Two ravens make black X's in the sky; a horse is snoring. My head is filled with the pots-and-pans clapping-and-bolting gurgle of internal gossip, not about people but about the dogs and horses I've worked with and known. My current bout of what sheepherders used to call “people-phobia” should worry me, but it doesn't. I like a strong binge of socializing, followed by a few months of monastic quiet—as long as I can be with animals. My older sister reminds me of the nights she'd come home from parties to find the family dog neatly tucked under the covers, head on the pillow, while I slept on the floor.
Solitude becomes a reflex. Instead of calling friends when I'm lonely, I shy away from them. On the other hand, solitude is highly overrated. We've romanticized Thoreau's days on Walden Pond, forgetting that he ate with the Emersons most evenings. The famous “examined life” included dinners and intelligent conversation with extraordinary neighbors, and I admit, I long for that now. People who have lived where the winter weather is truly harsh—like the Arctic—know that solitude is anathema to mental health and is inevitably linked to suicide. I concur. But living with animals is something else again.
On the ranch where I lived, I'd lie in the snowfields with the cows at midday, leaning my head against their bulging, pregnant bodies. I'd search out coyote dens, sit above the entrance, and wait for the pups to wander out. There were colts and working dogs being born and growing up, and cougars and bears on the benchlands above the pastures. Then and now, I apprentice myself to birds and animals, spending days trying to learn the way they know about one another and about my state of mind. My dog Rusty knew when something was wrong during calving. One night he pawed at my arm during dinner until I followed him outside to a distant pasture where a cougar was crouched by the cows and young calves. The mother cows had formed a wall and were pacing back and forth between their calves and the cougar. I made a lot of noise and scared the cougar away. Other days, the “using horses,” as they are called, always seem to know what's up. “Hell, that horse knows you're coming out to the corral to catch him before you even get out of bed,” Ray Hunt, the horse trainer, said. But how?
Life with animals sponges up our human arrogance. We're not the only ones who “know,” and we're anything but alone. There's a great sensory mechanism at work in the world: millions of noses, eyes, and ears, and nonhuman howls, bugles, grunts, screams, and song.
I'm still grieving about a recent loss, and winter helps me with the job. My journal from September reads: “Facing the darkness, a hummingbird comes to visit because my dog has died.” Before the writing of this book was begun, Sam began faltering. We were making our daily hike following two string lakes in the mountains. He kicked up dust with wobbly legs. At the willow-choked stream that feeds the lake, he lay on green moss among wildflowers, one leg resting on glacial till, the other dipped into floury water. In those hours everything ticked—springs dripped, wind stirred dew inside the cups of harebells. Noctilucent clouds shone in the north. We walked home as the sun was setting.
Later, in the night, I lay on my sleeping bag and watched Sam breathing, knowing we wouldn't have too much more time together. I pondered all that he had tried to teach me: wild enthusiasm, rustic joy, easygoing love, and unconditional living.
We were living in our tent. Below, a well was being dug for my cabin, and Sammy, Gaby, and I went down to watch the activity. In one hour the derrick went up and the drill augured down. Jim, the driller, said, “We have to use a diamond bit to go through these erratics. The glaciers put a lot of rock down here, but they also left a lot of water.”
The drilling of the well was like running through pages in nature's book, each deposition, each shelf of rock, a turning page. Under the rolling shell-bed was a layer of loose-grained sand and gravel, then tight gravel, then more shells, then a gigantic “page” of granite.
Jim hit water at 150 feet, where it lay in horizontal bands between depositions, but he went deeper. What he was doing was bringing up the collapsed history of ice ages, and the warm, shallow seas that came before and after. The diamond bit went deep. Down there, Jim told me, are mountains and rivers, oceans and beaches, glaciers and fires. The water, when it came, was blue-gray and looked like flannel. It turned muddy, then gray-green. The flow lessened, then surged, and the water came clean. Sam, Gaby, and I lay on the excavated sand and drank from the pipe.
Our tent faced the mountains, its screened window a perfect triangle. Through it the moon was a half-eaten orange. My attention was fully focused on Sam; we were idle and together all day long. As a result, the world slowed as if Earth had paused in her massive rotation. Every tiny thing loomed large: flies coming to life in a sunny window and the ones on their backs, their legs wheeling as they died. The days were real, Sam was real, and his death would be real too.
It was August, and on a Friday a brutal wind blew all afternoon. I had offered to take a friend's mother to a luncheon on a remote ranch. When I returned, friends from California— Robin, Jim, and their son, Crister, were at my camp. But something was terribly wrong. They were crouching over Sam. He was having a grand mal seizure. He had lesions in his brain from being hit by lightning with me years earlier. Since then he had become prone to mild seizures. But this one had him thrashing, and it would not stop. By the time I found a vet, two hours had gone by.
He lay in a cage at the local clinic for six days. The seventh day, Gary came down from Montana to be with me. When we arrived at the clinic the next morning, I was shocked to see Sam sitting up. When I called out his name, he turned and looked at me. He'd been lying flat for six days; he'd been deaf for six months. Now, suddenly, unbelievably, he could move and hear.
At noon Gary and I put Sam in the clinic's outside pen to lie in the sun, then went to lunch. When we came back, Sam was walking around and sniffing. He heard us coming, turned and looked at us as if to say, get me the hell out of here. I called Brent, the vet, to come outside. He said he'd never seen a recovery like this before. He hugged me, he hugged Sam. The emergency passed; Gary returned to Montana.
Sam and I went home that night. He slept soundly on his bed next to mine. Part of the reason I'd opted to live in a tent was so we could be together at dog level, and the arrangement had pleased him. Three days passed. Sam wobbled and walked, lapped up the buffalo broth I made for him, sniffed flowers, and slept. I had to go away for a night and left Sam in the care of friends with whom he had often stayed. The next morning he crashed. I felt overwhelmed by guilt. I raced to the clinic where he'd been taken. For ten hours I sat with him. By evening he was dead.
My neighbors Rita and Jamie came for me. Rita drove my pickup, and I held Sam on my lap. I talked to him, draped over my knees, all the way home. Mark was at the cabin. When he saw Sam, he quietly grabbed a shovel. I hadn't thought where to bury him, but the moment we drove in, I knew. Across a swale from the cabin's south-facing window seat, there's an eight-foot-high boulder erratic, deposited there during the last ice age. The rock stands alone on a knob below a cirque of eleven-thousand-foot mountains. It's lion colored and dappled with lichen. A crease runs down the middle like Sam's furrowed brow.
Mark, Rita, Jaime, and I took turns digging Sam's grave. I held him for a long time, then wrapped him in his red blanket. He was still warm when I laid him in the earth. A small white rock, dug up from the well, marks his grave.