Love and Death at the Ranch

[WARNING: This story is upsetting and raw. If you are not up for that, skip this one for now.]

I killed a horse today. Held a 45 to her skull and shot her through the head. She fell so fast I hardly computed that she was dead - but there was the hole in her head as proof, pulsing out blood like a broken pipe, thick and red and pulsing. She was dead before she had time to notice the gun. The hole was simple and neat and clean. There was no splash, no mess, not even any dust on my shirt. I just reached up and pulled the trigger, heard a pop, and she was down. 

I had expected the killing part to be harder than it was. That somehow the gun would be heavy, the trigger would take strength to pull. I thought I’d have to hold her head and struggle to keep her still. But I didn’t. The gun was light in my hand. It rested exactly where it was suppose to go. The trigger was easy to pull. I squeezed and it was done. She pitched sideways as her legs collapsed and hit the ground while I was still standing there, expecting to have something more to do. 

I had ear protection - good, professional grade shooting headphones that cancel the sound so well it is hard to hear the voice of a person standing two feet away. They dull the sound of a gunshot (even a 45) from a thundering explosion to a remote pop. I had known that the sound - the percussion of the explosion - would make the killing all the more abrasive, painful, lasting. Would exacerbate the violence of the act. So I thought ahead and brought my headphones. My good ones. And the sound, even standing right there, less than a foot away, was nothing. Remote. 

I talked to her before loading her into the trailer, and after unloading her, and before walking her into the woods. She struggled to walk those first few steps, hobbling on legs that shook and stuck in place with pain. I stood for a minute, my face resting against her forehand and called her, dear child, in a quiet, gentle voice. I told her it was almost over. She had only a little way to go. I just need you to walk a few more steps and then I’ll take care of everything. That’s all you need to do.

Come baby-doll. Come my dear one. A few more steps. That’s all.

She followed me, trusting, into the woods, no longer hesitating despite the pain in her legs. She walked willingly through the trees, over the downed branches and the undergrowth and down the overgrown remnants of a trail. When we reached the place that I had chosen, I stood for a minute and thanked her again, told her she was done, told her I was going to take care of things and the pain would be over soon. It was like she’d been in a trance, these last few hours, her big eyes fixed on me, calm and trusting. Trusting me to do what she needed to have done. 

I floundered for a moment, looking for the right words, the right ritual to send her on her way. And I sensed right away her trance begin to slip. Her eyes left my face and she began to look around. She shifted uneasily and lifted her heard. In a second of clarity it was clear to me that the ritual, the something more, was something I needed. She didn’t need it. She needed me to act quickly and decisively and do what had to be done. She needed me to continue with confidence while she still rested in her trust in me, before my hesitation and emotions brought her back to fear.

I stopped talking and lifted the gun. I placed the barrel against her skull, against the perfect white star in the center of her forehead. And I pulled the trigger, just like that. No stopping to reposition, no rehearsing the lifting of the gun. No careful evaluating of the angle or position of my arm. Before she could register what I was doing, I pulled the trigger just like that. And she was down.

I had thought out the method, picked out the place, been talking to Stormy for weeks, asking her to tell me when it was time for her to go. I had known for most of a year that her time was coming soon. I knew that I wanted her body to give back to the world - feed the wild animals, fertilize the ground. I thought this would feel beautiful to me, that the killing itself would be hard but once her spirit was gone I would be at peace to let her body take its place in the circle of life. But the killing was too easy and I stood over her body, and she did not look at peace in the wilderness, she did not look like a natural part of the beauty of the land. She looked like a beautiful body that I had loved, brushed, smelled, laying twisted on a hill. 

She had fallen almost on her back, her leg splayed over her face. I moved her leg aside to look into her eyes. I needed to be sure she was truly dead and gone. The glossy, empty eyes felt of peace and death, but when I looked away from them again, at her body, awkward and tangled, it did not feel of peace at all. It felt like one I had loved, dead violently in a pile at my feet. 

I found myself wanting to lay her out so that her legs rested gently on the ground and her head lay peacefully, as though asleep. I was quite sure that this did not matter one bit to her. But it mattered to me, and I wished that the last picture of her with which I was left was of a peaceful, sleeping death - not this mangled, strangled, picture of violence and stress.

Her coat still shown a glossy black and her muscles still gleamed, and I wanted to run my hands over her hips and legs and back. But her lips were pulled back and her tung lulled out and her legs stuck up at an awkward angle and she didn’t look like part of the wilderness at all. No hiker, stumbling into our thicket in the woods, would find her a peaceful sight and be comforted by the beauty of her body’s journey as it returned to the earth. She looked dead and there was a hole in her head and blood pooled beneath her face and gushed out of the hole as though it would never stop. And soon the bear would come and the coyotes and the wolves, maybe a mountain lion or two, and the flies and the worms, and none of this would be the graceful, gentle merging with nature that I imagined it to be.

The fact is, there is nothing graceful about a bullet in the head.

Nobody taught me how to do this kind of thing. Killing, in the city world from which I come, is a cruel thing, evil, to be shunned at all costs. Nobody told me that sometimes killing is is a kindness, or that even so, the killing itself is never kind. 

Who, in my city world, prepared me for dealing out death? Who told me that being responsible for the lives in my care would eventually mean arranging for their deaths? Who warned me that a gun, bought for protection, would be used to kill a thing I loved because it was my job to see that she could die?

Stormy was in pain. She had rallied and recovered many times. It was clear to me that she would not recover again. My horse, the dear, quiet girl with the long face and sleek black body, who never refused a person’s request but ruled the other horses without a second thought, was at the end of the life she was meant to live. For years she graced my pastures, raised my weanling foals, and ate the food that I provided. Now she couldn’t walk without pain. She had stopped leaving the barn to find food. She wouldn’t graze, she was hardly willing to walk twenty feet to drink water anymore. In the wild she would have been left behind long ago, taken down by an animal that was younger, stronger, at the beginning of its time to live. But this old girl was not in the wild. She was in my care.  She had long ago made the deal with my kind that she would obey and serve, in return, would provide for her that which she needed but could not provide for herself. And today the thing she needed but could not provide for herself was death.

She stared at me when I came into her stall, big eyes calm and deep, looked right into me, and waited for me to do for her what she couldn’t do for herself. And so I did the thing that was mine to do. I slipped the halter over her head and whispered to her quietly while I stroked her neck and scratched her ears. Then I led her to a trailer and drove her to the woods and I shot her in the head. I left her body for the wolves and bears to eat and I went home and cleaned my gun.

Spring?

Usually spring reaches Montana rather late in the year. Sometimes May qualifies, and usually June. Certainly not February. But this has been a strange winter, with more warm weather than anyone can remember. And I think its confusing the animals just a bit.

At a ranch, spring is a time for birthing (with the big animals) and for mating (with the small). Well, I soon learned the folly of that and this year I finagled the birthing to come in July and August (when the pastures and the barns WONT all be under water from the spring floods). But there is not much I can do about the small animals and their mating rituals. Usually that sort of thing just takes care of itself. At some point the geese all start renewing their bonds of matrimony (they often stick with one partner their whole lives), the ducks start pairing up (they change partners every year) and, well, the chickens breed year round so nothing unusual really happens there. This year we added turkeys and as a whole, the mating season for birds is active, loud and quite amusing. Its like a big, multi-week cocktail party and everybody has to go home with someone at the end of the night.

Of course, none of this should start until April or May. Out here we can easily have cold spells down to negative 30 in February and March can be almost as bad. If the pairing up starts too early, then the eggs, which quickly follow, are likely to freeze before they’re hatched. And normally the birds seem to know that. Except this year.

It started with the geese, of course, the trouble-makers of the bird world, and it quickly spread to everyone else. Now the turkeys are puffing out their feathers, dragging their wings in the snow, and strutting around in front of everything (I mean everything - one of them has been trying desperately to impress our truck, for instance). The young, unpaired geese are fighting and squabbling over mates as the older, stately pairs watch on indulgently. The peacocks are fanning their tail feathers in a brilliant display of blues, greens and purples. Even the Great Blue Heron who flies up our valley every spring to nest showed up here last week. Only the ducks, who are mostly trying to keep out of everybody’s way, seem to realize that its really a bit to early for so much fuss.

The problem is that its not just their timing that is screwy. If it were just that, I might write it off to them knowing something I don’t know and plan for an early spring. But its more than that. Their sense of species seems to be just a bit off too.

It started with the turkey flirting with the truck. Then, when he got no response there, he turned his attention to me. With one big Tom and two females, his normal courting behavior should be puffing out his feathers and dragging his wings on the ground, then strutting in front of his girls trying to impress them with everything he’s got. Well, he’s got the strutting, the puffing and the dragging down, but he seems to be aiming it just a little bit wrong. At this point, he mostly just follows me around all day, gobbling seductively in my direction, trying to show me what an impressive specimen he would be (something I already know, since I had his twin on my Thanksgiving table...). God forbid I kneel down on the ground to work on some fencing or dig something out of the snow. He never misses a chance to drag his 50 lb. body up into my lap to show me just how truly sexy a globby blue and red face can be, up close.

Then the geese started doing the same. Or rather, their version of it. One day one of the males actually cozied up to me, letting me stroke his neck and back while he rubbed his beak around my hands. At first I thought he was just being friendly - finally showing his appreciation for the endless work I do all winter to feed him every day. But it turned out he was trying to attract a mate. Now, every time I step outside the one of the female geese rushes to my side (its a different one each time - they take turns, it seems). For as long as I’m in the yard one of them is there, following glaringly at my back, driving me aggressively away from their men. I now know where the term “to goose someone” comes from. If the female believes I am getting too close to her men, she charges me and pellets me with a series of bites on my behind that have me running across the ranch, yelping as I try to get away. Occasionally I turn around and try to scold her (reasoning that I am the human, after all, surely I don’t have to be herded by a 30 lb. goose). At that point she generally leaps for the collar of my coat and hangs there, right next to my face, flapping her wings and screaming curses at my man-stealing ways.

The male peacocks so far don’t seem to have quite the attraction to me, I am pleased to say, but whether or not they have actually figured out who they are suppose to be attracted to, I am not sure. I’ve seen them strutting around, showing their feathers to chickens, turkeys and, occasionally, to a very unimpressed rabbit. They seem to leave the female peacocks alone (which suits them just fine, as far as I can tell). And the poor chickens pretty much just stay out of everybody’s way, though the roosters have occasionally tried their hand at the new specimens which suddenly seem to be fair game around them. I saw one rooster flirting with a goose this morning - something which he probably wont do again after two very large male geese saw him and grabbed him, one by the tail feathers and one by the head, and ran around in a circle with him screaming their furry and pulling out most of his feathers.

I keep telling myself that certainly all this activity is a sign - the great wisdom of nature coming through to tell the birds that spring is early this year and it is safe to begin their noble work of raising happy bird families on the ranch. But...yeah. I think I’ll wait to see just what he babies look like before I decide for sure.