by Ralph Helfer
Some came and went due to outside obligations, but over time our little group had developed into a family. We cared for one another, worked together, and lived communally in the big house. It was a run-down, fifty-year-old Spanish hacienda. The house was nestled in a grove of giant eucalyptus trees at the very top of a mountain. On a clear day you could see the crystal-blue water of the Pacific Ocean some twenty-five miles away.
The house itself had a strange, and not entirely welcoming, feeling to it. The walls were cracked and the paint was peeling. It was built in a traditional U-shape around a courtyard with broken red brick tiles and a cracked stone water fountain at the center, toppled after years of neglect.
The foreboding atmosphere extended to the inside of the house. All of the sixteen rooms were strangely interlocked: there were doors in the backs of closets, and others behind mirrored walls. But practically the entire first floor was a single, open room, approximately fifty feet long and almost thirty feet wide, with an eighteen-foot ceiling. The feeling here was one of warmth and hospitality. At each end, staircases with oak banisters led up to the second floor. In the center of the room was an enormous walk-in fireplace made of flagstone and mortar brick; you could see and feel its warmth, no matter where you were in the room. The fireplace was our only source of heat, spreading warmth via vents throughout the house.
Outside, the property sloped gently down to a small valley. An ice-cold creek dodged its way through groves of oaks and patches of ironwood until it dropped off a rock cliff, cascading down the mountainside like a miniature waterfall.
A six-horse barn, complete with a hayloft and outside runs for the horses, dominated the valley. We built rows of chain-link cages to hold our exotic animals, as well as corrals with pipe fences for the hay-eating stock.
“No problem” was the team’s unofficial slogan. We all shared the belief that by using a hands-on approach to working with wild animals, an approach based on love and respect rather than brutality, we could help to bring about a greater understanding of animals and an appreciation of their value to society. We felt sure that what we were doing would ultimately benefit mankind.
Ted, my headman and protégé, was a good-looking, muscular guy with a wonderful personality and a great love of nature. He shared my boundless optimism. Every day was a glorious event, and no matter how bad the circumstances might be, Ted shared my belief that with hard work, we could overcome it.
Don, a young teenager, had come to us after having spent many of his years as a runaway. After much negotiation with his parents (who did not want him) and the judge (who wanted to send him to juvenile hall), Don was legally allowed to stay with us. He may have seemed rebellious and dangerous to the outside world, but he was genuinely warm and gentle with the people he knew and trusted, and above all with the animals he cared for.
Laura, my girlfriend at the time, was a promising trainer. Joy was our general manager and the backbone of the company. After the accounting was done, and all the calls returned, she was out the door helping the others to prepare the food for the nursery animals. Ruth ran the house, and Ma Pud cooked for us.
The youngest member of our team was Maria, a tiny pixie of a girl. She had come to us one day from up north, alone, introverted, distrustful, and depressed. She was carrying a knapsack bigger than she was, and looking for a new way of life. From the day she arrived, I knew that this sensitive and dedicated young woman could benefit deeply from the love and tranquillity the animals had to offer. And she did. As time went on, we learned that Maria had a beautiful, lilting singing voice, and she brightened the kitchen and the forest with her gift.
Most people think of Southern California as sun and sand, a paradise for surfers and beach bunnies, but that’s not always the case. In our second year, although it hadn’t snowed for years, the area was hit by an unprecedented storm. Suddenly the temperature began to drop and then there was snow, enormous amounts of snow. Not just little white flakes that melted before they touched the ground; it was coming so thick and so fast that you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. It raged out of control almost immediately, and caught us totally unprepared.
By the sixth day, the situation was getting dire. We hadn’t been in contact with the outside world for five days. The electric lines were down, the telephone was dead, and the twisting two-lane road leading down the mountain to Thousand Oaks, seventeen miles away, was impassable. Food for the animals, especially the meat eaters, would soon run out, and the human food supply was also running short.
Even the relentlessly optimistic Ted seemed a bit depressed as he came in from checking on the animals in the compound.
“We’re just holding our own,” he said. “Everybody’s dry, at least for now—but I’ve got to tell you, Ralph, it’s getting scary.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “I know, but hey—a group like us….”
“I know,” Ted said, momentarily cheered. “It’s no problem!”
But actually, we did have a problem. The house was enormous and required a tremendous amount of firewood to keep it warm, and we were running low. We needed to bring in a large supply if we were going to make it through the storm.
“I found an enormous dead tree down the mountainside about three hundred yards from the house,” I said. “We could sure use it for firewood, but it’s going to be tough work bringing it up to the house. Do you want to give it a try?”
“Yeah, sure,” Ted said with the renewed enthusiasm that a sense of purpose will give you. As I put on my jacket I yelled, “Whoever wants to help haul a tree for firewood, let’s go!”
I heard affirmative responses throughout the house. We zipped up our parkas and headed out into the blizzard. For three hours, Ted, Maria, Don, Joy, Laura, Ruth, and I pushed and pulled, fell and slid, trying to haul that tree up the mountain, but for all our efforts we gained only about a hundred feet. It was clear that our plan wasn’t going to work without modifications.
Suddenly I got an idea. “Let’s get the horses and a couple of ropes—that’ll help.”
Ted and I headed for the barn and chose two stallions to ride. Stud was built more like a racehorse, with sleek lines, long legs, and delicate features, while Son was a roping quarter and looked like a bulldozer, with his thick chest, short legs, and powerful muscles. Midnight and Mollie, the two girls, were left behind, warm and comfortable in the barn.
We tied ropes around the tree and threw a loop around the saddle horns, put our own shoulders to the task, and gave a click of the tongue to the horses to pull. And pull they did. They strained into their chest plates, with steam pouring from their nostrils. Sometimes they slipped, and at times even fell. But, together with the team, they managed to get the oak up to the back door of the house.
Now we just needed to get it inside. I didn’t see any reason to fix something that was working, so I rode Son through the door and into the main room and threw a new loop over the roots of the tree. With all of us pushing, we managed to get the roots right up to the edge of the fireplace. Dismounting, I grabbed the roots; everybody followed suit, and we raised that section enough to thrust the whole base of the tree into the huge fireplace. While the main room was nearly thirty feet wide from the fireplace to the door, that tree was thirty-eight feet long! As a result, a good portion of it stuck out the back door. Nobody minded. We were content with the fact that at least we could have a fire, and we knew that the roots would eventually burn down. We planned to gradually inch the tree into the fireplace until we could close the back door.
After I had put Son in his stall, I walked over to the compound. Zamba was pacing anxiously in his cage, anticipating another night of howling winds and freezing rain. When he saw me, he jumped up against the chain links, all nine feet and 528 pounds of him, and looked down at me, begging for a little comfort and love. I couldn’t resist, so I opened the door and went in. He exploded with joy, running all over his cage.
At my command, he rolled to a stop and lay upside down at
my feet, looking up at me with his huge golden eyes. When I reached down to put on his leash, he pulled me down on top of him with his paws and proceeded to give me a rather raspy lick across my face. God, what a great lion—what a great friend!
As long as he had me to play with, Zamba loved the snow, and took great delight in jumping into a drift and scattering the soft, powdery flakes. He was soon covered with a heavy coat of it, and he seemed to like his new white cape, showing it off by high-stepping majestically.
We arrived at the house covered from head to toe. A blazing fire was going, and everybody was huddled around it. Everybody had brought a blanket and pillow, and had secured his or her own territory near the tree that was sticking out of the fireplace. I put a bowl of milk down for Zamba to enjoy and joined the rest of the crew. Maria, Laura, and Joy had brought some baby animals up from the compound to ensure their safety from the cold, and we turned some of them loose on the tree.
Jacks and Kabor, both tiny and delicate, lived together in the nursery. Jacks was a squirrel monkey, with beautiful dark eyes, elflike ears, and a long tail that he curled up between his legs and over his shoulder when he wasn’t using it for balance. He would often fall asleep holding it like a pillow. Kabor, a marmoset, was a bit smaller, with a white tuft of hair sprouting from the top of his head. He could always be found nestled close to Jacks.
Stinky and Bandit were also roommates and clearly cared for each other very much, although their personalities were quite different. Stinky, as you might have guessed, was a skunk. She liked to sleep a lot, and her raccoon buddy Bandit was always waking her up by jumping right onto the middle of her back, and Stinky would arch her tail at him, but thankfully, her scent glands had already been removed.
The four little animals scampered up and down the tree, enjoying its many hide-and-seek opportunities. They weren’t the only ones. Among the branches and along the bark, ants had set out on a long journey to gather what food information they could, sending it back to the colony through the ranks at incredible speed. Some ladybugs were setting up house in a niche of dried leaves and twigs. Hordes of beetles clambered everywhere, decorated with red, blue, and green dots and stripes, gorgeous patterns of color. All of them were moving away from the advancing flames, and the slow-burning wood gave most of them the chance to make it to safety.
Unfortunately, that meant into the house. We had to step lightly for the next few days, as the multicolored beetles, columns of ants, and even an old daddy longlegs were all scampering for new quarters.
The blaze of the fire cast a cavelike glow in the room; all else was pitch-black. I looked around at my family, and saw that they, too, recognized the special quality of this moment. The Bible says that a tree is a symbol of wisdom. So it may be, but it also gives of itself—its strength, its security, and its protection. I really understood that as we gathered around the tree in our great room that night. To touch it was to tune in to the soul of nature, to become one with the infinite.
Joy snuggled down in her comforter. “I feel guilty,” she said quietly. “With all the stress and worry, I still feel wonderful, and I don’t understand it.”
Zamba laid his great head in my lap.
“You feel as the animals do, Joy. You’re part of a group, not an individual now,” I said. “You know the difference between man and the animals? If a person on a crowded street in New York sees a runaway car coming in his direction, he panics and runs, knocking into others who remain unaware of the impending danger. But if groups of antelope are feeding on the veldt and one sees a lion approaching, the whole group reacts. They run in the same direction without knocking into one another, because they are listening to a universal ‘mind.’
“Animals do this naturally, in emergency and in tranquillity. I think we’re so close to our animals right now, and our love for them is so strong that we’ve crossed over, to their dominion. Wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone in the world could feel like this, just once in their lives?”
It was a long speech for me, and it was followed by a long, heavy silence. Everyone was deep in thought, sharing in the moment. Then, from a pile of blankets, bodies, and animals came someone’s voice:
“No problem.”
Everyone broke up.
Finally we fell asleep. When a chill woke us, we would push the tree a little farther into the fireplace, where it would blaze anew. We repeated this ritual until we could finally close the back door.
In the middle of the night I woke up and walked quietly over to the window. I looked out at a frozen white world. A bright moon lit the cloudless sky and the countryside below with an eerie glow. Nothing moved, and there was nothing to give away the existence of life out there. I was moved, watching nature sleep. After a few minutes, I turned toward the fire, and our mother protector, the tree. Territories had been forgotten, as the sleeping animals cuddled against the warmth of the tree. The hot bright coals threw light against the tree branches and reflected them against the ceiling.
I felt the chill. Zamba was curled up, kittenlike, and I was happy to hurry back to his warmth, snuggling up under his mane.
15
Our sense of peace was not to last. By dawn the storm had started to rage again. Food supplies were getting critically low. We were feeding five hundred pounds of meat a day just to the big cats—the lions, tigers, and leopards—and tons of alfalfa and oat hay went to the hoofed stock.
I was deep in thought, lost in calculations for rationing the food among the animals, when I heard someone scream. Nobody likes to hear a scream at the best of times, but a scream on a wild animal ranch is absolutely bloodcurdling, and my mind went to the worst possible scenario. Was something—or somebody—being killed? Hearing that scream set my adrenaline racing, and I got to the window as fast as I could.
In the snow-covered valley by the horse barn, I saw a small human figure running, screaming, and falling in the heavy snow. I raced out the door and slipped and slid myself the quarter-mile distance to the barn. It was Maria. When I got to her, she was hysterical. She threw her arms around me, crying and shaking. I wiped the snow from her face and tried to calm her down as best I could. I half carried her back to the horse barn, from where, according to her tracks, she had just come.
The smell of horses and hay filled my nostrils as soon as we entered the barn—and then I saw them. Our horses were lying all around us. Some of the seven were already dead, and some were clearly dying. To this day, the image is burned on my brain. I stood there, stunned, as my mind raced over the possibilities.
Then I ran to Stud, to Mollie, to Midnight. I had known these horses for a long time and they, like all the other animals, had become a part of our family. Maria had gone over to Midnight, her favorite. She had spent hours grooming and riding her. She was lying flat, every breath a labor. Together Maria and I tried to get Midnight to stand, but despite everything we were doing to help her, she just couldn’t make it to her feet.
The barn door burst open again and Joy, Ted, Laura, and Don were there with us. Their faces all registered the sudden shock I had felt just moments before. Each went to his or her favorite horse and pleaded with it to get up. Three or four of us would all pitch in as one. Pulling, hauling, bracing with our backs, we would finally get one animal to stand for a moment, only to have it topple over again. We fetched blankets and lanterns and built a small fire. I racked my brain to figure out what had happened. The only thing I could think of was food poisoning.
I walked over to the hay, and saw it: mold. The rain and snow must have caught the edge of the hay. But the horror behind me was still a mystery. I had seen horses eat moldy hay before, and they hadn’t died from it! Whatever it was, we needed to know what to do. I decided to send Ted on a mission to find out whether the hay was truly bad, and also to bring back dearly needed supplies. I would stay at the ranch, and try to keep everyone calm. I called the group together. Except for Maria, who wouldn’t leave Midnight, we huddled near the fire.
“Look, Ted, i
t’s up to you, buddy. The snow here has stopped, at least for now. It may be the only chance we’ve got to get you down.”
“I don’t mind going,” he said, “but I don’t think old Betsy can make it up the driveway to the main road. The tires will just spin out.” Betsy was our beloved truck.
Don, who rarely spoke, suggested that we modify the car chains to fit with the truck chains for added traction. Laura suggested we use Son.
“He didn’t eat whatever made the others sick; he’s fine. Use him to help to pull the truck out to the main road. It’s all downhill from there.”
“Okay,” I said, “but Ted, if we get you up and over the driveway, you’re on your own for seventeen miles downhill on a road you probably won’t even be able to see.”
“It’s no problem,” Ted said, his face somber and determined.
A light snow had started to fall as Ted climbed into the truck. He turned her engine over; she sputtered, then jumped and roared into action. I jumped on Son’s back while Don tied a rope to the truck’s bumper. I tied the other end to the saddle horn. Meanwhile the rest of our crew had lined the road ahead with brush and twigs. The double chains looked awkward, but strong. I gave the signal; the motor roared, Son pulled, everybody pushed, and off old Betsy went, backfiring, slipping and sliding, chains biting into the wet mush.
Before we knew it, Ted was over the rise and onto what we believed was the road. I unhitched the rope from the bumper. With a wave and a honk, Ted was off, the truck spinning sideways, weaving and sliding, down the mountain. We watched until he disappeared. The plan was insane. How was he ever going to make it down the hill in one piece—let alone back up? But we had no other options.
The storm started picking up as we walked back to the house. It was as though the powers above had held the storm back to give Ted a chance. I tried not to think of the consequences if he didn’t make it.
We set to work making the remaining horses as comfortable as possible. Mollie was dead, and Stud was going fast. We separated the bad hay from the good, throwing out every strand we thought could possibly have been contaminated. When that sad work was done, I left Maria and Don to tend to the horses’ needs, and the rest of us went out to feed, bed down, and water the other animals.
