Running with Sherman Read online

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER MCDOUGALL

  Born to Run

  Natural Born Heroes

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Christopher McDougall

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McDougall, Christopher, 1962– author.

  Title: Running with Sherman : the donkey with the heart of a hero / Christopher McDougall.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | “This is a Borzoi book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019009852 | ISBN 9781524732363 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525433255 (paperback) | ISBN 9781524732370 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Sherman (Donkey) | Human-animal relationships—United States. | Pack burro racing—United States. | Donkeys—Training—United States.

  Classification: LCC SF361 .M37 2019 | DDC 636.1/82—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019009852

  Ebook ISBN 9781524732370

  Cover image by Gini Woy Photography

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Christopher McDougall

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Shadow in the Dark

  Chapter 2: Hacksaw Surgery

  Chapter 3: No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care

  Chapter 4: A You Operation

  Chapter 5: Miners, Muckers, and Mean Mother—

  Chapter 6: The Beastmaster

  Chapter 7: “Earl’s in for murder. Several, in fact.”

  Chapter 8: The Barely-a-Puddle of Doom

  Chapter 9: Donkey Tao

  Chapter 10: Bag Man

  Chapter 11: Wild Thing

  Chapter 12: The Zipperless Guide to Better Living

  Chapter 13: Full Mooning

  Chapter 14: Matildonkey

  Chapter 15: Gang of Three

  Chapter 16: Sick, Stressed, or House Arrest

  Chapter 17: It

  Chapter 18: Plan C

  Chapter 19: You Rarely Win, But Sometimes You Do

  Chapter 20: Zekipedia

  Chapter 21: Go Barb Dolan on That Burro!

  Chapter 22: Skirt and a Smile

  Chapter 23: The Tao of Steve Rides Again

  Chapter 24: Ladies ex Machina

  Chapter 25: “Fear that thing. Do that thing.”

  Chapter 26: An Army of Wann

  Chapter 27: Home Is Wherever I’m with You

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  On Sherman’s behalf,

  this book is dedicated to the three women

  who brought the joy and adventure into our lives:

  Mika, Maya, and Sophie.

  To achieve great things, two things are needed:

  a plan, and not quite enough time.

  —LEONARD BERNSTEIN

  1

  Shadow in the Dark

  I knew something was wrong the second the pickup truck pulled into our driveway. I’d been waiting for Wes for more than an hour, and now, before he even came to a stop, the look in his eye warned me to brace myself.

  “He’s in rough shape,” Wes said as he got out of the truck. “Rougher than I thought.” I’ve known Wes for more than ten years, nearly from the day my wife and I first uprooted ourselves from Philadelphia to live on this small farm in Pennsylvania Amish country, and I’d never seen him so grim before. Together, we walked behind the pickup and pulled open the trailer doors.

  I took a look inside, then immediately grabbed in my pocket for my phone. Luckily, I had the number I needed.

  “Scott, you’ve got to get over here. This is really bad.”

  “Okay,” Scott said. “You just make him comfortable and I’ll be over in the morning.”

  “Yeah. No. I think you’d better, um, have to—” I paused a sec to untangle my tongue. Scott was the expert, not me, but I didn’t think we had many mornings left to work with. I tried again to tell him what I was looking at.

  Inside the trailer was a gray donkey. Its fur was crusted with dung, turning his white belly black. In places the fur had torn away, revealing raw skin almost certainly infested with parasites. He was barrel-shaped and bloated from poor feed and his mouth was a mess, with one tooth so rotten it fell right out when touched. Worst of all were its hooves, so monstrously overgrown they looked like a witch’s claws.

  “Scott, seriously. You’ve got to see this.”

  “Don’t worry,” Scott said. “I’ve seen it all. Catch you in the morning.”

  The donkey belonged to a member of Wes’s church. Wes is a truly wonderful person to begin with, and as a Mennonite, he’s committed by faith to helping anyone in need—or, in this case, any creature. Wes had discovered that one of his fellow churchgoers was an animal hoarder who kept goats and a donkey penned in squalor in a crumbling barn. The hoarder was out of work, so his family was suffering from his fixation as well; money needed for food and rent was going for animal feed instead. Wes and several church elders had tried to persuade the hoarder to relinquish his pets, but he wouldn’t budge. Finally, Wes took a deep breath and bent his iron-hard honesty to the limit. What if, he asked the hoarder, we take the animals away for two years? Just two years. We’ll give them to a good family and get them healthy, and that will give you time to put up some fences and clean out those stalls. It wasn’t really a lie, Wes told himself. More like a hope—the hope that two years would be long enough for the hoarder to forget these poor animals and get on with his life.

  “Give it a try?” Wes persisted.

  “Okay,” the hoarder replied. “But they have to go to a good family.”

  Wes got on the job at once. The goats were easy to place—someone in Lancaster can always use a free lawn mower—but donkeys are tough. They’re famously ornery, known for biting and kicking, and serve no purpose on a working farm. They can’t be milked or butchered or, in many cases, even ridden. Keeping them in hay and feed can be expensive, and that’s before you’re shelling out for dental care and deworming and vaccinations.

  So why did I want him?

  I didn’t. Not when I got a good look at him, that was for sure. As transplanted city folk who knew zip about farm life when we moved to the country, my wife and I had gotten a kick out of trying our hand with a few starter animals. First up was a stray black cat that appeared at the back door, and when it survived and stuck around we advanced to some backyard chickens, and then a foster sheep that we took on loan from an Amish neighbor to see if we could handle it, like a kindergartner bringing home the class’s pet turtle for the weekend. Wes owns the farm next to ours, and when he told me about the donkey he was trying to rescue, I figured why not? We could just turn it loose out back and let the kids feed it apple cores. I wasn’t making any promises till we saw it, though, which
was fine by Wes; the donkey’s owner, he said, was a bit of a handful who felt the same way about me.

  So one afternoon, my two young daughters and I headed over to the hoarder’s house to check things out. Secretly, that was just our cover story; the girls and I had already made up our minds before we’d even gotten in the car that unless this thing was a rampaging maniac, we were bringing it home. During the drive, we schemed up ways to talk Mommy into this operation and debated names for our future pet.

  “Skullcrusher?”

  “No!”

  “Zorro?”

  “NO! Actually, maybe.”

  But our happy chatter died once we arrived. The hoarder’s barn was sagging in a field of mud, looking like a sneeze would bring it down. We slogged inside, straining to see in the gloom and to pull our boots out of the sucking muck. A hard rain had fallen the day before, flooding one of the pens so badly that two of the goats had to stand on straw bales to stay above water. Next to the goats was another stall, this one as dark and tiny as a dungeon cell. Inside, another creature was barely visible against the back wall. The hoarder called and whistled, holding out a handful of feed.

  Slowly, a shadow detached itself from the darkness. Its long ears rose, twitching nervously, as it struggled to take a step toward us. The donkey was mired nearly to its knees in manure and rotten straw, and so cramped by the narrow stall that it could barely turn around. The hoarder poured the feed into my daughter’s hand. She held it out, and the donkey stretched toward us to gently snuffle it from her palm. My daughters and I stared at him in silence. We didn’t care anymore about getting a pet. All we cared about was getting him out of there.

  The hoarder agreed to let us have him. But overnight, he changed his mind. When Wes showed up the following morning with the trailer, the hoarder dug in his heels and said no, the donkey was family. Family had to stay together.

  “Remember, it’s just till he gets better. Just for two years,” Wes repeated, over and over, until finally the hoarder relented and opened the stall door. That’s when Wes discovered the donkey’s hooves had been so badly neglected that he could barely walk. Together, Wes and the hoarder struggled, one step at a time, to ease the sick animal out of the dark barn, into the daylight, and off to his new home.

  * * *

  —

  “How do we get it off the trailer if it can’t walk?” I asked Wes, dreading the possibility that he might actually have an answer. I held my breath, silently urging him to say it couldn’t be done and he’d have to speed the donkey off to some kind of sanctuary or animal urgent-care or wherever it is they handle the hopeless cases.

  “Slowly, I guess,” Wes replied. He took hold of the threadbare green halter around the donkey’s head and very gently pulled forward. What should I do, get behind and push? That seemed aggressive. And besides, from what little I knew about donkeys, trying to shove it could put me right in the danger zone for an angry hoof to the kneecap. Maybe I could kind of hoist it a little?

  Sherman arrives.

  I threw my arms around the donkey’s back and cradled its belly with both hands, trying awkwardly to lift the weight off its ailing hooves. I was ready to jump if it kicked, but it didn’t seem to have any fight at all. It looked dazed, more like a moldy toy hauled out of a basement than a living creature. Gingerly, it took one slow step after another. It walked when we urged it and stopped when we didn’t, as if it no longer remembered a time when it could think—and move—for itself. When we got to the end of the ramp, the donkey didn’t even start munching the tasty green grass; it froze back into a stuffed animal, head hanging and motionless.

  Wes had to scoot. He had 150 dairy cows waiting to be milked back home, and his last bout of hostage negotiations with the hoarder had put him way behind schedule. Wes wished me well and promised to stop by the next day to see how we and the patient were making out. I put a bucket of fresh water and some hay in front of the donkey, which still hadn’t budged, and checked my watch. My daughters would be getting home from school soon. I wanted to greet them with an action plan, something that would soften the shock of the donkey’s appearance and let them know the animal would eventually be all right, but I didn’t have a clue. We’d wanted to help a creature in need, but this kind of creature—and this kind of need—was way beyond anything I’d imagined.

  2

  Hacksaw Surgery

  Early the next morning, our savior rolled into the driveway. “Don’t worry,” I’d reassured the girls the night before. “Scott will know what to do.” Sure enough, Scott hopped out of his truck with a confident grin—which quickly faded.

  “I’ve seen it all,” he said. “But not this.”

  By day, Scott is a sales rep for Dansko, the Pennsylvania company that makes those clogs that chefs and dancers love. In the evenings, he shifts his focus from feet to hooves, his real passion. Scott grew up in upstate New York and paid his way through college by learning to fit horses for shoes. After he moved to our neighborhood in Lancaster County—home of America’s largest Amish community—he became the go-to guy whenever local farmers needed help with their big work mules and buggy horses.

  Some weekends, Scott and his wife, Tanya, would wander around horse auctions as unofficial animal advocates, speaking up when they spotted a horse that needed care. Once, Tanya jumped in front of an auction trailer headed to the slaughterhouse, pulled out her wallet, and told the driver to name his price for a mini donkey she’d spotted in the back. The little donk was so far gone that the driver gave it to her for free. Tanya thought she could heal it, and she was right. Soon, tiny Matilda was trotting along when Tanya and Scott took their carriage horses out for a drive. But this creature that turned up in my driveway was even worse off than Matilda had been.

  “Man, how did this happen?” Scott asked.

  “Hoarder,” I replied.

  “Jeez, this is…” Scott began. He stopped to think for a sec. “Look, the most humane thing might be to put him down now.”

  The hooves, he explained, were a death sentence. Donkeys usually keep their hooves naturally pumiced by foraging for long miles over rocky ground. But if you pen them up on soggy straw, or even leave them standing around all the time in a grassy meadow, their hooves will eventually curl like the nails of a Hindu holy man. Once they’re deformed, the damage can be irreversible and lead to an excruciating death: Because equines have unusually small stomachs, most digestion takes place when their intestines are churned by the rocking motion of walking. Hobble them, and it’s only a matter of time before waste matter blocks their guts until the animal is torn apart from the inside.

  “That’s a horrible way to die,” Scott said. “Unless…” He paused to think for a moment. “Do you have a hacksaw?”

  I ran to the shed and fetched one. Scott tied the donkey’s halter to a fence post. “Hi, buddy,” he said, stroking the donkey’s ears. “Ever seen one of these before?” He held the hacksaw under the donkey’s nose so he could sniff it. “Now here’s what we’re going to do,” Scott said. He began explaining to the donkey the details of the procedure he was about to perform. It made me cringe, but the donkey’s ears swiveled toward Scott as if it was listening intently.

  “I want him to get used to my voice before we start,” Scott told me. “Donkeys are very self-protective, way more than horses. They don’t like surprises.” And what Scott had in mind was going to be rough: as last-ditch emergency surgery, we were going to hold each hoof, one after the other, and saw through it like a tree limb. If Scott could cut off at least half of each hoof, he could then try shaping the hoof with his steel clippers and a rough file. Imagine going to the dentist with four cavities and finding out that each tooth had to be drilled not once but three times in a row, except you’ve never seen a dentist in your life and for all you know, the guy with the drill is some psycho grabbing you by the jaw. That’s what the donkey and I were in for.
r />   “Ready?” Scott asked.

  “Me? Or him?”

  “Both of you. Grab that leg and hold on tight.”

  We got to work. I leaned against the donkey’s flank, pressing him securely between my body and the fence, while Scott straddled the donkey’s leg and secured the first hoof between his knees. Slowly and carefully, he notched into it with the saw. Once he got a groove going he really leaned in, pushing and pulling through a hoof that was as tough as a car tire. Sweat began pouring down his face, but even though he was panting, Scott kept talking to the donkey in a calm, affectionate voice.

  “Doing good, buddy?” he said. “We’re almost through number one.” Every muscle in the donkey’s body was so tense it seemed he was ready to erupt, but amazingly, he stood firm. Scott finally put down the saw and straightened up, wiping his soaking forehead.

  “What do you think of this?” he asked. He held up a severed hunk of hoof that was nearly the size of my foot. The smell was repulsive, as if the hoof had already begun to rot while attached to the donkey’s foot.

  “I can’t believe he let you do that,” I said. “He must still be shell-shocked from the move.”

  “Maybe. But he’s a really good guy,” Scott said, ruffling the fur on the donkey’s head. “See how his ears shift as we’re talking?” Sure enough, the donkey’s ears rotated from me to Scott every time we opened our mouths. Sometimes he’d even split them in opposite directions, pointing one ear at me and the other at Scott like a cop directing traffic.