Despite the temptation to give myself over to ululations for the natural world in light of the recent midterm elections, I will be brave and strong. In fact, I’ll look to our dogs for clues about how to move ahead in confounding times with good cheer, if not always with a lot of grace, and perhaps with only an occasional low moan or two.

In an earlier post, I considered the change my walking pace has undergone over the years. What has remained constant is the presence of dogs on these rambles. When I’m in Colorado, I usually borrow dogs from my sister or my father. (Walking with my mother’s dogs was often a little demoralizing; she worried aloud that bears and mountain lions might attack them, but she never expressed any anxiety for me.) At Madroño, I’ve walked with a long line of brave and stupid dogs who’ve both saved me from and almost led me to some gruesome fates.

The first was sweet Daisy, a lovely golden retriever/English setter mix and the mildest of dogs—until she was on the ranch, where she became Trained Assassin Daisy, Scourge of Armadillos! I had never known that armadillos had much to say until I watched Daisy in hot pursuit of one at the north end of the property; speedier than it looked, it made a loud whirring noise, as if it were wearing a propeller beanie. Daisy missed that one, but she got lots of others. We decided that she loved them because they were “crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.”

One Thanksgiving Day at the ranch, we were all—parents, siblings, children, dogs, friends—walking up the steep hill above the lake when Daisy proudly came galloping up to us with what she must have thought was an unusually hairy armadillo in her mouth. She was delighted until she dropped it at our feet and found that much of it remained in her mouth. (It was, of course, a porcupine.)

Sweet as she was, she allowed us to pull out many of the hundreds of spines in her snout, under her tongue, in her gums, etc., but the job proved to be too much for us. Even though it was a holiday, we tracked down a laconic vet in Hunt who said he wasn’t doing anything but watching football, so sure, bring her on in. When they had gotten Daisy anesthetized and yanked out the remaining spines, Martin said to the vet, “Well, I bet most dogs only make this mistake once, right?” The vet cocked an eyebrow and said, “You’d be surprised.” Thank heavens we haven’t been surprised since then.

A few years later, we found a black puppy with a broken back leg at the gate who turned out to be Phoebe, our now-blind life-guide, about whom Martin wrote admiringly a few weeks ago. Phoebe has been a wonderful walking companion, although one of her chief virtues—steadiness—may very well stem from the fact that her eyesight was never very good; maybe she just didn’t see all those armadillos and porcupines and deer. She did notice snakes, however, and helpfully made little sideways hops to notify me that I should step elsewhere.

But even the admirable Phoebe occasionally caused me dismay. Aside from her tragic and annoying moans whenever I stopped to listen for and look at birds, Phoebe proved to be susceptible to wayward influences like, for example, our next dog, Honey. One day, a couple of months after Daisy died, I was at our neighborhood pharmacy in Austin. A couple of local kids who worked there had brought in a dog they’d found on the downtown hike and bike trail, skittish and covered with fleas. Their mothers had told them to find it another home. I looked and saw a fluff-bomb with an absurdly curling tail who might have had chow and/or golden retriever and/or some mountain dog in her, and maybe a little Ewok too. The kids noticed that I couldn’t take my eyes off her and asked, “Do you want her?” “Yes,” I said, helplessly smitten. Martin said something else, which I can’t repeat here, when I returned home with toothpaste, shampoo, and a new dog, but Honey was irresistible.

She was also, alas, flightier than Phoebe. Once, after the kids and our friend Charles and I had scrambled up a beautiful and nearly inaccessible draw at the ranch, we came upon a herd of aoudads, who were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Honey got a young aoudad in her sights and went after it, determined to tear its throat out, despite the shrieks and rocks we hurled at her. She backed the youngster into a fence while its mother threatened to eviscerate her with her great curling horns. Charles gallantly gave up his belt to get our darling murderous fluff-bomb under control, as Phoebe valiantly barked encouragement from a safe distance.

Another time, one of my favorite emergency-backup children and I went walking with Phoebe and Honey. We were in the canyon where we had once found a pair of rusted iron bedsteads and a rusted cast-iron Dutch oven, just poking around to see what other inexplicable but suggestive oddities we might find, when we heard a series of distinctively coyotic yips in the dense woods around us. In an instant, the dogs were gone, gone, gone. Despite our most beguiling efforts, Phoebe and Honey yodeled their way up to the top of the draw, and then Dave and I heard something else: snorts. Hogs. The woods were so thick we couldn’t see them, but we could hear them. Lots of them. Close by. Oh, great, I thought. How am I going to explain to my best friend that her sweet gangly son was carved up by feral hogs because my idiot dogs went gallivanting off to be eaten by a pack of coyotes? We all made it back to the house safely, but Phoebe’s irresponsible behavior still galls me.

And then another time, the dogs and I were out by ourselves when they, officers of ranch security, uncovered a plot by a couple dozen sows and piglets to disrupt our walk. Much barkage. Much squealing. Much inelegant scrambling by Someone to get into a tree and above tusk level. Much hilarity in the kitchen after our return to think about Someone sitting in a scruffy little scrub oak for half an hour wondering if the dogs were still alive and if the pigs were really gone. Phoebe got a really scalding series of lectures for that lapse.

Generally speaking, though, Honey and Phoebe were fine walking companions. When Honey died of cancer a few years ago, we realized that she had been acting as Phoebe’s seeing-eye dog, because Phoebe’s deteriorating eyesight meant she was quite literally lost without her. Phoebe’s ranch rambles have ended, but Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound has become my new companion and is presenting all sorts of interesting challenges.

While she doesn’t seem to have Daisy’s and Honey’s ferocious streak (except, sadly, when it comes to chickens), she has a hair-trigger chase reflex and is speedy enough to catch a deer, as we learned to our amazement a few years ago (fortunately, once she finally cornered it in the angle of a fence, she seemed content just to lie there panting and stare at it), or anything else that roams the ranch. (She’s learned to ignore the bison, a fine survival strategy; despite their awkward-appearing bulkiness, bison are plenty quick themselves, and they definitely don’t like dogs.) I’ve started using a shock collar on her, to discourage her from rocketing off after hogs; I heard not too long ago about a woman whose dogs took off after a bunch of hogs, who then turned on the dogs, who then ran back to their mom, who ended up with sixty stitches in her leg from the pursuing porkers. Fortunately, Chula is a total wienie when it comes to pain, and the early results with the shock collar have been promising.

The adventures, clearly, will continue.

What we’re reading
Heather:Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
Martin: Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island

It’s impossible to think about Madroño Ranch without thinking about its critters, both wild and domestic: bison, feral hogs, chickens, wild turkeys, aoudad, deer, geese, snakes, raccoons, porcupines, fish, and dogs.

On some days at Madroño, when the wind is exactly right, it’s especially easy to think about dogs, since we can hear the cheerful chorus from Kinky Friedman’s wonderful Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, right next door. We think that Nancy Parker-Simons and Tony Simons, who run the place, may actually be saints, and our kids have always loved visiting them and meeting the dogs they care for so lovingly. But the dog I associate most strongly with Madroño is Phoebe, our elderly black Lab mix.

In some ways Phoebe (pictured above in her younger days) has a better claim to the ranch than any of us, since we suspect she was born near the place. We found her out there twelve years ago, a tiny puppy no more than six weeks old, lying by the side of the road with a broken back leg; we don’t know if someone abandoned her because of the leg, or if she was orphaned first and then injured. Even though we already had all the dog we thought we needed in Daisy, a wonderful golden retriever mix, we brought Phoebe back to Austin with us; she was so small that she spent the trip curled up on a bandana on the back seat. Our vet thought for a time that her broken leg might have to be amputated, but we elected to wait and see, and remarkably it healed almost completely on its own (though now that she’s older it has gotten quite arthritic).

Despite the Dickensian start to her life, Phoebe (or “Little Black Dog,” as we also call her, though she eventually grew to a healthy fifty-five pounds) has proved to be faithful, affectionate, trusting, and resilient in the face of adversity—very like a Dickensian protagonist, come to think of it. When our children were little and we were still doing the family car trip up to Colorado every summer, we used to take her along and smuggle her into whatever motel we happened to be staying in to break up the drive, a bit of skullduggery that always tickled the kids. We also used to stop at a drive-through burger joint and buy her a “plain and dry” hamburger as a special treat, though she was usually too shy to actually eat the thing while we were watching. When we needed to break up the monotony of the long drive, we’d stop at a school playground or public park, and the kids would coax Phoebe up the ladder of the slide; she’d perch at the top, peering down the slide, her brow furrowed, before gallantly sliding down on her bottom. (She even negotiated the twisty slides, though they weren’t her favorites.)

She’s also quite vocal, and her repertoire includes a startling number of grunts, sighs, and groans. When our youngest was taking piano lessons, Phoebe would sit beside her while she practiced and make odd noises—we were never sure if she was complaining or trying to sing along. And when we return home after an absence long or short, we can always get Phoebe to tip her head back and start howling by saying “Hellooooooooo!” in a sort of Julia Child-like voice.

As the kids grew up, we stopped making those long family drives every summer, which I’m sure was a great relief to Phoebe. After Daisy died, we acquired other dogs, all of them mutts (we’re firm believers in hybrid vigor): first Honey, a fluffy light-brown-and-white Bernese mountain dog/chow mix (or so we guessed) who died a couple of years ago, then Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound, whom we imagine to be some sort of hyperkinetic blend of pit bull and whippet. As Phoebe got older, she began to slow down and her eyesight began to fail, and these younger interlopers frequently drove her crazy. Honey used to like to nip at Phoebe’s hindquarters, apparently hoping to goad her into moving faster. Chula is constantly galloping back and forth, sometimes in pursuit of her woobies, sometimes just for the hell of it, often bumping Phoebe on the way by.

Old age is definitely not for the faint of heart. Now that she’s completely blind, her once-brown eyes filmed over with white, Phoebe never seems to know exactly what’s going on, but she bears it all cheerfully, or at least resignedly. She’s memorized the layout of our house, and even though she occasionally bonks snout-first into doors or chairs or table legs, she never seems particularly bothered, even by collisions that make us wince in sympathy. And we warn her loudly every time she approaches steps, whereupon she slows down and feels cautiously ahead with one front paw until she finds the change in floor level.

I know that Phoebe will feature prominently when Heather writes about her adventures tromping around Madroño with dogs, as she promised to do in an earlier post; Phoebe was Heather’s main walking companion for years, since none of the rest of us could keep up with her. The most heartbreaking aspect of Phoebe’s blindness is that we’ve had to start leaving her behind when we go to Madroño, because there are so many things for her to fall off or into out there. When the sad day comes, however, we will scatter her ashes out at the ranch, the place she has always loved best.

As if her bum leg and blindness weren’t curses enough, she’s also been diagnosed with Cushing’s disease, a disorder of the pituitary gland, and thyroid and liver problems. All these conditions mean that she has a lengthy and complicated regimen of medications, so she gets a slice of wienie larded with various pills twice a day. (We also try to slip her a sedative when we sense a storm coming on, since she’s always been panicked by thunder.)

She has borne the indignities and infirmities of old age with unfailing good humor, and remains a fundamentally optimistic soul, always ready to go on walks (greatly curtailed these days, in deference to her general decrepitude); a few months ago, in fact, as I took her on her morning constitutional, one of our neighbors commented on how much Phoebe and I resemble each other, now that we both have a certain amount of frost on the pumpkin, as the saying goes. Her appetite is still robust; she always cleans her bowl at breakfast and dinner, and she loves her twice-daily wienie slices. She puts up with the occasional overflows of affection from various cats, and occasional body slams from the overenthusiastic Chula, without complaining. She still breaks into what we call the Happy Butt Dance whenever we scratch the base of her tail. She is, in short, one of my real role models as I too edge reluctantly but inexorably into senescence.

She’s still a really good dog.

What we’re reading
Heather: Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
Martin: Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

Susan Orlean’s wonderful story on mules in the military in this week’s issue of The New Yorker mentions one of my favorite, and most unlikely, episodes of Hill Country history: the U.S. Army’s Great Texas Camel Experiment of the 1850s.

Ultimately, the experiment was a failure; in Orlean’s words, “The camels were superior in terms of strength, but they were vicious, tended to cough up foul-smelling chunks of food, and made horrible groans and roars that terrified the horses.” Still, enough of the beasts went AWOL that for several decades unwary sojourners in the American Southwest occasionally found themselves face to face with a living, spitting embodiment of Oriental exoticism.

Before the Civil War, much of Texas was considered to be part of the “Great American Desert,” a vast area of the Southwest that was still largely uninhabited and considered unsuitable for agriculture. American expansionism was about to prove that characterization wrong, at least in the short term, though Timothy Egan’s terrific book The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl vividly describes the horrific long-term result. But in the mid-nineteenth century, the War Department had to figure out a way to protect settlers and supply lines in this fearsome territory, and decided that using camels, instead of horses or mules, to carry troops and freight might be one way to do so.

The story of the Texas camel experiment actually begins in Florida, where Col. George H. Crosman apparently first thought about using camels for military purposes as far back as 1836. Crosman eventually asked Maj. Henry C. Wayne to look into the idea, and Wayne eventually reported to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis that the experiment would cost a mere $30,000. Congress duly authorized the expenditure in March 1855, and a little over a year later, on April 29, 1856, the naval storeship Supply arrived in Indianola, Texas, carrying thirty-three of the beasts (both one-hump Arabians and two-hump Bactrians), including one calf that had been born at sea, and three Arabs and two Turks whose job it would be to tend the creatures. The crossing had not been easy; the crew had to tie the camels to the deck during storms so they wouldn’t slide overboard, and the animals proved to be susceptible to seasickness.

On June 4, Wayne finally started his exotic caravan westward toward Camp Verde, south of Kerrville, pausing in Victoria to have the camels clipped. The industrious Mrs. Mary A. Shirkey of that town spun and knit a pair of camel hair socks as a gift for President Franklin Pierce, but Pierce reportedly found them so foul-smelling that he refused to wear them.

Wayne put the camels to work ferrying supplies between Camp Verde (a little over ten miles east of the future site of Madroño Ranch, as the crow flies) and San Antonio, with encouraging results. A second boatload of camels arrived in 1857, and some made the long trek to new quarters in California. An officer who led a caravan to the Big Bend country noted in his journal that the camels “performed most admirably,” adding that “No such march as this could be made with any security without them.”

Unfortunately, however, reports soon surfaced that the camels’ wide, soft feet, perfectly adapted for crossing desert sands in North Africa and the Near East, were not well suited to the rocky terrain of the the American Southwest. In addition, the soldiers were not fond of the camels, and vice versa; the officer who led the expedition to California noted that the beasts smelled bad and tended to bite or spit at the troops, and the horses and mules were unable to keep up with them.

Eventually, thanks in part to the complications brought on by the Civil War, the army decided to get out of the camel business. Some of the animals were sold to zoos, circuses, and mine operators. Others were simply turned loose to wander the Southwest; in 1885, the five-year-old Douglas MacArthur was terrified when he unexpectedly encountered one of the unlikely beasts near an army fort in New Mexico. Ten years later, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that “Many a passenger on the Southern Pacific railroad trains has had a sight of some gaunt, bony and decrepit old camel away off in the distance.” Today, the last of the original camels has long since disappeared, though a metal statue in front of the Camp Verde General Store commemorates their presence, and the Texas Camel Corps, a dedicated group of enthusiasts, keeps a number of the animals for pack trips, commercials, Christmas pageants, and the like.

Medina’s Early Days, one of the late Dorothy Hatfield Ferguson’s books of local history, includes the reminiscences of James Washington “Okra” Walker, who worked with the camels at Camp Verde. Walker was born in 1847, and in 1862, with the Civil War underway, decided to join the army and have a share in the fighting. Instead, much to his chagrin, the fifteen-year-old orphan found himself assigned to take care of the camels at Camp Verde. Looking back on the experience years later, Okra grudgingly admitted that the camels did have some advantages over other beasts of burden, principally “the ability to do without water for an incredibly long time,” but he never really warmed up to them, noting that “they weren’t as easy to look at as a good cuttin’ pony.” Moreover, they seemed much given to malingering, held grudges for any perceived mistreatment, and had the habit of spitting on those they didn’t like. “They also frightened the mules and horses and generally looked mighty out of place.”

When the experiment finally ended, Okra Walker, for one, was not sorry to see them go: “I guess I’d fooled with those beasts so long, and was [so] disgusted that I’d had to herd camels instead of fighting in the Civil War, that I never as much [as] asked one question pertaining to those camels or the buyer’s plans for them…. When those camels left Camp Verde, they went out of my life forever. I shouted after them, ‘Thank God you’re gone!’”

We have no plans to acquire camels for Madroño—I’m pretty sure Robert, our manager, would kill us if we did—but I like to imagine them roaming the ranch’s hills like the aoudads and other fugitive exotics we occasionally see today. And who knows? Perhaps the great-grandchild of some Arabian or Bactrian import is still out there, running free and gazing down at us with that inimitable camelicious mixture of disdain and amusement, sneering, “I’ll never be your beast of burden.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials trilogy
Martin: Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music