Meet the Posse

           Dave bought his first horse at age 12, and disappeared into the backcountry fairly regularly after that. The few experiences I had with equines up to the point of our marriage involved the bruised imprint of two horseshoes between my shoulder-blades in one instance, and being clothes-lined by a runaway mule train in another. Needless to say, I was leery of the beasts. One huge benefit to moving to the ranch was that the animals came to live with us. It gave me the opportunity to better understand them, and also gives me plenty of fodder for future blogs. Since they, and the rest of our posse, will probably play prominent roles in subsequent stories, I thought you deserved an introduction to our cast of characters:

            Smoke: he’s one of the old men of the posse – a beautiful, grey, twenty-something Johnny mule. He’s solid, deliberate, and bomb-proof. One day when I was saddling him, the kitten got bored swinging from his tail and decided to climb his front leg. He didn’t move an inch – just shuddered a little bit.

           Mexico: the even older old man of our posse. Based on the number of people I've met who have either owned him or known him, he must be at least 102. Okay, more like 30ish, but still, he's been around! He was the first mule I ever rode (as opposed to a horse), and still has some trail time left in him.


            Rosa: a secretly sweet Molly mule, Rosa throws attitude at the rest of the herd. She’s always got her ears back, spoiling for a tantrum, but she’s the first to let me rub behind those ears too. She’s the one who ate the window out of my captain’s truck when he visited to review our wedding ceremony.

            Fey: She came to us from Texas with a couple of bad habits – she has a strong addiction to cat food, which, combined with her unnatural ability to limbo under any wire we put up, gets her into a lot of trouble.

            Jalama: she’s the “baby” of the herd. She acts just like an overgrown puppy, curious about everything, following you everywhere, and getting underfoot (or at least in the way) constantly. She loves to steal whatever you set down, and gives it a good taste test before she gives it back. (And only then if you ask real nice.) Cell phones, car keys, shoeing tools, she’s tasted it all.


                 Sierra and Nevada: the newest girls to join our menagerie, they are sweet and gentle, and still not very well known to us. Can you guess where they came from?

            Blue: Blue-dog is a retired hunter, bred in New Zealand to work for a company that travels world-wide to eradicate non-native animals from ecologically sensitive areas. She is incredibly smart, amazingly well-disciplined, and happy to be retired. While she no longer hunts, she does still enjoy stealing the catches away from the cats. Blue didn’t know how to be a dog when we first got her. She doesn’t understand “fetch” (unless it’s a live pig), or know how to play. We even had to teach her how to pee on her own terms, as she had been kenneled her whole life. (Don’t ask how.) Her biggest joy in life, besides running alongside a quad, is dinner. She starts her “dinner dance” around 3 o’clock, contorting her body in ways no 11 year old dog should be able to do, the whole effort contrived to lure you closer to her food dish. 

            Big Max: Moving to the ranch, we knew we needed a barn cat to control the rodent population. Upon describing our situation to the women at the animal shelter, they turned to each other and exclaimed, “Big Max!” Imagine the biggest, furriest, housecat you have ever seen. Now double it, and you have Max. They had to loan me a dog kennel to get him home. When he proceeded to never bring us a kill, we recognized we had been duped, and started joking that we had opened a ranch for retired hunters. (Dave used to be a hunting guide as well.) Now, we don’t know what Max’s life was like before us, but he is tormented by his desire for and fear of affection. He has a teeny, tiny meow (pathetic really) that he incessantly follows you around with, but when you stop to pet him, he runs away. He HATES to be touched, but wants so badly to be close. Fortunately, I stumbled on a solution – you just sit quietly about six feet away for awhile and he seems to be satisfied. The ranch has actually been great for him. While he still jumps at the slightest noise, he is a shadow of his former self (okay, maybe a shadow and a half), and we’ve discovered that he does actually hunt as soon as the sun goes down.

            Bobcat: She arrived on the mountain with her two sisters as rejects from a breeder – a pure-bred got knocked up by a barn cat. Her two sisters, Tiger and Cheetah, went to the neighbors, and we kept Bobcat. From day one, she put Big Max to shame, bringing us rats over half the size she was, hummingbirds (think about the logistics of that!), and anything and everything. I wish I could teach her to refine her palate away from songbirds and chipmunks, but I have to admit that we don’t have any mice issues. And she is one serious hunter. I awoke one morning to a loud clatter, and ran out expecting to chase Fey out of the cat food. Instead, I found Bobcat clinging to the side of our "barndominium," just under the eaves, spread-eagle like Spiderman, with not one, but TWO bats in her mouth.

            Now, all of our animals get along well, and tumble around together. Each morning and evening I walk around the pond, and various members of our posse join me. One morning, about halfway through the olive grove, Bobcat came prancing past me with a lizard in her mouth. Blue-dog immediately went in for the steal, and Jalama, noticing the action, wanted in on it and gave chase too. As the three of them went racing around the pond, my laughter changed to bemusement. I fear the adage that humans resemble their pets – does all this chaos mean I’m just as eccentric?