Thelma the Wayward Mule

Thelma and me

There’s one in every crowd—even a crowd of mules. I’m talking about that individual who marches to her own drummer—who says: I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.

I witnessed such an individual last week at the quail hunting plantation where I drive a wagon. The occasion was the annual meeting of the Georgia chapter of the Colonial Dames of America. The event was a historic preservation tour that brought them to view the plantation home designed by world famous architect, Edward Vason Jones.

It is worth noting that when hunting season ends on the last day of February, the animals take the summer off while the property managers are hard at work burning fields, clearing brush, and maintaining equipment. Since it is a private residence and a members-only facility, nobody comes on the property unless they have business there. When I arrived on the property last week, the horses and mules were grazing peacefully in their fifty acre pasture—peacefully, that is, until three large white tour busses followed by a small caravan of cars trundled down the dirt road in front of their pasture

I can only imagine what was going through their minds as the vehicles disgorged a hundred or so passengers. Maybe they thought all of these people came to see them—perhaps bringing food. It was quite a sight to see six mules and a dozen horses sprinting across the pasture to gather along the white wooden fence. It reminded me of when I was a kid and we heard the bells of the ice cream truck jingling through the neighborhood.

Thelma, looking for the way back to her pasture

I paid little notice, assuming that the guests would lose interest in a bunch of animals in favor of the historic house they had come to see. Imagine my surprise when I looked back and discovered that they had gathered around one of the mules who was grazing peacefully in the middle of the lawn. How had that happened? Had she jumped the fence? Not likely. Had someone left the gate open? Not according to a quick survey of the fence line.

The mule was one of the mules that pulls my wagon, my dependable pulling mule, Thelma. She gave me little trouble as I herded her back up the lane and through a gate that led back to the pasture. She even seemed—if I care to be anthropomorphic—glad to see me.

So, how did she get out? Well, that’s the interesting bit. According to several guests who witnessed it, when the other animals were trotting to the fence, Thelma separated herself and turned ninety degrees from the herd. She proceeded with purpose down the fence line away from the action and entered a grove of trees where the sturdy wooden fence becomes a tangle of metal posts and barbed wire—a section of fence that is apparently less than secure. Guests reported that when she emerged from the trees she was no longer in the pasture. She had decided to join the party.

How, I wonder, did she figure that out? How did she have the presence of mind to zig when the rest of the herd zagged? I can’t say, but it sure did make for some good theater. I wonder what made the greater impression on our guests from around the state, the architecture of Edward Vason Jones or the ingenuity of Thelma the wayward mule, who challenges us not to follow where the path may lead, but to go where there is no path and leave a trail.

As natural as life

Much of society, it seems, is disconnected from the source of our food. Deep down we know that if we eat meat, some animal had to provide that meat—but it is not something to be talked about in polite society.

This was illustrated recently when my wife, an elementary school librarian, was speaking to a first-grade class after reading a story about what animals eat. She explained the differences between carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores but when asked what category humans fall into, the students became confused.

Many did not realize that humans eat other animals—that when eating hamburger they are eating a cow or when consuming bacon they are eating a pig. This urban generation is being raised on shrink-wrapped food from the grocery store. I wondered if some parents might be upset that their children were being told otherwise.

Why the disconnect? Perhaps it is because we don’t want to think about the fact that animals are killed to supply our meat. We are content with the illusion.

This reminds me of the story (probably untrue, but a good story none-the-less) about a display presented by showman P. T. Barnum early in his career. It was called The Happy Family and it is said to have featured a lion, a tiger, a panther, and a lamb—all in the same cage. After the exhibition had been running for a while, a friend asked the showman how everything was going. “Oh, fairly well,” Barnum replied. “I’m going to make a permanent feature out of it, if the supply of lambs holds out.”

The guests I meet on my wagon are, for the most part, enthusiastic sportsmen. They love shooting the way some people love golf, even to the point of cheering the well places shot. Most of them are more like me than I ever suspected.

They are naturalists at heart. They may fly-in on private jets and carry shotguns that cost more than a new car, but they still marvel at the vultures that soar overhead, ask about the prescribed fire that maintains quail habitat, and get excited when a cooper’s hawk swoops in to steal one of their birds.

They are as knowledgeable about what quail eat as they are what size shotgun shell will bring them down and they believe in giving the birds a sporting chance to get away. Most will not shoot unless their target is well into the air and flapping madly in the opposite direction.

I am not a hunter. It’s not that I disapprove; it’s just that shooting guns and killing animals is not my thing. I have, however, seen lions in Africa kill an antelope. It is a different experience in person than it is on television. It is more visceral, more intense, and it helped me realize that it is perfectly natural for one animal to die in order to feed another.

It is more than a little ironic that in my retirement after a career working in zoos, where our goal was to extend the lives of animals, I find myself part of an operation that harvests (a polite euphemism for kills) hundreds of quail every month. My justification—if any is needed—is that death is as natural life itself.

The birds that are killed in our operation are dropped in a box on the wagon and placed on ice after each hunt. They are then cleaned, packaged, and frozen—ready for consumption by our guests. They are harvested at least as humanely as the billions of chickens who are slaughtered every year to provide our chicken nuggets, wings, and fingers.

Author, Temple Grandin, uses her autism and her expertise as an animal science professor at Colorado State University as a platform to advocate for the humane treatment of the livestock we slaughter for food. In her 2009 book Animals Make Us human, she suggests that our relationship with the animals we use for food should be mutually beneficial. If we are going to take animals for food, then we should provide those animals a good quality of life prior to that use.

I often wonder as I sit on my wagon and watch the hunters stalk the broomsedge and wiregrass hoping to flush another covey what this landscape would look like without quail hunters paying for its preservation. My guess is that the wide open, pine-wiregrass habitat would be swallowed up in a scrub oak forest. The quail, gopher tortoise, and other savanna-loving creatures would disappear.

Perhaps the people who oppose hunting as cruel and barbaric might see the end of hunting as a victory but, from where I sit on the wagon, it would be a hollow victory indeed.

Ode to Joy

A quail hunt, at least on the property where I work, is filled with pageantry. We arrive under the ancient live-oaks at the “big house” at precisely nine o’clock in the morning—two mule-drawn wagons with six or eight horses led by hunting guides in white vests. It is such an impressive sight that first time guests often stand on the porch and video the procession with their cell phones.

In all this pageantry—mules, horses, wagons, and guides—one individual is often singled out. She stands on the seat of the first wagon, as she has done for nearly a decade, and is clearly the star of the show. She is a thirty pound, chocolate brown English cocker named Joy.

To say I love dogs would be an understatement. Dogs have been a part of my life since the day I was born. My childhood dogs were yard-dogs that never came in the house but in those days children seldom went in the house either, except to eat or sleep. Dogs ran with us—or we ran with them.

In my adult life, my wife and I have always shared our home with one or two dogs as part of the family, and I still grieve for the ones that have passed. Maybe that is why I have such an affinity for the dogs in our hunting operation and why I love spending my workday with Joy on my lap.

Every morning, after we load guests and guns and we ride out to the hunting ground, the first order of business is to stop the wagon and get two dogs down. They are English pointers, muscular little short-haired dogs with names like Buck and Gabby, Bud and Pearl, and Ike and Dot.

They are taken out of the wagon in a male-female pair and positioned side by side in the

middle of the road, with a gentle tug on their collars and an equally gentle command to “whoa”. The control of the dog handler is impressive and must be the result of hours, weeks, and even years of training. The dogs stand still and look at their handler as he mounts his horse, listening for their release—a low whistle, not unlike the whistle of the bobwhite quail.

Once released, they run up and down the dirt roads and in and out of the grassy lanes. By all outward appearances, they are running aimlessly at a brisk lope—aimlessly, that is, until one of them catches the scent of quail in the thick grass. Then it looks like the dog has come to the end of some invisible leash. His head snaps toward the birds and his body jerks sideways. He remains immobile with head down and tail up. Our guide says “we’ve got a point up here.” The other dog is usually not nearby but when she sees a point, she will also fall into a less serious point, essentially honoring her partner.

It’s still a bit of a mystery to me, especially from my vantage point on the wagon, how the dog handler interprets the actions of the dogs. Is the dog pointing a covey or a single bird or a bird that was the morning meal for a hawk? Are both dogs on the same covey or are there in fact two coveys? This is the heart of the hunt—the dogs on point and the guide positioning the hunters; followed by the moment of truth when the birds fly, the guns boom, and the birds fall. This is when Joy, the little English cocker on the wagon seat next to me, stops whining and jumping around. She stands at full-alert and goes silent awaiting the dog handler’s call.

Most of the birds fall in an open area where they are easily picked up. Occasionally, however, a bird falls into the deep grass. That takes a little more looking, even when the hunter knows where his bird fell. After a few moments of fruitless searching, the call goes up from the guide as he looks back to the wagon and hollers, “JOY!”

Joy scrambles down the steps at the side of the wagon and navigates the lanes to where the hunters and guides await. The guide points and says “dead bird in here”, and Joy goes to work. She scrambles back and forth nose to the ground in ever shrinking circles until she homes-in on her target. Finally, she dives in and emerges with a bird in her mouth. She looks to the guide who says “wagon”, and back she comes to deliver the bird to me and turn her attention back to the action in the field.

This is clearly a highlight for the hunters and is the reason that after ten seasons Joy is, at least on our wagon, the star of the show. She is the enthusiastic magician pulling an invisible bird out the deep grass and bounding back to the wagon with her treasure. That, I suppose, is why Joy is the first one the hunters greet when they come out on the porch of the house in the morning and the last one to be touched with an affectionate pat on the head before they head in for drinks after the hunt. 

There is a tendency for people unfamiliar with their life to feel sorry for the dogs on a hunting plantation. They live in a kennel and only come out to train or to hunt. But not all dogs are bred to live in a house and sleep on a couch. Many were bred to guard property, pull sleds, or perform water rescue. The Jack Russell Terrier, for example is described as a “charming and affectionate” little dog, but it was developed in England over two hundred years ago for the not-so-charming job of hunting foxes. The hunting dogs I work with are bred to find, to point, and to retrieve birds. I don’t think Joy’s life will be better or she will be any “happier” when she retires to someone’s house and will never seek out another quail in the deep grass.

When the hunters come out in the morning and come directly to the wagon to rub Joy’s head, it is as if she is their talisman—a good luck charm that might hold magical properties. But if, as John Milton has suggested, luck is the residue of design, then luck will have little to do with the success of the day’s hunt. The pointers will point the birds and Joy will retrieve them—that much is certain. It is the skill of the hunters that is a little less certain. They will need to rely on quick reactions and straight shooting rather than the luck derived from petting their “lucky dog”. And no one will be happier with their success than Joy, as she lives out her name and trots out to help them find their lost birds.

A peaceful pace

Being the driver of a mule-drawn wagon on a quail hunting plantation affords me plenty of time to think. Sometimes my thoughts are directed toward the job at hand—the mules, the horses, the dogs, and the hunters—and sometimes my thoughts are drawn to the conversations behind me on the wagon—conversations that I treat as confidential. And then there are the long periods of quiet that remind me of the quote often attributed to Winnie the Pooh author, A.A. Milne: “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits…”.

At the end of every hunt, we have a fifteen or twenty minute ride back to the house. The dogs are back in the wagon and the retriever is lying on the seat beside me as I follow the horse riders. The only sound is the conversation of the guests, the jingle of the mule harnesses, and the occasional bobwhite quail whistling in the tall grass. The pace is slow enough for a person to walk and I have never heard a guest complain about the length of our ride. In fact, people often remark on how peaceful it is and how they can feel their blood pressure going down.

Our wagon is like an old fashioned covered wagon with its heavy wooden body and tall, spoked (albeit rubber-tired) wheels. It is not a stretch to imagine a time when this type of transportation was the norm. My Grandma Porter told me of her grandparent’s trip from the Florida panhandle to Nacogdoches, Texas on a covered wagon in the mid-1800’s—a trip of about six hundred miles. Her grandmother walked the entire trip behind the wagon knitting socks for the men-folk. According to Google Maps, I could drive that trip in just under ten hours. My great, great grandma’s walk, at about three miles an hour, would probably have taken several months.

I wonder what it would be like for me to drive to work in the mornings on my wagon. I would not need to worry about running into deer or hogs. I wouldn’t be checking my speedometer or gas gauge. Of course the drive would last about three hours instead of fifteen minutes. It would be like commuting from Albany to Atlanta—with no ITunes or satellite radio. With all of that time, I could solve a lot of the world’s problems.

The people who hunt with us are busy people. They spend plenty of time on their mobile phones making deals and staying in touch with their offices. I even had one guest suggest that we make the wagon a “mobile hotspot” so he would have better phone reception. But on the ride to the house at the end of the day, all that seems to change. The phones stay in their pockets as their conversations steer away from business and toward family, good times, and the beauty that surrounds them.

In his Zen Habits blog, author Leo Babauta offers us Ten Essential Rules for Slowing Down and Enjoying Life More. The first five are to do less, to be present, to disconnect, to focus on people, and to appreciate nature. That about covers the experience of spending twenty minutes on a mule wagon. It certainly gives me time to think about such things as how the dog handler controls the pointers with a whistle and a “whoa”, why the retriever races out to find a quail with such enthusiasm, and what—if anything—the mules are thinking about as they stand immobile awaiting my command to “gitty-up”. I’ll let you know when I work out some answers. In the meantime, I think I’ll just sits.