Call me Katt. My mother did.
I am Rusty and Chastity Mender’s boy. This is my thesis. It will be bound in a light blue cover, with glow-in-the-dark star stickers gracing the cover added by my sister Wynona. For such I promised her she could do and I always keep my promises.
My thesis committee suggested that I give some personal details about my life to help the future reader get to know a bit about me. Not that I matter. It’s just good to know the sources of things sometimes.
It is getting dark now and I’ve just lit the lantern. I’ll start the generator in a bit. The sheep I’m tending are nearby up on the eastern flank of Waas, in the La Sal Mountains of southeastern Utah. I’m watching them for a month so the herders can take a short vacation back to Bolivia. My dad likes me to touch base with our family’s roots and spend some time doing what Menders have always done for near 150 years—ranch sheep.
It is early fall. Elk are whistling their breeding status nearby. Just for fun I go out on the front steps of the round sheepherder’s trailer and slip a plate call into my mouth and imitate their voice. I sound out long and loud like a lusty male. One ready to breed and fight. The two go hand in hand often enough and I get a lively response so press the matter on. Even though there is still a glow in the west, it’s getting dark. I sit down on the top step and watch as the first stars of Cassiopeia appear above the hills to the northeast. The male is rubbing his horns through the branches. It is near. I walk down to the bottom of the steps and pick up a small aspen branch loaded with terminal twigs. One left over from a dead tree I chopped up for firewood earlier today. I rub it up and down the steps, feigning the action of a male elk making a challenge by worrying a low-branched tree with his antlers. The bugling male explodes into the meadow, nostrils flaring, looking fierce and undaunted. I let out a whistle long and loud.
Stanislaw has seen it too and rises up. He’s a big white Maremma, fierce as a demon. With me he watches the rutting male. Even with my poor human olfactory equipment the musky scent is virile and overpowering. The dog’s hair is rising, but he doesn’t bark. We are both awed. The monster feigns a strike at an imaginary foe, his antlers dipping up and down in the air. He is powerful and wants to show he means business. What female would not be impressed? The elk bugles, its body tight, head tilted toward the mountaintops. I thrill to the sound. The reverent stillness that follows could not be captured by a thousand poems. The silence lasts for only a second before Stanislaw barks and rushes forward. There is the crash and rush of vegetation as the beast flees into the stand and then all is quiet again. The dog does not chase it long before he returns and plops down in his usual place near me. We sit together in silence.
Saturn is fully disclosed now sitting above the shadow of the La Sals and the Milky Way is starting to Cheshire Cat its way into the blackening sky. I go around to the other side of the trailer and start the generator. It kicks up with a single pull and the air fills with the smell of gas exhaust. I enter the trailer. Close the door and boot up my Mac. I pull up some videos on the elk rut and learn some things I didn’t know. On YouTube I watch a bow hunter take a big one down near Medicine Bow National Forest in southern Wyoming. The man in the video is shaking as he approaches the beast. He says over and over, “Shit. Did you see that? Right through the heart! Right through the heart.”
It’s later now and I pull down my copy of Red Dog Flying by Gilda Trillim. It was written within about thirty miles from here in a cabin on the Utah side of Buckeye Reservoir. I am supposed to write a small article about Trillim for the Association of Mormon Letters by tomorrow. She is the subject of this master’s thesis. I’m working on my degree in Literature. I’m doing it online from the Mervin Peake Online University of the Arts and Sciences. It’s not yet accredited, but they expect it to be such soon and are much cheaper than most schools. They were kind enough to accept me even though my bachelor’s degree was not distinguished in any sense and I’d flunked out of another master’s program.
I pull down a large milk crate heavy with file folders and place it on the floor. My thesis is a compilation of Gilda Trillim sources. I’m trying to ferret out whether Trillim was a mystic, a fraud, or a madwoman. I can let it slip now that I can’t tell. But hopefully I’ll shed a little light on the unanswered question that will ease someone else’s path when they are trying to do the same at some future time.
My background for this? I decided to turn away from Philosophy at Brigham Young University when some of my favorite professors fled for greener pastures, those perhaps where philosophy was more appreciated. I finished my degree in English. I was never a good student because I struggle with tests as they make me anxious and jittery, and I can’t spell worth a damn, so I squeaked by with many ‘Cs’ a few ‘Ds’ and graduated with only a 2.1 GPA. Be that as it may, toward the end of my program, I felt a call to study God. After graduating from BYU I went three years to Claremont’s theology school, but was forced to leave after I flunked my prelims twice. I have terrible immediate recall and when people are staring at me expecting me to answer questions, I look as hollowed-eyed as a grazing ewe. If there is any pressure at all I slip completely away from coherence and appear even less insightful than a hunk of mutton on the hoof. It is hard to grow up among sheep and not to pick up some of their ways I fear. After my disgrace in California, I turned back to literature after being inspired by a friend of my Mom’s cousin—we call him HT. He was strange, but they say you could sense something deep in his heart. Plus, he wanted to make something of himself. Like me.
My mother introduced me to the subject of this thesis when she furnished me with several Trillim novels to read while up here on the mountain. They are odd, but of such a strangeness that suits well the long, lonely nights in the upper reaches of the La Sals. They left me pondering for days and I decided that I needed to bring these to the attention of others. Those who have time not only to read, but to stretch their minds to the distant stars set bright in cold mountain air. So for my thesis I decided to do a source biography on Gilda Trillim.
There are many I would like to thank for help on completing this thesis. First my advisors, Mary Locken whose passion for all things Gilda Trillim has been an inspiration to me. She first agreed to assist me studying Trillim’s work when she found that, not only had I read a fair amount of the writer, but like the author, I was a Mormon, and that I had spent a significant amount of time in the La Sals—the same place that Trillim spent her final years before her death in Thailand in 1996. Dr. Locken was endlessly encouraging and assisted warmly in my efforts to bring this group of interesting documents to light. The other members of my committee, Lenoir Forb and Ravenstar ‘Gerald’ Nightingale, were also of great help in completing this work.
My father Roy Mender, or Rusty as he was known around the bunkhouse, paid for trips far and wide to follow the twists and turns of Gilda’s life and allowed me to visit many of the Trillim Archives around the world including Russia, China, and Ethiopia. After reading Dark Leaves in Winter, he believes he was visited by Gilda’s spirit in a dream. She commanded him to fund my studies of her life. He has never looked back from the requirements imposed by that vision, including selling two hundred acres of good grazing land to see it through. I am grateful also for his love and encouragement in believing in me. My mother, Chastity Mender, has never doubted me. For that I’m most grateful of all.