WINTER IN THE COUNTRY
This entry was posted on 1/28/2009 1:14 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
When the West Texas winter wind comes howling down out of the north, the temperatures can drop 50 degrees in a couple of hours.
This is especially true when we're having one of those roller-coaster winters like this one, where it can be 80 degrees one day and 20 the next, then back up in the 70's. We can get six or eight inches of snow in the morning that melts by afternoon.
Winters like that tend to be bone dry, and very difficult on animals and their human counterparts. Animals shed fur they'll need soon; birds hang around who should be migrating, and people complain of catching--and keeping--more cold and flu bugs.
Most everybody gets irritable.
In the country, we deal with those extremes with the same wary watchfulness that we apply to everything else. And by "country," I don't mean the kind of "country" where your nearest neighbor is a quarter-mile down the road, or you can get to a major metropolitan area after 15 minutes or so on the Interstate or a couple stops on the train.
I'm talking the kind of country where I live--a hundred miles from a mall; 20 miles from the nearest convenience store. We can't see any neighbors from our house and not because of privacy-trees. It's a mile and a half to the mailbox.
That's nothing compared to some I know. When we first got married, we lived on one of the huge sprawling cattle ranches that measure land by the square mile, not the acre.
I didn't know any of this, of course, when I got married. I grew up in Dallas and had never been ten feet from a cow. I'm told they took bets at the wedding, because nobody thought the city girl would last six months. That was almost 35 years ago.
Back when we had horses, if the troughs froze, we'd have to take an axe to them so the horses could drink. (First the axe to break the ice, then the shovel to toss the ice-chunks on the ground. Otherwise they'd refreeze.) Feed would have to be taken to the cattle by pickup-truck.
Our barns are empty now, which grieves me as much as the kids' empty bedrooms. But that doesn't mean a blue norther can't still bring it's own adventure.
My husband travels a great deal these days, which leaves me to cope. I've gotten pretty self-sufficient. I know to watch the wellhouse to make sure the water pipes don't freeze and take warm water out to the dogs until it gets bad enough to bring them into the mud room. If they'll stay. They take their Ranch Security jobs pretty seriously and don't like being shut in.
And I take some dry cat food out to the barn cats because I know the field rats are buttoned up as tight as anybody else and they'll be hungry. They appear out of nowhere like mythical creatures, blink their gratitude at me, but keep their distance, except for one I call Sweet Fluffy Kitty who is the family matriarch. She lets me pet her and signals to the others that our old dog, Bart, a 17-year old shepherd mix who follows on my heels, sniffing and wagging, won't hurt them.
Maggie, another shepherd mix who is three and much more energetic and aggressive, has been trained to keep her distance when I feed the barn cats. She sits and waits impatiently for me in the yard, dying to chase when she sees one dark feline body gallop from horse barn to hay barn for dinner, but she knows better and keeps her peace until I come out and tell her what a good girl she is.
She's pretty smart. If I only knew how to go about it, I'm convinced I could teach her to take the car to the mailbox for me every day.
The howling winds, grainy-hard sleet, and razor cold hit this old house like a freight train a couple days ago. The dogs remained on the front porch until dark, when they finally permitted me to gather up their homemade beds of memory-foam and folded blankets, their food and water dishes, and bring them into the relative shelter of our unheated mud room.
Maggie still spent some vigilance at the glass storm door, gazing out, ears perked. She knows that snow and ice bring unfriendly creatures nearer and nearer, and though she's been taught not to chase cats herself, she will defend them from predators to her last breath. After all, they're part of our pack.
The next morning I slipped and slid around the house with beds and food and dogs, back to the front porch. No matter how cold, they will not come indoors in daylight, unless there is a bad thunderstorm blowing in out of the west, which soaks the porch and them too.
Temperatures plummeted all day long and I fought a losing battle to keep this stone farmhouse warm. It was built in 1904 by a farmer's hands, a one-room home for his family of seven. As the years went on, more rooms were added. Plumbing came along in the 30's, a laundry room in the 50's. The walls and ceilings of each room in the house are solid wood--no sheetrock--which is good, but there's no insulation and the windows leak.
So you do what you can and bundle up. The joke is that we never have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning because the house has plenty of natural ventilation.
I spent part of my day trudging outside in waddling layers of clothing, taking care of animals, and was snuggled warm in my bed reading Washington Post and New York Times political articles I'd printed up when Maggie got to barking and wouldn't quit. It was late afternoon and the world was pearl-gray, every blade of grass and bough of tree coated in a sheath of ice. You could feel ice crystals in the air when you inhaled.
She kept running around the horse barn--I say "barn," but it's not like what you see in the movies. It's an open-air series of stalls built many years ago by my husband, with an enclosed saddle-house and enclosed area where the feed was kept. That area is littered now with unused lumber and ancient hay bales.
Maggie would set up a ferocious fit of barking, then give the house a significant glance, as if to say, Where ARE you???
So, heaving a heavy sigh, I struggled back into boots, scarf, gloves, coat, crooked my .410 shotgun over my elbow, stuck a shell or two in my pocket, and headed out to see what the fuss was all about.
Bart, who is now stone-deaf and half-blind, has come to depend heavily on his Second in Command for Ranch Security, so he'd hobbled out there with her and was hopping and whining in unison.
I crunched through the frozen grass, straddled a fence because I didn't want to bother with the gate, and joined the dogs, who'd gotten more frantic as soon as they saw me. Maggie lunged into the far corner of the last stall, sounding like Cujo.
This could not be good.
Craning my neck, I tried to call Maggie back but of course she ignored me. Once she's in full Protection Mode there's no stopping her. As I drew closer to the far corner, I could see that there was a creature back there, and I thought it was a possum because it had a narrow, gray face and long snout.
But as I got close enough to see, the first word that popped into my head was "dingo."
Of course, we don't have dingos in west Texas. We have coyotes and we have foxes, but this was neither.
It looked a bit like a miniature Greyhound, if there were such a dog, but I don't think there is. The closest I can come to a mental picture is the dog "Christmas" who belongs to the cartoon Simpsons.
But this dog or creature or whatever it was, was certainly the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever seen. It was starved completely down to bones, and all the fur had been completely scraped off one side. It was favoring a foot, as if it might be broken or hurt.
I've never seen a more terrified animal.
You always check for signs of rabies, of course, but there were none. It was not gnarling its teeth or growling. Its tail was completely tucked between its legs, its eyes wide with fright.
I took Maggie's collar and dragged her away and took both dogs back around the house to the front porch. I told Maggie that this was a poor starving creature who had come in out of the cold, and we were going to leave it alone.
Inside, I called my husband, and we agreed that, no matter what that animal might be, one thing was certain: it was starving. Neither of us could live with that.
So I took a couple of large Cool Whip bowls, filled one with water and one with dog food, and attempted to sneak back out to the barn. I was certain that the animal--who was so ugly I'd taken to calling it "Gollum"--would let me leave food and water for it.
But Maggie would have none of it.
I could hear her dog tags jingling as she dashed around the house, Bart hopping along in his Old Dog way behind, and followed me to the barn. Of course, when I tried to leave the food, she set up such a riot that it drove the poor creature to squeeze its body through a hole in the wall big enough for an armadillo but not big enough for it--hence the scraped-off fur.
Maggie chased it under the now un-used horse trailer and I called her off. We traipsed back around the house and back onto the front porch. I hoped the creature would make its way back to the barn and at least get some food and water.
Sleet and freezing rain slammed into the house not long after that, and this time the dogs did not object to my, once more, gathering up their things and lugging them around the house and into the mud room. (It would be much easier to just go through the house of course. Maggie understands that but Bart gets confused, poor dear. You have to lead him around and he will dutifully follow.)
Darkness came sooner than usual while the ice-storm clouds moved south of us, leaving the night-sky crystalline clear and frigid-cold.
I gave up trying to read and, bundled under the covers, was watching TV when Maggie set up the bark-bark-barkbarkbark alarm from the mud room. With a loud THUMP, she shoved open the storm door and vanished into the night.
Once again I stomped into boots, warm cap, gloves, blah blah blah, and set out after Maggie, standing in the open doorway with a spotlight. I didn't want her frightening that terrified creature but I didn't want coyotes to sneak up and grab one of the barn cats, either.
And then I heard it.
The loud, melodic cacophany of Sand Hill Cranes.
Apparently, they'd settled into one of our pastures for the night.
What were they doing here? They're supposed to migrate!
They must have been as confused by the off-and-on warm weather as everybody else.
I LOVE the Sand Hill Cranes and they've not come this close in some years.
Maggie, of course, did not know that. She took off running, straight into the pasture.
I took off after her.
Bart took off after me.
Much to my fury, the cranes flew away, mainly because I was yelling at Maggie not to frighten them, which, looking back, I now see as counter-productive.
Bart, confused once again, headed around the house, back to the front porch, where of course, there was no warm bed, no food, no water.
I slid along through icy grass after him and tried to get him to return with me for the warmth of the mud room, but he refused, splaying out his front legs, lowering his head, and crying.
It was 15 degrees.
I tried and tried to get that old dog. I even attempted to lift him in my arms, but he would not budge. He kept wandering over to his old water dish, which was full of ice and snow. (His new one was now in the mud room.)
Maggie came gallumphing back and of course I blamed her, yelling at her for scaring the birds and confusing Bart when, naturally, it was all my fault anyway.
Finally, exhausted, I gave up.
Trudged back to the mud room. Gathered up memory foam, blankets, food, water, and spotlight and struggled back around the house to the stupid front porch, where I set everything up for them and showed Bart where he could get a drink.
It was 15 degrees!
I was so worried about those stupid dogs, well, mainly Bart, because Maggie has some Husky in her and never really gets all that cold--but I barely slept. I was afraid I'd find him frozen to death or something.
It was 15 degrees! No biggie in North Dakota or Canada, I realize, but in Texas? That's cold! It was 80 degrees three days ago! Even the Sand Hill Cranes were mixed up.
Morning came. Bart and Maggie were romping in the snow and ice like they'd slept in a baby's warm bed instead of on a front porch in sub-freezing weather, which of course, made me the dumb-ass.
I should have paid more attention to the veterinarian-author James Herriott, who tended animals in Scotland during the Depression and always said, in his books like, All Things Bright and Beautiful, that animals always found ways to be warm, even if snow was their blanket.
Maggie saw me when I headed out to the horse barn. This time--remembering, no doubt, all that yelling from the night before--she waited for me in the back yard while I went to check on poor Gollum.
But he was gone.
Some of the food had been eaten, but there was no way to know if some other wild creature had found it. It's more likely that he'd been too afraid to return to the barn.
I wandered around behind the barn and out by the horse trailer, but saw no sign of the animal. At least I didn't find the poor thing frozen to death.
Maybe it did come back, ate a few bites, then, fearing the Wrath of Maggie, slipped out at dawn in search of a better home. I prefer to think of it that way.
Was it a dog, abandoned by the kinds of coward-morons who think that if they dump out their unwanted dogs by the side of a country road, that they will miraculously find loving homes?
Was it a coyote? It didn't look like one.
It didn't look much like anything, really.
And that is one of the sad realities of the wild. Animals die. They starve or get hurt or whatever. We who live among them do what we can to be merciful, but there are not always happy endings.
The chicken scratch I'd scattered for the wild birds and the quail was iced over, so I filled up a bucket and put out some more. I saw the bright red flash of a cardinal as sunlight sparkled off the prisms of ice. Sweet Fluffy Kitty sat up on top of an old pickup truck in front of the barn like the Queen of Sheba and watched as Bart and Maggie darted around investigating scents.
And then came the gentle warbling sound of the Sand Hill Cranes nearby after all, once again, their soft call floating on the morning air like the sound of Peace.
Somewhat of a happy ending, after all.
