DONKEYS LOVE TOO

jenny and jack

Jack and Jenny are in orbit right now. She's gone into heat. The last three days they have been honeymooning. About any time I look out the window Jack is standing almost straight up on his back feet behind Jenny, his front legs hugging her sides, his chin on her back, him looking like a happy donkey. Jenny stands still with her head down and her mouth opening and closing automatically like she's talking to herself. This is Jenny in love. Last year, Jenny was not in love. This year she is with her man she sleeps side-by-side with nightly and grazes with all day. They have learned each other's temperaments and flow very well together after a year, in love the second half of the year. It's funny when Jack jumps onto Jenny's back and she starts walking, Jack attached to her and walking fast on his back feet, hanging on with his front legs. Early this morning I went out to take them carrots and saw Jack on Jenny's back. He saw me with carrots and started braying with his chin on Jenny's back. Hanging on and braying, donkey multi-tasking. Later, back in the house, I saw out the window Jack on Jenny's back again and Jenny liking her part in this time of making love several times a day. After Jack hopped down, Jenny went to their nearby pile of droppings. Her feet either side of the pile, she peed a trickle and dropped some donkey biscuits. Done, she walked away. Jack had been standing nearby watching. He walked to the pile, sniffed Jenny's scent on the fresh droppings. He positioned himself astraddle the pile, contributed his biscuits, walked to the fresh hay nearby and grazed. I put their hay down separately due to their jealousy over food. Jenny grazed on her hay for awhile and Jack grazed on his. Time out for breakfast. 

jenny and jack

I'd have been interested in the sex part when I was ten, though by now, the sex part is about the same as eating hay or rolling on a dust circle. The part of it that I like seeing in this time of the life is my two donkey friends, friends I brought together, lovers, donkeys who have taught me appreciation for donkey, whose lives I know as close friends. The donkeys I love equally, happy that my donkey pets have fallen in love and live together as lovers who would rather be with each other than with anyone else. I think they are both four years old. It makes me feel good to see Jack and Jenny so close, knowing they are mated for life, will love each other all their lives. I love that. I love that I have given a couple of donkeys a chance to live their lives in love. Even when I put Jenny in the meadow with Jack I never gave a thought to donkeys falling in love. Growing up in the Western world under Christendom, I was taught early that animals had no feelings. It didn't matter what you did to a dumb animal. They didn't feel anything. Definitely did not have a soul, the life force itself. None of that computed to me, but I accepted it. It was the world everywhere around me; home, school, church, neighbors, relatives. It was the unanimous belief in my world, like white superiority. It appeared to me that dogs and cats had eyes, ears, mouth, nose, etc. They breathed and they had heartbeats. Just like us. They had head, spine, ribs, legs. They consumed in front and evacuated behind, just like us. I couldn't talk to anyone about my observation I took for obvious. But it wasn't obvious to anyone else. I continued to believe that old way about animals until I came to the mountains. My first dog here taught me animals can love, they can think, they can communicate without spoken words, Sadie was her name. She was three years old when she came to me. We were bonded after two weeks together. 

jenny

She taught me a great deal about dog nature. I learned dogs have hearts full of love in them. All they need for it to surface is to be loved. Then their love surfaces. It was the same with the donkeys. I love them and they love me. I've raised all my pets since living here with love, five cats and five dogs. Raising them with a loving heart, I never trained any of them. I would not know how to train a dog or a cat. I've looked at training books and would not do any of the training methods on a dog of mine. I love them too much to make robots of them. I want them to live by their own dog nature to fulfillment, not be objects for me to command. My next dog, Aster, won my heart the day I threw a stick for her and she just stood and looked at me like to say, What was that about? I never did it again, glad to see she wasn't interested in chasing a ball or a stick. They were always at my side, rode on the seat beside me in the pickup. They flowed with me, attentive to pleasing the one they love. And I was attentive to please them. Never scolded any of them. I scolded Sadie some at first, because I didn't know better. Once I caught on, she never heard me scold again. Caterpillar is the last of three cats that were born here. I've never scolded any of them in their whole lives. We lived together in harmony, attentive both ways to the well-being of the other. Every one of their graves represents a very sorrowful heart when whichever one left the body. Sadie left the body thirty years ago and I'm still like the song about Mr Bojangles, His dog up and died. After twenty years he still grieves. I continue to love every one of them so much it still hurts that they're gone. 

jack

Love is wonderful, but oh it hurts when a loved one leaves the body. I've known several people who won't have any more pets after one died. The pain was too hard to bear and they don't want to go through it again. I tend to think of the years of joy they gave me, the happiness they gave me, the love they gave me, day after day. Sometimes the pain is rugged. It has never stopped me from wanting another for a home companion. Caterpillar is so jealous, I can't bring another cat or dog into the house. The donkeys will outlive me by several years. A day will come that the Ice Cream man will bring them carrots and sweet grain no more. Somebody else will take care of them. I'm remembering a French film I started to watch, Balthazar, the story of a donkey's life in rural France. The donkey was bought and sold and used as a beast of burden, regarded as though it had no soul. I couldn't watch after maybe ten minutes into it, could not stand to see a donkey mistreated and regarded unconscious. I'm grateful that I've had a chance to know donkeys, to learn donkey ways, to know two donkeys as individuals, as friends, as people I care about. Knowing donkeys is one of the treasures of my life. I'm grateful I came to know dogs and cats, too, as individual beings, sentient life forms. I won't argue with anybody over whether or not a four-legged has a soul. Somebody who will not allow the essence of life in a dog is somebody I'm wary of. It tells me they would learn a whole lot more having a dog to live with than listening to a preacher who doesn't know, just studied how to sound like he knows what he's talking about. I'm glad I had no preconceptions about donkeys when I met Jack. I didn't even know donkeys were bad to kick until somebody warned me. Jack and Jenny don't kick each other anymore and don't kick me. I'm grateful that in this lifetime I have learned that the four-leggeds love too. Now I know when I see a documentary about wild animals in Africa, the lion and lioness are in love, and they love their kittens like we love our babies. 

jenny and jack

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DROPPING IN ON OLD MAN TOM IN WINTER

I've found the notebook from my first months on Waterfall Road, the winter of 1976-1977. Conscious mind has forgotten most of it, but these reminders from page to page bring back the people, the places, the moments. Thought I'd share some of it with you. Tom is Tom Pruitt, later known as old man Tom. I am remembering these first experiences knowing him. Then, he was new, someone like I'd never experienced, somebody who, himself, was the old-timey way. He would be my teacher and friend for the next fourteen years. I helped carry his coffin from funeral home to grave site. I saw him last a few minutes before spirit left the body, or may have been while spirit was in transit. I came to know his life over the period of time I had the good fortune to know Tom. In the time I knew him, his culture was waning fast. He was left surrounded by exurbanites he was an oddity to. Farm land he'd spent his life working had become suburban lots with new houses. The exurbanites around him thought it was funny, like mystical, he always knew what the weather was going to be. "Is it gonna rain, Tom?" Tom's answer, "Always has." They thought he had the old farmer way of knowing by signs what weather was around the corner. He watched tv news from Winston-Salem and heard the mountain weather report every evening. No one ever questioned the source of his knowledge, assuming he was the wise old farmer who could read the signs. Characteristic of Tom's personality was his direct way of seeing and speaking. He said it came from his mother's side; she was direct. Tom never skirted around anything except when he was consciously misleading. I about got shot by him once. After I'd been here maybe four years, he was mad at me and told a great big lie on me to three different people. All three told me and all three told the same story separately. I went to his house and spoke to him about it. He swore he didn't say it. It came to, "You calling me a liar?" In the mountains, when somebody says that, it's the same as a death threat. It means WATCH. YOUR. BACK. I knew he was lying, he knew he was lying, he knew I knew he was lying. I answered his question as directly as he spoke, "Reckon I am." His eyes became shotgun barrels. There was no more for either of us to say after that, and I left. Walking from the door to my truck I anticipated falling down dead any split second. Tom would not miss. We were both irritated for awhile, then it passed. This journal entry is Thursday, February 3, 1977. Temperature outside was between zero and ten F, snow.

 

tom's house today

 

2-3: This afternoon at four I went to visit Tom. We sat before the stove and he told me some good tales. He talked about Christ and salvation. Christ and John the Baptist, according to Tom, are the only two perfect men that walked the earth. I about mentioned India, but held back. I asked him if he knew the reverend George Farmer, who preaches on local AM radio. Tom said, "Money preacher. He preaches for money. He don't preach from the spirit." Tom said a real preacher is a man chosen by God who has the spirit in him and lives by the spirit. He told of a preacher he knew who was a money preacher. The preacher had a vision once of himself and another preacher fishing. He came back with two fish over rough, dry, rocky ground. The other preacher came back with a load of golden fish over a green meadow. As a result of the vision, the preacher with two fish became determined to match the other preacher's abundance. He never amounted to anything and lived a carnal life for a preacher. "He didn't have sense enough to know them two fish was his churches." He was working two churches trying to make money. He told of another preacher at a wedding Tom went to, who passed the offering plate twice.

 

He talked about the divinity of Christ and quoted scripture. He said he could talk scripture all day, but he wasn't a preacher. He didn't have the spirit. He could get up and talk scripture in church, but it would be speakin, not preachin.

 

He told of the time he broke his wrist jumping out of a hay loft and had Don, his nephew, pull it back into place. Later, the next day, after sitting in the chair all day, after sitting in the chair all day the day before, pulling on the hand with the broken wrist to keep it in place, he knocked it out of place again. He went to the doctor to have a cast put on it. When the doctor pressed it with his thumb to snap it back, Tom said, "I like to jumped a foot from top to bottom."

 

Every time I'm around Tom, he tells me stories and tales I love to hear. I sit all ears, trying to be a memory box, and lose most of it due to there being so much. I look hard at his face and his clothes and his hands and his feet propped up on a chair in stockings. I don't think he ever washes anything. He carried a pot of stew from the wood-stove to the kitchen, using a cloth for a hot pad so filthy a woman would scream seeing it.

quan yin on cloud mountain

 

1-27: This morning I took a walk down to the waterfalls. Walked through snow over the ankles with Sadie, whose four legs could not go as slow as my two. She ran off ahead of me sniffing the snow for rabbits. She would turn and come back to say hello, and be off again. Often she would walk ahead of me and I would follow her through the thick trees as she always finds the easiest ground to walk on and the best ways through the most dense places. Followed the stream that runs by this house, under the road and through Tom's property. Many small streams flow from springs in the hills on either side, down to the stream that grows as it moves along. Small falls about a foot high, all the way down, then the big one, at least fifty feet high and just as wide. Most of it was covered with ice, huge forms of ice that cover the rock shaped like a big thick white quilt. There was a huge open space about ten to twenty feet wide where the water flowed at its constant rate, changing so fast a high-speed setting on a camera might not be able to catch it. I climbed down close to it and watched the water shapes that reminded me of white flames flowing down rather than up. Heavy flames.

 

Yesterday I cut down two more maple trees for firewood beside the road. They both fell perfectly between the fence and the road. The first one gave me a jolt when the butt of the trunk came down on my left arm, which was holding the chainsaw, and it running. Fortunately, the tree's major weight was held by the growth of laurel, and the saw was hung up in the laurel branches. I could not let go of the running saw and could not turn it off--my thumb could not find the switch. I stood there a few seconds trying to figure out what to do with the weight of that trunk on my wrist and the saw in my hand. I forget how I got out of it, but it was easy. I must have taken the saw with right hand, which had been occupied holding me in place on the steep bank wedged between laurel branches. Dealing with that saw is like having a loaded gun. You have to be conscious every second of what could happen if you slip, or if it jumps out of your hand. That, I suppose, adds to its excitement.

 

Sadie was funny today when a rabbit ran across the top of the snow in front of us. She took off in great excitement leaping through the snow. Every time she jumped, she broke the crust and sank in the snow to her shoulders. But she was not discouraged by this impediment to her grace and speed. She kept on hopping the same way she hops through tall grass, in great deer bounds.

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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BLUE RIDGE MY HOME

 



Spent some time among the trees today. Took my time. Sat down twice to be still and see my world up close. I looked around in the woods, snapped some photos. The ground I was standing and sitting on was my home, the Blue Ridge Mountains. Everywhere I look, I see the Blue Ridge Mountains on the inside among the trees native to the region. On the highway driving through wooded areas, I look as hard as I can at the leaf-covered ground, the tree trunks, the rocks, the ferns, and dream for a moment of walking in there, feeling the ground, seeing the scene from the inside. I can't look so hard when driving, but I take glances with focused attention for a second at a time. I love being in the woods. And I love being in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I feel a stillness among trees, a calm that brings me into tune with the slower life forms. Our human minds race so fast, we surely freak out the trees just walking among them. Or maybe they like the energy of our minds. More and more I like silence, seldom even put on the radio for news. Don't care much who is killing how many this week. The mountains, the trees around me were something of a free flowing mantra going on in my mind, the Blue Ridge Mountains, my home. Recently, everywhere I go in the mountain, out among the trees, walking in the meadow with Donkey Jack, driving, I see and stand upon my beloved mountains.

I like to see the mountains in the distance, big gray and white clouds boiling in the air currents I've learned in this southeastern quadrant of the county. I love it that I am able to look out over the Glade Valley and Ennice townships from Air Bellows Gap Road and see the clouds drifting in their currents of air flow. Today was a perfect day with clouds to see all the currents at once. I did not think to snap a picture, I was so engaged in seeing the clouds mapping out the flow in the air. In the woods I am in what for me is real church. The real deal. No collection, no preaching, no singing, no being nice when you don't feel like it, no wishing you were someplace else. When I sit down in the woods I am in stillness sublime. In the early years when I traveled all over this and surrounding mountains on foot, a dog was with me, a dog I loved to go walking with, Sadie. She was a tan and white fox dog, Airedale mix, good mind. She was only limited by my inability to teach her. Out in the woods, she was at home, just like I was, but even more for a dog. She could smell the tracks of every critter that had passed by in the last few days and nights. She read trails in the woods by scent when all I had to go by was sight. I'm like Mr Bo Jangles in the song, his dog up and died, after twenty years he still grieves. She was an ideal walking companion.

 

 

All these pictures were made from sitting in one spot, the scenery I was facing. This is where I felt in touch with the mountain today. I know this particular area very well from years past in days out walking with Sadie, and after Sadie, Aster, exploring the mountain, the trees, the water, the rocks. My house has pocket-sized rocks everywhere. Outside, I have rocks scattered about that I've brought home. It was in these mountains that I learned aesthetic appreciation for rocks. A rock is already the ideal sculpture. I picked up a nicely-shaped white one today, but did not want to carry it home and left it on an old stump covered with moss. Out walking I like to pick up the rock that calls my attention, the one I notice that says this is the one, the souvenir of the walk, pocket-sized. I have carried some fairly heavy ones home, too, believing at the moment I needed it someplace where I could see its beauty often. Along the walkway by the house I've placed rocks as big as both hands could lift into the back of the pickup from Whitetop Mountain. Whitetop has rocks like I've not seen anywhere else, not that I've seen everyplace, just that I think they're beautiful, angular, looking chiseled into abstract forms. I think of every rock as God's sculpture. Each one is shaped by its own experience. Some have rolled under glaciers so long ago it's inconceivable. Originally, rock was molten something on the order of lava when the earth was a ball of fire. I see the rocks as chunks of ice, frozen magma.  

 

 

 

 

I don't know if I get "renewed" spending time in the forest. I tended today to think about the mountains, the Blue Ridge, how happy and grateful I am these mountains are my home. Today in the woods I felt embraced by spirit. I don't mean in a woo-woo way, but a clarity of mind, joy in everything I saw. These photos were all made from the same spot, the place I chose to sit down, not because the scenery in this spot is better than any other, only because I didn't feel like walking any further without a rest. It's no good to rush through the forest anyway. It is best appreciated sitting still. Without meditating I felt like the experience of this wooded area in this time was just right and put me into a meditative mind. I'd not seen this place in several years. It was a review of the mountain I love with all my heart, walking on last years leaves and ground spongy from a summer of rain. It felt good underfoot, the ideal carpet that your shoe sinks into just enough to give good traction. Patches of ferns I walked through carefully. I don't like to break them and don't like being unable to see the ground where I put my feet. The ferns are pretty but I'd rather walk through them with a dog leading the way. The serpents of the region are colored like the ground. A dog's awareness and senses are sharper than mine. I have to pay more attention without a dog.

 

 

 

 

Nothing in particular was on my mind. It drifted around in appreciation of the Blue Ridge, again, joy and gratitude that I'd found these mountains and become so well acquainted, know them on so many levels, and best of all, know them in my heart. The heart is where I know these mountains. These mountains helped to open my heart in very important ways. I've learned the landscape so well that in my later years, like old man Tom Pruitt, I don't need to get out there and see it much. It was like the mountain was telling me that I and the mountain are one. Today was a joyous review of a place I'd not seen in many a year. I feel like I know the different places I like to go to personally as a kind of spirit. Again, not woo-woo, but the clarity of the world outside the ways of the human mind. This is the world that inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. The trees are air filters for all the critters that need oxygen to inhale. We complete the cycle with the trees. They give me oxygen, I give them carbon-dioxide. Possibly freshness of air is what feels like spirit to me among the trees. Perhaps the fresh air is what I'm breathing and it gives the place a golden glow in the mind's eye. It's the stillness that makes me want to put up a tent and move in. 

 

all photos by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 

 

MY FRIEND CATERPILLAR

you can't hide your lion eyes


Caterpillar doesn't let me get photos of her eyes very freely. When the camera goes up, Caterpillar's eyes go down and away. She knows it is pointing at her, that she's the subject, but she doesn't understand what it's about. Makes her self-conscious. Makes her look away because in absence of understanding what I'm doing, she feels some fear. She knows as well as she knows anything that she needn't be afraid of me, except when she's in my way as I walk through the house in the dark. After kicking her a couple times I've taken to carrying a flashlight. Don't see any point in turning on lights, but do need to know if Caterpillar is near my feet. She has learned to stay away from them, but not altogether.



My first dog here in the mountains, Sadie, came to me when she was 3. We bonded right away and our minds even worked together. Sadie would not have been my choice of a name for her, but it was already her name and I didn't want to change it. It could have been better if I'd had more experience before her, but she was the one taught me that we communicate by telepathy. It took her a long time to teach me that she understood me. I gradually came to understand that when I talked to her, she knew what I was saying, even when it was in words she'd never heard before. Sadie was my dog. She was meant for me. I didn't have to train her in anything except not killing chickens, and that was only once. She heard an awful lot of classical music in her time living here. I'm like in the song about Mr Bo Jangles, "his dog up and died--after 20 years he still grieves." It's been 25 years since Sadie left the body and I continue to feel deep loss when she comes to mind. The last photograph taken of her is framed and has its place on the wall.



Sadie was apprehensive of the camera at first. There came a time she got it. From then on, she posed for me. I'd point the camera, she'd hold the pose until I expressed satisfaction I'd got the picture. When I first started noticing she was posing, I told myself I'm just projecting it, wanting to think she's getting it. She's a dog. How could she get it about cameras and photographs? She got it, and wasn't long in the getting. It became something I took for granted after awhile; it was what we did. It pleased her for me to get her photograph. It affirmed for her what I told her about herself, that she was a beautiful dog. I never had any problem with my dog uncertain whether it's a dog or a human. I kept Sadie understanding that a dog is a wonderful thing to be--no shame in being a dog. She was never just a dog for me.



I learned from knowing Sadie that the only mental difference between us was the forebrain, which I had and she didn't, to her good fortune. The forebrain is why we need to get saved to go to heaven and dogs don't. They don't have a tongue for making a wide variety of sounds, so they never developed language beyond a long list of body-language, eye-contact, squeals, barks and a variety of sounds with particular meanings. Different barks have different meanings. The part of the self we call the unconscious, which is misnamed, it being the wide-awake part of the mind that misses nothing, is where I was able to see where the dog's mind was. They don't have the confusion of language that makes up the so-called conscious mind, the forebrain, meaning to me the dog's mind was a great deal more clear than mine. It showed when we were out walking. She heard and saw everything. I was off in my head missing everything.



I had the same kind of relationship with Aster, one of being able to talk to her and she knew what I was saying. In both relationships, I was the one slow and dense of mind. My relationship with TarBaby the cat was the same. I could talk to him and he knew what I was saying. Tapo was that way too. Caterpillar took the back seat in my relationships with the 3 cats. She never liked other cats and slept away from them, stayed away from them the best she could. Being the biggest and a fighter that went all out from the start she entertained herself pouncing on them and intimidating them. I gave her as much attention as she wanted every day, but we never communicated like I did with TarBaby. Now that TarBaby and Tapo are gone, Caterpillar and I are learning each other, drawing closer until by now our relationship is almost as close as with TarBaby. It might be there and I'm the one that doesn't get it. Sometimes I see Caterpillar frustrated with me for not getting her meaning. But I get her meaning more and more. We're still learning each other.



TarBaby and Tapo were Caterpillar's womb mates, grew up together, were together all their lives. TarBaby and Tapo got along well, but Caterpillar didn't get along with either one. By the time they individuated, Caterpillar would rather I'd have given them away. Now that she's the last cat, our last couple months have been adjusting to her being the only one. She missed them and was glad to be rid of them. Cats tend to be solitary, and Caterpillar has a full dose of it. I don't like to let her outside without watching her, because of dogs and coyotes. Since I don't have a dog to keep dogs and coyotes away, I keep her in the house. And she wants to stay in the house. She would rather watch birds through the window now than stalk them. She doesn't stalk mice any more, either. She stays indoors and we stay consciously in touch. We are each other's other house mate. Both of us used to live as all 4 of us, now it's just the 2 of us. We're both gradually catching on that it's just us. We're learning how to live as just us. She's now understanding my meaning when I talk to her in sentences.



*

GROUNDHOG DOG

Today I saw a crow pick up an apple slice in its beak, walk to a place where a small cluster of mown grass was lying. The crow dropped the apple slice to the ground and, one at a time, picked up three tufts of the grass and dropped them on the apple slice to hide it. Five minutes or so later another crow marching about the lawn found it. In one swipe of the beak, the crow removed the small pile of mown grass, picked up the apple slice and flew away. The funny part is the crow that hid the apple slice will never return to it, will never know it was swiped.


My first dog here in the mountains, Sadie, killed groundhogs buried them. Early on, she killed a groundhog and left it under the house, a safe place. First I was seeing big blue-bottle flies swarming from under the house. Next came the scent of dead groundhog, which is distinctively groundhog. I didn't know that then, but this was one of the early learning experiences to teach me that particular scent. I had to crawl under the house with a rake and pull the nasty corpse out, flies buzzing all around, pick it up in a shovel and take it to a place to bury it. Sadie watched the whole time to see what I was doing with her prize. I dug a hole, put it in the hole and covered it with dirt. From then on, every time she killed a groundhog, she carried it with her teeth to a place she knew the ground to be soft, dug a hole with her front claws, pushed the groundhog into the hole with her nose, and pushed the dirt on top of the groundhog with her nose.


I liked to watch her when she was stalking one. It was sport in the wild. There was a groundhog that had a hole by the fence to the pasture behind the house. She found the groundhog out one day about 30 feet from the hole. She hunkered down close to the ground and crept slow like a cat toward the hole. When she was about the same distance from the hole as the groundhog, she took off running full speed toward the hole. The groundhog, from another direction, ran to the hole as fast as it could go. A couple feet from the hole, dog hit groundhog in the side with her nose, sending the groundhog rolling a few times. Groundhog scrambled back to its feet while dog was slowing down from full speed, turned and was at the groundhog as soon as it could stand up on its back feet.

Dog lunged in at groundhog's face barking once, groundhog clicking its teeth, snapped in the direction of the dog. Their two front teeth are razor sharp like a beaver's. Dog lunged again barking at groundhog's face. Groundhog lunged at dog with teeth clicking. Dog jumped back and lunged forward again. She went around the groundhog, lunging in with a bark at the groundhog and the groundhog snapped at dog's nose, clicking teeth. Every time she jumped back from the lunge forward, it was a few feet to her right and she'd lunge again, circling the groundhog, making it turn to face the dog every lunge. Every time dog attacked, the groundhog attacked too, with clicking teeth. Turning all the time and snapping at dog's nose eventually disoriented the ground and wore it out until the first time groundhog failed to snap at dog, dog moved in, took the groundhog by the neck, shook it one time and groundhog went limp in her teeth. With the charged energy of a warrior's victory, she held her head high carrying the groundhog to where she knew the ground was soft enough to dig. She put the groundhog on the ground, dug a hole, put the groundhog in and covered the hole.


When Tom saw her catch a groundhog one day, he turned proud of her and acted toward her like she was a dog worth her keep. He even bragged to men he knew about her. When somebody asked me what kindof dog she was, I'd say, "Groundhog dog." Everyone knew what that meant, that she was a pet that happened to kill groundhogs, and regarded her respectfully. Once, a couple of fellers leaning on a pickup asked me if that dog hunted. I said, "Yeah, all the time." I added she was a groundhog dog and they looked at her in admiration. She was half fox dog, the half that showed the most, the reason I was frequently asked about the dog. The other half was Airedale, according to vet, Nash Williams.


One time out on the tactor mowing, I saw a short-stripe polecat, or skunk, walking over the meadow in daytime. That didn't seem right, but what do I know about how a polecat thinks? I do know how they stink, but not think. Here came Sadie. She made a pass at the skunk and it jumped up on its back feet, sitting straight up like a groundhog. Skunk showed its ten claws that were more exaggerated than a cat's, and its mouthful of sharp, pointed teeth. It growled like a small bear. I stopped the tractor and watched.


Saide did the same thing as with a groundhog. She danced around the skunk, keeping it turning, attempting to wear it down, but the skunk didn't wear down. He stayed right up, snapping every time the dog jumped in to bark at its face. The skunk showed fierceness that is the difference between a wild animal and a pet. The dance went on for quite awhile until dog got it that the skunk was not going to miss a beat. Dog settled down and walked away. The skunk went back about its business of passing through the meadow. One time I asked John Lee Phipps, a dairy farmer in Piney Creek, if he knew why so many skunks get run over. He thought a moment and said, "I reckon a polecat's kind of independent."