Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  “Easing,” on the other hand, would reduce that flood to a trickle. It’s better known as “whispering,” but these days there are so many self-appointed whisperers out there beating their chests about their magical powers with dogs, cats, macaws, CEOs, and psychopaths (yes, there is a “Psychopath Whisperer”) that no one can agree anymore on what qualifies as whispering or who’s qualified to do the whispering. Tanya isn’t a fan of flowery phrases anyway. She’d rather stick with straight talk, and to her, “whispering” has nothing to do with crooning in the animal’s ear and everything to do with taking things slow and easy.

  Easing would give Sherman a chance to process the world at his own pace. Instead of being driven, he’d be guided. We wouldn’t move on to the next challenge until he’d sniffed the last one, and eyeballed it for a while, and finally signed off. Easing is a more gentle approach, but it has a downside: it would force Sherman to face his fears head-on. He couldn’t just shut off his brain and follow blindly, a servant to a dominant master. He’d have to be fully aware of everything we were doing and make his decisions on the basis of courage, not intimidation. The choice isn’t as obvious as you might think, especially for a mistreated animal like Sherman. For him, letting his mind go blank could be a relief.

  I’d seen the Temple Grandin biopic, so I had some sense of what Tanya was saying. Glancing around our home, I tried to see it through Sherman’s eyes, scanning the landscape for little triggers that wouldn’t register on me but would freak out a more hyper-aware, born-to-flee prey animal. About a hundred yards from our driveway was a dirt road cutting through the woods. It would be the perfect place to take Sherman for walks, except if we went full-on whisper, it could take us a week just to get him there. Every few steps along the way there was something new that he would have to absorb, and I wasn’t psyched to stand by the side of the asphalt road, dodging pickup trucks, while Sherman weighed the risks of AK’s Saw Shop sign.

  Easing would put us on a very looooong calendar, and we didn’t have time to spare. Flooding would be a lot snappier; the only limit to Sherman’s training would be our own capacity for relentless persistence. And the time to start was right now, immediately, while we had that first hoof on the pavement.

  Or not.

  “Okay, Shermie, go chase a goat,” Tanya said. “Time to call it a day.” She turned Sherman around and led him back to the gate. Lawrence was still waiting, his hooves on the rails and his head poking over the top. Apparently I’d misread Tanya completely. For her, all that stuff about flooding versus whispering was an academic exercise, not a real question. There was never any doubt in her mind about what Sherman needed.

  Easing was the only way to go, Tanya told me, as she opened the gate and turned Sherman loose with Lawrence. “I’m not going to brutalize something just for my entertainment. Sherman would never go for it anyway. He’s had enough tough times in his life.” Tanya promised she’d be back in a few days. Until then, my homework was to build on what we’d accomplished and see if I could defy all odds and, whisper-style, get Sherman to place all four feet on the road.

  “This is really important,” Tanya reminded me before she headed off. “Anything you start, you have to finish. If you don’t think you can finish a task, don’t start it. Got it?”

  “Sure,” I promised, not especially concerned. What was so hard about sitting on a rope? To be honest, for all Tanya’s Sturm und Drang about easing and whispering and flooding, all she really did was lean back and give Sherman cookies. “Sitting and feeding, that you can handle,” I told myself, never realizing that like Prometheus, those whom the gods would destroy, they first make sassy.

  * * *

  —

  For the rest of the week, the main task I had to finish was keeping Sherman’s butt under close surveillance. I recognized right away that only David Blaine could pull off Tanya’s sleight of hand with a rectal thermometer, but fortunately she didn’t ask me to try. As long as Sherman was eating and moving around, she said, we could hold off on checking his temperature until her next visit. In the meantime, my job was to remain on Poop Patrol. I was supposed to keep an eye on Sherman’s stools and classify them as one of three categories: Normal, Weird, and None. Weird was anything runny, yellowish, or downright messy that could indicate he needed another dose of dewormer. None was a red alert; that meant his intestines were impacted and I needed to call Tanya ASAP.

  “And Normal?” I asked.

  “Is normal.” Tanya shrugged. “A good, healthy plop.”

  “I’ve never seen a healthy plop,” I pointed out. “I’ve only seen Sherman.”

  “You’ll know it,” she said. “You’ll look down and go, Yup, there’s a good one.”

  I did my best to follow Tanya’s instructions, but as far as I could tell, nothing that came out of Sherman for the next few days seemed worthy of panic or applause. That was something, at least. Sherman was still shy around the sheep and steered clear whenever they were marauding at the hay feeder, but now that spring grass was coming in, Buddy the ram and his crew were spending more time ranging across the meadow, leaving Sherman and Lawrence on their own to nibble together in peace. Tanya stopped by now and again, checking his temperature and probing his belly.

  “He’s on the mend,” she pronounced. “Now’s the time to get him moving.”

  So when my daughters got home from school that afternoon, we stuffed our pockets with horse treats and headed for the pasture. We haltered Sherman up, then shoved Lawrence back behind the gate and led Sherman toward the road. My fourteen-year-old daughter, Maya, held the rope while Sophie, the ten-year-old who’d gotten us into this, went in front to check for oncoming cars.

  “You’ve just got to sit back on it and—” I began, reaching for the rope to loop it under my butt and demonstrate Tanya’s passive-insistence strategy. While I was talking, Sherman just walked right past me. He put one foot on the road…then another…and then he was off, accepting Maya’s lead and following Sophie into the middle of the road, clumping along like he’d been strolling behind her all his life. Either we were world-class whisperers or something else was going on, which meant something else was definitely going on. We walked a little farther and then stopped to give Sophie a turn leading him. I showed her how to hold the rope: braced across her hips, firm in her hands but loose on his head.

  “And then,” I said, “you just go.”

  Except Sherman didn’t. I gave the rope a firm pull—nothing. Sophie tried, too, but for both of us, Sherman was a boulder. What the heck was Maya doing that we weren’t? Sophie handed the rope back to Maya to see if she could get Sherman going again, and a moment later, the mystery was solved: when Sophie stepped out of the way, Sherman stepped with her. Sophie stopped, and so did Sherm. We switched it around and let Maya take point, and Sherman was just as quick to follow her. Me, he wasn’t all that keen on; I tried getting in front and Sherman slowed down so much, he looked like claymation. I can’t say I blamed him: by now he knew that whenever I showed up, someone pulled out a hacksaw or took Lawrence away.

  Sherman seemed happy sandwiched between the girls, so I moved aside and let them do their thing. Tanya hadn’t left me with a playbook for this; neither one of us had anticipated the problem of Sherman suddenly showing a taste for afternoon hikes. I was a little uneasy about how far to let them go. Would his hooves hold up? Or was it smarter to end the fun now and turn the girls toward home? The dirt road was so close, though—twenty more steps and we’d be there. It was a little risky; we were heading into a nasty blind curve that pickup trucks liked to take on two wheels, but if we kept moving, we’d be around it in a jif.

  “What’s wrong?” Maya asked. “He looks so scared.”

  The moment we hit the curve, Sherman froze, with his ears flattened like a nervous cat’s. He was doing this weird hunching thing, pulling his body into a big furry ball but keeping his legs stiff, like he was trying
to both disappear and fight to the death at the same time. I glanced around and tried to Temple Grandin things out, searching for anything that could be spooking him. There were no dogs. No tree-caught plastic bags. No—

  “Easing” Sherman past his fears

  Wait, not that puddle? That wet stain? It was barely a foot wide. It didn’t even have any water. But Sherman was rooted to the spot like a kid peering over the edge of a high dive.

  “Maybe we should take him home,” Maya said.

  Absolutely. Any second now a truck could come blasting around that curve and find two kids and a donkey in its path. Except Tanya’s last words were still ringing in my ears, and I didn’t want to spoil the amazing leap that Sherman had already made today. “Let’s just get him across the stain first,” I told the girls. “Tanya showed me how.” Two little steps and he’d be through the thing. I slung the rope under my butt, ready to sit back and get this over with.

  But I wasn’t the only one who’d learned something that morning. When Sherman saw what I was up to, he yanked his head back before I could get set and threw me off balance. I barely caught myself before sprawling on top of him. Son of a—

  I took a breath and white-knuckled the rope. Okay, now I knew two things for sure: the problem was the stain, and I had to do something about it. Sherman didn’t seem scared; he looked defiant, like a kid clamping his lips and deciding he’s not taking his medicine, no matter what. His mane was bristling and the look in his eye said that he wasn’t giving up so easily this go-round. You better get this under control now, I thought, or you never will.

  “Girls, watch the road for cars,” I said, then thought better of it. “Actually, get back over here next to the fence.” This could take a while, and I didn’t want the girls straying anywhere near the blast zone of Sherman’s hooves or oncoming speeders. I hunkered down on my end of the rope, pulling it taut until Sherman’s head was over the stain, although his feet remained stubbornly at the very edge. For an ailing animal, his strength was unbelievable; I had to dig deep just to make sure I wasn’t the one being dragged down the street. We were locked in a grim standoff, staring each other in the face, neither of us gaining or losing an inch. Two minutes ticked by…three…

  My hands began cramping, and a part of me began to wonder what I was doing. This was exactly the kind of situation I’d been desperate to avoid for half my life. Twenty-five years ago, I was skiing with my brother in Jackson Hole when we saw an advisory for backcountry snowmobilers: “Under no circumstances should you leave your vehicle,” it warned. “Visitors have been gored to death after approaching buffalo on foot.” Somewhere, grieving wives were telling their kids that Daddy wasn’t coming home because he tried to pet a wild bull. Ever since then, I’ve been phobic about dumb-ass deaths. I didn’t want Mika to have to stand by a casket and explain to family and friends that no, I’d been in perfect mental health, but yes, my final moments were spent wrestling in a puddle with a donkey.

  “Car!” Sophie called. From a distance, I recognized the rattle of our seventy-year-old neighbor’s old farm truck. I knew Sam wouldn’t be moving fast, so I stayed put. Sam must have been used to public man-animal standoffs, because he came around the bend with a friendly wave and a toot of the horn and kept going. Sherman jumped at the sound of the horn, and it was just enough to swing the momentum my way. I hauled back before he could steady his feet, hand-over-handing the rope till he was on my side of the stain.

  “Treats!” I called to the girls. “Let’s feed him and get out of here.”

  The girls dug in their pockets. Sherman snuffled up the treats while I scratched his head and said, “Good boy,” remembering Tanya’s command that no matter how much grief Sherman put me through, every session had to end with a smile. We all crooned and petted him, then turned for home. As the girls began walking, Sherman hurried to stay with them, following so closely that his snout was nearly riding on Sophie’s shoulder. Sophie walked faster, then a little faster, until all four of us burst into a run.

  The girls were laughing, tickled that no matter how fast they went, Sherman’s bobbing head was right behind them. We raced toward home, thrilled by a music that none of us had ever heard before, not even Sherman: the drumbeat of his four flying hooves.

  9

  Donkey Tao

  That night, I went to bed with a problem. I woke up with a plan.

  Before falling asleep, I’d thought back with satisfaction on everything the girls and I had accomplished that day. In only his first second third attempt at getting on the road, Sherman had conquered his dread of pavement and crossed the Barely-a-Puddle of Doom. Best of all, he’d shocked the three of us by suddenly bustin’ loose and running all the way home by our sides. Sure, it was only a few hundred feet, and yes, he was eager to get back to Lawrence, but still, it must also mean he was becoming comfortable with me and the girls and considered the little brown barn his home.

  As I dozed off that night, I imagined what it would be like for Sherman and me to run the World Championship together. One by one, I could see each obstacle on the racecourse falling away behind us. I pictured myself soothing Sherman through the shotgun start, then urging him over that first mile of pavement until we reached the trails. We would really hit our stride on the dirt, leading us to the first of several—

  My eyes flashed open. The creeks. I’d forgotten all about Colorado’s gorgeous, cascading, mountain-fed pain-in-the-ass creeks. There were at least two creek crossings in the World Championship, maybe four, and depending on snowmelt and weather on race day, they could be anything from ankle-deep and glassy to bottomless and thundering. Sherman had just fought me like a grizzly over a splotch in the road; how many weeks of pulling on deadweight would it take for me to actually get him into moving water? We didn’t have that kind of time to waste; he and I both needed to log a ton of running miles in the next ten months to have any hope of finishing that race, and already the clock was ticking. The damn creeks brought us right back to square one, back to the same whisper vs. flood, drill sergeant vs. den mother predicament we’d had from the start. If I let Sherman ease through his aquaphobia at his own speed, we’d be standing around for hours in endless tugs-of-war. But if I forced Sherman to run, would he ever want to?

  By the time I fell asleep, I was feeling hopeless again. When I opened my eyes, I had my answer: the Tao of Steve.*1

  My mind must have been churning all night, because it somehow connected that old memory from fifteen years ago with a little throwaway nugget of advice that Tanya had given me the day before. “You’ve got to make Sherman believe everything is his idea,” she’d said, while I nodded along and yeah, yeah-ed without really listening. You hear that kind of stuff all the time in heist films and rom-coms and World Series of Poker commentaries, but c’mon—who besides George-Clooney-as-Danny-Ocean is really clever enough to trick people into insisting that no matter how much you “object,” they’re absolutely going to put your briefcase with the secret compartment into their casino safe. My sleeping brain must have cracked the code for me, though, because when I got out of bed I knew exactly what to do.

  My mistake was thinking of Tanya’s advice as a trick. When I first met Mika and went Tao-style, I genuinely put myself aside. Mika loved African music and didn’t want some stranger creeping on her, so I loaned her my Bonga and Cesária Évora CDs and made myself scarce. Whatever happened next was completely up to her. If I’d expected anything in return, there’s no way the Tao would have worked. I’d have been anxious or resentful or pushy, calculating all my actions against her reactions, radiating a hey-what-about-me vibe that sooner or later would have ruined everything. Done right, on the other hand, the Tao of Steve makes you forget the future and focus on the moment. You’re not playing a trick; you’re putting your mensch foot forward.

  I couldn’t wait to hustle outside and get started. It was a beautiful September morning, already getti
ng toasty at nine o’clock. Perfect for my plan. Sherman and I were going to shake the dust off my old playbook and, fingers crossed, repurpose it as a training method we could both get behind: Donkey Tao.

  The girls were in school, so I enlisted Mika to help. We grabbed a couple of halter ropes and some horse treats and went to assemble the rest of our team. Lawrence and Sherman were browsing on the far side of the pasture, and as I expected, Lawrence’s head shot up as soon as he heard us; he’d figured out that ever since Sherman had arrived, we always showed up packing treats. Lawrence broke off and frisked over at a trot. Sherman followed, and when he got close enough, we slipped the new purple halter I’d gotten him over his head and clicked on a rope. I left Sherman with Mika while I went searching for the next ally I needed for the Donkey Tao experiment: a grumpy white goat prone to fainting spells named Chili Dog.

  * * *

  —

  Chili had joined our family thanks to a pretty crafty prank pulled by an old gent named Ken Brandt. A few years earlier, Ken had bought two of our most adventurous, fence-defying goats, Skeedaddle and Lulu, because he wanted them for his great-grandkids. Exactly why, however, was a story of its own.

  Ken lived in Falmouth, a village along the Susquehanna River that’s even smaller than Lancaster and about an hour deeper into the central Pennsylvania countryside. Back in the 1970s, Ken and his buddies used to tease one of their friends for fishing and hunting all the time instead of taking care of his lawn. One weekend, Ken and the guys pranked their pal by staking a pair of goats on his overgrown front yard. The gag kind of fizzled because the goats were adorable and the guy they’d punked now had free landscaping, so Ken had to up his game. The next time their friend was off in the mountains, Ken put an ad in the local paper announcing the “1st Annual Falmouth Goat Race,” with instructions to call his friend’s home phone for date and location. This time, Ken struck gold. His buddy returned Sunday night and was blasted by his irate family, who’d spent all weekend answering a barrage of calls about some phony goat race.