Kathleen Clary Miller has written 300+ columns and stories for periodicals both local and national, and has authored three books (www.amazon.com/author/millerkathleenclary). She lives in the woods of the Ninemile Valley, thirty miles west of Missoula.
Soon after moving to and meeting new neighbors in Montana, I was politely asked if I would be interested in caring for their animals while they traveled. My Southern California upbringing had taken me as far as a dog, a parakeet, and those little turtles that swim through elaborate structures plopped into a plastic habitat. I’d scooped kibble and sprinkled fish flakes, and despite the motherly instinct that relishes in a child’s eating having kicked in at age ten, and having consequently amply overfed them more than once, they managed to survive.
Nestled in the Ninemile Valley, there is no lack of wildlife. Deer lounge lazily on our patch of grass and act as nature’s gardeners as they trim low branches from trees and shrubs. Spotted fawns are introduced into the world three feet from my bedroom window; I crouch and peer over the low sill to ogle them taking wobbly first steps. Mind you, no one mentioned these bucolic creatures were also the source of startling hisses from within the trees—I still jump whenever ambushed by their “keep out” warning while out for an otherwise peaceful stroll.
Bears have more than once dragged our sturdy trashcan into the woods so far that my husband and I play “Where’s Waldo?” as we search for what we know we should recognize but cannot spot for the life of us. Occasionally we glimpse a bobcat or a fox streaking by on the game trail behind our back patio, and once while my husband was away a brazen Tom turkey strutted right up to the back window and pecked obsessively until I sent an email to my PhD Zoologist friend who informed me in short order, “He wants to have sex with you!” Thank God for glass.
Animal life is part of the everyday scene here, but to date it had been “Look; don’t touch.” We’d hearkened to what residents affectionately call “our elk herd” bugling at dawn. Coyotes circled their prey and howled like banshees long after we were cozily under the covers at night.
My only hands-on contact with anything that breathes other than my husband had involved the discarding of dead mice; I’d finally reached the point where I could deal with the pesky invaders. After steeling myself to keep from flinching, I could ease back the spring bar to set traps. In fact, when it came to ensnaring them I’d turned the corner from disgust to determination. Heady with the thrill of the hunt, now whenever I heard that satisfying snap I did a pump fist and woke our dead-to-the-world dog (It’s amazing he isn’t really dead since for the first year of his life I neglected to wear my glasses and filled the kibble cup with what turned out to be twice his daily requirement). I hooted and hollered in a celebratory dance like a rookie tight end who has just completed the tie-breaking overtime touchdown. Still unfulfilled, however, was my “Big Valley” daydream—the one I’d engaged in ever since the onset of the TV series wherein I feed and groom the horses, herd milk cows to the barn, and sprinkle chicken feed on the good earth.
What a stroke of luck to have it laid before me! I could look in on two llamas, two steers, a horse, three rabbits, and an assortment of chickens, the perk being not only my anticipated sense of rancher pride but fresh eggs for the taking.
Picture my hopped-up-on-farm-girl-fantasy about to become reality—the key word being “reality.”
After embracing my mission, I found myself behind a sliding (so surprisingly heavy!) barn door with seconds to spare as two exceedingly large, snorting cows rapidly approached from the pasture. I’d been instructed by neighbor Jim to “get ‘er done” before they hemmed me in like kicking bullies. I should quickly heave a brick of hay to the horse, climb a corral fence to access rabbits, and lift the door to the chicken coop to gather eggs. Could I wade through the quicksand muck quickly enough to cross a barn, pocket eggs, hurdle the rabbit fence and get back before the heavy snorting I already heard (from something other than me) was upon me? It had seemed so easy when Jim was showing me.
Fortunately barns are not equipped with closed circuit cameras. Unrecorded is me taking off as if I were sprinting from bull horns in the streets of Pamplona. I hurl hay to the horse, entirely missing the container for it (whatever that’s called), pivot, snatch four eggs, pivot, scale the rabbit fence to dump food and slosh water, then tromp back through the barn, my upper body so far ahead of my lower slowed by sludge that I nearly fall flat on my face in every manner of manure. This animal-minding business is a minefield.
In the nick of time. Just as I clear the barn door big bull bodies (named Cow and Boy) clash and clamor at my heels. These guys didn’t look so large on television!
When I turned towards the safety of my car, my little handled egg-bag in hand, two large llama faces were nose to nose with me, their hot, bad breath steamed my glasses, and the scream that emanated from my mouth as they simultaneously spit at me was surely heard from the Ninemile Valley over the Reservation Divide and into Idaho. Osama and Bin Llama (Jim possesses a particular sense of humor when naming his livestock) are looking for their pellets. I fumbled for the scoop alongside the barn and backhanded its contents with every once of strength I had.
Day two I was prepared, but this time when I reached into the hen house I felt feathers (how odd!) and extracted bloodied fingers. Whoa. Cow and Boy were galloping from farther afield, so I risked life and limb to take a gander, and discovered a hen that was suffering some sort of uterine prolapse—not that I pretend to know the location of a hen uterus or if theirs actually prolapse. I had a friend who once experienced this medical horror, and no matter how hard I tried to dissuade her from doing so described it to me. What I saw matched the grim details that I had desperately tried not to hear her elaborate. Whatever it was, the bird was not only dying, but to add insult to injury her girlfriends were pecking at her like Alfred Hitchcock’s crows. Women really are tough on each other. I gathered my wits and asked myself, What Barbara Stanwyck do?
Call Jim’s cell phone. He took the news in stride and without pause told me he would send someone to “kill the chicken and get rid of the body.” This nightmare read more like “The Godfather” than “Bonanza.”
The next time they went away and solicited my services one of the rabbits wouldn’t eat or drink. It turned its back on me as I begged and pleaded with it to “just live one more day until your parents get home!” Two days later, sure enough the rabbit died.
“I’m cursed!” I whined, thinking it might be in both man and beasts’ best interest to fire me from any future favor. After all, Jim and Sue reassured me it was nature’s way and all part of the circle of life; not to worry.
I thanked them for the eggs and then asked, by the way… what was the “crusty stuff” all over the shell? These eggshells certainly appeared unlike the polished-to- gleaming ones from my childhood, delivered to the pantry door by Arden Dairy in Pasadena, California. Even organic eggs from the Good Food Store here in Missoula didn’t have scabby spots on them.
“Eggs come out of the same hole as everything else,” Sue informed me, I having eaten several after a brisk rinse, sans scrubbing.
I use a brush and vinegar now whenever I clean Jim’s eggs—a ritual I don’t perform as often after requesting that I be bumped to the bottom of the caretakers list when Osama journeyed to llama heaven shortly after I’d been on call (Did I reach for the wrong pellets?). Now I am relieved to be called upon only out of sheer desperation when local experts aren’t available, like Nathan down the road who owns horses, Ellen who feeds every life form that wanders up her driveway including wild rabbits, and in the event that some terminally ill creature requires humanitarian intervention, Walter, the chicken killer.
This frees me up to offer my services to anyone in the neighborhood with turtles.