An Accidental Cowboy
By Jameson Parker
Copyright 2012
Smashwords Edition
For Darleen
I never took you to Rome or Paris,
but we chased pheasants on Sitting Bull’s trail
and saw the lions with their kill at Kapama.
I never bought you a diamond ring,
but I bought you a fine strong horse.
I never even gave you a proper honeymoon,
but I give you now this book.
You know the difference between a fairy story and a cowboy story? Fairy story begins, “Once upon a time.” Cowboy story begins, “You all ain’t gonna believe this shit.”
Roger Ott, horse trainer
“These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where it molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.”
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
I
In a furnished apartment in Seattle, my wife and I are having a luxuriously late breakfast surrounded by the white noise—white din—of the city: cars, buses, people, and the intermittent counterpoint of seaplanes coming in from the San Juan Islands. We are on location, making a movie, the first time we have worked together in years, but this is our day off and we are basking in the indolence of freedom—freedom from wake-up calls, pick-up calls, makeup calls, wardrobe calls, camera calls. I am still in my pajamas, drinking coffee rich and dark as molasses as we watch the news, our morning ritual.
Darleen comes to the table carrying bowls of wild blackberries and yogurt, and as she sits down the newscaster starts to talk about a robbery turned homicide caught on surveillance video. The screen goes from color to black and white. We watch a young man walk up to the counter in a store with a revolver in his hand. I note, automatically, unconsciously, that it appears to be a six-inch, blued, Smith & Wesson .38. The clerk behind the counter and a stocky middle-aged customer both look at the gun, as expressionless as if they are looking at some completely neutral object—a candlestick, say, or a book. The young man is talking. He holds the gun casually, easily, no wild waving or gesturing with it.
Suddenly the middle-aged customer lunges for the revolver. The young man pulls his gun hand away, out of reach, turning his body as he does so. Instead of grappling with him, the middle-aged customer continues, absurdly, to follow the gun. The young man continues to turn and they make a complete 360-degree circle. Then the young man steps back and shoots.
There is no sound in this grainy footage. The only way I know for certain a shot has been fired is because the gun jumps slightly in the young man’s hand. The middle-aged customer stiffens, his whole body stiffens, and he seems to rise up slightly, almost as if he were standing on tiptoe. His hands come up, not to clutch at his chest, but in the air just in front of the wound. For a brief moment he stands like that. Then he pitches forward and lies absolutely, finally, still. The screen goes back to the pretty newscaster’s face in color.
I watch all this and I am fine. I talk normally to Darleen about other things. I finish my berries and my coffee. I am fine. I even sit and watch the weather report, for Darleen and I have planned a day of hiking in the country. I am fine.
But then as I start to dress, the air in this light and sunny apartment turns suddenly thick and dark as my coffee. The walls start to move in on me at crazy angles. And all at once, I can no longer breathe. No matter how hard I struggle, I simply cannot get enough air into my lungs, or out of them. I know what is happening, but I can’t help myself. I have to get outside.
Darleen, still in her nightgown, rushes to change, to go with me, but I can’t wait. Shirttails out, pants unbuttoned, I hurry past the elevator—even the thought of waiting for an elevator is unbearable to me—down the stairs, buckling my belt as I pass through the lobby, out into the street. I start to walk, fast, very fast, then to run, faster, harder, farther, farther.
I will never be able to run fast enough or far enough, yet I will run to a world I have never dreamed of, a life I have never imagined. I will run all the way to a ranch in the Sierras.
II
The bull and I are alone in the pen. He is nineteen hundred pounds of bad-tempered unpredictability, which is why he and I have come to this place. All four-year-old bulls are culled to prevent them from breeding their own daughters. Those that are relatively tractable go to McDonald’s, while the more aggressive, like this one, go to enliven—and sometimes shorten—the careers of ambitious young men on the rodeo circuit. He watches me without fear, without malice, without curiosity, as dispassionate and impersonal as an earthquake. I have just finished helping repair a five-strand barbwire fence destroyed when one bull, like this one, picked up another, like this one, and threw him onto the fence. This particular bull has earned his right to the rodeo life by throwing Dal, two hundred and ninety pounds, and his horse, fourteen hundred pounds, into a stock tank, not in anger, but simply because he wished to move from point A to point C and Dal was sitting his horse at point B. Dal is a far better horseman than I, better mounted, more knowledgeable about cattle, and he wears spurs. My horse has already proven herself relatively sluggish and insensitive to the leg. I wish I were wearing spurs. I wish this pen were bigger. I wish I knew exactly what I am doing here.
The pen the bull and I share has a gate which leads to a smaller pen, maybe fifteen by fifteen feet, which in turn leads to a chute which leads to the waiting stock trailer. A ranch hand has been struggling from the top of the fence for some minutes with the latch and finally, in frustration, he jumps down into the smaller pen, kicks the latch back and opens the gate.
“Drive him on in,” he yells.
“Don’t you want to get out of there first?” I ask.
“Gotta close the damn gate. Drive him in.”
I begin to walk my horse slowly in a semi-circle around the bull. I think of Hemingway, talking about the fighting bulls of Spain and how the pacifying effect of the herd instinct made them safe in numbers and dangerous only when alone. I remember a lecture from college on the “critical distance” of psychopaths, the distance they require between themselves and all other beings so they don’t feel threatened. I don’t know if bulls and psychopaths have the same requirements, but the results of their being threatened are very likely to be unpleasantly similar and I make my semi-circle as big as I can. The bull turns with me, watching. When at last I have him between me and the gate I walk my horse toward him. For the first few deliberate steps nothing happens; then, at about twenty feet—the bull’s critical distance—he takes a single quick step back and drops his head. I am feeling very focused, aware of all kinds of external stimuli—the heat of the sun on my back, the rustling of the sycamore leaves in the breeze, the smell of my horse and of cow shit, the creaking of my saddle, the distant monotonous cawing of a raven—all of these things at once as my horse steps carefully forward, once, twice. Then the bull turns easily and trots with massive dignity into the smaller pen and the cowboy slams the gate and throws the latch.
Suddenly, things happen very fast. One instant the bull’s tail is toward the cowboy. The next instant, quicker than thought, he has switched ends and his head, lowered and infinitely threatening, is three feet from the cowboy’s pelvis. This man is middle-aged and no sylph. His waistline shows plainly the effects of too much steak and too many beers. But adrenaline is wonderfully invigorating and he is every bit as quick as the bull. From the ground to the top rail of the pen is six feet, but he jumps it effortlessly, perching there like some stout laughing bird.
III
When I tell people from other states I live in California, those who remember me as an actor assume I mean Los Angeles. Those who don’t invariably ask if I live in LA or San Francisco (a few enlightened and well traveled souls might add San Diego, but that rarely happens), as if those two cities defined in some way the vast sprawling diversity of the nation’s third largest state. And while, in fact, they are defining, it is primarily a cultural definition having as much to do with attitude as with geography.
In spite of having the greatest total population and the second biggest city, California is a rural state. Agriculture, including beef and dairy cattle, is the third largest industry. It has more land without roads than any other state except Alaska. Vast sections of it are remote and wild and even parts of it that are not remote are still very wild indeed. The San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains around LA generally take several lives a year as inexperienced and ill-prepared hikers tumble off of cliffs, or lose their way and succumb to hypothermia or dehydration.
Where I live now, on the western slope of the Sierras, almost five thousand feet above the San Joaquin valley, California is wild in ways that sometimes astonish me. I see deer daily. Elk frequently feed or bed down in the saddle a hundred yards below the house. (Last year, for three days, five bulls made that saddle their headquarters, including one eight-by-seven-point monarch who drew my attention away from my desk as effectively as a girl sunbathing topless.) Bobcats work the land regularly, sometimes with laughable inefficiency. I watched through binoculars as one, possibly the village idiot, stalked some unseen rodent through the dry grass. When he finally pounced, he fell on his head and rolled ass over teakettle down the hill. The first year we lived here I was about to leave the house one day and had just put my hand on the door to the garage when one of my dogs insisted on being petted. As I straightened back up I happened to glance out the window in time to see a black bear amble out of my garage. If I had walked in and surprised him there it might have been embarrassing for both of us. A neighbor, a few miles away, was charged by a mountain lion as he planted zinnias in his back yard. Fortunately, in his surprise, my neighbor yelled and waved his arms, scaring the cat off.
And always there are the coyotes. When I did live in LA, I saw them there too, in the streets and yards around my home, but they always looked thin and shabby and afraid, like panhandlers in Beverly Hills. Here, they usually hunt in pairs or small family groups and are ruthless, efficient, and very much at home. At night, their lupine inter-pack communication (“We’re hunting here. Don’t trespass on our turf.”) thrills me, an audible symbol of all that is wild and lost and free in computerized America. Other times their insane, hyena-like screaming as they celebrate a successful hunt makes me and the dogs rise up out of our sleep, growling atavistically, and my heart goes out to whatever animal has become their prey, for it is not an easy death. My brother-in-law was riding down the barranca to the west of our little community, a four-thousand-foot cleft that cuts through the mountain as if God had driven His ax into the earth. He was riding along a steep and narrow streambed when three coyotes ran up the far bank and stopped forty or fifty yards away to stare at him. Curious, John rode over to see what they had been doing. In the creek bottom, at the water’s edge, was a dead doe, hindquarters eaten almost completely away, belly and forequarters intact. John was turning his horse to ride on when the dead doe lifted her head and bleated at him. He clambered down and cut her throat.
Coyotes are not cruel. They are pragmatic. The coyote likes fresh meat as well as you and I, but he lacks refrigeration. And when he falls afoul of a mountain lion or coursing hounds or a leg trap, his death is no less easy, no less natural, no less necessary.
But California is still, in spite of Hollywood and Disneyland and freeways and smog and metastasizing housing developments and all the other ills of modern industrialized, urbanized America, still a rural and frequently wild place where much is as it was when the vaqueros roped grizzly bears for sport and Ishi’s parents retreated into the rugged vastness of the northern mountains. And away from the ski resorts and crowded hiking trails of the national parks, ranch hands still ply their trade in the high Sierras in much the same way that the vaqueros once did, relying on horse and reata and each other.
IV
It starts gradually, infrequently, imperceptibly, a night here, a night there. You put it down to something you ate, or that you ate too much, or not enough, or you drank too much, or not enough, or too much exercise, or not enough. You sit in a chair with a book in your lap and a glass of whiskey in your hand. Or you sit in a chair in the dark with just the whiskey. Sometimes you pace through the darkened house, living room, kitchen, guestroom, office, guestroom, kitchen, living room, modifying your gait to accommodate the known but unseen rooms. Or you stand at a window, looking up at the stars. Three AM becomes a familiar time. In the dark night of the soul, it is always three AM. During the summer months you watch the sky lighten in the east before you go back, finally, drained and deadened, to bed, but never to rest.
And as the sleepless nights mount up, increasing in frequency, moving themselves from the abnormal to the normal column, you begin to dread the night. You begin to dread the futility of trying to sleep, until the bed itself, once a symbol of pleasure—softening sighs and throaty chuckles, quickened breath and sweet straining muscles, and then the drowsy awareness of a loved one next to you—becomes a symbol of agony. You begin to hate the bed itself for its false promises, hate getting into it when you know how soon you will be out again, pacing, sitting, drinking in the dark.
V
We were driving into the local livery, Darleen and I, to see about rescuing a pretty little Arab–Quarter Horse cross. She was legally the property of an overly macho ham-fisted fool who had tried to train her by punching her repeatedly in the face, and having created an unmanageable horse he was now neglecting her. We were just pulling into the parking lot when Darleen slammed on the brakes and sat staring at the round pen fifty yards away. My wife, who is an excellent hand in her own right, used to be married—for one cup of coffee—to a professional trainer who was as gifted and gentle with horses as he was brutal and dishonest with people. She has been around horses and trainers all her life and now she sat, mesmerized, watching a tall man in a dusty and decrepit black Stetson working a horse.
“My God,” she said finally, “that man is a hand.”
That, from her, is the Oscar, the Pulitzer, the ultimate accolade. Apart from the natural wave of jealousy a man feels when his wife expresses breathless admiration for another man—especially when the wife in question is prone to voice her criticism of her husband’s riding in the acid terms normally reserved for functionally brain-dead bureaucratic minions—apart from that, I was fascinated. The tall man was doing things I had never seen before. He stood in the center of the circle with a lariat in his hands, no longe line, no whip, driving the horse with a casual, almost lazy, lifting of the coiled rope. Now and again he would let the horse stop and he would turn away, looking over his shoulder until at last the gelding stepped forward to face him. He threw the open loop of the lariat over the horse’s croup, over his withers; he roped each foot in turn, letting the horse experiment with the sensation of having its legs held; he slid the loop up both hind legs and tightened the rope around belly, girth, and loins, each time giving the horse freedom to react as it wanted; he placed the loop over the horse’s head, around its neck, driving him forward, turning him, then forward again. All this was done with a steady and unhurried calm, as if time didn’t exist, as if all there was or had been or would be was this moment, this horse, this circle. And through it all the animal became progressively more confident, more relaxed, ears forward, eyes softening. We were watching a hand.
Dave Ferry is described by some people as our local horse whisperer, though that popular phrase is one he dismisses. “I don’t know about whispering, but when a horse shouts I can generally hear what he’s trying to say.” He is modest enough and realistic enough to know his limitations and prefers to describe himself as a “facilitator,” by which he means that he helps the horse avoid the wrong thing and do the right one. Horses that won’t load, that have been abused or allowed to develop bad habits, horses that pull back—one of the most difficult faults to cure—all respond to his infinite patience and gentle firmness and uncanny understanding. He is a disciple of Buck Brannaman’s and as such he is heir to a philosophy of gentle horsemanship that extends back through Buck and Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance to the horse itself. (All that is well and good. However, by his own admission, when Dave found himself one day facing a very large bear on a very small trail, he was neither gentle nor patient in communicating to his horse his desire to be someplace else, right now.) When Darleen and I finally acquired the Arab-Quarter cross, a horse we didn’t need, didn’t want and couldn’t afford to keep, we gave her to some neighbors with the stipulation that they hire Dave.
In A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s spectacular history of the fourteenth century, there is a brief description of the Sultan Bajazet’s cruelty in forcing the French nobles, “equestrian almost from birth,” to walk instead of ride after their defeat at Nicopolis. I think of that whenever I see Dave Ferry. Eminently graceful on horseback, as if man and beast were one animal, he seems oddly out of place on foot, lanky and bowlegged, almost awkward. But even more incongruous is to see him in his CHP uniform, the badge and gun and bulletproof vest in aggressive contrast to the kindly, sleepy eyes. Dave is a horse trainer. He pays for hay and feed for his many horses and three children by working for the California Highway Patrol, but he is a horse trainer by instinct, by proclivity, almost by birth.
Martin Dysart, in Equus: “A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs—it sucks—it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly, one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why?” A wild mustang, given to the son of a neighbor, and some essential moments in ten-year-old Dave snapped together so that now, thirty years later, when most of his fellow officers drive shiny new pickups and sport utility vehicles, Dave would rather buy a Doc Bar/Peppy San broodmare than replace the rattling, farting mass of antiquated metal that carries him uncertainly on his training rounds.
Another moment: his father, a Presbyterian minister, moved his brood to Scotland for a year when Dave was fourteen and Celtic blood awoke to a passion for all things Scottish and an encyclopedic fascination for the history of that bloody land. He and I, to my wife’s tolerant amusement, have been known to tire the sun discussing the Wallace and the Bruce; the glory of Bannockburn and Stirling Bridge; the irrevocable heartbreak of Culloden and Falkirk and Flodden Field; the perfidy and ruthlessness of the Sassenachs from Edward Longshanks to Tony Blair; the relative merits of Oban, Aberlour, Lagavulin; all of the above accompanied by generous taste tests of the last. And yet, and yet…
And yet there is another side to Dave, a place in him where I cannot follow.
Sitting in a bar with Dave and his former partner from Bakersfield CHP, drinking too many Voluptuous Blondes—the local microbrewery—I listened to the two of them reminisce. It is what men do in bars everywhere, but instead of laughing over memories of a camping trip or pickup basketball game or a pilgrimage to some revered golf course, they were laughing over the bloody details of an hour-long battle with a doped-up ex-con, a high speed pursuit, a foot chase through dark streets after an armed gangbanger, a deadly shootout. Their laughter was the laughter of the survivor, the victor. I recognized it and understood. On the painfully few occasions, during my short-lived career as the worst amateur boxer in recorded history, when I actually managed to find someone even worse than I to fight, and dropped him, I experienced something very akin to their laughter.
(A gym in Hollywood, of all places, cleaner and more civilized than most—possibly why it didn’t last. Ken Norton used to work out there, long after retirement, before the accident. I am in the ring with a big, flashy white kid. He is a bouncer at a nightclub and a black belt in tae kwon do. Neither of these facts impress me. What impresses me is that he is very fast, very strong and a southpaw. I have only fought one other southpaw; I got knocked out. The kid is peppering right jabs at me, snapping them out with his flashy speed as I keep shuffling to my left, away from his menacingly still left hand. When you box, there is only your opponent. Nothing else, no one else exists. Even your own body seems somehow unreal. The only reality is your opponent and your trainer’s voice. Other fighters can be yelling encouragement or advice, music can be blaring on the radio, people screaming and waving, but all you see is this other you, this reflection of yourself in front of you that you are trying to hit, all you can hear in the background bedlam of the gym is your trainer’s disembodied voice. In this gym now I hear my trainer—Bumblebee, he is called—yelling, “Step outside, lead with the right! Step outside, lead with the right!” He means he wants me to keep my left foot outside the southpaw’s right foot and to answer his jabs with my right hand. But I am scared of this fast, cocky, younger man and for one whole round I keep shuffling left, his crackling jabs snapping my head back, largely unanswered. In the second round, almost as if the jabs themselves had caused my frightened synapses to finally fire, I begin to realize that for all his speed and strength there is no real authority to his punches—I have trained with a seventy-two-year-old man whose jab could and did knock a three-hundred-pound football player across the gym—and I begin to use my right more frequently and confidently. In the third round my body, not my mind, suddenly knows he is about to jab—your opponent is yourself—and I step outside and lead with my right and he falls. Not the light fall of a slightly stunned fighter who is recovering even as he goes down, but the heavy, helpless fall of someone who is truly hurt. He lies at my feet, moaning slightly, and tries to roll over, but is incapable of even that degree of motor control. The impulse rises in me then, unbidden, unfamiliar, savage, to stomp on his face and I move to his head. Don’t misunderstand. I didn’t think, “I want to stomp on his face,” and move to do it. It was an atavistic, involuntary impulse akin to throwing your arm up to break your fall. And then Bumblebee is calling my name, slipping through the ropes, quick and graceful as a blacksnake, throwing his arms around me and backing me up, staring into my eyes as if I were the one knocked out and he determining my fitness to continue, murmuring my name like a lover and telling me I was good, I was good, I did good.)
And so I understand their laughter, but at the same time there is a glint in Dave’s dark eyes that hints at something else, something more that I do not know and cannot share. It came into focus one night as we walked into Buck Owens’s Crystal Palace. Dave gestured across the street and without breaking stride said, “That’s where I shot that carjacker.” Off-hand. As casually as another man might say, “That’s where I bought those boots.” And then we walked into Buck Owens’s gaudy unreality to hear my wife sing.
We were at a Buck Brannaman clinic, watching Buck work with an ill-mannered, foul-tempered snide that was clearly smarter than its unfortunate owner, when an enormous bearded cowboy walked up holding a brand-new baby. Dave introduced me to him, Dal Bunn, foreman of the Loop Ranch. We chatted for a few minutes and then Dal wandered off in search of his wife and a baby bottle. Dave turned to me.
“Hey. They’re going to be gathering cattle on the Loop this week. I’m going down on Thursday. How’d you like to come along?”
Since Dave is forever trying to rope me into some scheme or another, half of which involve considerable risk to life and limb, I was pretty certain this was something he had already discussed with Dal and that I had just been unwittingly auditioned.
“I don’t know, Dave. My mare’s never even seen a cow as far as I know.”
“This would be an ideal time for her to learn about them.”
“Actually, I don’t know anything about gathering cattle either.”
“Be a good time for you too.”
“Uh, well, I don’t have a trailer. I don’t have any way to get her down there.”
“We’ll throw her in my trailer. I’ll swing by and pick you up. Six-thirty OK?”
About this time I ran out of excuses. If I had had any idea of what I was getting into I would have dreamed up some good ones.
VI
The Loop Ranch, about an hour from my home, is 47,000 acres of steep, rocky, brush-covered mountains and narrow oak- and sycamore-studded valleys. It is divided into pastures that range from under five hundred to over five thousand acres. The Loop gets its name from the Tehachapi Loop, an engineering marvel whereby William Hood, in 1876, was able to overcome the rapid vertical incline in a narrow pass and connect the towns of Bakersfield and Mojave on the western and eastern slopes of the Sierras, respectively. It is now the most heavily traveled stretch of railroad in America, averaging thirty-six freight trains each day, and is considered one of the seven wonders of the railroad world. Certainly it is a wondrous monument to the three thousand or so nameless Chinese who cut through the solid and decomposed granite and laid essentially the same track that is still in use today. The loop itself is a large circle of track that bores through part of the mountain so that the front of the train actually passes over—or under, depending upon direction—the rear cars. Seen from one of the surrounding mountains, two, three, four thousand feet above the track, the trains negotiating the circle resemble huge sluggish snakes ever trying and ever failing to bite their own tails.
The ranch headquarters—two houses, a barn, assorted outbuildings, corrals, dilapidated trailers—actually sit within the loop. In the cool of the morning, saddling up our horses, all conversation becomes impossible as the first of what may be as many as five monstrous, connected diesels pulses deafeningly past us. The engineer waves and stares, as fascinated by his glimpse of nineteenth-century cowboy life as I am by his train. The diesels disappear around the hill and a few minutes later they reappear above us to the south while freight car after freight car continues to rattle slowly past on the north. The occasional migrant worker waves to us from these, but his look is not so much curious as it is hopeful. If we beckoned to him, he would jump down, eager for a day’s work. After the diesels pass we can shout to each other and we continue saddling up. Through it all the horses stand calmly. Later, my horse will try to bolt in trembling panic from a deer in the shadow of an oak, but now this palpable din bothers her not a whit. Dal and Mike, the two resident hands, claim that they and their wives and children all sleep peacefully through this cacophony, inured to it. I think I would die of old age before I got used to it.
The loop, the railroad, not the ranch, attracts thousands of tourists every year, train enthusiasts from around the world. There was a brief period, when Dal Bunn first came to the ranch, when he was the only resident hand. In those days he lived in the smaller ranch house, which has shockingly poor water pressure. He stepped into the shower one day to find only a thin and unsatisfactory trickle of water. Remembering that he had left a sprinkler on outside, he trotted out, naked, to turn it off. As he bent down to grab the faucet a round of applause greeted him. It was Memorial Day and thirty or forty tourists had gathered at this remote spot to watch the trains negotiate William Hood’s ingenious design, but they were happy to accept whatever entertainment came their way.
VII
My first drive had more in common with military maneuvers—possibly a guerilla cavalry raid, à la John Mosby—than any movement of cattle I had ever experienced, anticipated or dreamed of. On the New England dairy farm where I worked as a child, moving cows was as difficult as opening a gate and letting the patient, waiting Holsteins troop into the barn, eager to be fed and milked. It’s a little different trying to clear a five-thousand-acre pasture of wily, tough, feral cattle whose sole contact with humans has been unlikely to inspire trust. The pasture is a steep, treacherous mountainside dotted with huge patches of bitterbrush, dense and impenetrable as concertina wire and creased with scores of brush-choked arroyos deep enough to hide elephants. Normally, Dal and Mike use a motley and eclectic assortment of dogs to help drive the cattle, but a recent population boom amongst the coyotes, and the concomitant toll on calf survival, had made the services of the government trapper necessary, services rendered with cyanide bombs.
Trapping raises many ethical red flags in today’s society. Cyanide bombs for coyotes, however, are very different in their effect and effectiveness than traditional leg-hold traps: they kill instantly. No one, least of all Dal, wants to live in a world without God’s dog—as the Navaho call him—but Dal has to answer to the Loop’s owner with a bottom line written in black ink and when Coyote’s numbers rise to the point where he has an impact on the profit and loss statement, Dal calls in the trapper. I know that any quick death is humane, but still the red and white warning signs that announce the presence of the bombs fill me with queasy loathing as I think of the vulnerability of Liberty, my goofy, long-legged hunting dog, dancing through these mountains during quail season. I take comfort in the certain knowledge that long after the last man’s bones are bleached white in the brilliant California sun, there will be a coyote to lift his leg on them and trot off happily to his home and little ones.