“I got him fourteen months ago, down at the shop [his family’s welding shop],” Phil recounts as he shreds the cooling pork. “A Mexican brought him in; he didn’t know what to do with him. Li’l Buck’s mother got run over. He was about a day or two old. I raised him from about sixteen inches high, fed him goat milk, Carnation and water mixed together. A guy [who] used to raise deer tol’ me how much to feed it. Most people give ’em too much milk. You give ’em three ounces ever’ three hours and no more. They’ll drink a whole bottle, if you let ’em, and that gives them scours and kills them.”
Phil’s brother Gary walks into the house, a sturdy man in a baseball cap, a can of Budweiser bulging out of the breast pocket of his green T-shirt.
“Hi, Tree Monkey,” Phil greets him.
“Can I borrow a bowl?” asks Gary.
“Sure, what you want it for?” says Phil.
“Cleanin’ bream,” says Gary. He takes the bowl onto the lawn and cleans the fish he just caught in Phil’s pond with his two children, Lorie and Jacob.
When Phil is out of earshot, I ask Gary about the relationship between Little Buck and his brother.
“Lil’ Buck rescued him; I can’t think what he’d do without him,” says Gary.
When Gary departs, we feast on yellow squash, okra, Big Boy beans, brown crowder beans, ivory ears of Silver Queen sweet corn, hot cornbread, and roast pork butt with barbecue sauce, the drippings cycled back into the succulent brown beans.
“Why Tree Monkey?” I ask Phil.
“Long time ago he went deer huntin’ and he fell asleep and fell out of the tree, him and the rifle,” says Phil. “It was my rifle, too, but it didn’t hurt nothin’.”
At his “other place,” thirty-some wooded acres where Little Buck lives, Phil warns us, “I got no power or nothing, no air conditioning, just gas lanterns. It’s my huntin’ place. We didn’t get but four over there this year. We’re allowed six. There’s too many does, so we try and manage it to let the bucks grow and get big.”
Phil hunts with a bow and has the straight, square shoulders and posture of an archer. He also shoots turkey and deer with black powder rifles, a matter of historical interest and personal pride to him. “My great-great-grandpa, B. L. Sanders, he was the first one; he went to work for Kennedy rifle, you know those?” he says. I don’t, but I know something of the weight of a black powder rifle and how hickory-hard and strong a person has to be, how steady, to hold its vast barrel, fire, and hit a deer.
After lunch, I squeeze into his Chevrolet pickup truck with Prince on the seat, packets of Red Man on the dash, a box of Milk Bones, and a .22 caliber with a hunting scope wedged between the seats. The truck bed holds a compressor, chains and saws, cantaloupes, and a gas-powered weed cutter.
“Li’l Buck used to ride around with me in the truck, layin’ on the floorboards—Mama thought I was crazy,” Phil explains. “When Li’l Buck would try to get up on the seat, Prince, he’d grab his legs and make him lay back down.”
We stop briefly at Mama’s house, a spacious suburban rambler reached via a wooden covered bridge over a large fish pond. After we feed the fish, Phil’s half-brother Lewis hands us five pounds of blueberries freshly picked from an enormous bush behind the home.
The town of Biscoe is sleepy and blue collar, and its business consists largely of textile mills, foundries, and auto salvage. Signs indicate a prison down the road. Generous gardens bloom adjacent to homes set in woods drowning in spires of kudzu along roadsides, where magnolias with stiff glossy leaves flourish. There are churches, some little more than concrete bunkers with crude spires, and houses lost in trumpet vines and fields of Shasta daisies. Street signs and businesses bear old English, Scottish, and Irish names: Thigpen, Hunycutt, Tillery, and McBee.
Phil steers the pickup into the woods, opening and closing a metal barrier gate hung with “No Hunting” signs. The signs notwithstanding, this is a hunting community and one that doesn’t necessarily follow orders. I am worried that Phil’s Little Buck will fall to a poacher in here. “I got government land all around me; you can’t gun-hunt in there,” he explains. And any archers would presumably be close enough to see Little Buck’s two bright orange collars that indicate he is somebody’s pet, he adds.
A quarter-mile into the woods, the dirt road circles before an old brown-and-white trailer supported on concrete blocks. There’s a tidy wooden outhouse, two hammocks, a picnic table sheltered by a tarpaulin, and porch swings under the pines. The ground is covered with pine needles, bones, beer bottle caps, empty cartridge shells from Phil’s target range, deer droppings, and loose blossom-like balls of Phil’s discarded tobacco. A much-punctured target deer stands in the field behind the trailer.
“Li’l Buck!” Phil calls. “Li’l Buck!” Within minutes, a tiny young stag materializes, tail down and not the least frightened. Kingly in his carriage, with large round black eyes, he has a moist nose, exquisite small black hooves, and pipestem legs, slightly cow-hocked in back. Two blaze-orange collars hang around his slender neck, and his antlers are covered in rich, slate-gray velvet.
“He’s not but a year and two months old,” says Phil, handing a cookie to Little Buck, whose mouth has upturned corners, giving his muzzle the appearance of a silent smile. He is a light sorrel color, his back not quite as high as my waist. Phil estimates Little Buck’s weight at eighty-five pounds and says that should double by next year.
“You in paradise here,” says Phil, seated at the picnic table, slicing cucumbers, cantaloupe, and apples and handing them one by one to Little Buck, who serenely munches them. He throws in a few oatmeal cookies, peanuts, and four dog biscuits and pours a stream of dry kibble into a wooden deer feeder with a mineral block.
“These are Li’l Buck’s first antlers; last year he was a ‘knot head’ we call it or ‘button buck.’ I keep him fed good. He has good protein—dog biscuits and cow peas.”
I pick up the only reading material here, a rain-dappled copy of the Whitetail News lying on the picnic table, and open it to a dog-eared article: “Cause and Effects of 200 Days of Antler Growth.”
In the living room of Phil’s trailer, more mounted buck heads hang on the walls, and in the bedroom, still another buck is on display, his ten-point rack in seemingly perilous proximity to the small bed. Everything is neat, orderly, and still. Through the open bedroom door, a bobwhite calls in the woods.
“I tell you what, I got cable TV, and when deer shows come on, that dad-blessed dog watches ’em,” says Phil, as Prince stands on his hind legs, thoroughly washing the buck’s ears with his tongue. “Li’l Buck, he’s my buddy,” he says, taking a dog brush first to the deer and then to Prince, who pants with pleasure. “One time he got his leg through his collar, and I tried to get his leg out, and me and him hit the ground. He tore my pants off. My butt was black and blue. And that lump on the antler is where he got caught in the hammock and just panicked.”
“What’s the drill?” Phil asks Prince, who promptly sits. “Be easy now.” Prince delicately takes a morsel of cookie from Phil’s hand.
I reach toward the buck, who sniffs me carefully, then allows me to touch his antlers. They are hot and hard, alive under the velvet, about the circumference of bicycle handlebars. I stroke his face and scratch his ears, which leaves a slightly greasy feeling on my hands, like lanolin from sheep’s wool.
“I’m fixin’ to build a house here and a great big pond over there,” says Phil, pointing to where a spring runs between recently cleared slopes planted with cow peas and white clover for deer and turkeys.
“He got more to eat than by god I got to eat,” says Phil, rubbing Little Buck’s head. The buck pushes against him like a happy cat enjoying the caresses.
“Come on, boy, let’s git!” says Phil, walking off with Prince for a postprandial stroll.
Phil used to be the superintendent for a construction company, where, he says, he made good money and liked the work. A few months before we met him, the numbness he had been
feeling in his hands and feet while riding his ATV was diagnosed as diabetes. He switched from junk food to vegetables and venison and plummeted from 210 to 170 pounds. He looks healthy and fit, but the peripheral neuropathy that comes with the disease means he’s not supposed to drive a car, truck, or ATV more than fifteen minutes at a stretch, which limits his ability to work. And through a glitch in unemployment and disability law, he says, “The heck of it is, I don’t get no money.”
We walk through a forest of shortleaf pine, oak, slick hickory, and sweet gum. Little Buck stops to browse, then canters to catch up.
If work and health have gone badly, love has gone worse for Phil. “I’m single right now, and I’m gonna stay that way too,” he says. The previous year, his second wife left him after what Phil says was a dispute about money and fidelity complicated by antagonistic stepdaughters. Two weeks before our visit, she served him with divorce papers.
“I had a rough time,” he says, his eyes full of sorrow. “I was kind of lost. They brought me back,” he says, indicating Prince and Little Buck. “They were my salvation. Li’l Buck, he been a joy to raise.”
How can Phil love Little Buck and kill his kin? What’s the difference, I wonder, between the deer he loves and the deer he shoots and eats? “It’s just different; he’s a special thing,” says Phil. “The other ones I’m not attached to. I still like to hunt, and he goes huntin’ with me. When I’m on the deer stand, he lays down under the stand. If I’m on the ground, he lays down ’side of me. He’s been right there when I hang ’em on the chain and dress ’em out.”
The five of us—dog, deer, man, and women—walk across swales of cow peas and white clover into the woods, where a yard-high wall of woven brush and a bench provide a blind for watching and hunting deer and turkeys.
“The other day, me and Li’l Buck set down in the turkey blind, and turkeys came in here not ten feet away—I got ’em on video,” says Phil. “Deer, turkeys, it don’t make no difference; they love that white clover.”
He sometimes goes to Texas to hunt deer, Phil explains, but he “wasn’t going to Texas to kill a doggone turkey. I got bigger turkeys here than they got.”
In the shade behind the clearing for Phil’s future dream house, a wild tom turkey, the last of fifteen chicks he raised, pecks and paces in a pen, and a Rhode Island Red rooster and hens laze in another. The doors to a semi-sized metal storage trailer stand open, revealing furniture, an old stereo, deer hides, a dusty, stuffed red tail hawk, floor lamps, and a half-dozen mounted buck heads tumbled in different positions.
Phil has always cared for wild things. He had a screech owl, raccoons, and squirrels as a child and is possibly the only person to be cited by a police officer for reckless driving caused by a raccoon crawling around on his lap.
He’s healing in these woods, walking shirtless and barelegged for a raging case of psoriasis, and taking a shoebox full of medications for the arthritis chewing his bones, the high blood pressure, and, maybe, the depression. “My life went all to hell,” Phil reflects.
The saving element in all of his recent pain is his young deer. “He’s my little buddy; he don’t talk no trash to me. And he don’t know he’s a deer. Except for Li’l Buck and the dog, I got nobody to be in charge of.”
“I want me another one; it’s still not too late this year,” says Phil. “I’d like to have me a doe next time. I’d like to see what the difference is. I don’t know what I’d do without Li’l Buck. I guess I’d be crazy.”
Tory the mustang was born with crippled hooves and will never be ridden. He lives at an Arizona ranch designed for children with handicaps that has many handicapped animals as well.
27
WHISPERING HOPE
DIANE REID AND WHISPERING HOPE RANCH
SQUALLS OF SLEET spatter across the rimrock above us, sending veils of snow mist onto a pasture of orange poppies as our jeep clatters across the cattle guard. At the far end of the pasture, the scent of lodgepole and Ponderosa pine needles mingles with apple blossoms blooming near an ancient log cabin. Beyond the cabin, three donkeys nibble on iris shoots by a pond where a willow tree leans above a stream. Eeyore, a large gray donkey, and two miniature donkeys named Cuddles and Kisses snuffle and chew and consider the day in this quiet hour before the children arrive.
“Eeyore’s just the best guy,” says Diane Reid, who has come out of the cabin office to meet us. Diane is the founder of Whispering Hope Ranch, here in the mountains east of Payson, Arizona. Like many animals at the ranch, Eeyore has physical challenges. Before he arrived, Eeyore had a condition in his hind feet that limited his mobility, Diane explains.
“He knows exactly why he’s here and what he’s doing. Thank you, Eeyore,” she says, as his black velvet nose busses her cheek in a donkey smooch. What Eeyore does is greet children who have challenges also, children born with physical differences or who suffered illness, injury, emotional trauma or have developmental disabilities.
Now this nineteenth-century working ranch is being transformed into a twenty-first-century ranch that can accommodate those with special needs, and Eeyore is one of the staff. Diane walks with us up a path to where a new A-frame log cabin has just been completed. It’s a prototype for a dozen more cabins, each designed with special lighting, drains for dialysis, and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. There will be an arena where the campers—kids with spina bifida, epilepsy, autism, and hemophilia—can ride some of the ranch horses. But most of all, there are animals of all sizes, ages, and conditions, animals who know what it’s like to be different, in peril, injured or abandoned.
“Several years ago, when I went through a divorce, animals were healers for me,” says Diane, who has filled the forty-five acres with a hundred rescued creatures ranging from Sandy the emu, to J.T. the miniature mule, to City Kitty, a formerly feral cat from Manhattan. Now she and the board members are raising more than nine million dollars to fund a camp where animals serve as emotional and physical healers for children.
“Whispering Hope, that’s from a hymn I learned as a child; it’s about angels and healing,” Diane explains. “The idea of the ranch is that people can be with animals with similar kinds of trauma and physical difficulties—that can be powerfully healing.”
Children, aides, teachers, and parents swarm onto the ranch drive, being lowered from buses with special power lifts for wheelchairs. There are children with severe scars or missing limbs, kids with cerebral palsy, and one little girl with a cranial-facial injury.
Taurie, a pale blonde mustang, noses at them and at us, demanding scratches. His front hooves torque inward in unnatural curves, like a pair of outsized fortune cookies. Taurie was born without coffin bones—the core of the hoof—perhaps the result of his mother’s malnutrition during pregnancy. Diane bought Pisces, his mother, at a “killer” auction, an auction where horses are sold by the pound for meat.
“She looked like she was dying when I met her,” says Diane, as we pet the mare, now roving the pasture with her son. “She was all bones and standing with her head down, starved. It looked like she wasn’t gonna make it, but I purchased her on the spot. When the vet checked her, we found out she was in foal and due imminently.”
Taurie is seven now, walking well despite his twisted feet. He carries himself in a self-confident, even cocky way and runs in the meadow, kicking up his back feet in delight.
“I want this to be a healing place for both people and animals,” says Diane. “The hard part is we get calls every week about animals that need to be here or they will be put to sleep.”
City Kitty was one of the hundred lucky ones. He came from a colony of wild cats in New York City. “Someone tried to poison them all, and a woman rescued the four who survived,” Diane explains. “She got them spayed, neutered, and vaccinated, but she couldn’t place him. He had an eyelid that turned under. The eye ran all the time, so nobody wanted him. She called us and asked if he could come here to live, and since she wanted to see the ranch anyway, she brought
him out.”
City Kitty arrived on a snowy March day and promptly went into hiding, emerging in August at the renovated ranch house office. “He was just sitting on the porch, as if to say, ‘Where have you been?’” says Diane, as the cat escorts us around the grounds. “It took us weeks to be able to touch him.”
His friends are Sweet Pea, a fainting goat; Ferdinand, a miniature Brahma steer; and a fallow deer named Cupid, all refugees from a roadside petting zoo. “The animals were in a twelve-by-twelve pen, and they were harassed by kids, and nobody took care of them,” she says. “I got a phone call that the steer, deer, and goat were going to be done away with, ‘Unless you can take them. And we have to know by Friday.’ This was Wednesday. These little animals had been friends since they were babies.”
Now Ferdinand lives with Chili Bean the big Holstein. Since Sweet Pea is fragile and subject to falls, she lives with two goats named Billi and Vanilli and with Buckwheat, a horned white cashmere goat with a severe side bite and a tongue that dangles out to the side.
As Diane gathers animals and children, she increases her staff: an events coordinator, someone to manage the camp and office, and two full-time animal caretakers, who live in the new ranch house with the long porches. Members of the hourly animal staff live down the valley, while Mary Clark, executive director of Whispering Hope Ranch, has two part-time staffers at the office in Scottsdale. (Mary was not an animal lover before coming to the Ranch. “I used to pet animals through my sleeve,” she confesses. “Now I kiss llamas on the nose, and I have a rescued poodle.”)
A rooster and four black hens peck and flutter in a chicken yard near the goat pen.
“We call them Pokey and the Buddhist Hens—they’re a rock group,” says Diane. “He was a single rooster from the nearby Buddhist monastery, and he didn’t know how to be a rooster at first. “
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