I soon began to recognize the cows by their different markings, personalities and habits. I gave them all names, and they became my “pets”—in a wild sort of way. Two of my favorites were Freckles and her calf, Spunky.

  Freckles first came to my attention early one spring. The cattle had spent the winter months on our lower pasture along the river, but when the cows started calving, we decided to move them to one of the upper pastures near our house. The move was uneventful, except that we discovered that one cow was missing. It was Freckles. We weren’t alarmed because we assumed that she had probably given birth and was hiding in the thick patch of willows near the water. The birthing process is a private matter for most cows, and when labor begins they are quite clever at finding a hiding place away from the rest of the herd.

  As we got near the bottom of the hill, Freckles came running out of the willows and headed across the field. A look of fury flashed in her eyes, as if to scold us for intruding. Her belly was considerably smaller since the last time I had seen her and her udder was swollen with milk. These were both signs that she had calved. My husband went after Freckles to coax her back, and I headed toward the willows to find her baby.

  The calf was so still I almost tripped over her. Nestled in a soft hollow of spring grass was the most beautiful little creature I had ever seen. The calf was a dark russet color with a white spot on her forehead and a tuft of white at the end of her tail. She was curled up like a fawn and looked up at me with enormous brown eyes. I slowly knelt down and spoke softly as I reached out to stroke her velvety coat. She quivered under my touch, but she didn’t move. She wouldn’t even raise her head. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four hours old, but she had already learned how to stay put and be quiet.

  My husband managed to guide Freckles back toward the willows and when she saw me she bellowed for her baby. In a flash, the little calf understood the command, bolted from her nest and ran bawling toward her mother. We stood back to watch as they came together. The calf reached for the comfort of warm milk while her mother licked her reassuringly.

  Once they had calmed down, we walked them up the hill to join the herd. With her head held high and her tail bobbing like a pump handle, the calf pranced behind her mother. We laughed and christened her Spunky—a fitting name, as she turned out to be our liveliest and most mischievous calf that spring.

  As we got closer, the other cows started calling to Freckles. They bellowed back and forth, again and again, as if to guide her back to their new location, and they were all waiting by the fence when we arrived. As soon as we closed the gate behind them and moved away, they surrounded Freckles, and with nodding heads and soft lowing sounds they gently greeted her and inspected Spunky. Apparently satisfied, they slowly drifted apart and began to graze. A sense of peace and harmony was restored to their little community.

  I was puzzled the first few times I saw a single cow surrounded by several little calves, until I learned that cattle herds establish unique baby-sitting co-ops. Once again, I was amazed at their ability to communicate. How did they decide who would be the baby-sitter? And how did the mothers tell the babies not to move while they wandered away, sometimes for several hours?

  One day, I glanced out my kitchen window and was astounded to see Red Man, our huge twenty-five-hundred-pound bull, lying in the pasture with a group of calves. The cows had somehow persuaded him to baby-sit that day. At least fifteen tiny calves surrounded Red Man, all of them content to lie lazily in the sun, except for Spunky, who had obviously grown tired of nap time. She slowly stood up. Her rump came up first, followed by a long stretch extending to the tip of her tail. Then she shook her head, flicked her tail and seemed about to go romping across the field when Red Man lifted his massive head and gave her a disapproving glare. I watched, entranced. Would the tiny calf defy the giant Red Man? Not that day. Spunky gazed at the bull for a long moment, and then her legs seemed to melt back into the ground, once again the docile baby waiting for her mother to return.

  One night,we woke up to the terrifying sounds of a pack of coyotes on the hunt. Barking and howling, they raced down the hill behind our ranch and into the pasture where the cattle had settled for the night. Young calves were their favorite prey. The cattle stampeded in their panic to escape from the pack. My husband grabbed the shotgun and ran outdoors. A few shots fired into the air were enough to scare the coyotes, and we stood there listening to them yip and howl as they disappeared into the night. The herd had been badly frightened and their restless bawling went on for hours. But other than that, all was well.

  Or so we thought. At daybreak we went out to check. All the animals were unharmed—except for one. We found a dead calf near some rocks, apparently killed in the stampede. My heart nearly stopped beating when I saw the white spot on its forehead, but it wasn’t Spunky. It was a younger calf with similar markings. We carried the little body close to the gate and covered it with a tarp until we could bury it.

  A while later, I heard a cow bawling. I looked around and saw the mother of the dead calf nudging it with her nose. Then I watched as Freckles and eleven other cows slowly walked over and formed a circle around them. One by one they began to bawl with the mother. The low, mournful tones of their lamentation drifted across the land as the morning sun rose.

  As I watched them, I, too, became a member of their circle; I was one with them in their grief for the little life that had been, and was no more.

  The cows stayed in that circle of love for over an hour. Finally, the mother backed away, turned and walked to a far corner of the pasture. Only then did the others end their vigil and move quietly away.

  I stood rapt and motionless in the now-silent pasture, feeling the depth of their compassion in my own heart. Filled with awe and admiration for these animals, I turned back towards the house—that rare and tender scene firmly etched in my mind.

  Maria Sears

  One Last Gift

  “Mom, I’m taking Snowflake to the vet on Saturday.” My son slumped in the high-backed chair next to my hospital bed. “He doesn’t seem right to me. I think he’s got a cough, and he won’t eat.”

  “I’ll be home before then,” I told him. “The doctor has promised you and Dad can bring me home tomorrow.” I knocked hopefully on the plastic bed table strewn with get-well cards and half-finished glasses of stale ginger ale.

  We’d had Snowflake for ten years. He was a black Lab with just enough setter in him to give him long legs and a scrap of white hair on his chest. We brought him home in a snowstorm just before Christmas, all huge puppy feet and a black tail far too long. We named him Snowflake for the storm and for the bit of white hair. He arrived just after my first bout with colon cancer when I was still struggling to make sense of the new and terrifying challenge in my life.

  During the next months, Snowflake became my friend and companion. No matter how frightened or depressed I was, he needed to be cared for. We walked together through that snowy winter, his leash tangling around my legs. I watched him bound through snowbanks that nearly buried him. I swear he learned to grin at me as he dug through the snow, shaking the icy flakes off his whiskers.

  I got better. I thought less of cancer and more of living. Snowflake got tall and leggy. He learned to walk at heel, although he never was very good at coming when called. He’d come within a few feet, toss me his catch-me-if-you-can look and wait until I got close before he ran just out of reach. I’d turn around to go in the house, and he’d finally follow, refusing to be ignored—a good dog, but one with an independent streak, a little like me.

  He loved to run through the woods on the state land near our house. He galloped in wide circles while I walked and daydreamed or picked blueberries. Snowflake would find a stick for me to throw, or a rabbit to chase back into its hole.

  It was eight years before the cancer returned. A new tumor in my colon sent me back to the hospital for more surgery. I began a year-long series of weekly chemotherapy injections that left me feeling sick most of the time. Ea
rly in the morning, Snowflake walked with me along an old canal towpath. The steady walking relaxed me, and the fresh morning air settled my stomach.

  He had long since outgrown the bounding leaps of puppyhood. He walked more sedately now. I’d let him off his leash, and he’d take up a position about eight feet ahead of me, keeping pace and returning immediately to my side when I called. The old game of catch-me-if-you-can was gone, almost as if he knew I had little energy to chase him now. Occasionally he ran down the canal bank barking madly at a passing duck, but mostly he walked steadily ahead of me, turning every so often to check that I was keeping up.

  So we walked through that spring and into the summer and into a new diagnosis. I found a lump in my breast that proved, after more surgery, to be breast cancer. I resumed chemotherapy and began daily radiation treatments. For several months I was too exhausted for our morning walks. Snowflake lay beside my bed, his brown eyes half closed.

  Toward the end of winter, I began to feel stronger. The dog and I returned to the canal in the morning, walking carefully along the snow-covered towpath.

  It was eighteen months before cancer struck again. A new tumor appeared on an ovary. So after Christmas, I left Snowflake once again to go into the hospital. As usual, he begged to go in the car. His white hair was no longer confined to the bit on snow on his chest. His face was almost entirely white and arthritis made his back legs stiff.

  I woke from the anesthesia to hopeful news. The cancer appeared not to have spread. There was a good chance that I could get well. But I kept having the thought that there are only so many chances, only so many times to dodge a bullet.

  Still I did all the things necessary to recover from surgery. I blew into a small plastic tube designed to exercise my lungs. I got painfully out of bed. I shuffled down the hall pushing my IV pole. I graduated from ice chips to sips of ginger ale and bites of lemon Jell-O.

  Now, almost ready to go home, I listened to my son’s worries about Snowflake’s cough, his lethargy and refusal to eat.

  “Don’t worry,” my husband said. “Maybe he just misses you.”

  The next day my husband packed me and my awkward baskets full of get-well flowers into the car. It was icy cold outside, almost zero, and snowing.

  Snowflake was at the door, of course, almost his old self, wagging his tail and rubbing his ears under my hand. “He hasn’t been coughing today,” my son told me. “I think he might be better.”

  I curled up on the sofa in the bright winter light from the big windows, and the dog lay down beside me. My husband made a fire and fell asleep in the recliner. So we spent that first afternoon home.

  That evening I went to bed early, tired from the effort of leaving the hospital, but I couldn’t fall asleep. In my head I went over the doctor’s words again and again. I thought about the first colon cancer and the second one, the breast cancer, and now ovarian cancer. I thought about dying and how afraid I was.

  “Kate,” my husband called from the living room about eleven o’clock. “I think you should come here. Something’s wrong with the dog.”

  Snowflake was lying on his side in front of the fire. His breathing was harsh and slow. When he saw me, he lifted his head and moved as if to get up, but his legs crumpled under him.

  I sat down on the floor and put his head in my lap. His huge brown eyes looked up at me, and his breathing seemed to ease a bit. I sat there no more than ten minutes, silent in the firelight with Snowflake’s head in my lap. Then, with a sigh so soft I nearly missed it, he closed his eyes and stopped breathing.

  “You waited for me to get home,” I whispered.

  I sat there for a long while, the dog motionless in my arms, thinking of the gentleness and peace of his death, the silence that had filled us both. For the first time since I had been diagnosed with cancer, I felt no fear.

  “You waited for me,” I whispered again, tears in my eyes, “to show me not to be afraid.”

  Kate Murphy

  9

  ON

  COMPANIONSHIP

  In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.

  Dereke Bruce

  “Look at that crazy cowboy, Butch, he's talking to his horse.”

  Reprinted by permission of Dave Carpenter.

  Soldier Dog

  During the monsoon season of 1968, after several months of combat following the Tet Offensive, my army unit was moved from the mountains of northern South Vietnam to the coastal plain, north of Da Nang. We had been assigned to provide security for a battalion of Seabees. It rained torrentially for most of each day and night, but we tried to stay as warm and dry as we could.

  As a medic, my life was pretty good at this assignment. I didn’t have to pull guard duty, just hold sick call and do radio watch for a couple of hours each night. Sure, I was halfway around the world, separated from my family and my home, but the Seabees had supplies. We even got fresh food, which sure beat the freeze-dried and canned rations that were issued for consumption in the jungle. But best of all, I could buy a beer each evening and relax and try to forget the terror that had been with me since the beginning of the Tet Offensive.

  I was aware of the dramatic changes my personality had undergone in the short time I had been in Vietnam. I distrusted everything and everyone I came in contact with. Like the times when I treated Vietnamese civilians in their villages for their ailments.

  This was an attempt by the army to win the hearts and minds of the local population. The army’s public information officer wanted some photographs showing that the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne, the toughest of the tough, was also the most caring. On such occasions, the villagers would lay out a meal, sometimes consisting of rice and meat, with great formality. This was intended as a respectful greeting to me, and courtesy demanded that I eat first. But I was suspicious, and fearing that the food might be poisoned, I always insisted that the Village Chief be the first to take a bite, thus managing to thoroughly offend our hosts. But I didn’t care; my sole concern at that time was surviving to make it home.

  One night, after some revelry in the galley, I walked back to our camp and knelt down to slide into my damp living space. As I crawled in headfirst, I felt a wet, furry body brush my forehead. I grabbed my pistol and my flashlight and prepared to kill the rat in my bedroll.

  But it wasn’t a rat. In the light, I saw before me a shivering brown puppy that looked like a Chihuahua. Its big eyes were imploring, as if it knew that its life was almost over. I reengaged the safety catch and picked up the little body, so cold, so wet and so scared. We’re a lot alike, I thought.

  I dug around in my gear and found a can of beef slices from an old meal unit. I opened the can, broke up the meat into little bites, and put it in front of this intruder, who snapped it up quickly. Then I rinsed the can out and filled it with clean water so he could drink.

  That night, when I curled up to go to sleep, I wasn’t remembering the girl back home; I had a living, breathing being snuggled next to me trying to gain security and warmth from my existence. And I didn’t dream of the girl back home, either. Instead I dreamed of my beagle, who always curled up at the foot of my bed when I came home from school on vacations, and who went with me everywhere.

  The next morning, I went to breakfast and got extra eggs, bacon and sausages. My new little friend wolfed them down.

  I decided to name him Charger, after our battalion commander. Every time I called out “Charger!” I offered him a tidbit of food, so he learned his name in no time. He also learned some simple tricks, and seemed to grow very attached to me. Wherever I went, that little ring-tailed mutt of dubious parentage was right there with me, and I grew very fond of him.

  One day I was in the nearby village of Lang Co, where I went every day except Sunday, to treat the villagers for their various ailments, which ranged from ringworm and pinworm to elephantiasis. While I dispensed different pills and salves, I not
iced my little friend frolicking with the fire team that had accompanied me for security. As I watched him darting after the sticks they threw for him and prancing proudly back with the stick clamped firmly in his teeth, I had to smile. I turned back to the Vietnamese child I was examining, and I saw an answering smile light up his small face. Little Charger was effecting a remarkable change in my personality. I realized that I had begun to care about the local people. I really wanted to cure their illnesses, whereas earlier I had just been going through the motions to please the army public relations machine. Charger was helping me to recover some of the humanity that I feared I had lost.

  I was soon to be separated from my new friend, however. After a few short weeks, my company was ordered back to the mountains. After numerous inquiries, I was able to find someone in the mortar platoon at our battalion fire base to adopt Charger. I left him there, knowing that I would miss him but trying not to look back as I walked with my company toward the jungle, returning to the harsh reality of war.

  I served more than seven months with the infantry, before I was reassigned to a medevac unit. I had not forgotten Charger, and as I came through the fire base on my way to my new assignment, I had already decided that I would bring my little friend with me to my new unit. We recognized each other instantly, and our reunion was ecstatic.

  I spent the day at the fire base and soon noticed that something was different there. Talking with the soldiers, I registered that the level of profanity and vulgarity had dropped. And the men seemed more caring towards each other. A large number of them called to Charger as he trotted by, often stopping to scratch his head or give him a treat or two in passing. Charger was working the same magic for his new friends in the mortar platoon that he had worked for me.

  With my heart breaking, and on the verge of tears, I left Charger with his newfound friends, for they seemed to need him even more than I did.