Unlikely Loves

by Jennifer S. Holland

  {Grossglockner, Austria, 2008}

  The Boy and the Marmots

  I remember well my first special encounter with a wild animal. It was just a squirrel in my neighborhood, nothing exotic or dangerous, but still the interaction had a big effect on me. I was probably seven years old, and I spent a lot of time exploring outdoors, trying to get close to birds and squirrels without scaring them off, poking at bugs and caterpillars, digging up worms with sticks. Living things fascinated me.

  So one afternoon when a pudgy brown squirrel began eyeing me from its perch halfway up a tree trunk, I eyed it back. I clucked my tongue at it, moved a little closer, and clucked again. Most of the time that sound will get a squirrel’s attention, but if you get too close it’ll dart away. This one stayed put, seeming intrigued. Then it came down the tree. I continued my squirrel sounds, and the next thing I knew, the squirrel was heading toward me across the grass. I stood still. It approached cautiously, in fits and starts, closer and closer, and suddenly it was right there. Sitting on my foot looking up at me! This squirrel liked me! It wanted to be near me! It was on my foot! I managed to crouch down halfway, slowly, and touch it on its soft little head. It let me. Finally, it scampered off.

  Alpine marmot

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Rodentia

  Family: Sciuridae

  Genus: Marmota

  Species: Marmota marmota

  I called him (or her) Scurry, and for some weeks after, when I went outside and made my clicking sounds, that same animal came around to greet me. I didn’t actually try to pick it up—like all kids, I’d been told time and again that wild animals may bite and can carry diseases. But having it near me of its own accord was thrilling. Eventually it stopped showing up. But I felt special that it had chosen me as its human friend, at least for a time.

  That’s the feeling that a young boy named Matteo has for a group of animals he’s befriended in Austria. He met them in a park called the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe at Grossglockner, the highest peak in the country. It’s a territory known for marmots, large mountain-loving ground squirrels (a bit more exotic than Scurry was), and the population there has become rather accustomed to people. However, no one has gotten to know and love them like Matteo Walch has.

  Matteo’s mother, Michaela, likes photographing wildlife and wanted to visit the park, more than 100 miles from their home in Innsbruck, to get some good pictures of the marmots. Her son, then just three years old, wanted to go, too.

  “When we arrived, we didn’t see many around,” she recalls. “But then we tossed a few carrots and that did the trick. Marmots were everywhere! Pretty soon Matteo was running around with them and they were coming right up to him. One of them actually ran into him, knocking him down. He was just loving it.”

  “At first, I was a little unsure,” Matteo, now nine, told me (in German, translated here) about that first encounter, “because their claws were sharp and scratched my leg. But then I touched them and their fur was so soft! And they’re so cute and good-natured.”

  Most of the time, kids who visit the park enjoy seeing the marmots for a bit, but then they get bored and want to do something else. Not Matteo. “Once the marmots became friendly, he didn’t want to go home,” says his mom. “We spent the whole day with them, until dark. It was freezing cold, but he didn’t want to leave them. And the next day he said, ‘Back to the marmots, please!’ So we returned and spent another whole day among the animals. He really loved playing with them. They built up a special friendship.”

  And so visiting the marmots became an annual activity for Matteo and Michaela, and each time they came, the animals responded to the boy as if he were an old friend. “When I first sit down they come storming at me,” he says, “wanting to see what’s in my lunchbox. But I think it isn’t just the food they like. I think they recognize me. They’re happy to see me; they jump with their front paws in the air.”

  Matteo has named some of the animals—Felix (the smallest, sweetest one) is his favorite. “Sometimes,” he says, “he asks me to go nose to nose. He comes close and nods his head twice, so I lean down and we put our noses together.” Other times “they all just go wild, climbing all over me. Every day, there is something different.”

  During their stays at the park, he says he wakes up excited. “Yay, I get to see the marmots today!” He’s sure they are always waiting for him, wondering, “Where did you go? What took you so long to come back?” While out in the meadow with them, “I don’t think about anything else, not even playing Legos.” And when it’s time to go, he says some of the animals follow him for a bit, like they don’t want him to leave. “I’m sad when I have to go home, especially at the end of vacation when I know I won’t see them for a whole year.”

  His reciprocal friendship with the marmots has taught Matteo a lot about animals—how to treat them, and how to show his love for them. “I’m glad,” his mom says. “I’m glad he’s learning about wildlife and getting to know the beauty of nature. That’s so important.”

  Marmont

  These members of the squirrel family are mostly vegetarian, but sometimes they’ll eat birds’ eggs or even each other’s young.

  {Montana, U.S.A., 2011}

  The Fawn and the Woodland Friends

  It doesn’t matter where you come from; the story of Bambi seems to be part of all of us. Can’t you picture that candy-colored, tranquil scene of the smiling fawn surrounded by all kinds of woodland creatures? Maybe you recall the squirrels, raccoons, and skunks, the rabbits on a log, the wise owl perched in the tree above? Or perhaps the possum family hanging by their tails all in a row, tiny birds with beaks full of flowers, and butterflies fluttering here and there—the sprinkles on an already sweet cake. The scene truly looks to be spun of sugar.

  Of course, we can’t forget that the story started out taking a tragic turn, with Bambi’s mother shot by hunters. But the orphan fawn finds he can rely on his woodland friends. So there is, as you’d expect, a happy ending.

  That tale, down to the Bambi-Thumper friendship (and maybe even the Bambi-Faline love affair), has played out at the farm home of Svetlana and her family in a small town in Montana. There, a motherless fawn found himself embraced by unfamiliar animals as he recovered from the trauma of his loss and, later, made his way back into the wild.

  White-Tailed Deer

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Artiodactyla

  Family: Cervidae

  Genus: Odocoileus

  Species: Odocoileus virginianus

  Svetlana has always loved animals, and as a child growing up in a village in Ukraine she longed to have more of them around. “I always dreamed of living in wild country,” she says, and happily, when she came to the United States, she fell in love with a man who could fulfill that dream with her. Sharing his 18 acres in rural Montana, myriad wild things, from elk and bear to cougar, moose, and deer, were right there on the family property. “It made my life so happy,” she says. “Even though the deer would eat all my plants, my life was fuller having them around.”

  So what happened next seems fated. Late one summer night, driving through a rainstorm with terrible visibility, Svetlana suddenly came upon something in the middle of the road—a small, wet animal frozen in her headlight beams. She hit her brakes.

  “He didn’t move, just stood staring at me,” Svetlana says of the tiny fawn. She got out to help, and noticed some blood on the ground. “His mother had been hit and killed; she was in the ditch next to the road. I wrapped the baby in my coat—he was completely soaked. He didn’t make a sound, just let me pick him up and put him in the car.” There was a truck coming, she says. “If I’d left him there he would have ended up like his mama.”

  Svetlana too
k the fawn home and warmed him up, and the family named him Bambi. At that point they had two German shepherds, and one of them, an older female, was immediately taken with the fawn, following him around and licking him. “He was in shock at first, and wouldn’t eat,” Svetlana says, but with help from her motherly dog, soon the fawn was slurping down his meals.

  Rex Rabbit

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Lagomorpha

  Family: Leporidae

  Genus: Oryctolagus

  Species: Oryctolagus cuniculus

  When the bad weather passed about a week later, Svetlana put Bambi outside with all her other animals, and that’s when friendships formed much like those in the children’s story. “The rabbits would poke their noses into him, and he’d nose them back,” she says. “They cuddled together and he’d follow them as they hopped around—pulling on their tails. The rabbits would munch on dandelions, and he would sniff and try to eat them, too. Then the rabbits would steal the flowers from his mouth!” The rabbits and deer seemed content to hang out together in the barn, getting to know each other, she says.

  Bambi was also partial to Svetlana’s other pets. The cat would groom the deer; the dogs would play tag, chasing, touching, and running away, and Bambi would turn around and do the same in reply. “Everyone loved playing with the baby deer. My kids, too!”

  Svetlana wanted to make sure the deer would be able to return to the wild if he chose to, so after a couple of weeks she and the kids reduced their contact with him. “We watched to make sure he was safe, but didn’t touch. He found his own games: flinging chunks of tree bark around and stomping on them, even throwing aluminum cans into the air and jumping up after them.”

  Soon other wild deer started coming around, and Svetlana was pleased to see Bambi’s curiosity piqued. He slowly began socializing with them, spending more time among his own kind and less with Svetlana’s menagerie. (She held her animals back more and more, to let the transition happen.) He went into the woods with the other deer, coming back now and then to his “family,” but eventually, his visits became infrequent and then stopped all together. “We cried when he stopped coming, but it was beautiful to see him relate to other deer,” says Svetlana. “That was the hope all along.”

  The experience reminds Svetlana of a time when she was a child back in Ukraine and her grandfather nursed an injured raven back to health. “He built him a cage, fed and took care of him,” she recalls. “And when the bird was ready, we let him go. Like seeing Bambi return to the woods, it was nice to see him fly away free.”

  {Arkansas, U.S.A., 2012 & 1998}

  Tales from Rocky Ridge Refuge

  Kindness and love are ways of life at the Rocky Ridge Refuge in Arkansas, where more than sixty animals at a time find a haven from the rough world outside. Janice Wolf is their caretaker. And, with absolute commitment, she spends her days immersed in a furry, slobbery, smelly world—feeding, cleaning, petting, and loving each and every creature in her care.

  But she’s not the only one spreading love to those around her.

  She’s had a zebra that served as protector of her sheep. A goose that left the world of geese for a canine’s love, and a pregnant deer that did the same thing—actually seeking out her dog friend when it was time to give birth. There was a blind dog that didn’t have to see to take care of every little thing that crossed his path. A rabbit that spent its days tucked in bed with an injured pup that couldn’t romp and play with the others. And so on.

  Clearly I could write a whole book on the relationships at Rocky Ridge. Instead, I picked three to highlight. One is a case of a persistent little gal who refuses to leave her beloved(s). The second is a tale of mutual affection that includes some poolside flirting. The third is a story of paternal love from a totally unexpected beast. All three stories are based on commitments that many married people can’t claim.

  The Tortoise and the Puppies

  We’ll start with Crouton because, why not? Crouton is an African spurred tortoise, after all, and what’s better than an affectionate reptile named after a crunchy salad bit? When she came to Rocky Ridge, “she was shy and slow; she’d been neglected and wasn’t very sociable,” recalls Wolf. Reptiles need lots of warmth (usually just the physical kind), so she was given her own little heating blanket, and she spent a lot of her time under or atop it. But then came the Great Dane puppies. Ten of them.

  They were born to a rescue dog Wolf had taken in. The mother gave birth in the bedroom, and Wolf moved the whole squirming litter into the bathroom, where they’d be safe and out of the way. That’s when Crouton took notice. “She started abandoning her blanket and going into the bathroom to join the pile of puppies,” Wolf says. And not just join as in sit around the bathroom with them, but crawl in among them, literally bury herself in puppies. “She’d deliberately get in the middle of them, even when they got rowdy. She could go anywhere she wanted, and had her own warm place, but she chose to be with the dogs as much as possible. She would make a beeline for them every day as they wrestled and knocked each other around. She really loved those animals.”

  At feeding time, Crouton remained part of the pack, Wolf says. “I’d call puppy puppy puppy! And they’d all come running. And here’s this tortoise among them, running faster than some of the dogs, trying to get her head into the pan of mush right alongside the others! It would just crack me up.”

  Crouton took a special liking to a particular Dane, and though Wolf had planned to adopt out all the animals, she decided to keep “Crouton’s pup,” named Guppy. “I didn’t want to interrupt Crouton’s love story,” Wolf says. “They’d lie with each other, actually cuddled up. The dog would even use Crouton as a pillow.” (Doesn’t sound like the most comfortable choice, but who can argue with love?)

  And though nowadays Crouton spends a lot of time in a sunny spot in one yard with Guppy elsewhere on the property doing doggie things, whenever the tortoise is apart from her love for too long, “she’ll haul butt right back to him. She’s full of personality and affection for her pup.” And that’s saying a lot for a tortoise.

  African Spurred Tortoise

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Reptilia

  Order: Testudines

  Family: Testudinidae

  Genus: Geochelone

  Species: Geochelone sulcata

  The Miniature Horse and the Capybara

  Now, a quick nod to a pair that, well, just really liked each other. There wasn’t a long courtship leading up to their affectionate alliance, but Janice says it was special nonetheless. How could it not be when the characters are the world’s biggest rodent (called a capybara) and the least-big (truly miniature) horse?

  Janice had rescued two pregnant miniature horses, and one of them, Tofu, gave birth inside the pen of Cheesecake, a capybara. (Capybaras, for those unfamiliar with these supersize rodents, are a South American animal that’s comfy both on land and in water.) At first, one of Janice’s dogs, Butterbean, “just wouldn’t leave the foal alone. She was all over him.” But after a few days the dog lost interest, and Cheesecake saw an opening for her affection. “They would run around the pen together and eat and sleep together. They really had fun,” she says. And then came afternoons by the water.

  Capybara

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Rodentia

  Family: Caviidae

  Genus: Hydrochoerus

  Species: Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris

  “Cheesecake loved to swim, and it seemed she liked it best when Tofu was with her,” says Janice. The capybara had a little pool, and she’d splash around while Tofu stood by the side, head hanging down, watching her. “He really seemed to want to get in there, but he
was too big,” Janice says. So Cheesecake would swim over and give him a little nuzzle and a kiss. “They were best buds. I’ve since put Tofu in with a zebra that needed company, and another foal lives with Cheesecake. But I know Cheesecake and Tofu will always have a particularly strong attachment to each other.”

  Miniature Horse

  As their name suggests, these are simply little horses, selectively bred over many years to make them as small as possible. The tiniest on record was said to have been 14 inches tall and weigh 20 pounds, but more commonly the animals are 50 to 100 pounds and closer to 3 feet high.

  The Bull and the Horse

  Finally, enter the Ankole-Watusi bull, Lurch. First off, could there be a better name for a bull? This imposing animal with the perfectly suitable name was, in a sense, father to all around him. “The benevolent leader,” says Wolf. “He nurtured all the animals and they followed him everywhere. Miniature cows ran after him. A chicken used to sit on his horns. A goose fell in love with him and would eat, sleep, and swim with him. Everyone loved Lurch.”

  And Lurch loved everyone back. But maybe he loved a certain horse just a little bit extra.

  Lurch was of an impressive ancient breed of cattle, but that wasn’t the full explanation for his charisma. Even as just a wee calf, he had a special something about him.