Saving Simon (4 page)

I got some greatest hits albums—she especially loved “Good Hearted Woman,” “Momma, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

Those hours in the barn became special to both of us. She would listen to Willie Nelson, who would put her into a mellow and dreamy state, and I would chew my granola bar—I thought we should be eating oats together—and those sessions became sweet, calm, and healing for both of us.

Carol grew stronger and heartier, and I think she looked forward to our evenings as much as I did. Donkey bonding, I guess you’d call it. After a while, I began talking to her, and she seemed to be listening to me.

I came to admire Carol for her integrity, her independence, and, eventually, the affection she would show me, leaning against me, letting me brush and stroke her forehead. Carol started to matter to me. She wasn’t just an animal I was taking care of; we had connected in a deep way—a way I had not experienced before. It was different from what I’d had with dogs or other pets. It felt like something old, almost mystical.

A few months after Carol came to my farm, I got a telephone call from a woman who said she had driven by the farm and observed Carol. She wanted to tell me, she said, that Carol was troubled. That she did not know she was a donkey; she was not in touch with her “donkeyness.” This was a bit of a shock to me. It was not something I had thought much about, yet it did click. Carol had spent most of her life alone in that farm corral in Pennsylvania. She may not have ever seen another donkey.

Who, I asked the woman, might you be?

“I am a Jewish donkey spiritualist,” said the woman, introducing her self as Pat Freund. She bred and raised donkeys on her farm nearby and she suggested that I come and see them, and perhaps take one home to keep Carol company. They were herd animals, she said. They needed to be with other donkeys.

Pat came to the farm, and she was everything she said she was. She and Carol touched heads and communicated with each other. I visited Pat’s farm and went into her barn, which was filled with beautiful donkeys of all ages, gliding around me.

A few days later, Fanny arrived, and Carol flipped out, going into the barn for a week and refusing to come out, although she still ate her bucket of grain and listened to Willie Nelson at night with me.

She was clearly rattled. When she did come out, she was different.

She had, in fact, come to terms with her “donkeyness.” You could see it. She and Fanny were inseparable from that moment, always within a few feet of each other. Carol now knew who she was. She was a donkey.

Although Fanny didn’t seem to get Willie Nelson, she was happy to join our evenings, eating some grain alongside Carol while I tended to the old donkey’s wounds and cranked up “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

A few months after Fanny arrived, Pat Freund called to tell me that Fanny’s sister was for sale, and Lulu came to the farm. My donkeys became a happy threesome.

That winter, I saw Lulu and Fanny standing alone by the big barn. They looked agitated, and I looked around for Carol. I found her up in the pole barn. She seemed dazed, walking in circles and bumping her head on the barn’s wooden sides. The vet came and said she had had a stroke. Carol legs had been weakening lately and now it was hard for her to stand.

For most animal lovers, especially people with pets, compassion means keeping animals alive, going into debt sometimes, taking every step, making every commitment to extend life. This is, to many, the very definition of love.

I turned to the large-animal vet when he examined Carol, and I asked what would be the most compassionate thing to do. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Oh,” he said, “that is pretty simple. We should put her down.”

Simple? Nothing about compassion is simple in our world, especially the idea that ending a life can be more merciful than prolonging it. But I agreed. I didn’t need any further discussion.

I was glad to have given Carol a few great years. She loved her life on the farm, especially the green grass in the summer and fresh hay in the winter. As her body lay by the pasture gate, Lulu and Fanny came over to sniff her, and I played Willie on the boom box singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

It was raining that day, and I did a good bit of crying in the rain myself. But my life with donkeys was under way.

TWO
 

On a warm spring
Sunday in April 2011, the battered trailer bringing Simon to Bedlam Farm backed up our steep driveway. Jessica Barrett, the animal control officer, and her husband, Chris, got out and we agreed to place Simon by himself in the rear pasture behind the big barn. Their daughter McKenzie, who had helped pull Simon back to life, was there also. She had bonded with Simon at their farm. When they let him out of the trailer, Simon could not take his eyes off McKenzie; it was as if she was the only thing his battered instincts could focus on.

He followed her around the pasture, although he hobbled every step of the way and seemed disoriented. Jessica said she could not imagine the pain he was in.

We knew we had to keep Simon away from the other donkeys. These animals can be gentle, but they can also be mean-spirited, ungenerous, and less than gracious when it comes to making room for strangers or sharing their food. Equines often
greet new members of a herd with kicks and bites, and Simon could not have withstood any of that.

Simon was also a male, and I knew from my time on the farm that males behaved differently from females, and females behaved differently around them.

I knew there would eventually be some considerable butting and kicking and jockeying, even though Simon was a gelded male. But at this point, he was far too weak to engage in animal politics—a sharp kick or head butt or bite could have killed him.

Lulu and Fanny were inseparable and peaceable, but it would take a while before they got used to sharing their food, treats, pasture, and humans. They were also wise to the ways of trailers. Donkeys do not like to go places in moving vehicles—it rarely leads to good things for them—and so they stood well up the hill watching.

Even though I had seen Simon the day before, I was once again shocked by his blackened skin, his twisted legs, his clouded eyes and emaciated legs and ribs. As a former police reporter, I have a good idea of what humans are capable of, but the sight of Simon drove it home in a painfully direct way. He made me want to cry for all of us.

I felt somehow connected to Simon’s experience of aloneness and confusion, of fear and discomfort. I had spent a lot of my life that way. I seemed to know where Simon hurt, and I seemed to know what he needed—how to make him feel better.

My wife, Maria, and I took turns giving him medications, cleaning him, feeding him, administering his painkillers, and applying his potions and creams. But she was not as affected by him as I was, nor was he as connected to her. Something in me connected with something in him, but it was something I could
not yet define. It wasn’t an intellectual reaction; it was an emotional one. I knew I had to bring him back, heal him, to reaffirm the better parts of being human.

The rear pasture was about seven acres and had the lushest, greenest grass on the farm. There was a covered hay feeder near the gate that provided shelter for the hay during rain and snow, as well as shade for the animals. A one-acre corral surrounded the feeder and sealed the area off from the larger pasture. I used it for lambing. There was a large door leading to the big barn where Simon could go to get away from the flies, if there was a lot of rain and mud, or if he got too hot and wanted to cool off.

He was too weak to mount much of a defense against the voracious horseflies that torment livestock in the summer. We were concerned that flies and maggots could get into his wounds and sores. He was weak, and the vet said he had little or no resistance to bacteria and infection. It would take weeks, even months, to build up his immune system.

So Simon needed to have plenty of shelter, and to have his wounds checked several times a day. We bought gallons of thick black balm to keep insects off of him, and tubes of antibiotics. We had to be careful about feeding him. Like humans who have been starved or malnourished, he couldn’t handle a rich, full diet. I’d have to hand-feed hay to him until we could trust him to eat what he chose.

On that first morning, it took Simon a long time to walk the fifteen yards or so to the covered hay feeder and then, spent, he collapsed on the ground. Jessica, Chris, and McKenzie said good-bye, handed me a bucket of salves and other medications,
and left. They would come back in a few weeks, they said, with some adoption papers if we decided to keep him.

I think Simon decided from the first that he would live. It’s what donkeys do: endure hard times and keep going. That is surely their history. My first days with Simon are a blur. Maria and I moved back and forth from the house to the barn all day, ferrying water, medicines, hay, carrots, apples, oat cookies, balms and salves, anti-fly sprays and ointments.

It turned out that our farrier, Ken Norman, a big, gruff, profoundly gentle man, had gone to Jessica Barrett’s farm to work on Simon’s hooves when he was first taken out of his pen. He said it was one of the worst things he had ever seen done to an animal—that the hooves had grown out nearly a foot on either side and that Simon was walking on his ankles.

Ken came by to check on Simon, and to trim his hooves a little further—Simon was too beat up to endure much more work at the moment. I was told his legs would never be straight, and walking might always be painful. But he was a good boy, Ken said, and he wanted to live.

In those first few days, I wasn’t sure he would. Simon was usually lying down under the covered hay feeder when Maria and I came out. He was gentle and trusting. He did not resist the many ointments, pills, and salves we tormented him with for days and weeks. We had to make sure the flies stayed off him, that the wounds healed without infection, and that he had soft food that wouldn’t challenge his healing gums. Many of his teeth had literally grown into his jaw, he had been lying on his side for so long, and they had been removed. He had most of his front teeth, but chewing was difficult for him, and still painful.

Since walking was also difficult, I pulled up fresh grass and piled it next to him, and brought him some hay from the bales in the barn. He had terrible diarrhea those first few days, and the evidence of that was all around the feeder.

Simon watched me closely; his big brown eyes were always on me. How could I help him, I wondered. What did he need?

I’ve lived with animals for years, seen them born and die, get sick and heal, get sick and die. I have always kept some distance from the animal rescue culture. I resist seeing animals as piteous and abused creatures—it is a prism that is too narrow for me. But I had never seen anything quite like Simon, an animal in such extreme distress and suffering. I felt it rearrange my heart, penetrate it, unleash old anger, hurt, fear.

I think part of my problem with the rescue culture is that I don’t like to see myself as piteous and abused, either, and yet to a large extent, I was, and I had been working to heal those wounds my entire life, and to move beyond them.

And here those wounds were right in front of me, lying on the ground, needing me to rub all kinds of pastes and oils and balms on them, to massage them, knead them, inspect them. It was a shockingly intimate experience for me, and it engaged the deepest and most private and painful parts of me. Simon made me see myself in a jarring, intensely emotional way.

I felt an enormous pull to bring this animal back to life. We would not lose this one. This creature would not be sacrificed to the inexplicable inhumanity and cruelty of human beings.

There is something about the mistreatment of children and of animals—helpless beings, in so many ways—that stands out in the spectrum of human failings.

Lying down on the ground, in the mud, in the waste and vomit that spewed out of Simon, hand-feeding him hay, gagging on the smell and maggots, fending off the savage horseflies, I felt right away that I was knee-deep, not only in the broken and open wounds of Simon, but of me.

Something about the way Simon looked at me, the intense focus of those big brown eyes, spoke to me. There was trust in that look, and great interest. Perhaps not affection, not yet. I was too new and strange for him, and he was too disabled and stunned. But a part of each of us had found the other.

If I could help Simon heal, maybe he could help heal me. A grand bargain.

The second night Simon was with us, I thought back to Carol and how much she had seemed to love listening to Willie Nelson with me. Donkeys, I had seen, need people in much the same way dogs do. They have been living with people for so many thousands of years. Whenever a donkey meets a human, they first look for some food—an offering or tribute, a cookie, a carrot, or an apple.

But then, satisfied with their deal, rewarded for their time, they always—always—offer something back. They press themselves against you and allow themselves to be touched, brushed, even kissed on the nose.