This Side of Wild

by Gary Paulsen

  “They trained you.”

  He nodded. “I always got what I wanted, what I needed, or almost always, but it was all working backward and I didn’t know it, didn’t see it until Gretchen showed me how to see, how to know, how to learn.”

  Gretchen sat looking at him, into his eyes, as he talked, clearly loving him but more, too, something more. She heard more, felt more in some way, and I realized with a start that she was listening to every word, every single word.

  And more—much more—she understood some of them.

  He had seen my look, and his smile widened and he nodded. “That’s why she wants a conversation. When she hears a word she knows, she feels like she’s more a part of it.”

  “How many does she know?”

  “I’m not sure. I tried keeping track of them at first and got up to seven hundred or seven hundred and fifty before I lost the thread of it. I think she’s way past a thousand now—a thousand words she recognizes and places with some object or place or thought. And she’s learning more all the time, just stacking them up. But there’s more, too.”

  I looked at her, thought I was maybe seeing some of kind of a freak—no, miracle. Some kind of miracle. “What could be more than this?”

  “She has learned how to understand people in some way that goes with the language. So that you can actually talk to her, or almost talk to her. Watch her. Watch her reaction when you say something she knows and likes. Say the word c.o.o.k.i.e.” (He spelled it.)

  “Cookie,” I said, and there it was; she perked at the word, and (I swear it) seemed to add to it, to almost nod.

  Winnike saw it as well and smiled. “She knows the word, of course, and that was the alerting part of it, but that second little bit was because she likes it, wants to eat one.” He stood and went to the cabinet over the sink, took a vanilla cookie from a jar, and gave it to her. She ate it with two small, delicate bites, then nodded again and with a half grimace added a toothy look.

  “She’s smiling,” Winnike said. “She picked it up from a little girl who came to visit who kept smiling at her. Now, say something she won’t like, wouldn’t think of eating. . . .”

  “Gretchen,” I said. “Would you like some broccoli?”

  And here she shook her head in a negative manner, studying me the whole time.

  “Now another thing she might like to eat . . .”

  “Steak,” I said, “smothered in gravy.”

  She alerted, nodded, then smiled, and he gave her a cookie.

  We went back and forth that way for a time—pork chops and spinach, chicken and grapefruit, beef stroganoff and eggplant—and she was right, dead right every time. She would shake her head in a negative way when she didn’t like it, nod in a positive way when she did.

  “She knows,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee; somehow cold it was more palatable than it had been hot. Cold and sticky sweet. Like Kool-Aid from the devil. “She knows all the words. How is that . . . ? Is that even possible?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that. I doubt even all humans would know all the words. It’s the other thing, the thing that surprised me and led me away from my former life. What I thought I knew my whole life . . .”

  “What was that?”

  “She ‘reads’ people. . . .”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either. But I think she can tell by voice or posture or smell or some thought wave, or something, when a person is saying a food she wouldn’t want to eat, or when he says something she would like. . . .”

  “But how could she know . . . me? We’ve never met. How would she know anything about me, about my speech or posture or smell? How could she know anything about me?”

  He nodded. “I understand and agree with your thinking, or how I believe you’re thinking. But the thing is, it’s not just you. I’ve had other people in here, old people, young people, children barely old enough to understand what I mean, and they’re all the same. She reads them all. . . .”

  “She’s reading their minds?” I shook my head. “You think she’s actually reading their minds?”

  He hesitated, sighed, rolled another cigarette, and poured more coffee—in my cup as well as in his—before I could stop him. I wouldn’t be able to sleep for the rest of my life. “No. Yes. Maybe. God, I don’t know. But I have seen it and know what I’ve seen. The only way I think I can understand it, or feel that I know what she’s doing, is I have to think in some kind of way that I don’t really believe in—spirits and vapor clouds or thought beams or some of that other kind of wild stuff. Thing is, thing is, I’m just an old cowboy who took to training animals and don’t know how that other kind of thing works. Do you?”

  I shook my head briefly, then thought of the school I was going to with blast patterns and radioactive winds and radiation lobes and flash damage with melted people who were turned into instantaneous shadows on concrete. He could not know any of this, would probably not understand it any better than I understood what I was seeing with Gretchen. “No, not really.”

  “Is it”—he sighed—“would it be something you might like to learn, to know?”

  I looked at Gretchen. She looked up at me, waiting, waiting, waiting for, for what?

  For me?

  For me.

  “Yes. On the weekends when I’m not at school. I can come each weekend, if that’s all right?”

  He nodded, and so it was that I came to talk to Gretchen and listen to Gretchen, and Gretchen kept me from going insane—or something like it.

  The thing was, I didn’t know what I was seeing or hearing. I decided to take a notebook and simply write down words or subjects she liked or disliked and see if there was a pattern.

  Again:

  “Broccoli”—head shake negative.

  “Steak”—head moved in nod.

  “Turnip”—negative.

  “Butter”—positive.

  “Butter” in negative tone—positive.

  “Spinach” in positive tone—negative.

  Here—and almost in a regular rhythm—she would stop for a sip, or a couple of laps of coffee, a tail wag, and (infrequently) the need to go outside and relieve herself, to return quickly, get back up in the chair to look at me quizzically, head cocked, waiting for the next question.

  No matter what I tried, I could not confuse her, catch her out. I changed tone of voice, facial expression, gesturing with hands, not gesturing with hands. Always she would give the correct, or what I assumed to be the correct, answer.

  “Pork chop” in angry tone—positive.

  “Ice cream” in anger—positive.

  “Vinegar” in loving tone—negative.

  I sat in the chair backward, watching her with a small mirror I found in an amazingly decrepit bathroom, and she never missed.

  “Jackrabbit running fast,” my back to Gretchen—positive.

  “Bowl of okra,” my back to Gretchen, positive voice—negative response with a small shake of the head and a courteous tail wag.

  “Oatmeal, no condiment,” negative tone—positive nod.

  Oatmeal, brown sugar and butter on top,” negative tone—positive nod.

  And slowly, over three or four or five weekends, it became evident that she was somehow “reading” me, and it was still more evident in another short time that she had begun testing me, seeing what I “knew” or could be taught.

  One cold November morning, at least cold for El Paso, I drove down along the river in my old 1951 Buick (army pay then wasn’t what it is now; I made $82.50 a month and was forced to pay 10 percent back in donations to United Fund) that barely ran. I had paid seventy-four dollars for the car, and it was worth that—or nearly.

  Inside, the old house was warm—a small potbellied stove in the corner burned a cherry red with mesquite—and Gretchen met me outside as she always did. Mr. Winnike was gone, but he had left a pot of coffee. God, it was so strong. I still remember the bite of that first sip; it was worse even th
an army coffee, which was nearly brain damaging. I sat at the table, jolted awake by the coffee, petted Gretchen on top of her domed head, got a tail wag and, in as positive a tone as possible, said: “Used motor oil.”

  And got no response at all. The first time. Clearly it was something she wouldn’t like to eat—and most of these decision-questions involved food. Or smell. Or noise.

  And here nothing.

  Then I noticed something.

  In front of her, on the table, was a small piece of prickly pear cactus, just a corner of a tiny lobe, big enough to have a couple of spines sticking out of it. I hadn’t seen her bring it in, and for moment I thought it must have stuck to her ear and flopped on the table. I reached to brush it off the table, and she stopped me with her nose, looked pointedly at the cactus, and gave a deliberate negative shake of her head, then looked up at me.

  “You don’t like cactus?” I said.

  Again, a negative shake, then a focused study of my face, waiting.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  For what?

  Me. A response. I looked at the cactus, saw the needle- sharp spines, and agreed wholeheartedly that I didn’t like that piece of cactus either. I shook my head in a negative.

  Bang. She got rid of the cactus—put it by the door—and picked up a small stick. She put it on the table, looked up at me and nodded, waiting, I returned the nod, reached for the stick, thinking she wanted me to throw it, but before I could pick it up, she grabbed it and was out the door.

  We were not to play. We were working, studying, thinking.

  Learning.

  And so that day passed. Not with me testing her but the opposite. She was finding out what I knew, what I thought, and somewhere in that day, I realized with a kind of shock, or stunned belief, that we were actually “talking.”

  I had, as a small child, been raised by my grandmother—a wonderful, all-knowing woman brought up on farms in Norway and later in northern Minnesota. She believed in the old Norse tales of gods and goddesses and spirits of another world, another spirit world that could and often did talk through animals, telling tales of love and hate and joy and music. Sometimes when birds were singing, she would put her hand on my arm and say, “Songs, for you and me, from them; the birds sing for them, for us. . . .”

  I did not disbelieve it, actually, but simply thought it was something perhaps only old people could know, a code I did not understand yet. Like when it was going to rain or snow or when somebody would be close to death or birth. I was not skeptical so much as blank, unable to understand.

  But now it was true for me, and open, and clear. Gretchen was, in her way, a very real way, bringing me into a conversation; she knew many things I liked, and now she was showing me some of the things she liked and disliked. We were very definitely “talking,” and as the afternoon drew on, my level of astonishment grew lower and I accepted it and began to understand what I was really doing:

  Having a conversation with a friend.

  We had—or rather Gretchen had—found a way to break down the communication barrier and interlock with another species. It was simple, clean, and very elegant—we looked at things, said what we thought of them, and with more depth than I thought possible, we understood each other completely.

  It was, in many ways, for me a lifesaving understanding. I had come to the army as an escape from my life—as many men did, I suppose—and though I’d had a complex and rougher childhood than most, I was still virtually unsophisticated. I had seen many ugly things as a child in the Philippines, when the war with Japan was still not quite finished, and through the hazy viewfinder of alcoholic parents, but as the real world hit me, I was simply not able to handle it.

  Because I had a semi-technical background in high school, the army started putting me through various electronic-weapons schools: missiles, both antiaircraft and surface-to-surface tactical weapons, which included the care, maintenance, and firing of nuclear weapons, and so to nuclear-warhead schools.

  At that time—and in many ways it is still true—the public was given at best a very limited and horribly skewed idea of what nuclear war would be like. True, we had dropped two nuclear weapons (designated then as atomic bombs) on Japan—one on a city called Hiroshima and another on a city named Nagasaki. They were devastating and primarily leveled both cities, but little was told to the public then except that a new kind of bomb had been used against the Japanese. Soon Russia also had the bomb and the Cold War started. We rushed to the edge of nuclear war, and a kind of mass panic hit the United States, with people building bomb shelters and leaving to live in isolated parts of the world in sophisticated bunkers where they thought they might be safe.

  But little was told accurately about how the weapons actually worked, and much that was said was so wrong as to be dangerous and downright silly.

  In public school we were told to hide under our desks, or duck on the lawn and cover ourselves with our jackets, or hide along a wall with our hands over our heads.

  It was so incorrect, so inane, as to be criminal, and when the army sent me to nuclear-warhead school, I had absolutely no idea of what to expect, of the reality of this new kind of tech war. I was brought to a shattering of my ignorance almost as brutal as the weapons themselves.

  We sat at desks, with notebooks, the first day of the class. While most of the classes we took were taught by soldiers and sometimes ex-soldiers who were tech reps, in this case a civilian walked into the room. He sat on the edge of a desk, lit a cigarette (we were ourselves not allowed to smoke except in outside breaks), smiled in an almost deprecating way, and said:

  “When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it killed between eighty-five thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand people in three hundredths of a second. The human brain operates on a much slower frequency than that speed, and so therefore they were vaporized—reduced to less than their base molecular or carbon level—faster than they could think about it, faster than they could know. They would have had no cognizance of their own death, would simply not mentally know they had been killed, had died, or had ever lived—nothing into nothingness.” He took a drag off the cigarette. “The yield of that warhead was the same as approximately twenty thousand tons of conventional explosive, and essentially the same for the warhead dropped on Nagasaki, with the same results. It is important for you to know now that in current terms, these are actually incredibly small warheads, and indeed, are primarily used as triggers for larger-yield weapons, weapons with millions of tons of yield, numbers that are almost literally unimaginable.”

  But I was gone, stuck on the fact that hundreds of thousands—even millions of people, with the more advanced weapons—could be killed without knowing it, could simply be evaporated into nothingness without knowing that it had happened.

  Was it, then, I thought, like they had never existed at all? In their own minds? Simply never have been?

  It was then—half a century ago—illegal to speak to anyone about any of this, so I bottled it up, but I could not stop thinking of it, the horror of it, knowing what practically nobody else could know; I was eighteen years old and stuck with such insane knowledge.

  And then I met Gretchen and so to sanity; I could speak to nobody else, no human, and so I spoke to Gretchen.

  On weekends when Mr. Winnike was not there, I would sit and have coffee with her—I must confess that I made it somewhat weaker than he would have done and that she was often negative about how I made it, lapping a bit and then shaking her head slowly from side to side. But she was too courteous to be outright rude and accepted my effort.

  The talks went on for three or four weekends with me discussing various nuclear yields and how the bombs worked and frankly how insane it all was, and she was so kind to me. I mean she was very negative about the whole thing, shaking her head from side to side; she did not approve of the use of nuclear tactical weapons at all. But in some way, she was gentle with me at the same time.

  We became closer a
nd closer, and when she could sense my sincere frustration growing to an uncomfortable level, she would pause and go outside and bring me something positive from her own life—a favorite stick, a stuffed or rubber toy—which she would place on the table in front of me, pushing it slowly to me with her paw . . . an easing thing, a gentling touch.

  I had many dogs before knowing her, and Lord knows how many dogs have wonderfully entered my life in the past fifty years since I met her. But the way she helped me—as no human, really, could have helped me—by breaking down the interspecies interlock and letting her mind come into my thinking . . . There was such care, such love.

  Soon after this I was sent once more to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for still more missile and radar schooling. I was gone, without seeing her, for seven months. When I came back, Mr. Winnike—doubtless due to the coffee—had passed away. When I went to see him and Gretchen, the house was empty and the neighbor lady told me that when he died, Gretchen had come to her house and all but dragged her back for help but it was too late. Soon after, his family had come and taken her back to the Houston area, where they lived.

  I wrote to them (this was half a century before the Internet or e-mail) and they informed me that not long after she had come to live with them, their three-year-old daughter had nearly stepped on a diamondback rattlesnake in the backyard, but Gretchen had thrown herself between the snake and the little girl and had taken the strike on her shoulder.

  It had been a large snake—as many of the rattlers in eastern Texas seem to be—and a solid direct strike. Such a bite would often have enough venom to be fatal. But the family found a vet with antivenom serum (it was new at the time and apparently they had all the neighbors and all the police calling all the people they could to locate the serum), and Gretchen, after a few days of scaring everybody, made a full recovery.

  I never saw her again, though I wrote now and then to the people who lived with her. I have never forgotten her, nor will I, and I think she had a full and wonderful life.