Saving Simon (7 page)

Cindy and Sean were shocked and shaken. I knew how
hard it was to find another home for an animal you cared about; you always worried about how they were doing. It seemed a leap of faith under the best of circumstances, and I understood that Jim had done the best he could under the worst of circumstances. There aren’t a lot of places to send an animal like a donkey, especially not in hard times, when people were abandoning donkeys and other animals all over the country.

They peppered me with questions about Simon—how was he doing, how much space did I have? They asked if they could come and see him; they were so grateful he was at my farm. They wondered what had become of the horses.

Cindy told me that Simon had come to their farm a couple of years before Sean was born. They had bought him for their daughter, who was now a web designer in Boston, but he had become Sean’s donkey. He had been named for her grandfather, who emigrated from Ireland. The whole family loved Aengus; he used to bray at them all day from his pasture right behind the house.

Sean had ridden Aengus when he was little, and they walked all over the farm together. Sometimes, in the summer, said Sean, he would sleep out in the barn with Aengus and then they would walk out in the woods behind the farmhouse. Aengus was good on a halter, he said. He loved to walk around the woods, nibbling on leaves and underbrush.

Cindy made me a cup of tea, and I told them about our plans for Simon, our commitment to healing him. I didn’t want to stay too long. I imagined this wasn’t pleasant for them.

Cindy’s eyes were moist as she walked me to the door. Sean, quiet, had gone back to his video game. “He and that donkey were together their whole lives,” she said. “It was just
awful when the trailer came for Aengus. Sean said he wanted to be there, so we agreed. Maybe that was a mistake. It was awful, Aengus—Simon—just bucked and kicked and screamed when we put him on the trailer. He knew what was happening, and Sean just stood there hugging him and crying. What could we do? We couldn’t afford to feed him and we weren’t going to starve him.” Maybe, she said, it would be good for Sean to see him again. She’d talk to Jim about it. Maybe it would be upsetting for both of them. It was, she said, the toughest thing she ever had to do. Aengus was like a member of the family; he did everything but come into the house for dinner. They all loved him.

She thanked me for coming. They would follow Simon’s progress on the website. She took my number and said they would call me about a visit. She said I should call if there was anything they could do.

I said my good-byes. Sometimes, I just know I will not see certain people again, and that was the case with Cindy and Sean. As much as they loved him, I didn’t think they could bear to have Simon in their lives anymore. He was in the past for them, and they knew he was all right now.

It was an important trip for me. It broke my heart to imagine the wrench for Simon and this family when they had to give up their farm and let him go. It also helped explain how loving and trusting Simon was, and why he loved children so much.

Beyond that, it showed me that some people had a boundary when it came to compassion, especially for animals. They loved having a donkey, they loved Simon, they hated to lose him. But that was a chapter in their lives. There was a point where they simply had had to let go; they had to
take care of themselves and their own lives. That was a kind of compassion, too, a kind of perspective.

I saw that I needed to understand what had happened to Simon. I needed to put the whole story together, not really for him—he was in good hands now—but because there was something inside of me that I had to come to see and know.

It seemed that Simon’s life bore out the drama of the donkey. Loved, worked, used, and discarded. He had endured and been reborn into another life.

FIVE
 

Simon came to life
in stages, slowly, unfurling like one of those slow-motion videos of buds opening in the spring. When I looked at him each morning, I couldn’t see too much difference. If I looked at a photo or video from the previous week, though, his progress was astounding.

It is always miraculous to watch the way animals heal. They have no therapy, no machines, no expensive procedures, yet their bodies can heal themselves in the most astonishing ways.

Perhaps it is because they are not aware of their suffering. They don’t know—as humans do—how bad off they are, how much they are struggling or hurting. They feel pain and discomfort, but they don’t dwell there. For Simon, I always thought, pain was a feeling, just like feeling strong or well. A space to cross, something to accept and endure.

Donkeys are obsessively ritualistic. They do the same things in the same way every day. There were already two trails crisscrossing Simon’s small corral, where he walked on the same path
each day, and he could still barely walk at all. He made his rounds in the corral, to the bush on the right, the downed limb on the left, the grass on the other side.

This seemed to me a miraculous demonstration of his will to live and the healing power of the natural world. Just a few weeks earlier, we had considered putting him down as an act of compassion. Now, we could hardly wait to get out to the barn to see him get healthy. And mercy meant something different.

I still couldn’t get the neglectful farmer out of my head. What was mercy for him? What was he owed? We could arrest him, trash him on the Internet, make him pay a $125 fine, but I was drawn to the murky questions that no one had answered.

What is a donkey’s life worth to humans? Is it more than a traffic ticket? Less? Was there any good reason to neglect an animal like this? Any good excuse? If we owed Simon a better life, do we owe the farmer any consideration? Even to the extent of wondering what could have driven a man who lived with animals to such neglect?

As always with animal issues, I was reminded that Simon was not part of the discussion. The fate of almost all donkeys and many animals lies in human hands, and donkeys have been making their way in the world for a very long time. Simon didn’t ask to go to his new farm, didn’t ask to be rescued, didn’t consent to be adopted by me.

Perhaps that’s what makes our decisions about animals so intense, so laden, so filled with anger and conflict. The decisions are all ours. All Simon did was to heal, yet that was the most important thing.

Day by day, his eyes cleared, the cloudiness and infection moving out. He was able to see.

His ribs were not sticking out any longer, his stomach was beginning to fill out, and he did not look emaciated.

The fur on his blackened ears began to come in, as well as the fur on his shoulders and back.

The sores on his back healed.

The swelling in his jaw decreased, enabling him to chew normally.

His newly trimmed hooves gave him a solid footing, and he was walking with confidence again.

One morning in early summer I opened the back door, and I heard a loud and piercing sound echoing off the barns. It sounded like a trumpeting elephant. Rose barked and I froze.

I looked over to the pasture, and there was Simon, standing by his hay feeder, his big head sticking out, his ears back, releasing a window-shattering bray at the sight of me.

It was a beautiful sound. I ran back into the house and grabbed my video camera. He was still going by the time I returned. Clearly, his throat and lungs had recovered. His bray was not exactly musical—it was loud and up and down, back and forth, full of wheezes, coughs, and off-key notes.

Maria came running out. Simon was still braying, and she and I broke into applause. I put the first video up on YouTube, and people loved it. After a few brays, I told Maria “It’s the call to life,” and I started posting it in the mornings, to start my day. Simon’s bray became an affirmation, for me and for many other people.

There was something both joyous and defiant about the sound. This battered creature who was just learning to walk again seemed to be reminding me to value life, to use my time well, to face adversity with strength and grace.

It seemed that Simon had won a mighty victory that day, and he was sharing it with me. It was hardly lyrical, but it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard. I sometimes cried when I heard it, though more often I laughed.

The day that Simon first brayed, I decided to go on a short walk with him, out of his small corral and into the larger pasture beyond. There was tall grass there, a couple of apple trees, fallen limbs, and brush that ran along the road. The pasture sloped up a hillside, and was perfect grazing ground for donkeys.

Lulu and Fanny were still in the smaller pasture behind the farmhouse. It was much too soon to put all three donkeys together. Simon was still too frail to risk getting kicked or chased. And Lulu and Fanny were the royalty of the farm—imperious, coddled, and entitled. We had been warned that Simon would get a skeptical reception from these two strong and powerful sisters. They had had a very different life from Simon’s, bred on a well-run donkey farm, given fresh hay and cookies and shelter and pastures to roam every day of their lives.

After lunch, I put a couple of apples in my pocket and opened the gate to Simon’s pasture. He was so much better, but his fur was still raggedy and he was shaky if the ground was uneven. The farrier said his legs would hurt for a long time, and we had to be careful not to overdo his exercise. I walked into the pasture and stopped to say hello to Simon—his ears were up and he was watching me closely.

I patted him on the shoulders, said good afternoon, and then walked over to the corral gate, opened it, and stood on the other side. I’ve learned something about how to communicate with donkeys, and there is no equivalent for donkeys of the “come” command that trained dogs love to respond to. In fact, there is no command at all that works for the donkeys I have known. They are agreeable creatures, but they do not like being told what to do, and if you show that you really want them to do something that doesn’t involve food, you may be standing out in the sun for a long time.

The downfall of the donkey, his Achilles’ heel, is curiosity. They are intelligent creatures, fascinated by every movement or sound. If you put a watering can in the pasture and it wasn’t there the night before, each donkey will notice it immediately, approach it, and sniff it. They can’t help it. They have to know what is going on. Carol taught me that the best trick to get donkeys to do something—the only trick that works—is to make them curious and they will come.

I didn’t call to Simon to join me or give him anything like a command, or even look at him. I just took a carrot out of my pocket, started chewing on it, and walked a few feet out into the pasture, looking away. I must have shown too much eagerness, because Simon wasn’t moving. He was looking at me, trying to figure out what I wanted. But he wasn’t budging. The sun was getting warm, the flies were circling, and I was getting a bit restless. I do not have a fraction of the patience that donkeys do, but I am just as stubborn. We connect on that level.

Simon was chewing it over. I could see him looking at me. Every time I had seen him in the pasture, I had brought him food—hay, cookies, carrots, apples. He liked that arrangement and did not really see any reason to change the procedure. If he just stood there, I would probably eventually come to him. It was not his idea to take a walk into the pasture, so why do it?

There were two reasons, and I was confident both would work, if I stayed patient. One was the carrot he saw me chewing. He would have spotted the others sticking out of my pocket by now, and he wasn’t about to sit around watching me eat his snacks. Secondly, he had not been out of his little corral, and before that, his confining pen, since he arrived at the farm. There was interesting stuff to see out in the big pasture—cars on the road, fallen tree limbs, acres of green grass, and who knows what else.

I stood there, checking my cell phone messages, eating my carrot, drifting farther out into the pasture. Sometimes that worked with Lulu and Fanny, sometimes not.