later I heard a buh-duh-BUMP buh-duh-BUMP coming up behind me. Bobbi and Bonny Pico passed Sheba and me like we were hobbled. And Bonny Pico wasn’t even running. She was galloping. Huge, yard-eating strides. And as she galloped by, she had this dreamy, ecstatic, “free at last” look in her eye.

Bobbi and Bonny Pico zoomed past us, coating us with lots more mud. Then they passed Joanne and Legend, giving them an adobe facial as well. When we finished our course, Bobbi and Bonny Pico were in fine fettle and Sheba, Legend, Joanne and I felt as good as mud lumps could.

I may never get to Heaven, but I know what it would feel like from the look in Bonny Pico's as she passed Sheba and me by like we were chained to a tree.

Dandy, Ironsides and Salty

2009-01-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

Three More Horses, Dandy, Ironsides and Salty
Copyright Ken Harris, 2009

I don’t believe Dandy was a U.S. Cavalry veteran, but he was interesting. For one thing, his neck was thicker than his head and jaws. Halters and bridles dropped off him like rain off a slicker. Escape was his specialty. But when he had freed himself, he didn’t want to go anywhere alone, so he would untie all the other horses as well. Chuck or Bobbi Williams would periodically take the working horses down to play in the Arroyo Seco water, back n the days before it became a concrete ditch, and to soak their hooves. If Dandy had not been working during riding lessons that day, he was left behind. Not to worry, he would soon show up minus his halter. After that the Williamses decided that whenever anyone went for a cooling footbath, Dandy got to go as well. It was easier than hog tying him.

Ironsides was a boarder, but he loved to jump so much that he was used in jumping lessons as well. The horses lined up and jumped in turn. Ironsides was so keen that he would cut in line to get in more jumps. Most of the other horses didn’t mind since they could live their entire lives and never jump, prefer it, in fact. A professional trainer whom I shall not name, borrowed the horse for further schooling. She “crammed” Ironsides against a jump and ruined his front legs. He was good for the occasional pleasure ride, but his jumping days were through. The trainer, by the way, was not my landlady, Bobbi Williams.

The last horse I shall discuss was neither the most beautiful nor the most obedient. Certainly not the latter. His name was Sultan, but everyone called him “Salty.” That should give you a clue right there.

On this particular afternoon I had just returned home from work. (So many of my adventures begin with my just returning from work to discover what my frau has been up to.) On this afternoon, she had been dutifully washing the dishes. She had put her hand into the top of a glass holding a wash cloth, and made a circular washing motion when the rim broke and she gashed her hand deeply.

Bobbi Williams loaded Joanne into her elderly Cadillac and took her down to the Los Angeles County Hospital Emergency Room where they administered medicine in the rough. They held her hand over a pan and poured alcohol over it, and then stitched it up without benefit of any pain deadening injections. Fortunately, I guess, the alcohol on the fresh cut caused the nerves in Joanne’s hand to shrivel because she didn’t even feel the stitches. It’s like curing a headache by cutting off a toe.

They got back from the hospital just as I drove in from work. Meanwhile, Salty ran out of the stable with his saddle underneath his belly, leaving his rider, a teenage girl, lying face down in the middle of the ring. Salty hung a right out of the stable driveway and began his mad escape. We piled into Bobbi’s Caddy and began a hot pursuit. We’re talking Friday afternoon rush hour here.

It was easy to track Salty. You just went in the direction people were looking and pointing. When we caught sight of Salty, he had slowed to a canter. Just then an intrepid soul in an MG convertible tried to head him off. Salty was a jumper-and-a-half at need, and he easily cleared the MG, saddle under his belly and all, giving the driver an object lesson in why people should think before they act.

By the time Bobbi caught up with the horse, Salty had slowed to a walk and was on the on ramp to the Pasadena Freeway. Cars were lined up for a half mile in every possible direction. Bobbi pulled up beside the horse and drove slowly, perhaps 1- to 3-miles-per-hour, as slowly as she could without stalling. Joanne stepped out of the car to catch the horse.

Joanne was carrying our first child. Her balance must have been a little off because she did not land gracefully on her feet, but flopped around like a scarecrow in a whirlwind, finally landing in a supine position on the street. At this point, the cars stopped.

Joanne got to her feet. Still silence. She walked quietly by the horse, not even looking at him. She’s just a girl going her own way, minding her own business, catching a horse the furthest thing from her mind. She suddenly reached out and grabbed one of the broken reins dangling from Salty's bridle and stopped him. Quickly she uncinched his saddle and stowed it in the car.

The trip back to the stable was almost anticlimactic. Joanne began to walk Salty home and soon Bobbi slowly drove by in the Caddy. They women changed places, Joanne drove, Bobbi and Salty walked, and order was restored in the universe.

I never before believed in miracles until this incident, but in all that time, with all those cars stopped, not one Los Angeles motorist honked. Now that’s a miracle.

Arroyo Seco Stable Horses

2008-12-29T08:48:00.000-08:00

Arroyo Seco Stable Horses
Copyright Ken Harris 2006

In 1957 my wife and I rented a house in South Pasadena owned by Chuck and Bobbi Williams, who also owned the Arroyo Seco stables. The house was a part of the stables property and so, besides our own two horses, Sheba and Legend, we had many other horses for neighbors.

Arroyo Seco Stables was a rent , boarding and schooling stable, so there were many horses permanently in residence. Chuck and Bobbi Williams had discussed the matter years before and had decided that they were put on earth to give horses a good home. I decided that in my next incarnation I wanted to be one of their horses. Those horses got rest, exercise, care, feed, and affection. Some humans who don’t do that well.

Many of their horses were U.S. Cavalry remounts. Cal Poly at Pomona had been a remount training station before the Army decided that they would go to tanks and helicopters. When the army went out of the horse business, Chuck and Bobbi bought some of their finest equine friends from them. An ex-cavalry horse was a great buy. It had received wonderful training and care during its formative years. Four of the Williams’ horses come to mind, Richard, O’Malley, Grey Dawn, Cocoq (pronounced “Coke” because we couldn’t figure out how to say his real name).

Richard, when I met him, was a 24-year-old bay. He was in good flesh, he ate well, and he worked as hard as any horse on the place. However, you had to be a little careful with him first thing in the morning. No sharp turns for the first fifteen minutes of the day. After that, you were dealing with a healthy, strong, mature horse. He was the best looking 24-year-old horse I’ve ever seen.

O’Malley didn’t like to work nights. He was a gentle soul and a favorite with student riders. When Bobbi gave a lesson at night, you could bet the ranch on it, someone would call for O’Malley. O’Malley would slink into the corner of his stall, put his head in the corner and make himself as small as possible. It never worked. He was a huge, seal brown gelding. If he had stretched himself out against the back of his stall, he might have disguised himself as the wall. But the corner schtick never worked. It was like hiding a football in a bucket. But each night O’Malley would try his little trick and wonder why it never worked.

Gray Dawn earned a little extra money for the stable by working in movies, appearing in at least one Disney flick. He was a perfectly well mannered horse, a perfect school horse. Except for one little character flaw. He had one buck a day. It wasn’t a sunfish, but just a little crow hop. But you never knew when it would happen. Riders were relieved when he bucked early in the morning. But as the day grew longer and the buck hadn’t come, riders would get more nervous. Then Gray Dawn would buck. Once. And everything settled down again.

Cocoq was a jumping fool. When Bobbi taught jumping classes and had a student who might be reluctant to jump (and if you stop to think about it, why would you jump a horse over an obstacle when you could walk around it), Cocoq was saddled up and away the pair went. In Cocoq’s opinion, the whole U.S. Cavalry had taught him to jump and who was some chicken rider to tell him that it was too tough.

That worked against me once. I was taking English riding lessons from Bobbi and I rode like I was duct taped to the saddle. No style whatever. Bobbi had heard somewhere that if one had a student of indifferent ability and talent, his progress could be hastened by teaching him to jump. I seemed like the perfect guinea pig to her. Of course, she didn’t tell me that. She just said she thought I was ready to learn to jump.

So there we were one night, Cocoq and I, in a “gambler’s sweepstakes.” The winner of the event was the person who took the most jumps in a minute. Maybe it was an hour. It seemed like it. Cocoq and I took the first jump and I lost my right stirrup. I tried to put my foot back into the stirrup, but by then Cocoq had committed himself to the second jump and I lost my left stirrup. Then I clenched the horse between my legs as much as I could and we took jump after jump, Bobbi calling, “Stop him, Ken, stop him!” Joanne, meanwhile, encouraged me. “Jump, Ken, jump.” I think she wanted me to win the event, but she may have been bucking for early widowhood. I completed the picture by hauling on the reins and crying, “Whoa, damn you, whoa!”

We won the event.

I could hardly walk the next day because I had strained every muscle from my toes to my nose. Bobbi said she was relieved that I had not cracked her horse’s ribs. For Cocoq, it was all in a day’s work.

Picking Up Ponies

2008-12-24T12:47:00.000-08:00

Picking Up Ponies
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

Twin Falls, Idaho. Spring, mid-1960s. Opening day of trout season. My wife and I were trailering back to Twin Falls to pick up two stud ponies. Our intent was to win fame and fortune raising Ponies of the Americas (POAs).

It was a long drive from Auburn, California to Twin Falls, Idaho, made longer by a flash snow storm over Donner Summit. God, I loved crawling on my belly in muck trying to put rusty, borrowed chains on the GMC. Because it was opening day of trout season, there were thousands of motorists lined up at Nyack Garage to buy chains. Who brings chains on a trout fishing trip? Stu Wells, the garage owner, had a grin on his face they could have used to guide airplanes.

We finally got through to Twin Falls when the alternator on the GMC gave out. Slow go to no go. Bought a used alternator that wouldn’t work because the mastermind who sold us the vehicle had reversed the wiring. We stood in the weather while some guy with a screwdriver and a cigar clenched in his teeth tried to fix it. Did you know that there isn’t a single tree between the North Pole and Twin Falls to break up the wind? Not a single one! This happened 40 years ago and I still have icicles on my liver.

We loaded up our ponies, at least, we were assured they were ponies. It was difficult to tell under all their hair because they had been on good Montana winter range until we picked them up. I wondered if someone had slipped in some Ponies of Siberia on us.

Driving back was uneventful except for a brief – it seemed like forever – encounter with black ice in the high desert of Nevada. I'd heard enough about it to know to take my feet off the gas, the clutch, the brake, and just hope the forward inertia would do just that, carry us forward.

Not a pleasant trip. Successful, but not pleasant.

Balein

2008-11-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

Balein and the Rose Parade
Copyright Ken Harris 2006

Balein was a steel grey stallion who lived at Bobbi Williams’ stable. He didn’t roam in a pasture with a herd of mares, but he didn’t work very hard either. His main job in life was to be part of an equestrian unit in the annual Pasadena Rose Parade. The rest of the time he hung out in his stall or went out with his owner, Don Branstatter on some trail rides or worked in the riding ring a bit. Life was good for Balein, except for that one day of the year, the day of the Rose Parade.
And this was that day, January 1, 1958. Don had asked us to help him prepare Balein for the parade and then to park his rig while he joined the rest of his unit. We thought it might be fun to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Rose Parade, and that is why we were up at 4:00 a.m. on New Years Day, yawning, scratching, and helping Don and his horse where we could.
Balein stood outside his stall, hip shot and half asleep. Perhaps he was all asleep. No point in his getting up early. He’d had his bath the day before. Grey horses always need a bath. That’s why they are called laundry horses. If there is filth anywhere in their vicinity of a grey horse, it will stick to, cling on, smear up and otherwise sully his coat. Balein slept through the night strapped warmly in his blanket so he could not roll in his own poop and thus enter the Rose Parade decorated with green smears.
I held his haltered head by a lead rope while Don picked up each foot and coated each hoof with black shoe polish, the liquid kind that comes in a bottle with a dauber. Joanne meanwhile brushed his mane and tail. There was no problem there, for she picked up the tail easily with the thumb and first two fingers of her left hand and ran the brush through the hair. Balein liked being brushed.
Then Don took off the blanket and put on the saddle. After that, he attached the breast collar. That keeps the saddle from sliding backwards in the event the horse finds himself facing uphill, as he might do standing on his hind legs. Again, no problem.
But then came crouper time. A crouper is the exact opposite of a breast collar. It is a ring that attaches to the back of the saddle and fits around the horse’s tail and it keeps the saddle from riding forward. Now we had a problem. Balein hated the crouper. Well, think about it. Would you like someone to give you a wedgie every time you went downhill? Balein clamped his tale down so hard that Joanne had to put both hands, arms, shoulders, hips, thighs, and some grunts and curses to lift his tail enough for Don to fit the crouper onto the horse. But on the other hand, Balein was no longer half asleep.
He was no more trouble after that. Once the crouper was attached he seemed to accept his fate and we finished our tasks and enjoyed backstage at the Rose Parade fully. We asked Don how one got such a well behaved stallion. Most of the stallions I had encountered didn’t actually eat human flesh, but you had to be careful with them. They were none of them as mellow as this guy. Don’s answer was as simple as it was brief. “You buy them.”
Duh.

Podge

2008-11-12T19:00:00.000-08:00

Podge
©Ken Harris, 2008
Auburn, California, 1980s. Our friend, Sally Poole, had a nice home east of Highway 49, a few miles north of Auburn. Still has it, by the way. On her property lay an inviting pond, pasture and a huge barn to accommodate her horses. In the huge barn she had some old hay bales that needed to be restacked to make room for a shipment of new hay bales, and here is where Joanne and I enter into the story.

Sally had invited us over for lunch. Or perhaps we invited ourselves. We do that sometimes. In any event, she asked us if we would mind shifting some hay for her.

Out to the barn we went, Sally, Joanne, I and, bringing up the rear, Podge, a marmalade cat. While nominally a barn cat, it had been some time since Podge had actually made an on-site inspection of the place.

We all surveyed the scene. Two-story ceiling, check. Dirt floor but hay on wooden pallets, check. Horses in the barn fascinated by anything connected with hay, check. Barn cat to supervise, check.

I shifted a bale or two and suddenly we saw a mouse. Then two, three, dozens, at least a hundred mice. The floor was covered with squeaking, scurrying mice. We humans stepped in lively fashion. I certainly didn’t want one of those creatures running up my pants leg. I don’t know how those weasel guys in the U.K. do it.

Podge immediately leaped into action, but he was only one cat. Soon he had a mouse in his mouth, then two, then three. We could tell because their tails were still hanging out. Besides that, he had another mouse under each paw and watched helplessly as dozens more scurried around.

Joanne soon joined Podge in the fray, scooping up mice and putting them in a deep bucket. It’s a wonder she didn’t get gnawed. She tells me I helped her, but I don’t remember that.

Very soon the mice disappeared, except for Podge’s and the ones in Joanne’s bucket. Then came the conundrum. What do we do with a bucket of mice. That’s another thing about this memorable day that I don’t remember.

We finished shifting the bales and all returned to the house to ponder our next move. Podge stayed behind because he knew what his next move was going to be.

Sally did not call the exterminator, but she did stop feeding Podge in the house. Podge didn’t object and in fact disappeared from sight for more than a month. When he reappeared, the mouse population was under control and Podge himself looked extremely prosperous.

Two Bits

2008-11-06T12:03:00.000-08:00

Two Bits
©Ken Harris, 2008

While we lived in Auburn in the 1960s, we decided to gain fame and fortune raising Ponies of the Americas, or POAs for short. A POA is a pony with Appaloosa coloring.

Appaloosa colors come in several varieties. Some animals are white with leopard spots. Others are dark colored with white, spotted rump patches, or some have
just rump patches, no spots.

Lightly colored but patchless horses may still have darker hair over shoulder and hip bones than the rest of their bodies. These are called varnish marks. Horses lacking even these markings, they may still have mottled skin around the eyes, as if they have some rare Egyptian eye disease. Striped hooves are another Appaloosa indicator.

The curious thing about breeding for color, be it full sized Appaloosa horses or the smaller POAs, is that if you get some color, you have an animal worth some money. It doesn’t matter whether the foal has an even number of heads, an odd number of legs or looks like a space alien. If it has color, it’s worth some money; the more color, the more money. If, on the other had, your foal has no color, it doesn’t matter if it has strength, stamina, beauty, personality, charisma, and a good disposition — you have nada. In France you could sell him for stew meat, but in the USA, nada.

The first thing we needed was some breeding stock, mares. But where to buy them? Not everyone had ponies with Appaloosa DNA. And those we found had some serious drawbacks. We did find one mare, Two Bits. She was possibly 13 hands 2 inches high. (A hand is 4 inches, but we horse people like to have our own jargon just to show how cool we are. I could have said she was 4 feet 6 inches at the withers, but then you would have known what I was talking about.) Two Bits was about 4 feet 6 inches across the butt, too. She looked like she’d lost her beer wagon. Her belly sagged from previous pregnancies. I considered building her a belly wheel. We persuaded ourselves that in spite of these cosmetic imperfections, she showed some signs of an Appaloosa background, possibly around the time of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Someone we knew had a POA stud named Road Agent. We bred the two animals and when Two Bits came due she had her foal in our garage. I opened the door to our garage one morning and here was this dark little colt running figure eights around his mother. We got the two of them into the pasture and saw them settled in. Two Bits was formidable enough that the other animals knew not to mess with her and her new baby.

For the record, we named the baby Short Change. Short Change by Road Agent out of Two Bits. Shorty was a complete miss. French stew meat. Two Bits did not agree.

One day, after Shorty was gone, sold down the river, I looked down at our pasture and saw Two Bits standing motionless at the gate. Two hours later, she was still there. Motionless. Something had to be wrong, so Joanne and I went down to investigate.

Our gate was just a stretch of field fencing that attached to a fence post. You took it down to let livestock go through, and reattached it when the animals were where you wanted them. It was like stringing an 8-stringed bow. We found our gate down and Two Bits tangled with all four legs through the wire. I held her head and spoke soothingly to her while Joanne gently freed her legs, first the front and then the rear. When we were through, Two Bits tested her legs gingerly, then kicked Joanne and bit me. We waited for a long time after that to see if we could catch her in a similar fix. We wanted to go down and bite her and kick her.

It never happened. It just shows how unfair life is. We sell her baby and she turns around and bites and kicks us. You’d think she would have been grateful.

Bonnet on the Tevis Cup Ride

2008-10-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

Bonnet on the Tevis Cup Ride

Shortly after this romantic interlude Bonnet moved to new quarters in Sunland and for us life went on. The next thing we heard, Lona had taken it into her head to ride Bonnet on the Western States 100. She conditioned him and trained him. I thought it was madness, but nobody ever asked me. (Nobody ever asks me.) She and the pony showed up, both of them in great condition because they had been working in the rugged San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California.

The trail ride board of directors had stipulated that each horse had to carry 150 pounds of weight. Lona and her saddle weighed 130 pounds, but nobody cut them any slack. If Bonnet was going to play with the real horses, he was going to have to abide by Real Horse Rules. So he was fitted out with lead weights for his saddle.

I was concerned because much of the Western States ride is made at the trot. You’ve seen people riding English saddles where they bounce up and down while their horse trots. It’s called “posting.” It’s a way of equalizing the load and making things a little easier for the horse. People riding Western saddles don’t post. Instead, they put their weight from side to side as the horse progresses, counterbalancing the motion. It also equalizes the load. But both riding methods have something in common. The rider looks like he’s going to fall off any second.

Many people were concerned about Bonnet. Compared with the trail horses, even the relatively small Arabs, Bonnet looked like a Yorkshire Terrier running with Great Danes. But he was in such great physical condition that a hundred-mile trot only made him horny. He propositioned every mare he could identify along the way, and maybe a few geldings, too. When you’re young, you’re not particular.

The ride ends at the Auburn District Fair Grounds. At 6:00 a.m. certain vets conduct a quick post-ride survey of the animals. bIf they find some horse massively dehydrated, for example, they can do something quickly. Since Joanne was the vet secretary, she had to get up early to make the 6:00 a.m. call with them. She told me that Bonnet was still propositioning the mares. One of the vets commented, “That’s a damn tough pony.” “Damn tough” is a technical term used among veterinarians.

Bonnet lived into his middle twenties. He pulled carts, appeared in parades, and was Lona’s friend and companion during all that time. Several times he won the NTRA (National Trail Riding Association) national open championship.

When he died, Lona sent us an edged-in-black note saying she had lost her friend. And we mourned with her. He was one of the planet’s good guys.

Bonnet Breeds His Last Mare

2008-10-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

We had let Bonnet breed a few mares before we sold him to Lona, if you could call it that. Breeding horses is tricky business. It takes more than a willing pair of horses. You must wrap tails, engage breeding hobbles (for mares who aren’t quite so willing), and make sure that the stallion is wearing a halter equipped with a nose chain to get his attention in case he gets carried away by passion and injures his partner. Last, but not least, one requires a bucket for an antiseptic solution and sponges to apply it to the stallion’s member. He doesn’t always take kindly to this procedure. Imagine, Bonnet and his girlfriend have just gone through the beautiful act of creating a new horse, and while he is still dreamy with beta waves, we slosh him in the crotch with a bucket of Phisohex.

Breeding horses presents so many technical difficulties that it’s a wonder horses can do it for themselves.

We had one more mare to breed, and we just didn’t want to be bothered with all the usual foofaraw. We just bound her tail to keep it out of the way. Then we stepped back. Bonnet was so gentle that we didn’t fear that he would hurt the mare; in fact, he was quite a lover. He looked at the mare, nuzzled her a bit, looked at us, got a huge smile as he realized that he was going to do this on his own, and leaped into the air and clicked all four feet together. His pure joy made our day.

More on Bonnet

2008-10-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

More on Bonnet
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

I mentioned before that there are advantages to raising horses on hillsides. They do not grow up, as some rural myths say, with legs shorter on one side than the other. Instead, since no matter where they go, it will be either uphill or downhill, the horses or ponies muscle up in the hindquarters.

And so it was with Bonnet. After six months with us in Auburn, he no longer resembled a Friday Horse. (To refresh your memory, you never wanted to buy a new car built on Fridays because that was the day they cleaned the factory and built cars out of parts that didn’t fit right in on first attempt at assembly Mondays through Thursdays.) All of Bonnet’s horse parts seemed to fit together better than they had when we first got him from Montana. Men no longer laughed when they saw him. We might have even finished 22nd in that show at Stockton, instead of 23rd. .

At that time Joanne and I were heavily involved with the Western States 100 Mile Trail Ride. We had both done the ride before and won our much coveted silver and gold buckles. (To win the buckle you had to ride one horse the roughly 100-mile distance from Tahoe City to Auburn within 24 hours.) Both of us realized that we only needed one belt buckle because we only needed to wear one belt at a time. But we still worked on the ride, clearing and marking trail in the spring to get ready for the summer event. I used to be a drag rider and sweep up lost riders and try to get them in so they could earn buckles. Joanne was a vet’s secretary. We did all this when we were not trimming our ponies’ feet.

During this time we met Lona Sweet and her family from Sunland, California. I don’t know if Lona will ever read this story, but she was a little bitty woman who might have weighed ninety-nine pounds if someone put rocks in her purse. She fell in love with Bonnet and bought him.

Owning a Horse

2008-10-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

Owning a Horse
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

A few thoughts on horse ownership. If you like to ride and don’t own a horse, you go down to a stable and rent a horse or even take a class. Perhaps you have friends who own horses and are willing to loan you one or go riding with you. But, if you buy a horse, then either you must board the horse or put it in your back yard, if you have a big back yard. You have to feed your horse, take care of him when he’s sick, pay for the damage he might do if he gets out. You brush the horse, bathe the horse, braid his mane and tail. If you want to go anywhere far away, you must have a trailer. A trailer is not much good without a vehicle to pull it. You can’t ride very far bareback, so you need a saddle, bridle, saddle pads. You also need clothes for yourself, which could mean anything from jeans and shirt to coats, jodhpurs and rat catchers for fox hunting and jumping classes. Boots are always expensive. You’ll need to buy feed for the horse and you will need a barn to put all of this stuff in, not to mention a place to park your truck and trailer. By the time you have done all of this, your horse has died of old age and you have done everything but actually ride. You never found the time for that.

Dancer

2008-09-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

Dancer
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

Dancer was our wonder pony, beautiful, sweet natured, gentle, good with children. Brilliant rump patch with prominent, defenite, chocolate brown spots. Dark chocolate. He had only one fault. He only had one testicle. Actually, he had two of them, but one was undescended. In vet school they would call him “cryptorchid,” a phrase that has nothing to do with flowers. In breeding equine animals, cryptorchidism is a serious defect. You can’t enter him in a show because one of the things the judge does is count testicles. If he finds an odd number of them, you and your pony are out of the show.

And so, with great regret, we called the vet out to have the colt castrated. In the testicle world none at all is better than one and at least we’d be able to show him off as a gelding. Unfortunately, the vet could not locate the undescended testicle. He reached inside the poor animal’s cavity and fondled various anatomical parts, but didn’t want to perform surgery by Braille. It would be really embarrassing if he removed a tonsil by mistake.

And then a curious thing happened. Dancer healed beautifully, but he had a profound personality change. He became vicious, unruly and carnivorous. Not only was his orchid crypted beyond access, it was putting out some really vicious testosterone.

We had to have the undescended testicle removed. This meant a trip to the University of California at Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. It also meant signing a lot of waivers, but we were willing to do that. Poor Dancer had what was called a “high flanker,” and it took the doctors and students a long, long time to perform the operation.

The operation was successful and our normally sweet horse was restored to us. We promptly sold him to someone in Southern California who was connected to the movie industry. Dancer did a few Disney television shows but then, one day, while doing something perfectly normal, jumping in the air, running in circles, something he did every day, he fell and broke his back and had to be destroyed.

Some days you're the windshield, some days you're the insect.

Pony Feet

2008-09-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

Pony Feet
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

There’s something to be said for raising your horses on the side of a hill. Leg
problems tend to straighten themselves out. Haunches grow, knees straighten. But feet don’t straighten. They tend to remain the same. That’s where corrective trimming comes in. A horse’s foot is actually one big toe and the hoof is its toenail. Essentially, a horse shoer is an equine podiatrist. Our splay footed ponies needed some expert trimming, but we couldn’t afford an equine podiatrist to come out every two weeks and trim away. That lot fell to me. Every two weeks I would trim the outsides of the ponies hind feet, just a little bit, with the hoof nippers. Then I would file them smooth so they wouldn’t chip in the rocky pasture they called home.

Until this point I had congratulated myself on being the first Harris in four generations to not be a horse shoer. My father shod horses as a young man, my grandfather, my great grandfather, even though they all engaged in different occupations, they took their turn at trimming hooves level and nailing steel plates to the result. I had escaped this fate – until Bonnet and Dancer came to live with us.

The first thing you will notice when you work on a pony’s feet is how close to the ground they are. You raise a pony’s hoof and it’s still nose to the toes time. You spend a lot of time bent over that way, even if the ponies are cooperating. Soon I was doing a whole string of ponies, Two Bits, Queenie, their foals.

Dancer and Bonnet

2008-09-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

Dancer and Bonnet
Copyright Ken Harris 2006

When we lived in Auburn, California in the 1960s we pursued several mad ideas. One such concept was to win fame and fortune breeding Ponies of the Americas (POAs). A pony is an equine creature less that 14.2 hands (58") at the withers. A POA is a pony with appaloosa color or at least some other characteristics. It was a color more than anything else.

While we were in the Ponies of the Americas business, we decided that we needed a stallion, or even two stallions. We saw an ad in the POA newsletter placed by a Spud Snyder in Montana. Spud had two colts to sell, both colored, and he agreed to meet us in Twin Falls, Idaho to make the transaction.

We hitched our two-horse trailer to our salty GMC ¾-ton pick-up and set forth over Donner Pass. It was opening day of trout season. The Manitou of Weather chose that day to bring down a snow blizzard on us. Cars skidded around the road like skateless ice hockey players. The Highway Patrol put on the chain control at Nyack Garage. (All of this means nothing to you who are unfamiliar with the area. Let’s just say we were trying to get over Donner Pass in a snowstorm because we're not very good history students). Since most of the trout fishermen had no chains with them, they lined up for miles to rent or buy their chains at Nyack Garage. Stu Wells, the garage owner, sported a smile that almost broke his face. You could see his teeth for a hundred yards. One single storm had changed his fiscal year from loss to profit.

I had borrowed chains from Ina Robinson, but had no idea of how to put them on. I was a Son of the Desert from Riverside County. We do sand dunes and sage brush, not sleet and snow. Somehow I managed to attach the chains, with the help of pliers and baling wire, and we got over the hill, shortly before the chains rebelled at my inexpert attempt to attach them and broke loose, wrapping themselves around the brake lines.

When we arrived in Twin Falls, the GMC’s alternator died. We went to a salvage yard to replace it. I am here to testify that there is not so much as a single tree or bush between Twin Falls and the North Pole. Joanne and I were wearing long underwear, short underwear, shirts, sweaters, coats, everything but the motel blankets, and still we froze. The wind cut through us like we were wearing no clothes at all. I have never returned to Idaho and have no intention of ever again exposing my portly person to weather like that.

We contacted Snyder and bought the colts, two miserable looking little guys fresh off that good Montana winter range, wondering what they ever did to deserve weather like this. We loaded them up quickly and headed for California hoping the storm over Donner Pass would be over by the time we got there. As it happened, the weather had cleared, but it was cold enough to provide black ice in the higher places in Nevada. I'd never seen black ice before. On the road it looks just like water, but it's like driving on elephant snot. When you hit the patch with a trailer-load of horses, you take your feet off everything and hope you keep going straight.

We made it home in spite of all and our friends came around to dutifully admire our purchases. Dancer was truly admirable, a dark seal brown pony with a bright rump patch, with spots, a good looking head, and fine conformation. He looked just like a pony should look except he was a little cow hocked and splay footed in the rear end.

Bonnet was different. How is it that Southern Belles damn with faint praise? They precede their comment with “Bless his heart.” “Bless his heart, he don’t suck his thumb in public.” Well, Bonnet, bless his heart, was a Friday horse.

You’ve probably heard that you don’t ever want to buy an American car made on a Monday or a Friday. On Mondays the work force is hung over and on Fridays they put together some cars with left over parts, things that didn’t fit neatly the first time around. They look in the corners and think, “There must be enough parts here to build another car.” Bonnet looked like a Friday horse. He had all the right parts, but they didn’t quite fit. His base color was a reddish brown and his rump patch was not brightly colored and there were no spots. His head was not beautiful and the pink around his eyes and mouth, marked with darker spots, while denoting Appaloosa DNA, made him look like he had a skin disease.

More next week.

Frogging

2008-09-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

Frogging
Copyright Ken Harris 2006

It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my brother-in-law Fritz’s fault. It was all my neighbor Bill Van Landingham’s fault.

Long, long and long ago, not back to Dinosaur Days but almost, in the early 1960s, Fritz and Ruth Heyser came up to visit us in Auburn, California. We were all visiting together very nicely. We hadn’t insulted each other hardly at all. Things would have passed uneventfully if Bill Van Landingam hadn t come by and asked us if we liked frogs legs. Fritz and I both agreed that we loved frogs legs.

Now, from the wisdom conveyed by forty years after the fact, I confess that I had never eaten frogs legs in my life. How would I know if I liked them or not? But Fritz said he loved frogs legs and I wasn’t going to look like a wuss in front of him.

Bill then got us to agree to go with him that night when it was good dark to go frogging. He said that there were ponds where he worked that hadn’t been frogged in years, and he was sure that we could fill up our bags with frogs legs and have them for breakfast. Bill worked at the DeWitt State Mental Hospital as an attendant and said that he had scouted the territory well.
Nothing to it, he said. We drive out there, go to the ponds, fill our bags with frogs legs and return home to a grateful female population who would then gladly fry them up. In butter, rolled in corn meal. We could have frogs legs, potatoes and coffee with brandy in it for breakfast.

Fritz and I must have had a lot beer to drink because this seemed like a good, sound idea.
So that s what we did. We drove out to part of a six-foot chain link fence topped off with three strands of barbed wire that was near the ponds. The barbed wire was strung on arms that were set inwards 30°. Wait a minute. I didn’t remember Bill saying anything about chain link fences and barbed wire.

No matter. We climbed over and made our way to the ponds. It was easy; even the part where we jumped over the three strands of barbed And the frogs were there all right, chuggarumming so loudly you could hear them a hundred yards away. We shined our flashlights on the pond and frog eyeballs lit the place up. The pond looked like a Christmas tree. We gigged frogs with our three pronged frog giggers, killing them, removing their legs and cramming them into burlap bags. We were knee deep in mud, sweaty and yucky with frog yuck, when Bill said, “We d better hurry. We’ll be in trouble if we re caught.”

We filled three burlap bags with frogs legs and made our way back to the fence. But the three-strand layer of barbed wire, now loomed over our heads and looked far more formidable. We thought about going to the main gate and telling them that we weren’t patients there at all and that we didn’t really belong in a mental hospital. But we thought maybe the people at the gate might disagree. They might think we were exactly where we belonged.

So we gave up on going out the easy way and threw our bags and our gear over the fence and then made our way over as well. I learned a lot from this expedition, mostly about things that portly gentlemen should not attempt.

But we returned with most of our clothes, skin and flesh, and lots of frogs legs. The women had given up on us and gone to bed, but we woke them up, masculine studs that we were. They agreed to cook them and help us eat them. But we had to clean them. I never think things all the way through. You don t just throw a frog in a pan skin and all. But we got them cleaned while the women argued about who had the stupidest husband.

The frogs legs were excellent. But the whole experience was yucky from beginning to end. Ever since then I have just bought chicken at the store like a sensible man.

On Killing Turkeys

2008-08-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

Andrea’s Turkeys
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

My wife Joanne’s sister, Andrea, lived on five acres outside of the metropolis of Rough and Ready, California. Andrea and her late husband, Phil Phillips, lived in a fine home with a fine barn and a fine flock of sheep to live in the fine barn. They also had a fine flock of turkeys to live with the fine sheep. But Andrea was never cut out to be a farmer, and she made pets out of her sheep and her turkeys. She fed her sheep by hand, going to the barn and calling, “Here, Sheepie, Sheepie, Sheepie.” And the sheep would dutifully trot up to be fed.

Her turkeys were not quite as tame as her sheep. The turkeys had the run of the place and hitchhiked rides on the backs of the sheep. They rode everywhere, digging their claws into wooly backs until the backs were raw and sore. Phil once expounded the theory that the fact that turkeys hitchhiked on sheep was compelling evidence that turkeys were smarter than sheep. But that’s not saying much. Everyone knows that doorknobs are smarter than sheep.

One Thanksgiving when the turkeys were grown and the sheep’s backs were raw from so much hitchhiking, Audrey decided that the poultry had to go. She offered Joanne and Fritz their choice of fowl. There was a condition. We would have to do the slaughtering and she would not help in any way. In fact, she wouldn’t even be there. She would be indoors, upstairs, meditating and reflecting on the uncertainty of life. After all, these turkeys were her personal friends.

Fritz was butcher-in-charge. He had read a magazine article about killing turkeys. According to this author’s advice, we should hang the turkey upside down by his feet over a bucket. Once the turkey had quieted down in this position, we were to cut the bird’s head off and it would quietly bleed into the bucket.

This didn’t sound quite right, but it sounded better than whacking the bird’s head off and watching its body bounce around the pasture like a big feathered basketball. So, what the heck, said we. Let’s give it a try, said we. And so Joanne, Ruth, Fritz and I stood in a ring around the suspended bird, and Fritz severed its head with a carving knife.

Can you say “pinwheel”?

That’s what the dead bird made of itself and in just a few short seconds we all looked like victims of a chain saw massacre. After that, we slew the other turkeys in a more conventional fashion and watched them bounce around the pasture like big feathered basketballs. Meanwhile we reflected, wondering whether Fritz had skipped a paragraph in that magazine article.

The Halt and the Blind Saw Salmon

2008-08-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

The Halt and the Blind Saw Salmon
Copyright 2007 Kenneth Harris

Our daughter Patricia phoned us one day from the Chapa-de Health Clinic in Auburn to tell us that in was Salmon Day. Periodically the Great White Father gives his Indian Children free salmon. These are dead females who have been “harvested” for eggs at the fish hatchery. In the normal course of events, the females lay their eggs and then die. The hatchery accelerates the process a little bit. It’s not very nice, but then it’s probably not a good idea to think about where any of your food comes from.

The hatchery uses the offices of Chapa-De Health Clinic to distribute the fish. It’s convenient since the clinic is tasked with seeing to the health needs of the Indian population in several Northern California counties. Truth to be told, the salmon are not as tasty as wild salmon caught off the Alaskan. Nor is the texture up to par. Nevertheless, it’s free fish and there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m Depression Baby enough to leap all over the offer.

We got our salmon in the form of two females frozen together in a solid block. They didn’t want to come apart with screw drivers or pry bars. We didn’t want to thaw them to get them apart and cut into steaks because we weren’t ready to eat both of the animals at one sitting. We offered to share our loot with Joanne’s brother Fritz and use his table saw to cut the fish into steaks. He agreed and we drove over. Meanwhile, he trundled the saw out onto his garage apron so that we could see what we were doing.

Good light was important because Fritz had wet macular degeneration of both eyes and wasn’t seeing anything very well. The nature of the disease is that you can see anything that is not directly in front of you. It’s like one of those television shows where they blot out the miscreant’s face.

I, on the other hand, had my right arm in a sling because I had just had a torn rotator cuff repaired and a stone removed from the elbow bursa, an aftermath of falling off a ladder and landing on a pile of gravel.

We plugged the saw in and turned it on. It was an old Craftsman saw, but the blade was new and unless we exercised some caution we could easily sacrifice fingers or a hand to this enterprise. The two fish were still frozen together, one solid mass. Joanne stood in front of the saw and pushed the fish through, first removing the tails and then the heads. Then she began to cut the fish into steaks. Fritz stood behind the saw to steady it and remove the pieces of fish as they came toward him. I stood to one side to help both steady the saw and handle fish pieces.

The process worked well except we were all soon covered with “fish dust.” Finely formed fish flesh, scales, and such other parts as had not yet been previously removed covered our hands and faces. And our shirts. And decorated our hair. We were earnest and energetic, but we looked like extras in a horror movie.

Fritz was essentially blind. I had one functioning arm. It’s too bad Joanne wasn’t lame. We could have been a threesome.

The fish, by the way, was…well, it was…free.

2008-08-13T09:33:00.000-07:00

An Ending
Copyright Kenneth F. Harris

While Tequila and Norman were not successful, Joanne and I were. As Patricia’s birth neared, we faced some unpleasant truths about a dog we had come to value greatly. He was our friend. But we just couldn’t trust him with a new baby in the house. He was jealous of us, and it is doubtful that he would accept the baby with equanimity. And so Joanne took him to the vet, but this time not for adoption. Norman was intelligent, and he knew that he had failed again. He died quickly in Joanne’s arms. One shot from the vet and he was gone instantly.
That night we cried.
I still choke up every now and then. Fifty years later. And what really bothers me most is that all that time Norman was with us he was just being the best dog he knew how to be. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

Norman and Tequila

2008-08-06T17:08:00.000-07:00

The important thing is that Norman was sensitive and intelligent. He was so shattered by the loss of his first home that he never adjusted to subsequent homes. He soon adjusted to us once he adjusted to the horses in the stable and our back yard.
Nothing in Norman’s previous apartment-style life had prepared him for people who just sat right down on a horse and rode it around. The first time he saw me on a horse he tried to drag me off by my boot heel. However, once Norman had decided that there was nothing obscene or degrading in the relationship between a man and a horse, he loved to come along with us. He had learned that horses occasionally got out of the yard and went interesting places, did interesting things.
Norman was the most intelligent dog I have ever met. He understood hundreds of words. It was our custom to go grocery shopping once a week. And every other week we bought Norman a bone. This bone held tremendous significance for him. He would bury his bone as soon as he received it. Then, in the evenings, when we came out to sit on the glider in back of the house and drink our coffee, Norman would appear with his bone. It was a pack thing, something we all did together, he and his family.
But one grey day Joanne forgot Norman’s bone. He understood time enough to know it was bone week. He stood at the door looking through the glass into the kitchen while Joanne unpacked our goodies. Suddenly, she looked at the dog and said, “Oh, my God, I forgot Norman’s bone!” Norman put his head and tail down and left the kitchen door.
Joanne ran to the phone in the living room and called her friend, Zoe Ann.
“Hello, Zoe? Have you been shopping yet?...Well, I forgot Norman’s bone. Could you pick one up for him?...You’ll bring it here in a half an hour? Wonderful!”
A living room window was open and Norman, sitting outside, heard this one side of a telephone conversation, but he understood. When Zoe arrived within half hour, Norman met her at the gate. He fawned, groveled, crawled on his belly like a reptile. He knew who Zoe was, knew she had his bone and he wanted it! Zoe had never before walked into our yard unchallenged, and she never did again, but that afternoon she was visiting royalty.
About the time that Norman came to live with us, Joanne’s brother, Fritz, and his wife Ruth acquired a German Shepherd bitch whom they named Tequila. And so, as must inevitably happen in the face of profound, collective ignorance, we decided to breed the two dogs to each other. Now dog breeding is one of the Greater Arcana, right up there with transmutation of substances and balancing the checkbook. People spend their lives breeding and raising dogs and still spend restless nights wondering about the myriad things that could go wrong. But we, we knew nothing of these things. Dogs have bred without human help for tens of thousands of years. How difficult could it be?
And so we got the two dogs together and poured ourselves some wine. Unfortunately for us, we had two virgin dogs. Norman smelled the air, he smelled Tequila, and then the two of them stood around looking expectantly. Surely something should be happening. But it wasn’t.
We had some more wine. Even that didn’t help. We picked up Norman and placed him on Tequila. Still nothing. We were getting rather desperate when Norman accidentally made the proper penetration. Then the two dogs were permanently stuck. They stuck together even when they tried to walk off in opposite directions. Finally, they got too near the bluff and fell ten feet into some brush where they fortunately separated. For some strange reason, we could no longer interest them in coupling. Perhaps they felt that sex was just too painful. Forget pups if that’s what you had to do.
We had come to that conclusion ourselves. And so Tequila and Norman never added to the gene pool.

Norman

2008-08-03T17:48:00.000-07:00

Norman (Continued)
©Ken Harris, 2008
Norman had the unfortunate habit of biting people. Joanne and I were as safe as gold at Fort Knox but anyone else who came into the yard stood a serious chance of leaving a part of his gluteus maximus in Norman’s mouth. Whenever Joanne came home from work she always shoved Norman into the house first. Anybody lurking there was going to get fanged to a fare thee well.
It didn’t help that the drive-in parking lot joined our property line. Several amateur dog trainers had to be told to stop leaning over the fence and calling to the dog. I especially remember asking one man several times loudly, and profanely, to leave the dog alone. Norman had already taken some tentative steps towards him, trying to decide which hand to remove first. “But dogs like me,” the gentleman said.
“Yes,” I replied, “and this dog will like you so much he will remove your arm and bury it in the back yard.”
The gas man was another near miss. He screeched up to the driveway, stopped diagonally and vaulted the front fence. Norman was waiting for him on the other side of the fence with his mouth open. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone defy the laws of physics, because somehow he reversed direction in mid air and came back down on his own side of the fence. In this case, I was cheering for the dog because the man was showing no respect.
Another meter reader did not escape intact, though. He came into the yard and Norman followed him all around. He was about to leave when Joanne saw him and expressed surprise. “Well,” the gas man said, “dogs like me.” Joanne went back into the house and heard a cry of pain. Norman had sunk his canines right up to the gum line into the man’s leg. And the dog had been following the man around for twenty minutes. Oh, well, another round of quarantine.
The people who gave Norman to us lied about him. He was not a two-year-old dog. He was actually six year old, or even older. Joanne found this out when she had to take him to the vet. Norman had lived with one family in an apartment for five years and then been placed for adoption because, who knows why. The family had taken him to the vet and asked that he be placed in another home. But when Joanne walked in with the dog, the receptionist said, “Oh, no, not poor Norman again.” We were his fifth family since his original abandonment.

Norman

2008-07-31T16:55:00.001-07:00

Norman
Copyright Ken Harris 2004

I sometimes think of our first dog, shortly after we were married. Let’s place this in the summer or fall of 1957. We had rented a house on a bluff overlooking Arroyo Seco in South Pasadena. It was part of a property including a stable owned by Chuck and Bobbi Williams, owners and operators of the Arroyo Seco Stables. To our north was the York Street Overpass. Next door to us, picking up traffic from the Overpass, was a popular diner with a large parking lot. To our east and south curved a major road and to our west, behind the house, was the bluff, probably 10 feet. At the foot of the bluff lay a level area behind the stable barns where we built a corral and kept our horses. Also behind the barns lay a collection of old cars and car parts that some uninformed people might mistake for a trash pile. In reality, it was Chuck Williams’ priceless treasure trove. Beyond the corral and trove area lay a city park and the Pasadena Freeway.

We had lots of property, horses and cats, but we were dogless. Joanne answered an ad one day and went to an apartment where she picked up a German Shepherd named Norman. The ad represented him as two years old. He was actually six, or even older. He had lived with one family for five years and then been placed for adoption because – who knows why; the important thing is that Norman was sensitive and intelligent. He had been to several other families before he came our way, but was so shattered by the loss of his first home that he could never adjust to subsequent homes. Also, when Norman came to us, he was under quarantine by the L.A. County Health Department because he had bit someone.

When Joanne answered this ad, I knew nothing about it. This was a nacky notion she came up with all by herself. We had only been married for 16 months. I’m more used to her doing this now, but it was a big surprise to me that day. I had been off fishing that day in a small boat offshore from Santa Monica. There we were, three innocents afloat, even including the clueless boat owner. He landed a barracuda, which fell flopping and wriggling onto the bottom of the boat. Our host grabbed a hammer and pounded on the fish, screaming, “Kill him! Kill him!” I was afraid he would punch a hole in the boat and sink us all in the ocean with the other barracudas. He didn’t sink the boat, but he did splatter us all with barracuda parts. I drove home with the windows open, but still could scarcely stand my own smell.

When I arrived home I found my wife in the company of a large German Shepherd who tried to bite me. I couldn’t blame Norman. I was a stranger who smelled like a barracuda. This could not be reassuring. But, thanks to Joanne’s strenuous intervention, he did not devour me and by the next day, I was his favorite person.

Death of the Black Calf

2008-07-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

The End of the Black Calf
©Ken Harris, 2006

When we last left this story, Joanne was standing in the middle of a pasture dressed in hose, heels and clutching an extremely dirty blouse. The cow, still in discomfort, nosed at her long, thin, black calf wondering whether it had been worth the effort. And Barbara Van Landingham cooed over the latest addition to the nursery, wondering how they would ever, in a year’s time, find the resolve to kill the beast and eat him.

Joanne said that the real problem would be letting him live long enough to get big enough to eat. She never spoke truer words. This calf was BIG! He was also MEAN! (This is a really unpleasant combination in calves, and I don’t recommend it.) In just a few short weeks he destroyed the flower beds, knocked down the fences, pulled seedling trees out of the ground, treed the cat, nigh pulverized the dog and Barbara found that neither she nor any of her family could even go into their own pasture.

At last Barbara decided that castrating the calf would improve its temperament. We agreed that when the calf reached six weeks of age, we would do the dirty deed.

I don’t know why females think castration improves a male’s temperament. It certainly wouldn’t have improved mine.

And so on a bright, sunny, Saturday morning we showed up at the Van Landingham house ready for work. The calf, who had been named Sunshine, or Sweetness, they should have named him Damien or Be’elzebub, had been penned up. We went to the pen and found ourselves looking eyeball to eyeball with the animal. We checked our tools, Phisohex, clamps, razor blade, and ropes. Lots of ropes.

So we were ready. Be’elzebub wasn’t. He doubted our sublime intent and wouldn’t stick his head in a noose. At last we got a bit of a noose around him and, from the top of the corral, I threw myself on his head. We dropped to the ground, the calf and I, and Joanne lashed his hind feet to the bottom of a corral post and then his front feet to the bottom of another corral post. He was lying flat on his side and I still had hold of his head.

As soon as Joanne made her first incision, the calf objected strenuously. He lifted me up by his neck and slammed me into the ground while at the same time pulling in with his feet. These gyrations went on through the entire delicate procedure. I didn’t dare let go of the head because he would certainly have wreaked havoc (and wrecked everything around him).

At last the job was done. I let go of his head. Joanne untied him. He had pulled so hard he had snapped one of the corral posts off at ground level. It’s a good thing we nailed him when he was only six weeks old. Otherwise I’m not sure who would have done what with which to whom.

When we finally killed him, some months later, he was two axe handles broad and did everything but breathe fire. But he had good taste.

Driving a Dead Cow

2008-07-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Driving a Dead Cow
©Ken Harris, 2008

It was a dark and stormy winter afternoon in the 1990s in North San Juan, California. One of our short-yearling steers lay dead in the mud, stiff and ungainly. This was a disagreeable event at a disagreeable time in a disagreeable place.

Our “ranch” lay on two horizontal planes joined by five hundred feet or so of more or less 45º real estate. On the upper plane sat our house, on the lower plane a pasture and a seasonal stream. In between, on a bulldozer enhanced level patch of ground, sat our barns and a fattening pen, protected by large madrone and bull pine trees and lots of manzanita and Scotch broom brush. But the trees and brush didn’t offer sufficient protection, for the steer lay dead in the field of mud we called our fattening pen. Joanne, Bill Brown, a man whom we occasionally hired to help us do grunt work, and I glumly surveyed the scene as the rain whipped in our faces and dripped down the backs of our slickers.

We had to figure out what to do with this large, dead animal. We couldn’t just leave him there for the coyotes, buzzards, flies and microbes. The carcass would perfume the valley for weeks.

We had to get him out of his mud puddle and off to some place where we could bury him. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get our 4-wheel drive pick-up anywhere near the carcass without taking out a side of the fattening pen and driving on serious mud. Even if we took out the side of the pen, mud driving is a minor art form in itself. From a previous experience I knew that chains just dig you in deeper and faster.

At last we came up with a plan. Bill and I tied two long ropes around the dead steer’s head and then the three of us rolled the carcass onto its back and pointed it in the direction of the entrance to the fattening pen. Then Bill and I looped our ropes over our chests and arms and began tugging like two mules breaking sod. Joanne stood behind with a hind hoof in each hand, like a pioneer woman gripping plough handles, keeping the steer on its back and giving some direction to our efforts. She steered as Bill and I strained, hopping the steer’s head wouldn’t pop off before we got to where we could attach him to the pick-up.

Success! We got a whole carcass all the way to the pick-up. The rain and wind were just as bad, but my arms were so sore I didn’t even notice. We towed the animal downhill to the level pasture and Bill and I grabbed shovels. Seems you never have a backhoe when you need one.

Of course we had to bury the animal. We couldn’t cut it up for steaks and ribs because we didn’t know why it had died, basic knowledge you really want to have about your food.

Birth and Other Inconveniences

2008-07-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

On Birth and Other Inconveniences of Life’
©Ken Harris, 2007

Puppies, guppies and other wildlife young were not occasions for great comment in our family. Someone was always whelping, calving, littering or otherwise inconveniencing themselves. Doesn’t everyone hatch chicks in their ovens?

Occasionally, however, some truly spectacular births occurr. One such was the birth of our neighbor’s calf. We were living in Auburn then. Our neighbors, the Van Landinghams, didn’t know much about cows or calves, but that didn’t keep them from having a pregnant white face cow. This poor cow had been trying to have a calf all day, but things just weren’t working out for her.

My wife, Joanne, was teaching math at a local high school at the time. I mention this to explain her inappropriate apparel. I was working for Intercoast Life Insurance as an underwriter and working on my teaching credential at the University of California, Davis. I had arrived home from school fairly early, but even so Joanne had arrived before me. As I drove up the hill to the house I could see her trying to help this cow through her hard birth, assisted by our neighbors.

Joanne was still wearing hose and heels because she didn’t even go up to the house to change into her grubbies, but just leaped headlong into the situation.
She was dressed for school, except for her blouse. She had removed that garment and wadded up in her hands to use it to get a better grip on the calf as she pulled. The calf had presented its front legs properly. This was not a breech birth situation. The calf was simply too large.

Some readers may not have had the opportunity to assist at a mammal’s birth. On the other hand, some female readers may have given birth to your own mammal, but hopefully not in the middle of a cow pasture surrounded by well meaning but ineffective amateurs

I drove on by the impromptu delivery room and changed my clothes. By the time I returned to the scene of the action, the blouse had been discarded in favor of a length of baling wire looped around the calf’s front feet. The blouse, too slimy to put back on, just lay heaped in the grass. Joanne tugged at the calf, and then I tugged at the calf, and then we tugged at the calf. But it was hopeless, and eventually even we saw that. The calf was stuck like a pig in a stove pipe.

We decided to call the vet. An ungenerous observer might say we should have called the vet in the beginning. But that would be – ungenerous. We always try to solve our problems by ourselves before we call in people with knowledge and tools. It’s our family, it’s a tradition.

As Barbara Van Landingham called Virgil Traynor, the newest veterinarian in town whom we called Virgil the Vet, her 12-year-old daughter, Julie came out with a jug of wine and some glasses. I don’t know about the cow, but the rest of us definitely needed a restorative.

Eventually Virgil the Vet arrived. He set up a pully arrangement attached to a frame connecting the good mother earth to the buttocks of the good mother cow. Then he attached a line to the calf’s front feet and, without benefit of clergy or contraction, began to crank away. The calf came out. A bull calf. A long, thin bull calf. I thought it was a wonder both mother and son survived the birthing process.

The cow bonded with her calf and began cleaning her up. But she was still having massive contractions. Finally, with a hearty shudder, she expelled a blob about the size of a basketball.

“What’s that?” Joanne asked.

“Uterus,” replied Virgil the Vet.

“What will we do?”

“Clean it off.” With that, Virgil began plucking blood clots off the uterus.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” contributed Paula, the older Van Landingham girl.

“Go somewhere else to be sick,” replied Paula’s unsympathetic mother, Barbara. “Don’t do it here.”

In short order, Virgil cleaned off the uterus, and was ready to place it back inside the cow. This was more easily said than done, for the cow was still shuddering and contracting. Moreover, the uterus, while it had shrunk a little, was still a formidably sized organ. Virgil didn’t want to spend time waiting for the cow to stop contracting and the uterus to shrink, which would surely have happened eventually. Instead, he and Joanne together put their hearts and hands into the reinsertion project. There followed a curious game of push-of-war (the opposite of tug-of-war).

At last the uterus was inside the cow where it belonged. At least, it was inside the cow. Who could say where inside the cow it actually was. Virgil rummaged through his shiny, new doctor’s bag. “Darn, I don’t have a needle or any thread. Oh, well, keep an eye on her and if the uterus falls out, give me a call.” As he was leaving, he added, “Call me tomorrow. I’m going out tonight.”

We left the cow tending her calf, who by this time had pulled himself together somewhat and looked a little more like a real calf than one from an alternative universe.

The next morning the cow was found grazing in her pasture, both calf and uterus following dutifully behind her. Another call made, and Virgil the Vet returned, this time with a needle and thread. This time the uterus, now the size of a small apple, went in easily.

Virgil charged the Van Landinghams for two calls. He also said that the cow would never have another calf, a reasonable enough assertion on the face of it. But in subsequent years, the cow had several more calves
.
What was I doing while all this tugging and pushing of generative organs was going on? Well, someone had to make notes.

Redwing, "Okie Cow"

2008-06-22T15:05:00.000-07:00

Redwing, “Okie Cow”
©Ken Harris, 2008

The people who sold Redwing to us called her an Okie Cow. She had beef cow and milk cow in her DNA. She was brown and white; we figured her for Hereford crossed with something dairy. She had the dairy cow personality, mellow, easy to handle. Our son, Eric, named her Redwing.

We bred her to a beef bull every year. Redwing’s beef background gave us a 3/4-beef calf, something we could sink our teeth into when he (or she – we’re equal opportunity carnivores) grew to the right size. Her dairy background guaranteed enough milk so that we could raise a second calf, a “drop calf,” on her, thereby getting two edible animals for the effort of raising one. Drop calves were to be had at the dairy, little bull calves not much use to anyone who makes his living milking cows. Drop calves were usually free and, while the beef wasn’t top notch, the price was great.

Redwing had all the maternal virtues and bonded quickly with her own calves. She showed less enthusiasm for the “orphans” we foisted upon her, but she usually came around after a couple of weeks. Not only did she nurture her own babies, she was careful and considerate of other peoples’ babies as well, whether human, equine, canine, feline. I have a picture of my nephew, Mark Kampe, sitting on her back while she is lying down enjoying the sun. The amazing thing to me is that her brand new calf is lying down just a few feet away. Another time, I came home from work to find the three neighbor children and our own two all perched somehow on the cow. Eric was climbing hand over hand up Redwing’s tail. All of the children were singing Michael, Row the Boat Ashore at the top of their lungs. Redwing stood placidly and appeared, and if she didn’t enjoy the attention, she appeared resigned to it.

We bred her through by artificial insemination. On an appointed morning the local artificial inseminator would show up with his selection of bull semen stored in a dewar of liquid nitrogen. For the curious, nitrogen liquefies at -320°F. He handled his vials of semen very carefully, because at 320 below you could give yourself a nasty freezer burn. Then, while one of us held Redwing by her halter and the other held her tail aside, The Great Inseminator inserted a tube into the cow’s vagina, into the uterus, put his mouth to the free end of the tube, puffed firmly, and the job was done. The cow flinched every time. Well, I guess! That semen couldn’t have warmed up all that much. I always entertained myself with the speculation about what would happen if cows could come up with a pre-emptive uterine puff first. There would be fewer artificial inseminators and more happy bulls.

Once a Hereford bull did make it into our pasture. That animal was BIG. We didn’t go into our own pasture for several days, until we located his owner. Redwing loved it. Her own personal bull. She grazed at his side with a smile on her face like she’d just filled an inside straight flush.

When Redwing first came to live with us, she had little buttons for horns. If we had taken them off with a pocket knife right then, there would have been no problem. But we were so ignorant. We let them grow and soon she had four-inch horns and we had a problem because, while she wasn’t vicious and would never have gored us on purpose, she might whack us accidentally shooing flies away. We hired our horse shoer, Jack Howell, the same one who taught us how to trim a rabbit’s teeth. Jack came over with a hacksaw and a can of combination disinfectant and instant blood clotter-wound sealer. Again, with little formality, we held her down and Jack sawed away. My lord, the blood. It spurted with each beat of her heart, long streams, eight feet. The canned medicine worked and the blood flow ceased almost instantly. We turned her loose within a few minutes. For the next week, Redwing refused to speak to us. When we entered the pasture with hay or oats, she turned and looked away. If we pursued the matter, she would walk away. She just wanted nothing to do with treacherous people. I couldn’t blame her. We had let our ignorance get us into a situation that could not be resolved in any pleasant way.

Augustine was probably the best drop calf Redwing ever raised. We drove out to a dairy where a nine-year-old boy was in charge. He took us out to a large wooden barn where a number of calves stood, tied by their necks to the walls with jute baling twine. We chose one and loaded him into the bed of the pickup and drove home. At least, we thought it was a him because we didn’t check too closely. We figured even a nine-year-old, if he was connected to a dairy, must know the difference between a bull calf and a heifer.

He didn’t. August became Augustina and she was as gentle as one of the dogs. We knew we would have trouble butchering her for beef. She was just too nice. We traded her to some neighbors for alfalfa because they wanted her for a 4-H project for one of their daughters. A few weeks later we received a phone call from the neighbors wanting to know something about Augustina’s breeding. The 4-H organization didn’t require papers but they did want to know something about the heifer’s background. Sui generis doesn’t cut it with the 4-H. Joanne phoned the dairyman and explained how we’d gone out to get a bull calf and the kid gave us a heifer, ha ha, and now the new owners wanted to know something about the animal. “Is that what happened to her?” quietly asked the dairyman, more to himself than to Joanne. “That heifer’s mother was last year’s state butter-fat champion. Is there any chance I could get her back?” Joanne gave the dairyman our neighbor’s phone number. We never did hear how it turned out, but it seemed obvious that Augustina was not going to go on the butcher’s block.

When we moved to Guam we had to get rid of Redwing, send her to another home. Many people wanted to buy her. She was sweet, kind, gentle and if you staked her out by the road to get rid of a fire hazard, that hazard was gone. Our friend Betty Veal offered to buy the cow and to satisfy my ego I said I wanted $1.00 per pound for her, a fair enough price for the world’s greatest cow. Then I estimated her weight to be 100 pounds, and Betty and we struck a deal.

Redwing lived with Betty for many more years. Some years she raised two calves, some years one, some years none at all. After Redwing had passed her 20th birthday, one man suggested to another that she be butchered for bologna. “Good thing Betty’s not here. She’d make bologna out of you for that suggestion,” was the reply. Redwing had that effect on all who knew her. She wasn’t a cow, she was a person.

When Redwing died Betty hired a backhoe operator to dig a hole under the oak tree at the west end of her property and bury the cow there. She had liked to stand there in the evenings and watch the sun set. Like most of us, Betty was not foolishly sensitive; but some people just deserve a final gesture of respect, and Redwing was one of those.

Betty's Heifer

2008-06-15T18:14:00.000-07:00

Betty’s Heifer
©Ken Harris, 2008

Back in the 1960s in Auburn, California, Jack and Betty Veal lived on some acreage with their horses, cattle, chickens and other family members including a white faced heifer whom they felt was ready to be introduced to a gentleman cow. Unfortunately for a good many of us, Betty’s heifer did not want to be introduced to any gentleman cow, thank you very much.

Betty hitched her two-horse trailer to the pickup, removed the divider so that the heifer would have plenty of room once she was loaded, and put a little hay and grain on the floor in front of the trailer, something to entice the beast inside. But the heifer wasn’t having any of it. Hay and grain were all right in their place, and that place in a manger or feed rack, certainly not on a floor inside of a trailer. The heifer wouldn’t go in the trailer.

Betty called her friends to help. Joanne and I responded to the call, along with our horse, Legend, in case we needed some good old fashioned cow ponying. Carolyn Geier also brought her horse. Ina Robinson, Max and Jonie Fields, and Woody Bexar formed the rest of our excessively brave and foolish crew.

The plan was to herd the cow into the trailer quickly and painlessly and then treat ourselves to self-congratulatory brewskis. Unfortunately, nobody consulted the heifer.

First, the heifer didn’t want to be herded. Joanne and Carolyn tried to sandwich her between their horses and guide her toward the trailer. The heifer was having none of that, however, and made a 90° turn to the left and ran under Joanne’s horse toward a fence. The horse, Legend, was somewhat surprised by this antic, but she had been used as an endurance horse, a cart horse, a trail driving horse, a parade horse and a carrier of small nieces and nephews. In fact, we had asked her to do everything but tap dance. So she didn’t panic when the heifer ran under her. She just thought it was unusual and raised her front legs so the heifer could proceed unmolested toward the fence.

The fence, now, that was really going to bring the cow up short. It stood four feet tall and proud, heavy gauge field fencing attached to thick, steel posts. Surely this fine fence would hold the cow.

But, actually, the fine fence didn’t hold the cow. The fine fence didn’t even slow this cow down. She ploughed through the fence and proceeded westward dragging ten yards of fencing and T-posts behind her. I am sure that when Leonardo first conceived of the tank he had just seen a runaway cow.

We followed behind the heifer as best we could. She faced another fence and slowed for it and so we caught up. By that time she had shed her field fence adornment. As we urged her trailerward, she took out the second fence and off she went again. We followed in her wake, confidence now replaced by desperation. We soon left the boundaries of the Veal ranchette and proceeded down a draw filled with scrub oak, poison oak, rocks and brambles. I began to wonder if we were going to have to follow her to Marysville, some thirty miles away. Suddenly Woody Bexar got close enough to the the cow to get a loop around her neck. He quickly ran to an oak tree that fortunately grew nearby and took a dally. The Cow hit the end of the rope and the earth around the oak tree quivered. The cow dropped like a rock.

We quickly loosened the noose around her neck because we didn’t want her to die on us, not there, not a half mile from the nearest motorized pulley. Skinning and dressing out a cow with a Swiss army knife and then packing it out was just not an option. She soon regained consciousness, but then she just lay there, flat on her belly, front and back legs pointing back, just as though she had splatted on the spot from an airplane overhead. In an attempt to motivate her to move, Joanne and Carolyn attached lassoes around the animal’s neck and began to drag her toward the trailer and her gentleman suitor. Surely she would yield to force majeur, and get onto her feet and follow along rather than have her head pulled off. Surely.

No. Surely not. Joanne and Carolyn dragged her on her belly, leaving a trail a foot wide and three inches deep in the scrub oak duff. She was easy to track that way, but we didn’t need to track her. We already knew where she was.

We loosened the rope, but we were still many, many yards away from anywhere useful. Our next idea was to sever a hot wire from a nearby electric fence and hold it to her nose. That motivated her to move rapidly, but just far enough from the hot fence to where we could no longer shock her. Then she dropped again. But she outsmarted herself and fell near a puddle of water. One of us collected some water in a felt hat and poured it in her ear. The idea was to persuade the animal she was drowning and maybe she would swim cross country toward the trailer. Stupid as the idea was, it worked – for fifty feet. Then down she went again.

At this point we began to think in terms of a barbeque right there, on that particular spot. Or better yet, just shoot the he cow dead and go to church bingo that very night.

Somehow, though, after several hours and the expenditure of much energy, we got the animal to within two hundred feet of the trailer. Unfortunately for us, close as we were to the trailer, there was a large barn in the way. And brutal as you may think us, that heifer was in a lot better shape than we were.

At that point Betty Veal’s husband, Jack, drove up. He saw our problem and at once announced a solution. First, he opened the barn doors on both sides of the building so that we had a straight shot at the trailer. Then, the trailer already having been prepared for the heifer’s virginal entrance, Jack stationed two of us to quickly slam the ramp up and lock it once the calf had entered. These preparations made, Jack picked up a pair of offset pliers and grabbed the heifer’s nasal septum and gave it a sharp twist.

The heifer sprang up with a roar and began to chase Jack with lethal intent. Jack had no desire to die that day, and so he ran for the trailer. Very fast. He was highly motivated. He didn’t dare let go of the pliers or slow down, either one. He flew into the trailer, closely followed by a fire breathing heifer. And then, as the ramp clanged shut behind him, he let go of the pliers and dove head first out trailer’s safety door up front. He let the heifer have the pliers.

And so we had our brewskies after all and finished the day covered with blood, sweat and beers. The heifer, meanwhile, left in the trailer on her way to meet her gentleman cow. Aint love grand?

Vaca Mexicana

2008-06-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

Vaca Mexicana
©Ken Harris, 2008

In 1956 or 57 my wife and I lived in a Hollywood apartment and attended universities. We were both working very hard and welcomed the opportunity to take a brief vacation whenever we could. Usually we went to Joanne’s parents’ mining claim on Paiute Mountain in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. Usually we took Bobo, a poodle, with us.

Bobo was very intelligent and could learn anything in five minutes. This was fortunate because he could forget anything he wanted in ten minutes. He would also put his own spin on his orders of the day. “Don’t get on the couch” meant “wait until everyone has gone for the day.” But he was pleasant company even with his faults.

On this particular occasion we had finished supper in the cabin and the three of us went for a walk to the meadow several hundred yards to the north. We gingerly crawled through a rusty barbed wire fence surrounding the pasture and noted the sign of many cattle. The meadow was part of the Bureau of Land Management domain and overgrazing seemed to be a part of their policy.

We came across the herd. There were a lot of them. Mexican cows, some with twisty horns, all of them lean. A few had extravagant brands on their hips. None of them looked like Elsie. The herd bull stood to the far side of the herd and ignored us. He didn’t look like Elmer, either. His disinterest in us was his only redeeming trait that I could see.

We stayed clear of the herd and tried to keep within running distance of the fence. It was just as well we had, for Bobo found a calf. He immediately tried to play a game with the calf, something named “I chase you around.” The calf cried, “Mama!”

The old lady showed up immediately. As soon as she saw Bobo and us her expression changed from exasperation to menace. She was a strawberry road cow, so lean you could count her ribs with long, twisty, glinting horns. The right horn could have gone in my navel and out my nose.

We called for Bobo, quietly. “Bobo.” Then firmly. “Bobo!” Then desperately. “BOBO!!!”

By this time the cow had decided which of us she wanted to gore first and she began to move. So did we. I beat Joanne to the fence by several yards at once demonstrating speed and lack of gallantry. Bobo, delighted that we had joined in the game, yapped and barked harder.

The calf ran away from all the noise and confusion and the cow followed. And that’s all of the story. Nothing really happened. Except I remember thinking the next morning as I shaved, “This is ridiculous. Indians don’t get grey at 23.”

Babe

2008-06-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

Babe
Copyright Ken Harris 2007

We have just returned from a sea kayaking trip off Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, Washington State. Since we live in Tucson, Arizona, we found the weather colder than a teacher's wit. However, I'm posting again. Here's a story about our Main Coon Cat, Babe.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sometime around 1978 someone gave us a Maine Coon Cat. For the uninformed, Maine Coon Cats are larger than the average family feline, and very hairy. They’d have to be to withstand the Maine winters, wouldn’t they? Babe was so hairy that it parted down the middle of her back and tail and drooped to either side, much like a skunk’s. Also like a skunk, she was black with some white markings, her four feet, her nose and some chest markings. More like a civet cat, actually.

She was a grown cat when she came to us. She had lived with her former owner in an apartment for several years until that owner died. She brought her own bed, blanket, combination scratching post and climbing gym, and toys with her. Oh, yes, she also had her baby book with pictures lovingly collected by her previous owner. Babe was a precious jewel, an apartment cat, and she had never been outdoors in her entire life.

The bane of Babe’s existence, at least at first, was Tiger, our half miniature poodle-half Yorkshire terrier. The little dog was already in residence and it was his home. He did not buy into the concept of sharing. Babe, on the other hand, had no concept of sharing at all.

When they first met Babe didn’t really know how to respond. Then Tiger barked and ran up to her. Babe then made of up her mind. She ran. She zigged and zagged and juked and jinked but when she neared the counter separating the kitchen from the living room she looked over her shoulder and there was Tiger zigging and zagging and juking and jinking six inches behind her. She hadn’t gained a centimeter. In fact, she’d lost a few just by looking over her shoulder. She leaped high onto the counter, rattling a few pans in her unceremonious landing.

The dog and the cat soon came to terms, mainly because the dog was essentially a pleasure loving beast and fairly easy company for a cat. Also, Babe was considerably larger than Tiger and if he had actually come to grips with her he would have regretted it.

Having a cat that had never been outside did not meet our family traditions. And so one afternoon when we were sipping our brewskis on the back lawn, we saw Babe happily sunning herself in the window. Joanne went inside, picked her up and brought her out to the lawn. She put the cat gently down on the grass, a thing she had never felt underfoot before. Babe raised all four feet at once, with predictable results. She landed on her belly, literally bounced, did a 180 in mid-air, and ran back into the house. It was a week before Joanne could get near her again.

But she soon forgave us because we were, after all, the people who fed her. And Babe soon became a notable huntress. Deep in the DNA of a Maine coon cat lie certain imperatives. See small animal. Stalk it. Kill it. Eat it. Mee-oww. And while she was very good at night stalking, she could never entirely overcome the handicap of the white breast patch. Usually the small animal saw her in time to escape unscathed. But both Babe and the small animal got lots of exercise that way.

Babe and Tiger even became partners in crime once. It was winter in Upland, California, mild by Midwest standards but unpleasant by California criteria. I lay prone upon our water bed for a well deserved afternoon nap. The bedroom window provided the only sunny spot in the house. The only warm one, either, for that matter. When I woke up I found Babe asleep in my left arm pit and Tiger asleep in the right. Joanne said they’d been that way for half an hour. Of course, they weren’t supposed to be on the bed. Neither was I for that matter, not in mid-afternoon.

One night Babe went hunting and never came back. All we ever found was some hide and part of a jawbone. We reasoned that two coyotes got her, or there we would never have found anything. As you may or may not know, coyotes run freely through urban southern California. Streets, walls and fences don’t seem to mean much to them. We were sorry to lose Babe, but glad in a way that she died hunting, the thing she was literally born to do.

Poquito

2008-05-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

Poquito
©Ken Harris, 2007

When we married in 1956, we were both 22 years old and convinced we were adults. Everyone else had their doubts. We had a small apartment in Hollywood near Vermont Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. Joanne worked on her secondary teaching credential at Cal State Los Angeles and I pursued a bachelor’s degree at UCLA. We had no pets.
No pets. No car. Very little money. For wheels we had a little handcart to carry our groceries home. We couldn’t even buy enough food for seven dinners. Joanne’s parents, Sid and Esther, always came through with an invitation for Sunday dinner. It was in our budget. They even drove out to get us when we couldn’t afford bus fare from Hollywood to El Monte. We were so poor that we once had a party and served the cheapest beer we could buy mixed with the cheapest sauterne we could buy as a punch. Our guests were so poor they drank it and so polite they called it good.
We wanted a pet, but how could we afford one? Answer: we couldn’t. And that’s where the mouse came in.
I first met our mouse one morning when I came into the kitchen to fix breakfast. I had known he was living with us because I had seen little droppings around the kitchen. We had intended to get a mouse trap, but we were both very busy. Besides, if he could find anything to eat around our house, he was welcome to it. (I got down to 155 pounds at this time of life. But I was working 12 hours a night at the Post Office and carrying 18 units at UCLA.)
On this particular morning I came into the kitchen and found the mouse in our cast iron skillet. He ran in circles in terror. Then he tried to dig his way out through the bottom of the skillet. At last he put it together that the only way out was up and over. And with a mighty leap he made it -- halfway over the rim. He scrambled frantically until he dropped over the side of the skillet to freedom, falling out of the pan into the fire ring, beyond the drip pan, bouncing off various inner workings of the stove and eventually hitting the floor. He made a mad dash for the door, but missed. By several inches. Instead he smacked his nose on the door trim, which sent him reeling backwards. Recovering, he finally made his escape. It cost him every shred of dignity, but he escaped.
At this particular point in our lives Joanne was taking a course called Mammalogy. One of the class activities involved capturing a mammal, chopping its head off, boiling or otherwise getting rid of the meat on the head and then intensely studying the skull. In this way you could tell what kind of animal it was. I guess they didn’t have Peterson’s Field Guides in those days. I never did much care for the premise behind this course. The activity may have furthered scientific knowledge a nanomillimeter, but it didn’t improve the animal at all.
We set out a live trap for Poquito, for so I named the mouse, and he, not suspecting our plans, walked right into it. We set up a little nest for him in a mouse cage and placed grain for him to eat. We seldom saw him, although when he thought he was unobserved he would pace the ceiling of his cage.
Fortunately for Poquito, someone gave Joanne a cow’s head. They had slaughtered the cow and gave us the head. So we didn’t need Poquito’s head. Rendering the meat off a cow’s head presented more of a challenge than a mouse’s head. It took several weeks. We borrowed an Army soup kettle and boiled away whenever we could.
Joanne had a friend, Sally Porter, who would drop by and check the pots, pans, cupboards and refrigerator for anything to eat. So in she dropped one afternoon early on in the rendering project and opened the soup kettle lid. She slammed it down again firmly, surprised by the mournful stare of the cow. We had not yet removed the eyeballs. In subsequent days she encountered the head in the refrigerator, on the stove, in the oven, always with less meat and more bone visible. Finally, she just gave up in discouragement and decided she would never find any Fritos® at our house.
So even though Poquito’s head could not serve science, his entire living body might do so as an example of a mammal. But once again, Poquito was saved! Joanne’s brother, Fritz, caught a gopher, and this was thought to be a much superior example of a mammal than a mere mouse. She built a terrarium for the gopher with wooden sides over the glass so that when they were removed people could observe the tunnels the gopher had dug.
So Joanne took the cow’s skull into class and the gopher in his terrarium while Poquito was left at home to pace the ceiling of his cage. Other people brought in other animals. One Saturday the class lab assistant, a student named Bill Hatten, came in to catch up on his work. Bill let his sample mammal, a dearomatized civet cat., out to wander the room and stretch his four little legs. When he caught the animal again, he saw that the terrarium had been disturbed. He sifted and resifted the dirt in the terrarium, but he never found hide nor hair nor fur nor feathers nor any part of that gopher.
Not only that, the civet cat had got into the study skins. Study skins were another part of the Mammology curriculum. Students had to trap small animals and skin them and box their hides, ie display them in a sort of unnatural looking rectangular form. They even took field trips to do this. But skinning a small animal is not all that easy. Granted, it’s easier than skinning an elephant or a giraffe, but small animals’ skins tear easily. Here you are, the intrepid student, trying to gently work the skin off a dead shrew, getting it off completely so that you can display it on a piece of cardboard, and it tears in half. You’ve not only gotten your hands dirty, you have no skin to show for it. The shrew isn’t improved either. Joanne was very good at skinning shrews because of her long experience as a Girl Hunter on Paiute Mountain in her early days. Whatever you shot, you ate; and dinner tasted better if you skinned it first. Joanne had quite a nice collection of study skins. And Bill Hatten’s civet cat completely tore them up.
We eventually turned Poquito loose. He didn’t get his head chopped off. He didn’t get eaten by a civet cat. With his luck, he probably sired nineteen generations of mouselets.
Anyway, in the conclusion you thought I’d never reach, our first three pets were a mouse, a gopher and a cow’s head. Now that is purely pathetic.

Impy the sparrow farmer

2008-05-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

Impy
©Ken Harris, 2007

Impy, a grey cat, felt that there was much room for improvement in the world. He especially disliked kittens, and, wouldn’t you know it, my wife’s family, the Heysers, family was always bringing home new ones. The kittens never knew anything. They had to be taught everything, and guess who had to teach them? Right. Impy. Would Sid and Esther teach the newbies how to snatch gophers and break their little necks? Not on your tintype. Lessons like this were always left to Impy. And just when the kittens learned enough to be of some help around the house and in the garden, they would get run over and the whole process would begin again with. Sheesh!
Impy was a large scale sparrow rancher. In the Heyser back yard, between the house and the barn, stood a huge English walnut tree overgrown with ivy. The ivy provided home and haven for thousands of sparrows. When the birds were in full throat, you had to shout to make yourself heard. And if you ventured under the tree without an umbrella, chances are you would have to change clothes and bathe, such was the steady drizzle of guano, dust, twigs, egg shell and other sparrow detritus. In short, the sparrows were a Compleat Nuisance.
While the rest of the family suffered, Impy thought the situation was great. His own plantation! He climb his tree daily, checking the nests. When he found a baby bird that was just right, not too small and bony, not too many baby feathers, he would tip it out of the nest onto the concrete walkway below. Then, down he would come for a sparrow snack. Life was good for him: less so for sparrows. But there were so many sparrows, and only one little cat; he could have gone on for decades if it wasn’t for a stroke of bad luck.
Impy’s days as a plantation owner came to a sudden halt when Joanne’s brother, Fritz, came home from an outing one day with a sparrow hawk in a bag. The bird was a fledgling, just learning to fly, and Fritz had come across him sitting on the ground. He threw a cloth over him and, presto, the bird was bagged. The hawk was unhurt save for his dignity.
Fritz installed the sparrow hawk in a tall cage, about 4’’ x 4’ x 8’, in the back yard and gave some thought to taming the bird. One day he gently poked the remains of a chicken drumstick through the cage, hoping to convince the bird that he was a source of food. The hawk seized the drumstick with one claw and snapped the bone in half and Fritz abandoned all thought of teaching the bird to eat out of his hand.
Several weeks after the sparrow hawk arrived, he decided that he had listened to shrieking sparrows enough. If they wanted shriek, he’d show them shriek. And so he did. Once. Every sparrow in the walnut tree fell silent and people could hear other ambient sounds again, locomotives, freeway traffic, thunder. The silence lasted for a few seconds, and then every sparrow took flight, never to return. The back yard had been restored to the Heyser family, and Impy’s days as a prosperous bird farmer were over.
Fritz freed the sparrow hawk a few days later. He was too wild to tame and too small to eat.
The first time Joanne brought me home to meet her parents, Impy was there to greet me. I wanted to sit in a chair that he already occupied. I waited. And waited some more. Finally, I gently grabbed the cat by his rib cage and lifted him up. The seat cushion came up with him, for he had sunk each claw into the cushion as deeply as he could and then clenched his feet. But gradually gravity took hold and the cushion came loose claw by claw. I sat down and Impy grumpily left the room twitching his stump of a tale. (He had lost most of his tale to a refrigerator fan; otherwise he would have really flipped me off.)

Mocs

2008-04-23T08:40:00.000-07:00

Mocs
©Ken Harris, 2008

El Monte, Los Angeles County, 1958. We had a new home so we acquired a new kitten, a grey kitten with four white feet that resembled moccasins. We were too lazy to say “moccasins,” so we named him Mocs. He and our new dog Skoshi immediately became fast friends. They played a special game, “Ambush.” As Skoshi ran around the persimmon-colored Volkswagen, yelping loudly at nothing at all, Mocs lurked behind the right rear wheel. Then as Skoshi whizzed by, Mocs would pounce on the dog’s hind leg while Skoshi ran off happily yelping, dragging the kitten with him. This scene repeated itself over and over.

Skoshi had long hair that knotted and tangled easily. Except for the left hind leg where the hair was long, silky, and untangled, combed by the family cat.

As is the case with most kittens, Mocs was a jangle of nerves. Once Joanne’s sister and her husband, Audrey and Tom Kampe, visited us bringing with them their teacup sized black dog, Frederick Minimus. Frederick just knew he was a predator. It was deep within his DNA. As soon as he saw Mocs, who was much larger than he, he ran up behind him and yapped as loudly as he could. Mocs immediately leaped high into a nearby persimmon tree. Then he sat in a fork of the tree, front paws on one side and rear paws on the other, and looked at the happy, dancing dog in utter self-disgust. “I ran from that?”

As an only cat, there was no one to teach Mocs to hunt. He showed little natural ability. One morning he took an interest in a flock of doves grazing on our front lawn. He hid himself behind a saxaphragia plant Joanne had just planted a few weeks before. The plant was still small, the kitten large; large enough to be plainly visible behind the saxaphragia, at any rate. He bulged out on all sides.

As the doves grazed and moved ever closer to the lurking cat, you could see Mocs trying to resolve some monumental questions. Which bird? When? Now? Which foot do I start with? What do I do if I catch one? It’s not easy being a cat. You’ve got to have a keen eye, balance, and a sense of timing. You’ve got to have a plan. The doves eventually tired of waiting to be eaten and wandered off leaving the poor kitten to wonder if he would ever get it right

Rope Racer and the Kittens

2008-04-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

Rope Racer and the Kittens
Copyright: Ken Harris, 2008

Auburn, California, mid-1960s: When our daughter, Patricia, was still in grade school, she fell in the playground and sustained a greenstick fractures of the left leg. In a cast, immobile and hurting a little bit, she was unhappy. To make her feel better Joanne brought home a kitten.

The kitten was a congenital hysteric. The least untoward noise sent her nervous system into spontaneous disassembly. She tried to run through a glass door once because somebody sneezed.

She was hyperactive, like most kittens. Our son, Eric, christened her Rope Racer after they had played “Let’s-Maul-the-Dangling-Jump Rope” for half an hour.

Rope Racer grew to a fearful, fugitive feline, afraid of anything that moved, or might have moved in the past or might move in the future. If you tried to put her on your lap, she took immediate evasive action. I didn’t have to be clawed too many times in delicate places to recognize a bad idea.

If she found my company distasteful, she didn’t have any trouble with tomcats because she turned up pregnant one day. Oddly enough, impending parenthood seemed to settle her nerves a little. She no longer caromed off the walls simply because I set a coffee cup down too hard. She no longer hid under the refrigerator like a furry chuckawalla simply because the kids ran into the house announcing to the entire county that they were home from school.

We held a family conference to determine where Rope Racer would best have her kittens. I built her a nest out of a cardboard box stuffed with freshly laundered rags and put it behind the hot water heater in the garage. It was the darkest, warmest place around, much better than outdoors because it was still winter. I thought it was the ideal place for a cat to have her kittens.

Rope Racer did not agree.

I arose early on weekday mornings so I could change the sprinklers in the pasture and do other little chores before putting on a suit and driving 50 miles to my job as an insurance company junior executive.

Once ready for work I cranked up the Datsun, backed out of the garage, and began to carefully negotiate the steep gravel driveway leading away from our house. On the way down I heard a “me-EW, me-EW” coming from a distressed kitten. Several other voices soon joined in a chorus of complaint. At the foot of the hill I stopped to investigate. Suspicion confirmed. Rope Racer had chosen to set up her nursery under the front passenger seat of the car.

She had conferred upon a waiting world seven fat little kittens with distended bellies and eyes squeezed shut. Rope Racer oozed pride and didn’t even have a screaming fit at the idea of being so close to a human being.

And here’s where I demonstrated my mettle and displayed my true colors. I drove back to the garage, opened the door to the house and called out to Joanne, who was putting on her hose and heels getting ready for a day of teaching high school biology, “Honey, I’m taking your truck today. You take my car.”

I started to get into the truck, but I just couldn’t be that rotten. I opened the door to the house again and called out, “You’d better check under the front seat before you leave.” Then I got out of there in a hurry.

Hunting the Wild Mustache

2008-04-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

Originally written between 1978 and 1980
Rewritten in Tucson, Arizona, November, 2007

Hunting the Wild Mustache

When I was courting Joanne it was my custom to finish my janitorial duties at UC Riverside’s library around 2:00 a.m. and immediately drive over to her home in El Monte so we could spend weekends together. At first I tried to sleep in the car until the family woke up. That was not very comfortable so I tried making a place for myself on the stack of hay bales in the barn. But very soon I was discovered by Joanne’s father, Sid, who liked to get up at 4:00 in the morning. He invited me in for a morning cup of coffee and the family set up a bed for me in Joanne’s brother’s room.

Her brother, Fritz, at that time sported a huge R.A.F. style mustache, luxuriant, bushy, with the tips waxed into rings.

One Saturday morning I woke to the pressure of little cat feet on my face. The family had taken in a new calico kitten and she was exploring her new, personal domain. She sat on my chest for a few moments and then looked across the room to where Fritz slept peacefully. As he exhaled the air from his nostrils blew through his mustache, ruffling the hair, creating strange, little rippling movements. The motion, accompanied by light snores fascinated the kitten. She had never seen anything like it.

She didn’t know what kind of small creature might be sitting there under Fritz’s nose, but she felt she would be doing him a favor if she killed it and ate it. Slowly she began to stalk the mustache. Off my bed and onto Fritz’s she leaped. Quietly. Softly. Over his knees she crept, onto his belly, his chest, pausing frequently to study the situation. Closer and closer she crept until finally, just as Fritz blissfully rippled his mustache again, the kitten sprang!

She landed on the mustache in approved fashion, mouth and claws open. Her claws and teeth were razor sharp, kitten like, and she produced a monumental effect. Fritz sprang into the air with a scream and batted the kitten from his face. She landed like a colorful little rubber ball, bounced off the door and out of the room. She was as surprised by the results of her attack as Fritz.

I laughed unsympathetically. I saw the humor because I didn’t have a mustache. Neither did Fritz after he shaved that morning.

Leah

2008-03-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

Leah
Ken Harris © 2006

Most of the times in our lives, animals simply happened to us. They came, they stayed with us, and they left, living their lives and enriching ours. Leah was that way. I don’t remember how she showed up but she was one of the nicest persons, cat or human, I’ve ever met.

She was a long-haired calico, totally uninterested in grooming herself. As a result, she left a trail of hair balls wherever she went. You would think that this would be enough to consign her to the highway, but no. She was so amazingly nice that we put up with her disgusting lack of personal hygiene.

Everyone liked Leah. The dogs petted her by rubbing their noses along her back. I even saw one of our horses do that one morning. She was stroking her sides back and forth on Ringwraith’s (a large sealbrown gelding of Joanne’s) and soon he nuzzled her.

She used go with me in the mornings to change the sprinklers. It fell my lot to change the sprinklers in the five acre pasture. In the winter, this meant doing so in the dark of the morning. In the summer, since I commuted long miles, it often meant changing them in the dark of the evening. But Leah went with me even though it she always returned soaked to the skin. Leah is the only cat I ever heard of who would walk through tall, wet grass just to keep a human company.

She even jogged with us. I liked her company because I have never been much of a runner and a pussy cat trot was fine with me.

Leah had a litter of kittens once. We checked them over and complimented her on what a good job she had done. No problem. Skoshi and Abby nuzzled the kittens. Again, no problem. And then one day our neighbors’ dog showed up, a golden nosed retriever. He heedlessly stuck his head in the kitten box and ran home wearing Leah on his head. She had sunk all claws and teeth into the surprised dog’s head. We were all surprised. Especially the dog. It was a total turn around for Leah.

The dog never returned. Can’t blame him.

Swine Lake, Part II

2008-03-24T15:24:00.001-07:00

Swine Lake, Part II
©Ken Harris, 2006

On this particular occasion Fritz had to go to work and so was unavailable to help us. But we didn’t worry. We had done enough of this thing ourselves. We put food in the trough and the pigs crowded in to eat. We selected the pig we wanted and Joanne put a .38 caliber wad cutter into his head. Just to make sure, Joanne shot the pig in the head several times. Wad cutters are slugs squared off at the ends. It’s like shooting pieces of rebar.

When you shoot a pig in the head with a .38 caliber wad cutter, you will kill him. The only trouble is,the pig doesn’t always know it. And this sometimes interferes with step two, which is slicing the pig’s throat to get the blood out.

In this particular case, as soon as Joanne shot the pig in the head, he withdrew to be very center of Swine Lake. Joanne and I looked at each other. We looked at each other’s feet. She was wearing mud boots. I was wearing regular shoes because I didn’t have mud boots. She won. She got to slice the royal throat.

Joanne approached the pig and slit its throat nicely, I thought. And that’s when the pig began to sing and dance. “BYOR-R-R-K!!” it sounded, even though it’s head was almost severed, inhaling air through its open trachea. “BYOR-R-R-K!!” again. Meanwhile it stood on its hind legs and byorrrked some more. People from homes a quarter of a mile away stuck their heads out of doors and windows and peered into the noontime gloom, wondering what was happening in that distant fog. Surely something dreadful.

Finally the pig ran out of energy and began to lie down in the mud. But in a final burst of defiance, he stood up and fell over onto the other side, so that his body was completely covered with foul goop instead of only one side of it. Then with a convulsive inhalation, the pig ingested slime into his interior, creating an unholy mess inside and out.

Joanne dragged the carcass to the shore where I could help her get him on the hoist. Usually humans win at a pig slaughtering, but this time I think it was a draw.

Man, I was so glad I didn’t have mud boots.

Swine Lake, Part I

2008-03-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

Swine Lake, Part I
©Ken Harris, 2006

Sometime in the 1970s my brother-in-law, Fritz, his wife Ruth, and their three hopeful daughters, Katrina, Leslie and Holly (see http://norcalcazadora.blogspot.com/), moved from the fair sized Southern California community of Thousand Oaks to five acres outside of Orosi, a small town in the Central Valley. Even by Central Valley standards Orosi was something of an armpit. (But that was almost 40 years ago. Maybe it has anatomically improved itself by now.)

In Thousand Oaks Fritz had worked as a computer engineer, but they didn’t have any of those in Orosi, so he accepted employment with the local irrigation district. The move made sense in certain ways. The Sixties were not too far in the past, and there was still a healthy “back to the land” movement afoot in the nation. Mother Earth News had a large circulation.

The land that the Heyser family moved back to was very sandy, great for walnuts, citrus and grapes. Fritz decided to raise pigs. We, the rest of the family, could buy the pigs, and we did so gladly. Fritz’s handraised pork was some of the best I have ever tasted anywhere.

But the pig project did not come easily. For one thing, pigs are not among God’s most gracious creatures. They are stubborn, insensitive, immune to pain and very intelligent, an unfortunate combination of traits. Raising pigs is full of surprises, few of them pleasant.

Fritz put his pig pen next to an outbuilding under a huge walnut tree. Later he discovered that pigs are almost immortal save for human intervention, but don’t fare especially well on sandy soil under walnut trees. Be that as it may, the pigs all lived long enough to slaughter, butcher and eat.

For those uninitiated into the genteel mysteries of porcine processing, slaughtering consists of killing, drawing, skinning and quartering the animal. Butchering is the art of taking pig quarters and cutting them into hams, chops and sausage meat. Not to forget the bacon. Never forget the bacon. After the pig has been reduced to parts, he is wrapped, frozen and, voila, the butchering she is done.

Since anyone with some tools and a misplaced faith in their own competence can slaughter, we did that for ourselves. The butchering we left to others who knew what they were doing.

Slaughter time always seemed to coincide with tule fog time. That is another matter that requires some explanation. The Central Valley of California extends from a little north of Redding to a little south of Bakersfield, a matter of almost 500 miles in length. It is almost 100 miles wide. Several rivers run through the valley and eventually drain into the Pacific Ocean by way of San Francisco Bay.

The Central Valley is great for plants, but animals have some problems with it. For one thing, it is very hot in the summer. Then in the spring, when other places find flowers, the Central Valley displays tule fog. The entire valley can be submerged in a huge cloud of dense fog, 24/7, for months. Imagine a black and white photo of clam chowder in a white bowl. You see vague, murky things that you can only hope are benign. And that’s daytime. Visibility can run from quarter of a mile to your hand in front of your face. At night visibility can drop from the hand in front of your face to nothing at all. Day time temperatures may rise to 37°F. Nights plummet to 33°F. This weather can last for weeks. After a while, people just feel like killing pigs.

Fritz had obtained some U.S. Department of Agriculture pamphlets on hog slaughtering. He had lots of experience with deer, but hogs just might be different. The pamphlet advised the prospective hog slaughterer to slice the pig’s skin and cut the flesh of his hind legs near the trotters so hooks can be inserted between the Achilles tendon and the leg bone. Then, using the hoist you have thoughtfully provided beforehand, lift the pig until he is suspended upside down free of the earth. Then cut its throat and the pig will bleed freely. As a final precaution, the U.S.D.A. advised against upsetting the pig, since he was going to be alive while you were doing all this.

We always killed the pigs before we suspended them upside down. They didn’t get so upset that way.

Slaughtering was also a social event. Sometimes we had coffee and doughnuts before and celebratory wine after.

We shot the hogs with a .38 caliber hand gun, slit their throats, suspended them, and then skinned them. This latter process turned out to be laborious because pigs are firmly attached to their hides and do not easily relinquish them, even in death. But we cut and pulled and tore and tugged and, in due course, had a vaguely pig-shaped blob of lard. It looked like modern art. And standing in a ring proudly admiring the greasy creation, stood a ring of artistes, drinking a celebratory libation. The visibility was still 10 feet in front of your nose and the temperature was up to 37°F. Killing pigs and drinking wine. Life is good.

On occasion the Heysers even had a hog rendering. Fritz would start a fire under a cauldron, and how often do you see one of those except in a production of Macbeth. Bit by bit pieces of lard would be added to the cauldron until it was filled with liquefied lard. Then we could all skewer bread cubes and cook them in pig fat and drink more wine. Fritz and Ruth invited the neighbors in. It was the social event of the Orosi Season.

One other thing should be mentioned about slaughtering pigs at Fritz’s. It was wet. Since the fog never lifted, things that got wet stayed that way for a long time. The pigs’ pen attained an ectoplasmic state in just a very few weeks. At those times we called it Swine Lake.

Joshua Clemens

2008-03-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

Joshua Clemens
©Ken Harris, 2006

We had a rabbit experiment for a while when we lived in Auburn, California, back in the 1960s. It had something to do with our daughter, Patricia, and 4-H. From one reason or another, the experiment was a failure and the end of the experiment followed its beginning in very short order. We were left with one poor, pitiful excuse for a rabbit, Joshua Clemens.

We who are older than dirt remember Joshua Clemens as a character in the television series Davy Crockett. Our son, Eric, was responsible for naming all our animals. That’s why our brown steer was named Black Sam and the kitten who loved to chase the end of a jump rope was called Rope Racer. Eric never missed Davy Crocket and he especially liked the Joshua Clemens character. And so it happened that when this ridiculous excuse for a rabbit became his pet, he named the one after the other.

Joshua Clemens’ front legs splayed out. When he ran he had to take care to spread his hind legs wide. Otherwise, his hind feet would step on his front legs and he would fall on his nose.

His teeth grew in great circles. Uninterrupted, they would grow through the roof of his mouth. We asked our farrier what to do about them. He had us hold the rabbit on its back and he nipped off the teeth with wire cutters. Well, shoot, we had wire cutters. We didn’t have to hire a horse shoer to do our rabbit’s dental work. Every six weeks or so after the farrier’s demonstration, we’d turn Joshua Clemens onto his back and trim his teeth with wire cutters.

What Joshua Clemens lacked in physical perfection he made up for in charm. Everyone liked Joshua, even the neighbor’s dog, Rajah. One day we were sitting in our living room when we saw Joshua Clemens running across the lawn with Rajah in hot pursuit. By the time we got out to the yard, Rajah was running across the lawn with Joshua Clemens in hot pursuit. Just a game they played.

As might have been expected, Joshua Clemens did not live very long, even for a rabbit. Physically, he just had too much going against him. We accepted his loss, except for Eric who grieved.

It may strike you that some of my animal stories end with the death of the animal. Well, duh! That’s what happens to your pets. That’s what will happen to us, too. The death rate among living things is 1.0. Not a very good arrangement, but we’re stuck with it.

The coati mundi

2008-03-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Coati Mundi
Copyright Ken Harris 2007

One day my mother-in-law, Esther Heyser, made a foray into Ralph’s Supermarket, part of a grocery chain. As she stood in line waiting for the cashier, a moderately sized furry creature leaped into her shopping cart and started tossing canned goods and cereal boxes onto the floor in search of bananas and eggs.

Pandemonium. Uproar. Eeks and shrieks filled the air. Stomps and clomps reverberated as everyone in the near vicinity tried to remove themselves to the far vicinity. Everyone but Esther. Esther remained calm because she knew what the creature was. A coati mundi. She’d seen them in zoos and National Geographic magazines.

Obviously the coati was someone’s pet who had gotten himself lost and decided that his only reasonable course of action was to raid a supermarket. Since she recognized the animal for what he was, she volunteered to take him home with her and find the owner. Her decision saved the store manager the trouble of phoning Animal Control and he was very pleased when Esther paid her bill and took her groceries and new companion with her out to the car.

The coati mundi stayed with Joanne’s parents for three days, time enough for me to meet him and decide that he was not a restful creature. It’s really hard to concentrate on your book when the beast leaps into your lap, digs his hind feet into your belt, pries open your mouth with his front feet and roots around with his nose looking under your tongue for grubs. I threw him away as far as I could and he disappeared in a furry flash. I spent the next half hour spitting out coati mundi hair.

It wasn’t just me. He did that with all of us. He never found any grubs, but he always tried.

We never had trouble finding him. All you had to do was open the refrigerator door. This happened to Joanne. She opened the door. Instant coati raid. He’s on top of the refrigerator leaning in. Joanne shut the door and pinched his feet. He bit Joanne. She swatted him away and closed the door again quickly. On her nose. The furry flash disappeared.

He was with the Heyser family for only three days, but it seemed like decades. His owner reclaimed him and a great rejoicing was heard throughout the house.

Balto

2008-03-08T07:32:00.000-08:00

Balto
By Ken Harris © 2007

A dog named Balto lived next door to us in Glen Avon, Riverside County, California. It was around 1939 and I was five or six years old.

In January, 1925 a diphtheria epidemic threatened the children of Nome, Alaska. The nearest serum sat in Anchorage, 1000 miles away. The only airplane that could deliver the serum had been dismantled for winter. More than 20 mushers and their dog teams carried the serum from Anchorage to Nome. Temperatures dropped to 40 below, strong winds blow the sled teams over, but in spite of it all, the serum made it in six days. A musher named Gunnar Kaasen drove his team into Nome, and the team was headed by – you guessed it – a huskey named Balto.

Balto became a celebrity and for a couple of years afterwards Balto traveled the country as part of a show. And, as befits a celebrity, when he died, they stuffed him. The curious traveler may see his preserved body at the Cleveland Natural History Museum.

That diphtheria serum run also led more or less directly to the creation of the Iditarod sled dog race. Some people would like to have Balto’s remains sent to Alaska where he could be displayed at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Museum, but the people who manage the Cleveland Natural History Museum don’t want to give up their prize. This leads us to the sight of grown people, college people, fighting over a dead dog. (This information comes from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/sleddogs/balto.html.)

The point of this story is that back in the late Thirties there were many dogs named Balto, and I had one living next door to me. He was a husky type dog, and we spent some quality time together since there was no dog at the Harris house that summer.

Summer was coming on, and it got hot in Riverside County back then. It still does. Balto’s owners took him into town and had him clipped. All that long, Husky-type hair came off except for a ruff around his neck and a pompom on the tip of his tail. The groomer called it a “lion clip” and Balto’s owners thought he looked handsome and elegant. Balto thought he looked stupid and spent the rest of the week hiding behind the oleanders.

I agreed with Balto and spent some quality oleander time with him. At the same time, without the clip he would have been miserable in the summer heat. All of which makes me wonder. Why do people who live in the desert keep sled dogs? Do they keep Chihuahuas in Alaska? Finally, can anyone think of a better way to dispose of a dead dog?

Hawks in a Country Chicken Pen

2008-02-29T13:09:00.000-08:00

Hawks in a Country Chicken Pen
©Ken Harris, 2007

North San Juan, California, mid-1990s.

I locked myself in the chicken pen one morning. Unintentional and all that, but there I was, locked in the chicken pen with a flock of Rhode Island Reds.

They are nice birds, Rhode Island Reds. When I was a little boy my dad had a flock of Bard Rocks. Scared the bejeezus out of me. They were almost as big as I was – I was four – and a whole lot meaner. I thought their favorite food was four-year-old boy. I never went near them unless I was with my dad. Dad was treetop tall in my four-year-old eyes, more than a match for those mean chickens. They couldn’t hurt him, but they surely could have put some beak-sized dents in me.

Later on we had some Rhode Island Reds. I was bigger, so they weren’t so menacing. Moreover, they were nice, gentle birds.

In my married life we have had chickens on several occasions. We bought them mail order from Murray-McMurray in Iowa rather than going down to the feed store and buying whatever they had there at the time. We even bought an experimental flock once, the X-9s, supposed to lay eggs right through the winter.

But our favorite birds were still the Rhode Island Reds, and when we settled into our home in North San Juan and fenced off a space for our vegetable garden, we found we had room for a hen house and chicken pen. After we built these structures, it followed that we needed some hens to fill them.

We ordered Rhode Island Reds from Murray-McMurray. Their packages usually arrived within a week, but they were sometimes delayed by hatching dates. The system works well provided the birds arrive when the post office is open. But in this instance, the birds arrived on a Sunday.

Early Sunday morning we received a phone call from someone in the Nevada City post office who said a package had arrived for us from Iowa and it was cheeping.

We drove into town to collect our chicks. The post office was closed since it was Sunday, but someone opened the back door and hand delivered our birds. All this happened in the 1980s. The population of Nevada City in 1980 was 2431 and not much higher in 1990. I doubt if we would get such service in Tucson in 2007.

The chicks were all very healthy and lived to become a flock that went on for years. As the spring garden got into gear we supplemented their diets with thinnings and later with trimmings. They especially adored Swiss chard leaves. Three hens once got on top of a Napa cabbage plant and countersunk it. Ate it right into the earth.

In winter things were tougher for the birds. Garden trimmings were rare and the ground was wet and muddy. The sun seldom put in an appearance.

On days when the sun did deign to reign, we’d let the chickens into the garden. The couldn’t do the vegetables any harm at that time of the year, and they really did a number on the sowbugs and earwigs. Chickens are T-rexes of the insect world. They are earth scorching machines. Attila the Hun must have gotten his ideas from watching chickens.

One late afternoon as darkness approached, we shooed the chickens to bed. But one hen wouldn’t go in. She was happy where she was, dusting in a garden bed. She was hunkered down in a relatively dry vegetable and happily flicking dirt into her wing pits. Joanne picked her up forcibly and then had to endure chicken insults as the hen protested volubly.

There was only one problem with letting our birds roam in the garden. We were chumming for hawks. One afternoon we went into the garden area to discover a hawk dining on one of our hens. He had just killed the bird and ripped open the top of her head and eaten the brains.

The hawk wasn’t even slightly afraid of us. He flew up to the top of the power pole that furnished electricity to our garden and surveyed us, probably wondering if we would dare to steal his dinner. His very fearlessness marked him as an escaped hawk, someone whom a falconer had “sent on a mission” and decided he didn’t have to return. It happens all the time, a falconer told us.

“Can’t blame a hawk for acting like a hawk,” Joanne philosophized. Then we noticed that the dead bird’s brain cavity was not very large. Maybe you could put a half dozen beads in it. We debated how many chickens a hawk would have to kill per day if he ate nothing but brains. We decided there weren’t that many chickens in the county. Meanwhile, the hawk fidgeted a bit, wondering if we were ever going to go away and leave him to his dinner.

We eventually left and the hawk dined. But a second hawk raider did not fare so well. I went down to the pen one day and instead of seeing my birds roaming free, found them all inside the house or the pen, frozen as stiff as stuffed. Two stood in one corner and didn’t even blink. Also inside the coop was a red-tailed hawk, also frozen, an “oh, shit” look on his face, with no idea of how to get out of the prison he’d flown into.

Joanne shot him with a handgun and we threw him in the freezer. Later we gave him to a woman at the Chapa-de Indian Health Clinic and Cultural Center. She harvested the feathers to help her children’s Miwok dance group make authentic costumes. Everybody benefited. We saved our chickens, the kids got some great feathers, and the world had one less stupid hawk. We never had hawks bother our chickens again.

Chickens provided us with brown eggs for which there was always a market, and something to do in our spare time. They required a lot of attention. Nests had to be maintained with straw or rice hulls. The ideal situation required that an egg sink into the straw and out of sight as soon as it’s laid. It is not commonly known, but a chicken’s two favorite foods are chicken and eggs. If a chicken were smart enough to realize that the feathered person next to her was a chicken and the round thing under her was an egg, there would be no chickens on earth within weeks.

And you have to remove the chicken guano. They won’t do it for themselves. Instead, we did it using a flat head shovel and a wheelbarrow. And don’t forget water. Sometimes their water looked protoplasmic, and that was with daily changing.

All of these ruminations are not to put you off your feed the next time you address a plate of scrambled eggs or chicken nuggets. It just explains, sort of, how I locked myself in the chicken pen. For some reason I had to enter the pen. The door closed behind me and the hook flipped up and caught the eye dead center.

I wasn’t worried. A momentary inconvenience, nothing more. But I had come down without my pocket knife, and any other tools I might have had were safely locked outside the pen.

I reached for the latch with my fingers. They weren’t long enough. I tried vigorously several more times, and they still weren’t long enough.

Our house was a couple of hundred feet uphill from the chicken pen. Nobody “uphill” had ever heard a cry from “downhill” before, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

After a while I gave up yelling, screaming and throwing tantrums and flashed on the stupid hawk. I had a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, two teaching credentials and a master’s degree in mass communications, but I couldn’t get out of the chicken pen either. I took comfort in the idea that while I might be dumb as a hawk at least I didn’t have any feathers to dangle from some kid dancer’s costume.

At last I stopped being emotional about my plight and looked around for something to use as a tool. There wasn’t much, but I finally found a piece of rusty wire I could break off. I used it to fish to hook loose.

And as I walked to freedom, leaving the chickens behind me, I thought about how really great it is to be a human being. We can go to the moon, write classics, solve abstract mathematical problems, and, if we try really really hard, some of us can even escape from the chicken pen.

Skoshi, the Chicken Dog

2008-02-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

Skoshi, The Chicken Dog
©Ken Harris 2006

We moved from Southern California to Northern California around 1962 and settled onto a five-acre piece of property north of Auburn in Placer County. The property was fenced and cross-fenced, had a year-round creek flowing across the foot of it, and we had built a 3-bedroom home on it. We had plenty of room for our dogs, cats, horses. We even had a cow. And chickens. And with our chickens, we had hawks, bobcats, raccoons, and other chicken eaters.

Skoshi was one of the family dogs. Skoshi (Japanese for “itsy bitsy”) had been born in Japan and adopted as a pup by a military family who didn’t recognize the significance of a pup with feet the size of saucers. The feet don’t shrink to fit the pup. By the time they got back to the States, Skoshi was too big to be cute and too stupid to be useful. They put him up for adoption, and we came along.

Skoshi was industrial strength stupid and his only gift lay in charming the females. They loved him. When a neighbor’s bitch came into heat, Skoshi scored unless they took the precaution of locking their bitch in the bedroom with them at night. In very little time he had Skoshi pups all over our new neighborhood.

He particularly picked on one family, the Kiebers. When a bitch came in heat, she broadcast the news o’er hill and dale and soon a score or more of gentleman dogs came calling. A massive dog fight invariably ensued and soon, out from under the crush of bodies, Skoshi and the bitch would emerge and go behind the barn, leaving the other dogs to fight until they forgot why. Naturally, the Kieber children had lots of Skoshi pups to play with for a few weeks. But they always went down to a nearby supermarket parking lot with a cardboard box of pups and sold them for a dollar a dog. Dollar-a-Dog Days were a regular commercial event in our neighborhood.

We once asked the Kiebers why they didn’t shoot Skoshi with their air rifle when he came round. It might discourage him.

“Oh, we couldn’t do that,” Mrs. Kieber answered.

“Why not? He’s got long hair. It wouldn’t hurt him.”

“We’ve tried. But every time he hears us cock the rifle he disappears. He’s fast!”

At the same time, among our chickens we had an Araucana, a chicken with goofy looking feathers who lays green eggs. She hatched out a dozen chicks or so, but lost every one of them to our black and white cat, Rope Racer. Every evening the hen settled herself over her chicks for the night and later Rope Racer went out, gently lift up the hen, and ate one chick.

The hen lost all her chicks and we concluded that she was stupid, even by bird standards. But she figured things out and the next time she hatched a clutch of chicks, she sent Rope Racer up to the top of a tall oak where he stayed for a couple of days. She pecked the dogs on their noses. She kept the ponies at bay. But her most signal success was when she put me on the washing machine.

She had her chicks in the garage and I happened to walk between them and her. She immediately attacked me with beak, wings and feet. She didn’t care who bought the chicken food, I was not getting near her chicks. I leaped onto the washing machine because that was one of only three options. The other two were hurt her or let her destroy my leg. Forget the woman scorned: an aroused chicken ranks right up there with Hell’s Famous Furies.

And it came to pass that one evening we locked Skoshi up in the chicken pen. The raccoons had been raiding and we thought he might scare them off. Skoshi was deeply insulted. He wondered what he could have done to merit this humiliation. Outrage oozed from every pore. But that night the raccoon struck and Skoshi repelled him. Suddenly he knew what his place in life was. He was created to defend chickens. He’d had an epiphany. This makes me insanely jealous, because I’ve lived 74 years and never had an epiphany.

From then on, we never lost a chick or chicken. When the Araucana or any other hen hatched a clutch of chicks, Skoshi stuck to them like a boyhood prank to a preacher. One of my fondest memories is the sight of Skoshi following the Araucana and her chicks. He was crawling on his belly and keeping always within a few feet of the hen. He had three chicks on his front legs and one on his nose. He was content; he had a purpose in life (besides impregnating every bitch in the county).

Pecky Floppy Rooster

2008-02-21T12:09:00.000-08:00

Pecky Floppy Rooster
©Ken Harris, 2008

Auburn, California, 1960s. We had a flock of chickens and a banty rooster to keep them in line. The only trouble with this splendid scheme was that he thought he ought to keep us in line as well. His favored tactic was to ambush from behind and dig into our ankle with his spurs and peck us with his beak, all the while filling the air with feathers and chicken invective. The kids named him Pecky Floppy.

Our children, Pat and Eric, were afraid to go anywhere near the bird. Their fears were well founded. Pat might have been seven, but I think younger. And Eric was two years younger than she. They were no match for a feathered psychopath.

One morning Joanne was working in the garden near the chicken pen when Pecky Floppy nailed her in the Achilles tendon. Joanne instinctively turned and whacked the bird with her hoe or rake or whatever gardening tool she had in her hand. She broke the rooster’s wing. Both she and the bird were startled by this development.

Joanne said, “All right, you little son of a bitch. I’ve hurt you, and now I’m going to kill you.”

And she did.

Once she had removed his head, feet, feathers and entrails, there wasn’t much left of the bird except sinew and bone. She boiled him and stewed him and simmered him and brewed him and that evening we had Pecky Floppy Stew. He was chewy but, if we tried hard enough, we could swallow him.

During the course of dinner Eric paused and looked at the chunk of chicken meat on his spoon. “Mom,” he asked, “are you sure this is Pecky Floppy?”

“Yes, this is definitely Pecky Floppy.”

“Good!” smiled Eric and began to happily chew. It’s good to eat your enemy’s heart. Or drumstick.

Just 'Cuz You're Mortally Wounded

2008-02-16T12:14:00.000-08:00

The Banties
Copyright Ken Harris 2007

When we lived in El Monte, California in 1960 we had, among our horses, dogs, cats, and chickens, two banties, a rooster and a hen. They added color and class to our yard and were permitted to range in the flower beds because their little banty feet wouldn’t do much damage to the plants as the birds foraged for insects and grubs. Every now and again the rooster would find someone especially delicious and he would make his special cluck and his hen would come running.

One day someone, I can’t remember who, gave us a fighting cock with a broken wing. I wasn’t really too anxious to have a super alpha male on the premises, but Joanne seemed to think well of the idea. I wonder if she was trying to tell me something? Oh, well, it’s too late now.

We threw the fighting cock over the 2x6-lined-with-chicken-wire fence that separated the chicken and horse area from the rest of the property that was reserved for dogs, cats and humans. The game cock lost no time in seeking out our banty rooster and engaging him in battle. The banty had no chance, even with the game cock fighting with a broken wing. So the banty hen leaped in to help her rooster. Even so, the both of them would have been defeated. But we intervened, deciding that if the hen preferred her own rooster to the super alpha, we wouldn’t interfere.

So the game cock was captured, isolated, and the next day passed on to someone in the neighborhood who needed law and order in his henhouse. Game cocks insist that if there is going to be any fighting done, he is going to participate. Non-game cocks quickly decide they would rather watch television instead. The neighbor was pleased with his orderly henhouse.

Shortly after this episode, our banty hen disappeared only to reappear a few weeks later with a clutch of chicks in tow. She proudly led her little disciples around the yard, showing them the best places to peck and scratch.

But just as her chicks were thinking about sprouting feathers, a neighborhood animal, possibly wild, mauled her badly one evening. He was probably looking for dinner, but he didn’t get any for he failed to kill the hen. Instead he tore her side open almost down to the entrails. She lay be the side of a fence in severe shock, her internal plumbing visible through a single layer of skin, her chicks around her wondering what was wrong with mama. We figured that was the end of the hen and hoped the rooster would be up to single parenthood.

But that’s not the end of the story. The hen survived. She got well. The next day she was back leading her flock. She couldn’t die. She was too busy. Her chicks needed her. Her wound jerked over like dried beef and within the week, her feathers grew back and she was as good as new.

The lesson the chicken taught is just because you’re mortally wounded doesn’t mean you have to die.

Goat Salami (With Special Seasoning)

2008-02-11T12:27:00.000-08:00

Goat Salami (With Special Seasoning)

In 1982 Joanne’s brother Fritz moved up to North San Juan with his wife, Ruth, and youngest daughter, Holly. They had land near us, within walking distance, although walking involved hill climbing, creek wading and forging through nigh impenetrable walls of Scotch Broom. Fritz and Ruth lived in a trailer while Holly set herself up in a tent along with her misbegotten dog, Chinwester. For power they had a generator they ran long enough to depress themselves watching the evening news.

We also lived in a trailer on our own twenty acres with two kittens, two dogs, a horse and a burro. We also had no power, but at least we had started to build our house.

None of us had jobs. Budgets were works of fiction.

At the time we all had thoughts of living on our properties a la Mother Earth News and the Foxfire series. Vague thoughts, but no concrete plans. Wouldn’t it be neat to make our own Kailua or hard cook our eggs in the compost pile? Those sorts of plans.

We had nearby neighbors, John and Becky Burton. Becky had some goats, Nubians, the kind with Roman noses and droopy ears. John disliked the goats. He worked in the Bay Area as a steamfitter and when actually on a construction project was home only on weekends. Becky figured it would make for nicer weekends if the goats found a new home.

Becky gave us the goats. She was thinking “pets” that would fit in with our menagerie. We were thinking “food” that would fit in with our fictional budgets.

One of the goats was a special pet of Becky’s and she persuaded John to allow her this one personal friend. They came over to see if they could get the goat back. They drove up just in time to see one of their goats hanging from a tree, skinned, gutted, and halved.

John and Becky treated us to an eyeball dance as they looked frantically around to see which goat we had killed. Fortunately, we hadn’t killed Becky’s pet. In fact, we’d inadvertently done a good thing. One of Becky’s goats was a very mean doe. She had broken another goat’s leg asserting her authority. She also butted Fritz’ hand and drew blood. That was the one we killed.

We returned Becky’s pet, but John was so turned off by seeing goat halves hanging from an oak tree that he allowed all the surviving goats to return.

We decided that the best way to equally distribute the meat and still be able to consume it in sensible portions, rather than one gigantic, carnivorous binge, was to make goat salami. It seemed easy enough in Mother Earth News. Grind up the meat, mix in salami seasoning, roll into loaves, and roast. Fully cooked, the meat should keep for a while under ice box conditions.

We took the goat carcass apart muscle by muscle. Since we were going to grind the meat up, appearances didn’t matter. We ground the meat up with a hand-crank grinder, something they Heysers had brought up with them. Great, huh? You don’t need to go to the gym. You can grind thirty pounds of goat meat.

Ruth and I then drove into Sacramento to a meat packing plant to buy some seasonings since, for some strange reason, the local supermarkets didn’t have any. We mixed the seasonings in with the meat by hand using a huge, metal mixing bowl.

All of this food prep was done outdoors to a fascinated audience of meat bees. Meat bees must have incredibly acute meat sensing abilities because you can’t have meat outdoors for ten seconds without some scout discovering you. Rolling our goat salami as also an exercise in bee swishing, with just about as much swishing as rolling.

I was not as avid a swisher as I should have been because meat bees got into my salami rolls. To hell with them. I rolled them up and into the oven they went. I didn’t tell anybody about this at the time. I thought I’d let it be my little surprise.

The meat bees didn’t taste bad, actually. They added a little crunch to the salami and a bite like a hint of hot pepper.

Of course we ate them. We were all Depression Babies. You don’t throw food away.

Das Gefoulenschmeller

2008-02-08T09:21:00.001-08:00

More on the Levingston's goats
by Ken Harris

Kids, nursing and otherwise, were a fairly common occurrence in the Levingston back yard. To keep their nannies fresh, the Levingstons at one time kept a billy goat, or, as they call them in Germany, ein gefoulenschmeller. Billy goats have a universally bad reputation which they richly deserve. They are depraved and beyond smelly. The females, naturally, adore them. But no one else does, not even the goat breeders who apostrophize them as necessary evils.

One day Sweet William escaped from the Levingston yard and began to consume the neighborhood shrubs. No one else was around and so, against my better judgment, I managed to ignore Sweet William’s foul odor and grabbed him by his horns. I soon found that I was not going to drag that goat anywhere. If I pulled, he pulled harder. Finally, it occurred to me to push. I pushed and he pushed harder. I let him push me all the way into his goat pen where he belonged. Leaving him with his adoring nannies, I spent the next hour failing to scrub goat musk off my hands. I carried the smell with me for a couple of days. Goat musk would make a useful substitute for ambergris should there ever become a world shortage of this dubious commodity.

Needless to say, Sweet William was not my favorite person in the neighborhood. But one cold winter morning I saw something that wrung even my calloused withers. Sweet William had a cold.

It was a January morning, early, and it gets cold in Southern California. Not Minnesota cold, but cold enough to preclude nude sunbathing. Sweet William had found a sunny spot against a shed wall in the Levingston’s back yard and was trying to pretend it was warm. His hair jutted out. His back was hunched. His eyes were swollen almost shut. His runny nose defied description.

My heart went out to Sweet William, but from a distance. I wasn’t getting any closer to that smelly thing than I had to.

The Nursery

2008-02-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

The Nursery by Ken Harris ©February 2008

El Monte, California, Spring, 1959. We lived in El Monte, California, the very first home we owned, with our dogs, cats, horses and daughter, Patricia, who had been born the previous December. On Star Street. Our neighborhood had modest homes, large yards, sewers, mail delivery, trash pickup. Most people would qualify the area as suburban.

And yet, many people had horses living in their back yards. At the foot of Star Street lay easy access to a trail that could take you all the way to Long Beach and the Pacific Ocean. A bachelor had built a large barn of hollow tile concrete for his horses near that access. The barn had a “hay loft” with a card room and a wet bar. I don’t know if they rode horses much, but there were people always hanging around. We could sometimes smell and hear the residents of the nearby dairy.

And our neighbors, Okie Levingston and his wife, Doris. kept a back yard full of own quarter horses, a cow or two, goats, chickens. If it mooed, clucked or baaed, it probably lived in the their back yard.

So many animals took up a large part of the Levingston’s time, energy and income. Doris said that many times she would blow the family cash on feed for the animals and then check the barn to see if the chickens had laid any eggs for supper. Also, the animals made it hard for them to get away and do anything.

This became a real problem for Doris because she wanted the two of them to visit her parents in Tulare, a farm town (city now) in Central California for the weekend. She asked if we would mind their animals for them.

We had no problem with that. Feed some people hay and the others mash and don’t get the meals mixed up. No big problem. We would have to milk Willa Mae, but we could do that. We had given them Willa Mae to raise their two kid whose mother had died, but they were weaned. In fact, everybody was weaned. No problems there.

Piece of cake, we told her. The two of you go off on your weekend, drink beer, tell lies, have a great time, we told her. And so they did, leaving at o-dark-thirty on Saturday morning, long before we were awake.

When we went over to the Levingston yard, after feeding our own animals, to an enthusiastic chorus of animal sounds, and we began to feed. But we noticed one new little kid, one we had never seen before, black with drooping white ears. And this one wasn’t weaned. The way she looked at the hay, it might as well have been from Mars. She had no clue about what to do with it.

Joanne had milked Willa Mae already and she went back to our house for one of Pat’s nipples. I enlarged the business end with my pocket knife, and slipped it over the mouth of a Coke® bottle filled with Willa Mae juice. The kid eagerly attacked the bottle although frequently butting my hand that held the bottle, trying to make the milk flow faster. She thought my hand was an udder and I just wasn’t releasing milk fast enough.

She finished her bottle of milk and I looked up to find myself surrounded by other admiring young animals, including a rather large calf. They had all been weaned, sure enough, but they weren’t really enthusiastic about it. They made “me next” sounds, but we scattered them back to their yucky hay.

When the Levingstons returned we told them what happened. It turned out, they had told us the truth. Their animals were all weaned. However, a “friend” who didn’t know they would be gone that weekend had dropped the kid off in the wee small hours. I guess he had a goat he didn’t need and thought to himself, “I’ll drop it off at Okie and Doris’. They like goats.” You’ve got to be careful of friends like that.

Skinning a Snake

2008-02-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

Skinning a Snake
By Ken Harris ©2007

Greenwood, South Dakota, summer, 1948. Our family took a summer trip to South Dakota. At the time I thought it was a simple vacation trip, the kind people take to major tourist destinations. Like Greenwood. In fact, my father was considering going into farming in the Dakotas.

But we traveled around South Dakota a bit. We visited some relatives in Greenwood on the brakes of the Missouri River, on the Yankton Reservation in Charles Mix County. All that’s left of Greenwood now are foundations where houses used to be. I imagine the Missouri River flooded so often that people just got tired of rebuilding. But Greenwood will always have a place in my heart because that’s where I taught myself how to skin a snake.

It came to pass in this town of Greenwood that some cousins and I came across a rattlesnake downtown. Of the group of us, I was oldest at 14 and so clueless I would be lucky to tell up from down at high noon. Being dumb kids, we killed the snake. So far, so good. A dead rattler isn’t likely to hurt us. We could just pitch it somewhere and that would take care of it. Right? Wrong!

A female cousin rather near to me in age, a rather good looking female cousin in fact, stated that she would like to have the skin for a decoration, maybe a hat band. Not to worry, said I, for I was an expert snake skinner from way back and would be pleased to present here with the trophy. As you might guess, I had never skinned a snake in my life. Or wanted to.

Just as an aside, I have observed that attractive females are dangerous to immature males and should be kept away until the young men are, what, say 50?

I cut off the snake’s head with a knife and buried it. Then I cut off the rattles because I thought she might want to wear them as a decoration on her prom gown. After I had removed the head and the tail, I had this long, headless, tailess thing which still occasionally squirmed. “What next, Ken,” thought I. Can I pretend to hear my mother calling?

Not with a good looking girl present. So I borrowed a single edge razor blade and began to cut along the center of the belly at one end of the snake hoping to finish at the other end without going to far astray. I cut too deeply a time or two and the snake’s insides began to become outsides. I mastered my gag reflex, for in those days I wasn’t even keen on taking out the garbage, and continued my incisions.

Once the surgery was completed my next problem was to peel the skin from the snake in one piece. Getting started was more difficult than you’d imagine. You have to immobilize one end which I did with a hammer and a nail. After the grand peeling I had two objects, a smelly snake skin and a slimy dead snake. Snakes aren’t slimy when they are alive and inside their skin. But dead and denuded, they are pretty slick rascals.

By now, though, I was home free. We threw the carcass away and pinned the skin down, flesh side out, with thumb tacks. Then we salted the skin. Mortons® iodized salt.

Everyone was pleased with our deed except me. Not only had I spent an entire afternoon in an inelegant enterprise, but my hands smelled I didn’t want to get them within six feet of my nose. My hands, unfortunately, were firmly affixed to my wrists, well within smelling distance.

So come all you young gentlemen and listen to my tale. If a good looking girl wants a snake skin, keep your hands in your pockets and your mouth shut. Let her skin it.

Trash Pick-up

2008-01-28T15:55:00.000-08:00

Trash Pick-Up
By Ken Harris © 2004

It is Tuesday morning, April 13th, 2004 in Tucson, Arizona, and the trash and recycle men have just come by. The trash and recycle men are different people driving different trucks and handling different containers. And the men don’t actually handle the containers. Thanks to the magic of hydraulics and clever engineering design, their truck does that for them.

It was different years ago (said the Old Man in a quavering voice). Specifically, I’m thinking of 1958. We had bought our first home in El Monte, California for less money than a used Korean automobile costs today.

The house needed was a DUMP! We took three pickup loads of trash, including some dead chickens, to the unsanitary landfill AND burned sulfur candles in the house before we could even move in.

Our house also had some design flaws. The bedroom closet could only be accessed through the back yard. The bathroom shower stall stood in the middle of one wall while the wash basin stood directly opposite on the other wall. The basin drained through a pipe sunk in concrete onto the floor of the shower stall. A half dozen shaves coated the floor of the shower stall with a rich deposit of scum composed of shaving soap and whiskers.

The kitchen was ten feet wide with the stove and cupboards against one wall and the sink and the refrigerator against the other wall. Joanne was very pregnant with our first-born and there wasn’t enough room between the appliances for her to walk. She had to sidle between the stove and the refrigerator, and as she did so her abdomen turned on all of the burners. Not to worry. She turned them off in the same manner on her return trip.

Clearly, we needed to remodel our home. We added a 20 x 20 living room and enlarged the kitchen so that two pregnant women could sidle between the appliances backside to backside. Heck, we had enough room for a dozen pregnant women to do an entire dance review. The entire house was lighter and roomier.

But rehabbing was not without its problems. Melding Romex® with knob and tube wiring presented a challenge. And friends were not always available. As time went on, we had fewer and fewer. This explains why Joanne, who was expecting to whelp our first child momentarily, was on the roof helping me put on new composition shingles when Willa Mae screamed for help.

Willa Mae was a Nubian goat we had acquired. Our theory was that by the time our baby needed milk, Willa Mae would be fresh and there would be plenty of goat’s milk for the infant. So, when Willa Mae screamed Joanne flew off the roof, down the ladder and into the barn to help with the delivery. The kid was presented breech first. Joanne had long, thin, strong hands and she was able to work the kid out. Unfortunately, it was born dead. So were the other two kids that Willa Mae was carrying.

My first problem was getting rid of the kids. I could have buried them, but it was trash pick-up day. We had already filled one 55-gallon oil drum with trash, so I took a second drum and layered the kids in with other trash. (When you’re remodeling, you always have lots of trash lying about.)

When the trash men came I met them at the gate to try to persuade them to take the second drum. A large, economy-size gentleman who looked like he played with tractor tires on his day off assured me that since we paid for one barrel, that’s all he would take. He agreed, however, to let me cram the contents of the second barrel into the first one, if I could. I succeeded in merging the contents of the two barrels, but the result was very heavy. I could barely move it. It weighed well over 200 pounds. But the barrel presented no problem for the trash man. He casually picked up the barrel up shoulder high and shook the trash into the bed of his truck. Fortunately for me, he did not notice the unusual contents of my trash.

Having given away the kids, our problems were solved, but Willa Mae’s were just beginning. She flowed copiously, as any successful female mammal should, and I thought I was going to have to learn to milk a goat. Not to worry, Joanne assured me. While I might not know which end of the goat to grab, Willa Mae was a pro and we would get into a successful routine quickly.

But just as I was coming to grips with the prospect of milking a goat, our neighbors had a kid whose mother had died. So, kidless mother, motherless kid. Simple solution to simple problem, right? Wrong. Willa Mae did not see it that way and she rejected the kid with head butts and kicks.

Our neighbor solved the dilemma through the magic of Vicks Vaporub®. She smeared a gob of Vicks on Willa Mae’s nose and another under the kid’s tail. Willa Mae accepted the kid as having the right smell. She would have accepted a plunger as having the right smell. In a couple of hours the Vicks wore off and Willa Mae resorted to her kicking, butting ways.

But after two days of repeated Vicks applications, Willa Mae accepted the kid and everyone was happy. Especially me, because I didn’t have to milk the goat.

The Rattlesnake Farm

2008-01-25T10:42:00.000-08:00

North San Juan, California, mid-1980s. This will be my last snake story. My next blog will begin a short series of goat stories.

When we moved to North San Juan, our house was located across a ravine from a large rock pile. Many of the rocks were outright boulders while others were merely to large to carry comfortably for more than a few feet. I think we're looking at a pile a hundred feet long, forty or fifty feet wide and with a fifteen-foot bulge more or less in the middle. Perhaps two hundred feet separated the rock pile from our house.

The pile was home to an immense den of rattlesnakes. If you think about it, rattlelsnakes have many admirable features. They usually warn you before they bite you. How many people do you know like that? They don't get drunk and pick fights, and they will back away from a confrontation if they possibly can. They only kill in self-defense or for dinner. That being said, you still don't want them loitering near the house.

I made no attempt to kill the snakes. With what, my .22? Ricochet bullets all over the place and end up shooting myself, Joanne or the dogs? Or what if I fall and break my leg or land on a snake? Or both? Bad idea.

That's why we started importing snakes. Whenever we saw a king snake or bull snake in the road, we stopped the car and grabbed it. All right, if you insist on perfect honesty, I stopped the car and Joanne grabbed the snake. Once she grabbed a bull snake, but just a little too far back of the head. The snake took two half-hitches and a bowline around her forearm and sank his fangs into her thumb. And there they sat while I drove home. Each one had the other one "gotchaed" and wouldn't let go. When we arrived home Joanne had to shake her arm vigorously several times before the reptile hit the dirt. They the snake left in search of a hole while Joanne went in search of some Iodine.

In 1984 I was playing the role of Jud Fry in Oklahoma. Joanne and I returned home from a performance late one summer night. Fortunately, the moon was full and Joanne saw the snake before she stepped on it. We turned on the lights and it was a rattler. We killed it. Why had the snake been near our house? It was thirsty and had come for the dogs' water. After that I put out water near the snakes rock pile. They stayed in their home, we stayed in ours, and it worked out well that way until we moved.

But word soon spread througout the county (it was a small county) that I was a maniac, putting out water for rattlesnakes. Hardly anyone approved. But a Water for Rattlesnakes Program offered the fewest possible negative consequences, and I still think it was the right thing. We never saw one near the house after that.

Boa Constrictor Search

2008-01-20T15:18:00.000-08:00

San Diego, California, late 1976 or early 1977. Now you may have noticed that when it comes to snake grabbing, Joanne does the grabbing and Ken does the cheering. But I'm not afraid to pick up a snake. It's just not my favorite thing.

I was subbing in a classroom one winter morning in San Diego for a teacher who kept two boas in glass cages. It was a sixth grade. Sixth grade teachers do strange things. This particular teacher had worked with the San Diego Zoo before her reincarnation as a sixth grade teacher and had even bottle fed baby gorillas. Probably the school was happy that she would settle for two modest-sized boa constrictors.

The office clerk asked me if I would object to looking at two snakes all day. Apparently they had learned to ask that question early in the year. I said no, I had absolutely no objection. Snakes were quiet, they were seldom disruptive, didn't throw tantrums or refuse to do their homework. The human students could learn a lot from the snakes' behavior, if they'd just pay attention.

So as I walked into the classroom, I saw on my right a large glass case with a boa happily sleeping inside. On my left, however, was an empty glass case where a boa used to be. Apparently someone had decided to leave the top of the case open and the snake took the opportunity to escape.

A young, female student teacher was present when I arrived. The two of us conducted a systemic, all points search and finally located the snake, not a very big one, maybe three feet at the outside, wrapped around a carton of teaching materials trying to keep warm.

Now I have always been a feminist, an egalitarian, and believe that women should have an equal opportunity to be heroes. So I convinced her we should toss a coin, loser has to put the snake back. Unfortunately, I lost the toss.

I grabbed the snake behind the head and the poor thing was so cold he rapidly coiled around my forearm and oozed himself back and forth, enjoying my warmth. If he had been a cat, he would have purred. Now I don't really mind snakes. They're fine animals, beautiful even. But I don't want to snuggle.

I tried to deposit the snake back into his glass case, but for some reason he didn't want to let go. I unwrapped one end and he wrapped the other end back. I finally shook him free and he landed with a thud on some pine cones that were in the bottom of his case. That couldn't have felt good, but I winced, apologized, and then got on with the business of the day.

I tell this story to show that I also can catch snakes. It's not my favorite thing. It's better than network television, but it's still not my favorite thing.

Taiwanese Health Food

2008-01-18T14:55:00.009-08:00

Lungshan Night Market, Taipei, Taiwan, December 30, 1971. -- Joanne, my son Eric and I were touring Taiwan with the Guam Science Teachers' Association as our 1971 Christmas gift to ourselves. On the night of December 30 we visited the Lungshan Night Market after a stupendous seven-course dinner.

Large office buildings loomed within a mile of the Chiang's presidential palace in Taipei, but after the main businesses closed and the power brokers in their three-piece suits repaired to their wives or mistresses, less formally attired capitalists appeared on the streets. They took over the center lanes of an eight-lane thoroughfare and set up their modest businesses. Strange people in strange attire with strange business enterprises set up their shops and hawked their wares.

A dentist showed up carrying his chair on his back, held in place by a strap around his forehead. An acupuncturist displayed a large chart showing the human body decorated with x's and dotted, curved lines. But the most amazing sight of all was the health food guy.

The Chinese have a theory of health consonent with their theory of the universe. The universe is composed of contesting opposites, yin and yang. Don't ask me which is which because I never could keep them sorted. Illnesses come in two varieties, hot and cold. If you're afflicted with a cold disease, a head cold, for example, you should eat a hot food. Dog, for example. On the other hand, if you have a hot disease, you need a cold food. Snake bile is a popular restorative. The bile of a venomous snake, the more venomous, the better. Taiwan doesn't have any native venemous serpents, so they have to import them. Here in the States we import ginseng. There they import bushmasters and mambas.

So, anyway, here we were, a group of 24 sophisticated teachers, wandering around the market with our mouths wide open. You'd have thought we'd just come into town on a wagon load of pumpkins. We stopped by a Chinese gentleman standing by stacks of wire cages. He bowed to us. We bowed to him. Then we bowed to each other some more. After sufficiently demonstrating our spinal flexibility he proceeded to show us some of his wares.

He picked a length of wire about a foot long with a hook bent into the end of it, opened up one of his cages, and fished around for a few seconds. Finally he brought out his wire with a blackish snake hooked over the end of it. We looked at each other, the snake and us, and finally the snake decided he didn't like what he saw. So he spread his hood.

Joanne and I were in front, of course. We all of a sudden realized that this guy was poking a cobra into our faces and instantly retreated three giant steps. If there were any children or pets behind us, they died. Two dozen people stampeding in reverse can create a lot of havoc. Sorry about that.

The vendor offered to kill the snake for us and let us sample a sip of cobra bile, but we none of us saw the need to kill a perfectly good snake just so we could decorate the streets of Taipei with our dinner.

Throwing Pythons

2008-01-16T06:49:00.000-08:00

Throwing Pythons

Torremolinos, Spain, 1975. I met a great white hunter at a party. He complained that by the mid-70s the great white hunting business wasn’t what it used to be. Thanks to unfriendly poachers, vigilant rangers and inflation, there just weren’t that many safaris any more. Things had come to such an ugly pass, he continued, that he was available for almost any reasonably legal employment. Consequently, when a British movie company came to his part of Africa on location, he signed on with them as an assistant animal handler.

The plot of the movie was unbelievably bad by any standards. A white man and a black man were “chums” at Oxford. But even then the black man knew that he was going to return to his tribe, put on a lion skin, and become the chief. The white man knew that he was going to be a park ranger in his friend’s territory.

And there they both were, in the same part of Africa. But before the black man could assume his role as chief, he had to murder somebody. He did so, and lo and behold, the white man now had to bring his former friend to justice. I really wanted to leave the party right there and go out and see this movie. Not.

That’s where the movie was when the company arrived in Africa. According to the script, the black man fled to the “Land of the Snakes.” The actual film later even thoughtfully provided a title on the screen as the men entered the little patch of jungle. “Land of the Snakes.”

The black man was to enter the jungle with the white man in hot pursuit. As soon as the white man entered the jungle, the script called for a python to drop onto his shoulders. The white man was to brush the snake off, whirl, shoot the snake with his rifle, wipe his manly brow, and press onward. The rifle hand blanks, of course, because the head animal handler was using his own pet python for the shoot. The head animal handler was to stand on a tree limb drop his python on the actor as he ran underneath. The assistant animal handler cum great white hunter was to retrieve the python and pass it back up into the tree in the event things did not go well.

The only thing was, the actor was deathly afraid of snakes. As soon as he ran into the jungle someone called “Make Up” and the make up man ran up and squirted him in the face with water mist. This procedure even has a technical term, spritzing. The actor didn’t really need to be spritzed: he was already sweating profusely. It’s a good thing the film was in black and white because the actor was definitely an unhealthy shade of grey.

He finally mustered enough nerve to enter the jungle patch, but when the snake landed on his shoulders he threw the rifle high into the air and screamed “S HI T!” The director yelled, “CUT!” and said they had to do the shot over.

After the seventh shit-cut the python decided he’d had enough and tried to wriggle off through the jungle. The great white hunter caught him by the tail and tried to pass him back up into the tree, like passing a column of cooked spaghetti.

It took three days to get the shot, and then only because the director felt they had enough footage to cobble together, frame by frame, enough to get seven acceptable seconds of film. The snake had been dropped close to two dozen times, and it’s a wonder he didn’t slip a halfhitch around the actor’s neck and end everyone’s misery. That's what I would have done if I'd been the python. "Look, mate, we're all in this together. Can't we just do this shot?"

Neither python nor actor be.

Lessons in Snake Handling

2008-01-13T12:05:00.000-08:00

Auburn, California, mid-1960s. We had a five-acre place near the town of Auburn, east of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. We fenced and cross-fenced it for our horses and cattle and had a great year-round stream running along the bottom.

We had an abundance of snakes there, bull snakes, garter snakes, and king snakes. But no rattlers. The rattlesnakes in that area are very shy and don't like to share their living space with dogs, cats or constrictors.

On this particular occasion we had some children present, possibly ours, possibly the neighbors' kids, or maybe neices and nephews from Southern California. They might have been total strangers, just passing through. Joanne was doing some yard work when she saw a lovely king snake stretched out in the primroses. She reached behind the snake's head to grab him and teach the children how to catch one safely. But she reached too far back and the snake managed to turn it's head and hemstitch her hand.

Joanne turned the spontaneous snake-grabbing lesson into a spontaneous leave-snakes-alone-if-they-aren't-bothering-you lesson. "You see, if I'd left this snake alone, like I should have, I wouldn't be bleeding right now." The kids were most impressed with the blood oozing from her hand, and I don't imagine very many of them became snake handlers in their adult lives.

Cailidh entertainment

2008-01-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

On this fine Saturday evening of this past January 5 our Scottish Country Dancing group gathered in the town of Bisbee, in the mountains just north of the Mexican border for a Twelfth Night Ball. The town is accessible by highway. We didn’t have to take a mule train or anything like that. Going there is just something our group does just to get out of Tucson for a while.

We danced, ate, danced some more. We also had cailidh (kay.lee) entertainment. Cailidh is a Gaelic word meaning entertainment where everyone gets up and does their own thing. (And people want spelling reform in English. Compared to the Welsh, Scots and Irish, we’re doing great.)

A husband and wife team conducted a do-it-yourself Twelve Days of Christmas with Scottish foods improvised as a substitute for the traditional gifts. They reminded me of Victor Borge conducting an orchestra. One woman read a Scottish poem in such a great Scottish brogue I couldn’t understand a word she said. Several people performed on instruments and sang. A woman read a wonderfully dreadful poem by a McGonigal, the “worst poet in Scotland.”

Although I hadn’t planned anything, I thought I might enlighten the evening by telling a story. I chose the story that I posted on this blog in January 1. As I got really involved with telling how Joanne and her brother, Fritz, killed these rattlesnakes and put them in a bag to bring home to mother, I could tell by the way some mouths dropped and some eyes bugged, that I was not offering up standard cailidh entertainment. Some of the people were shocked.

I loved it. I teetotally LOVED it. I proceeded onward with gestures and expressions.

I received a nice round of applause. Because I was through, I believe. Afterwards, several people came up to Joanne to offer stories of their own, but by and large the rest of the people at the dance were content without our company.

Joanne and I grew up in non-traditional circumstances and we’re a bit rough around the edges. I'm sure we'd disgrace ourselves at Buckingham Palace, but I doubt if that will ever be a problem.

Do Rattlers Bite Themselves?

2008-01-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

By Joanne Harris --

There's always this argument, will a snake bite itself, or not. Well, let me tell you, under the right circumstances, yes, they will bite themselves. On this business of biting themselves, now in that pile of snakes, those we were shooting -- (we had returned to the nest) we had the guns with us and we put bullets through their heads. Some of the snakes tried to bite themselves. I mean they would turn around -- there was a pile of snakes -- and they would try to find a piece of snake and bite it. Well, that wasn't them and then they'd try again. Eventually when they'd found and bitten themselves, they stopped biting the others. Three of them did this.

Once we found a snake that had been run over by a car and it lay in a circle, its fangs in its own body. Another time, years later (the 1960s) when I was teaching at Colfax High School, one of the other teachers brought in a rattlesnake in a big gallon jar. It was supposedly a dead snake, and I watched it and watched it and watched it. And I saw movement in the body and I said, "Skip, that snake is not dead."

He said, "It is dead."

I said, "Skip, it is not dead. I've seen it move." Skip just filled the jar with formaldehyde. When we came back later and looked, the snake was dead and its fangs were in its own back. So when Skip put the formaldehyde in the jar, it was horrible and the snake killed itself.

Dancing with Snakes

2008-01-03T12:08:00.000-08:00

Tarzana, California, late 1950s or early 1960s.

Joanne's sister Audrey decided she wasn't getting enough exercise teaching high school biology in the Los Angeles City School System, so she took up belly dancing as a conditioner. She turned out to be quite good at it, with a real sense of rhythm and some good movements, all the while keeping great time with finger cymbals. Her husband Tom backed her up on the oudh.

Ever anxious to improve her act, Audrey took to using a boa constrictor. She converted the space in her fire place into a snake apartment. What would you call that? Serpentarium? Contrictorium? Probably something dull and boring like herpetarium.

Whenever she danced with her snake, she would put it in a basket and place the basket in her refrigerator. The boa, fine, coldblooded animal that he was, would go to sleep. When the time came for her to dance, Audrey would remove the basket, transport it to the show, and dance balancing the basket on her head. After fifteen minutes into the dance the snake would stick its head out of the basket, wondering what all the motion was about. When the snake emerged, there was more than motion. There was audience uproar as well.

It was a good sized boa, three feet at least. The two of them looked really good, so good, in fact, that Audrey was offered a gig in Vegas dancing two 45-minute sets per evening for a lot more money than she was making teaching biology in high school.

Audrey sometimes had trouble finding food for her boa because constrictors like their food fresh. Canned dog food isn't going to make it. Audrey wrote to a group at U.C. Berkeley, I believe, one of the UC campuses, to ask the researchers if she could have their rats for snake food after they had done giving them cancer. The researchers wrote back to chastize her for being so cruel as to feed live rats to her snake. Audrey as miffed. The snake won't eat dead rats. Duh! Besides, is feeding the rats to her snake any more cruel than giving them cancer in the first place? Audrey's husband Tom pointed out that these researchers had spent tens of thousands of dollars breeding a genetically pure strain of rat, and now Audrey wanted to use them for snake food. No wonder they were incensed.

Eventually Audrey began working with other snakes. She had one shipped out to her, a beautiful, slim, green female with a ruby spot on her throat. She named it Carmen. Carmen was very depressed, didn't like dancing, didn't like living in a herpetarium. She wouldn't eat and lost weight. Audrey picked the snake up to dance with her one evening and Carmen bit her. At the time she had the flu, and so she went to bed.

The next morning when she woke up the flu symptoms had disappeared. Audrey persuaded herself that she had discovered a cure for the flu and wrote to the shipping company about her experience. The shipping company did not share her enthusiasm for this medical breakthrough. Instead, they wondered when she received the snake, and what employee had mailed it. It seems that Carmen was very venemous and if she hadn't been weakened by her hunger strike would have probably killed Audrey.

Audrey soon went on to other activities besides dancing with snakes, but still I sometimes wonder about a possible cure for the flu.

Mama and the bag of snakes

2008-01-01T18:25:00.000-08:00

late Thirties or Very Early Forties, Paiute Mountain

One time Fritz and I were out hunting at the Squaw Pocket Claim. There was a rock face about ten feet high and twenty feet wide. It was actually a huge boulder pile, but the boulders were very large. This rock face had a split about five feet up. As we walked by, a snake fell out of the split. We jumped back and thought, "Jeez, where'd that snake come from?"

We looked up and there were other snakes sticking out, too. Apparently it got too crowded up there and this one slipped and came down. So we killed him. Then we got a long stick and started pulling out snakes. Once on the ground, we killed them. We had quite a pile of snakes.

We'd gotten a few quail that day, so we put the snakes in the same bag with the quail and took them home to mother. We didn't tell her what was in the bag and she was unhappy. She berated us.

Mother made us throw the snakes out. We had a deer hanging that we had shot before. We had skinned it out some distance from the cabin and had quartered it up. I guess we gave half of it away. It was fairly fresh, only three days old. Mother told us to get rid of those rattlesnakes and take them a long way from the cabin. Well, you know kids. We went over the hill a little ways and threw them behind a rock where we hoped she wouldn't find them. Soon the buzzards started circling. We were certain it was the rattlesnakes, but mother thought it was the deer. When she found out it was the snakes, well, we didn't get a paddling, but we got a dressing down.

More Rattlesnakes

2007-12-31T13:13:00.000-08:00

Still Paiute Mountain, late Thirties, early Forties

We only met two rattlesnakes that were really mean. One of them, I don't know what had gotten into him. He was beside the road and something must have gotten him upset. We were walking beside the road minding our own business and he coiled up. Then he started to come towards us. We rarely used a gun for a snake. It was a waste of ammunition. We broke their backs with a stick and then cut off their heads with a knife. We all carried knives.

Another time a rattlesnake had been trying to eat something, trying to swallow it, and apparently it wasn't warm enough. A cold blooded animal's temperature depends upon ambient temperature, and they have to have a certain temperature to eat. You can't put something into a cold oven. Apparently this snake had swallowed it and threw it up, and he was really pissed. He came after us, so we did him in.

Usually the snakes tried to get away. Fritz stepped on one once. It started to rattle and then stopped, like it was embarrassed and shouldn't have done that. We used to tell visitors that the first person in line wakes the snake up, the second person makes it mad, and the third person gets bit. In all of our years up on Paiute, no one we knew, let alone us kids, ever got bit.

My wife, Joanne

2007-12-30T14:16:00.000-08:00

My wife, Joanne, had a very unusual girlhood. Her parents had a mining claim on Paiute Mountain, a primitive part of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains. The family hunted their dinners because you couldn't bring up everything you needed for a prolonged stay from town. She learned to handle a gun, to kill and dress out the local fauna and have them for dinner. It was an unconventional upbringing that she shared with her brother, Fritz, her sister, Audrey, and her cousin Beverly. I mention their names because they figure in the next few stories that I'm going to tell about her. These stories will be from her memoirs that she is dictating and I am editing.

Our modus operandi is simple. I mix us a couple of highballs and thrust a tape recorder in front of her and say, a la George Burns, "Tell me about your family, Joanne." This is her account of the California boa.

Paiute Mountain, California, late 1930s or early 1940s.

Sometimes we had some strange pets. We would pick up some creature, keep it for a while and turn it loose. There's an animal called the California rosy boa or the rubber boa. They're a little, tiny snake. Eighteen inches would be a big one. When they bend, their skin wrinkles like rubber. You don't always see them, but that summer we saw four or five of them. I picked up a rubber boa one day that was long enough, and wrapped it around my neck. This was just fine with the snake because it was warm. I wore the snake for two or three weeks, 'til the novelty wore off and everybody on the mountain was shocked. Then I turned it loose.

On rattlesnakes, same time, same place

Besides the animals we hunted for food, we dealt with a lot of rattlesnakes. When we first moved to French Gulch everyone called it Rattlesnake Gulch. Lots of rattlesnakes there. We were all fairly young. I was probably about five. Fritz would then have been ten and Audrey eleven. Our neighbors used to kid us. "You oughta eat them rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes are good food." Of course, not one of them had ever eaten a rattlesnake.

So, what did we know? We wanted to eat a rattlesnake. Mom was gone when we found a rattlesnake in the foundation of the cabin. We dragged it out and killed it and decided to eat it. Mom was raised in a finicky house, even though she was very open minded and we ate all kinds of things. But we knew she wouldn't really want to eat the snake. So we took action. We knew you were supposed to soak the snake in salt water, so we put it in a soup tureen filled with brine. It was a lovely tureen. It had a lid and everything. When Mama came home the four of us, Beverly, Audrey, Fritz and I, lined up and said, "Mama, we want to cook this."

We took the lid off the tureen and Mother said, "NO!"

We all cried in unison. It was well rehearsed. She finally said, "Oh, dammit, look, I'm going up on the hill. And don't tell me which pan you used." So we dried off the salt water, cut it up into two-inch sections, rolled it in egtg and flour and fried it. My siblings had me eat the first piece. Just in case. Being the youngest child, what did I know?

Ever after that we ate rattlesnakes, if they were fat. There are a lot of bones in a rattlesnake, and if it doesn't have meat on it, it's not worth the work. We became known for eating rattlesnakes, and in our wanderings over the mountains when we found a rattlesnake we killed it. Now I wouldn't do that. Kids do stupid things.

Snakes

2007-12-29T18:47:00.000-08:00

The first important thing to know about snakes is that they are not poisonous. Some of them are venemous, and that is sometimes inconvenient, but they are not poisonous. If you eat them, you will not die. If you don't know what you're eating, you may not even get sick.

Constrictors, especially, are good people. They eat rodents and keep rattlesnakes away. And bull snakes put on a great show.

Auburn, California, mid-1960s

I recall one bull snake in particular from when we lived in Auburn. We'd meet him from time to time on the dirt road leading into our "ranch" home. When we'd meet, he'd coil up and shake his tail just like the rattlers. But since he had no rattles, the effect wasn't quite the same. If you didn't run away when he shook his tail, he'd go over to plan B, roll over onto his back and drag his tongue in the dirt. Playing dead. If you turned him onto his belly, he'd flop right back over onto his back and drag his tongue in the dirt some more. Quite the little thespian. Big thespian, in fact, because he was a big snake.

One spring morning, Joanne, my wife, was returning from work in the afternoon. It was the first warm spring afternoon after a long dismal winter. She wore hose and heels, for such was the teacher costume in those days, and drove our 3/4-ton GMC pickup, the one with the dents and rust spots. And as she drove home she came across our friend the bull snake stretched out across the road. He reached almost from one side of the road to the other. Joanne stopped the truck, got out, and kicked the snake olut of the road with her pointy toed spike heeled shoes.

Next afternoon, same place, same snake, same truck, same woman. Same result.

But on the third afternoon when Joanne got out of the truck, the snake coiled and charged. If he could have talked, he would have said, "Not today, lady, godammit!" Joanne hastily leaped back into the cab of the pickup and the snake went victoriously into the tall grass by the side of the road. Bull snakes aren't venemous, but they have long, sharp dentures that would have certainly made some deep indentures into Joanne's leg.

Three Kinds of People

2007-12-21T14:11:00.000-08:00

Jean Meadowcroft, a friend of ours from the 1960s now living in San Diego County, wrote to me about the Rincon Indians and their 10-story hotel. I remember Rincon and Valley Center quite well. Those are my earliest memories. This was in the mid-1930s.

My father was one of those fortunate Americans who had a job. He drove a school bus on the Pala Rancheria. For a while we lived in Valley Center. I was about three.

Back then Valley Center was Old Man Mazzetti's gas station. No Indian Casinos or 10-story hotels then. His gas pumps had handles on them. Mr. Mazzetti hand pumped the exact amount of gas his customer wanted into the glass well on top of the pump, and then the gas drained by gravity into the customers car. Mr. Mazzetti also had a cold drink box. Nehi, R.C. Cola and Welch bottles hung suspended by their necks between bars. When you put in your nickel, an end bar would lift and you could slide your drink out. This was the Depression. When would I have a nickel for soda?

Old Man Mazzetti was responsible for one of my more memorable taste sensation. He offered me a chunk of his homemade salami and I bit into a whole black peppercorn. I thought I burned a hole in my tongue.

We had a cow. We had a cat who ate beans. One at a time. But only after chewing them well. It took her a long time to eat dinner. We had dogs and used to buy fried pig rinds, chicherones, for their dog food. Nowadays they sell them in teeny little celophane bags for guys to drink with their beer. I don't think they are a ladies' snack, but what would I know?

I recall playing in the front yard. I had a lathe in my hand, stabbing at the air, pretending it was a sword with which I was demolishing my enemies. My parents were sitting on the porch watching when suddenly my father leapt into the yard, grabbed my lathe and started whacking at the ground with it. He broke the stick, of course, but he also broke the back of the nearby coiled sidewinder.

I loudly lamented my broken lathe until my mother explained to me that my father had just saved my baby buns from being well and truly fanged. And the moral to this story is there are three kinds of people. Some people make things happen, like my father. Others watch them happen, like my mother. And then there are those who wonder what happened. Like me.