When one bright morning I open my eyes and look around and find myself waking up in the thistly, chigger-ravaged cusp of a 3,000 acre working ranch and wildlife preserve, I experience the process of “life change” in what is known in music and dance and rate of pay (as well as, drill-sergeant jargon) as double time. I know this because as I lift head from pillow and gaze through glass-pane streaked with Hill Country dirt and dew, I witness across the gnarly, twisted-oak, monolith-and-boulder-strewn horizon (worthy of a Hemingway novel or Karen Blixen memoir) the head-on, corkscrew collision of blackbuck antelope–crash!!! Only to see them back away from each other, shaking dizzy noggins, before lowering those twisted implements of impalement and charge again.
Am I in the mountains of Nepal? I wonder. The vast plains of India? While, simultaneously just beyond, massive curving racks of mouflon rams shatter the morning air and tremble the earth with a smashing vengeance all their own–smash!!!, and again wonder: Am I in the desolate, black-slate mountains of the Caucasus? The wilds of Iran? And my state of momentary dislocation is only brought back to earth when a vision big as a boxcar comes drifting toward me, stilling the surrounding turmoil in an instant by its massive and aloof presence, sending hooves and herd fleeing in every direction, until only the longhorn bull stands there, colored red as July cherries, white as sun-blistered artic snow, with a tip to tip horn spread that (I swear at the moment) could touch down on both sides of a hometown football field. And my head plops pillow-down and weary with the effort.
At first I am enchanted by the night skies. There is no intrusive light in that place, and the countryside, when the sun goes away, becomes a vast inkwell. So the stars are your only point of reference, stretching across their infinite space like frozen drops of white and yellow oil on canvas by an over-caffeinated van Gogh on endless “I just can’t help myself!” stroke repetition. Next, I see some sort of satellite drift by, leisurely blinking and beckoning, and think a solitary night walk along a nearby lane would be nice at the moment. Then I catch myself, remembering the advice an old-timer gave me not long after arriving. “Just remember, city feller, once the sun goes down, this place don’t belong to the folks anymore. It belongs to whatever’s out there where you can’t see and they can. And, believe me, they damn sure know what to do with all that can. So there’re only two places you need to be around here at night. In your pickup, headed out. Or between your walls with a good fire going.”
After that, I snoop around a bit (writers call this research) and realize real, real quick that predators are indeed things that prey. And even quicker that there are species extant in those parts that don’t really care that I am bipedal and have bragging-right thumbs or know my multiplication table almost up to twelves. For this regard, all they know is hunger and satiation. So serendipity of serendipities at that moment, I hear a scream coming at me out of the darkness. Now I’ve heard it mentioned that such a scream resembles that of an adult female human. And, in a manner, it may. But it’s different than that. It’s a scream without any human heat, figuratively speaking. It is something rather cold and merciless and…predatory. Something unto itself. So I forget the late-night walk. And I turn and go inside my walls and get a good fire going, instead.
Meanwhile, in the light of day I observe that the wild turkeys (abounding there) have attitude issues; especially, the tom variety. I experience this when I am out, minding my own, working with utter hopelessness my useless limestone-strewn pastures, and see their approach: a rafter of plain-as-hominy hens surrounding a couple of strutting toms. And I watch out the corner of my eye as they jump atop my fence railing, one by one, and sit there in a row, balancing and weaving back and forth like so many beady-eyed-and-beaked bean bags. Then one of the toms jumps down into the pasture and begins a wide circular walk around me, eyeing me suspiciously, as I eye him suspiciously back. Then I hear another “plop”, and the second tom is down and following the same path around me as the first bird, albeit directly opposite the other. That’s when I notice that the stiff, cautious walks have turned into crouching struts, with wattles and snoods reddening and extending, and the circle tightening with each lap they make. And I have to smile, as they remind me of two comedic, melon-gutted WWE wrestlers circling their opponent in the ring, looking for an opening. “Gobble-gobble,” one tom calls out. “Gobble-gobble,” the other answers back. Really? I think. Now I have to put up with this? “You know,” I say finally, “this piece-of-shit pasture is big enough for the both of us. You can have the bugs and I’ll keep pulling these bull thistles. Okay?” And it’s as if my accommodating voice somehow breaks the menacing moment they were trying to create, and they both finally wander away, somehow looking simultaneously nonplussed and indignant, and are soon joined by the hens, everyone now pecking with great concentration at the hard ground and ignoring me.
When you find yourself living in such an open, equal-footed environment, you begin to realize that your needs—that is, the needs you need to survive—are no more important than the needs of everything else living and surviving around you. And, in fact, sometimes less so. As when my wife found an old mouflon ewe, lying afield, too weak to take water. And she medicine-dropped it back to health, and for some time the old girl stood atop our stone walls, looking down as if to thank her, before suddenly disappearing back into whatever nature had in its store. But the message was clear. All of us were just trying to survive. Trying to live our lives, however we were able. And we all had to find our place, sometimes giving a little, sometimes taking, but always seeking where we belonged at the moment. That is, so everyone else could get on with whatever they needed to.