Running with Sherman Read online

  Mika with her ewe

  Personally, I felt my own identity clicking over from city to country the day three strangers passed our house and I thought, Who the hell are those weirdos? They didn’t greet me with a quiet wave, like the Amish do, and they weren’t driving a 4x4 pickup, like everyone else. They were clopping along in some sort of big-wheeled cart pulled by two well-groomed horses, the kind of thing Queen Elizabeth might use to tour Buckingham Palace’s back forty.

  “Hallooooo,” hollered the woman at the reins, waving a long whip. One guy sat beside her on the bench, and the other balanced on the rear fender like a footman. They yelled and waved too. If they hadn’t spotted me already, I’d have ducked out of sight. Instead, I mouthed “Hey” and gave the least perceptible nod I could get away with, then faded back into the house. For months afterward, I kept crossing paths with them, usually when I was out for a run on the dirt road to the river and they were tooling around in their carriage. It was always all three of them, Whip Woman and her two buds, and there was something about their jolliness and sophisticated horsemanship that made me wary. I didn’t know how they fit into Southern End life. They seemed like such…outsiders.

  I mostly managed to keep my distance, until the day we ran smack into them in the woods. Mika and the girls and I were hiking the nearby Conestoga Trail with some friends, fighting our way up stony hills known as the “toughest ten miles east of the Rockies.” When we made it back to the trailhead, we heard a clatter of hooves behind us. We got out of the way just as the two carriage guys burst from the trees on horseback. Behind them was Whip Woman riding a donkey. I’d never seen anyone on a donkey before—no one, at least, who wasn’t playing the Madonna or a Mexican bandito—so despite my doubts about this crew, we couldn’t resist crowding around for a closer look.

  “My ass is breaking my ass,” Whip Woman hooted. She slid down from the saddle and swatted her backside. “The Southern End is taking a beating today.” The kids were enchanted by the donkey, and I had to admit I was charmed at the way Whip Woman not only cut straight to the butt jokes, but also introduced Muffin before even mentioning her own name and then immediately bustled over to show the shyest girl how to shove a fistful of horse treats into Muffin’s mouth. “Good job, girlfriend!” she cheered.

  Tanya McKean, best donkey trainer in the Southern End

  “I’m Tanya,” she finally got around to telling us. The two guys were her husband, Scott, and their horse-show partner, Paul. Right around the time I first saw them, Tanya and Scott had relocated here from outside the county and bought a small farm that was even harder to find than ours. Paul was an engineer who lived three hours away, but nearly every weekend he drove down to work out his horse and hang with Scott and Tanya. None of them had kids; instead, they were devoted to the fine art of carriage competition and, in Tanya’s case, to nearly every critter she encountered. Tanya was the adopted child of sweet but stiff British parents, and she learned early on that with animals, she didn’t have to throttle back her bubbling natural warmth. Dogs don’t freeze up when you hug them; horses give you the same oxytocin rush of love and appreciation no matter how much you brush them. Luckily, her parents indulged her; from the time she was eleven, Tanya had a horse of her own and went on to study equine science in college and veterinary tech school.

  By now, I was feeling like an idiot for having avoided Tanya and her crew for so long. Mostly because they were so fun, but partly (okay, equally) because Muffin was such a star. Up close, donkeys just ooze charisma. Yes, they look ridiculous with those stubby bodies and Bugs Bunny ears, but that just makes their Latin lover eyes all the more heartwarming. While we were talking, the horses were pacing and pawing the ground, but Muffin stood quietly, holding our gaze as if she genuinely, soulfully, wanted to connect. Or con us out of our granola bars. Either way, Muffin was definitely next level over those horses. We were all sad to see her go when it was time for Tanya and the fellas to load their rides back into the trailer and leave.

  On the drive home, Mika and the girls and I cut loose with one of those conversations that are such a blast because you can pretend it’s real even though you know, deep down, none of this stuff is ever going to happen. My youngest daughter, Sophie, was the one who really went wild. All she wanted for her tenth birthday, she said, was a donkey like Muffin. We could keep it behind the house, so whenever she wanted, she could just saddle up and ride through the hayfields. Wait a sec…she could even ride to school, and I could run up later and bring the donkey home!

  Sure, why not? Someday, we really ought to get a donkey of our own.

  Someday.

  *1 I can’t excuse my cultural ignorance except with the weak argument that a Hawaiian friend thinks the same way. When he first visited New York and saw the Statue of Liberty, he was disappointed: “I know Samoans who are bigger.”

  *2 If you want to see for yourself how wrong I was, a seventy-foot-tall portrait of Mika is painted on the side of the parking garage at Philadelphia International Airport. She’s the third dancer from the right.

  4

  A You Operation

  “I can’t believe he isn’t dead,” an appalled friend who raises sheep in upstate New York replied when I sent her a photo of Sherman. “I have seen farmers here put down animals in far better shape.”

  After Scott’s hacksaw surgery and Tanya’s tough-love shearing, we left Sherman in peace for the rest of the day. We held our breath, waiting to see if he could walk, but he spent all day pressed against the side of our little brown barn, head hanging, looking like he’d been led there for execution. Whether he was frightened, or in pain, or just confused, we still couldn’t tell.

  But now it was getting dark, which meant things were about to get ugly.

  I’d moved our little herd of goats and sheep to another meadow for the day, figuring Sherman would settle in more easily if he could explore his new home on his own. Once the sun began to set, the sheep began baaing by the gate, eager to get back into the shed for the night. I didn’t know how they’d react if they rushed in to find this scruffy-looking stranger in their yard, and the last thing Sherman needed was any kind of physical challenge. Our animals are all pretty gentle, but we have a ram and two billy goats who are, by exact scientific standards, a bunch of boneheads. Their normal greeting for newcomers is to rear up on their hind legs and race straight at them until they knock noggins. It’s not malicious; I’ve seen enough of their headbanging to realize it’s just their way of high-fiving. Still, playful or not, no way was I letting them anywhere near Sherman tonight.

  Sliding them past Sherman without one of them breaking loose was going to be tricky. My hope was that if I waited till dark, they’d all be in such a hurry to get inside that they’d rush right past Sherman without stopping. Overnight, they could get used to his smell and (fingers crossed) be adjusted to the presence of this weird new creature by sunrise. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it turned out the sheep and goats were down with it. When I opened the gate, they all breezed past Sherman and were heading straight for the stalls.

  Until suddenly, one of them froze in his tracks. I peered through the dark, hoping it wasn’t….

  Yup. Here comes Lawrence.

  * * *

  —

  Every problem I’d solved by getting rid of Bamboozle and Skeedaddle, I un-solved by getting Lawrence. Yes, I realize now it was a mistake, but tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing: One Saturday morning in March, I drove to the farm of our Amish friend Elam to drop off the ram he’d lent us to—as the Amish say—“freshen” our two ewes. Over the years, we’d developed a little swapping circle of local sheep raisers who trade studs every year to prevent in-breeding in our herds. Elam’s ram was known for fathering twins, so we could expect to have four new critters bounding around the meadow within a few months. That meant that no matter what kind of adorable little creature Elam had for s
ale, we didn’t have the room for any more mouths. Returning the ram was strictly a drop-off operation, Mika reminded me.

  “Absolutely right,” I agreed.

  When I got to Elam’s, it took a while for me finally to track him down in the back of the barn. He was gazing over the half-door of a stall.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” he said. “When I heard what they were, I couldn’t resist.”

  Elam was a regular at the livestock auction held every Friday night at the Green Dragon Farmers Market on the outskirts of Lancaster. He was always coming back with great finds, like Katahdin sheep, which shed hair like dogs instead of being sheared, and Tennessee Fainting Goats, which freeze into living statues whenever they’re scared. Once, he even got a llama that acts like a watchdog and protects his herds from predators. But this time, had he actually found a pair of—

  “Gazelles?” I blurted. “You got gazelles?”

  “They look like that, right?” Elam said. “They’re actually Oberhasli. They’re a kind of Alpine goat, really hard to find around here. They’re famous for being amazing milkers and easy to work with.”

  Inside the stall were a mother goat and her young kid. Both were a beautiful chocolate brown, with oddly wide-veering horns and a black streak down their spines, which made them look noble and wild, like they’d just wandered in from the African savannah.

  “What’s wrong with the baby?” I asked. The top half of its ears were missing, like they’d been snipped off with scissors.

  “Remember that cold snap a few weeks back? The owner said he was born late at night and they didn’t find him till morning. The mother kept all of him warm except the tips of his ears, and they just dropped off from frostbite.”

  I spent the drive back home trying out my excuses: “Look what I found wandering in the street!…I think Elam was going to eat them…No, they’re going to make us money.” Just before I pulled into the driveway, I realized I was holding a winning card that didn’t require lying; the two brown goats were so cute, my best move might be to keep my mouth shut until Mika got a look at them. Luckily, it worked; the lop-eared baby was a heart melter who won over my wife and daughters the second they laid eyes on him, and Mama Oberhasli turned out to be sweet-natured and an amazingly productive milker. But we weren’t going to take any risks; the baby was a boy, meaning it was prone to mischief, and we didn’t want to end up with another Bamboozle on our hands by tagging it with a name that could release its inner demons, something like Beetlejuice or McConaughey. The safest bet, we decided, was to call him Lawrence, after the gentle, nerdy fourth-grader who played keyboards in School of Rock.

  Perfect. Baggage-free.

  Soon we were being awakened at five in the morning by screeching brakes followed by irate neighbors hammering on the back door to say they’d nearly hit a furry doofus in the middle of the road. It had taken only a few weeks for Lawrence to grow into a lean, lanky-legged youngster with a body aerodynamically designed for maximum lift and glide. I would scramble out the door, blurry-eyed and apologetic, and hustle off in bare feet to chase Lawrence back behind the fence. At first, I blamed the name—after all, the original Lawrence did join Jack Black’s rebellion and got all chesty with drummer Spazzy McGee—but then I did some due diligence in Modern Farmer and got the good news about Oberhaslis:

  The dogs of the goat world, they are quiet and companionable.

  And the bad:

  But that doesn’t mean they won’t go on the lam. With powerful hind legs, an Oberhasli can easily bound over a fence or to the top of a car.

  Lawrence, in other words, was genetically wired to crave cuddles and elude anything that tried to prevent them. During thunderstorms, we’d be startled by a sudden pounding on the door before remembering that it was just Lawrence, feeling lonely and wanting to come inside. We got a lucky break when our best Amish friends, Katie and Amos, came up with the idea of breeding Lawrence with their Boer goats to create a super-herd of friendly, meaty milkers. Traveling with Lawrence was easy; I just clicked a leash on his collar and strolled the half mile like I was walking a dog. I dropped him off with a mob of Amos’s nanny goats and said good-bye as he ran off happily to meet the ladies. Two weeks later, a tractor trundled into the driveway with a dog crate on the back. Inside was Lawrence, returned in disgrace. Even though Amos’s fence was higher than ours and was reinforced with an electric shock wire across the top, it was no match for those Oberhasli springs. It was bad enough that Katie had to constantly race out the door to shoo Lawrence out of her garden, but the final straw was the phone book. The Amish keep their telephones out by the barn, usually in a little shed that looks like an outhouse. Early one morning, Katie went out to make a call and found Lawrence inside, munching the thick notebook containing the family’s lifetime collection of phone numbers.

  No matter how aggravating Lawrence was, though, I couldn’t stay mad for long. I would come boiling out the door at dawn to retrieve him from the road, only to find him galumphing toward me as if he’d been looking forward to seeing me all morning. To him, breakouts were less about freedom and more about friendship. Big and strong as he’d become, in his heart Lawrence was still the frozen-eared little furball shivering next to his mom on his first night in the world.

  * * *

  —

  Lawrence, as usual, was bringing up the rear as the herd came in for the night, always the last kid to leave the playground when it got dark. Suddenly he pivoted, head high and on alert. He sniffed the air, zeroing in on the weird, shaggy shape standing motionless against the wall of the barn. Sherman was cornered. Even if he suddenly found the power to move, he had no room to escape whatever was going to happen next.

  Chummy as he was, Lawrence was the last one I wanted anywhere near a dazed, traumatized donkey whose badly damaged feet and months of captivity in a tiny shed left him practically immobile, a sick and sitting target. Lawrence’s bounding welcome tended to freak out children and other animals meeting him for the first time, mostly because they had no idea why this galloping madman with two giant bone spears on his head was charging at them, full speed. There was no way I could get to Lawrence in time without the risk of spooking him and making things worse, so I braced myself and hoped Lawrence would change his mind and hurry off once he noticed the herd had left him behind. Instead, he did something I’d rarely seen him do before: he took his time.

  Lawrence

  Lawrence approached Sherman slowly, cautiously, as if he were tiptoeing. It’s so weird to see him so nervous, I thought, until I realized something else was going on: When Lawrence got close to Sherman, he shoved his nose right up against the donkey’s flank and began sniffing him, curious but careful, working from head to toe. Sherman didn’t move a muscle, not even flinching when the points of Lawrence’s horns were in his face.

  I watched, edgy and ready to spring into action the second that goofy goat gave a hint of feistiness. Lawrence kept snuffling along, working his way all the way down Sherman’s flank and into the high-impact zone behind his tail, circling Sherman until he disappeared behind his far side. He finally reemerged by Sherman’s drooping head, his inspection tour complete. Whatever story Lawrence’s nose picked up must have troubled him, because he then did something that, in an instant, made up for every flowerbed he had ever ruined, every driver he had ever terrified, every torn fence I’ve had to replace.

  Lawrence lay down beside the sick donkey, curled his legs beneath him, and settled in for the night.

  * * *

  —

  When I came out the next morning, Lawrence was still there. It was baffling. Sunrise never found Lawrence anywhere near where he’d been the night before; ordinarily he’d be messing around with the other animals by now, then hurrying down to the front gate to see if the kids who caught the school bus at the end of our driveway were in the mood to share a little treat from their lunch boxes or at
least scratch his ears.

  But not today. Nothing could make him abandon this sick stranger. Nothing—

  Except breakfast.

  I pulled open the door of the hay stall and suddenly Lawrence, that chowhound, scrambled to his feet. He sprinted toward me, shoving his way into the middle of the scrum of sheep and goats that were already crowding around. I shoved a half bale of hay into the hayrack and got out of the way, leaving the critters to tear into their meal. Behind me, I sensed something approaching. I turned and found Sherman taking a few slow, tentative steps. He stopped a few paces away from the hay feeder, keeping himself clear of the mayhem, but as Lawrence shifted to the left, so did Sherman. When Lawrence spotted a better place to attack the food and moved to the right, Sherman quietly followed. For the rest of the morning, Sherman kept his distance from the other animals. But anytime Lawrence made a move, a long-eared shadow was right behind.