This Side of Wild: Chapters Two–Three

I was eighteen, so young my brain had hardly started to function; in the army, stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, near El Paso, learning to kill my fellow man with various weapons, including missiles and nuclear warheads—living in a state of perpetual confusion mixed with a dosage of fear.

Nuclear war, according to them, according to the press, was imminent. The missiles were in Cuba, ready to be fired.

Mr. Winnike—I never called him by his first name, though it was on the card; I never seemed to remember it—lived in a house down along the Mexican border that seemed run-down when I first saw it as I parked in the track that could hardly be called a driveway: two ruts in the sandy dirt that led to a small chain-link gate, which was closed.

The coffee was profoundly black, almost tar, and so strong it seemed to jump at me from the cup.

And the impending all-destructive war with Russia when we would all—when every single living thing on the planet would be—would be...

He drew deeply, coughed intensely—it was then that I first truly noticed he had a viciously fluid-sounding persistent cough—and gestured to Gretchen.

She had been “watching” the conversation, swiveling her head from one to the other as we spoke—much like watching a tennis match—and I had noticed that now and then, at odd intervals, her ears would perk up and she would seem to almost nod.

He reached now and ran one of Gretchen’s soft ears through his gnarled, bent fingers, like silk through barb-wire.

“She knows,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee; somehow cold it was more palatable than it had been hot.

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

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.

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.

He sat on the edge of a desk...smiled in an almost deprecating way...

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...

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.

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

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.

A month went by, then another dragging, roach-filled, red-eyed month, head swimming from working each night until I passed out, having my work torn apart by the three men the next day, cycling endlessly, it seemed, rolling from office to grungy home back to office.

Lady Brette was old, ancient, or so it seemed to me, with gray hair losing its battle with age and gimlet-looking eyes that showed she was nearly blind through glasses so thick they could almost have been made with the proverbial Coke-bottle bottoms.

Bent in every conceivable way by time, she had two things that fought the age: absolutely perfect white teeth that flashed from the wrinkled old face like beacons of youth and a voice that was so beautiful, soft, low, and Southern, it seemed to have been dipped in honey.

Somewhere, in some time long ago—wild sheep living on wild pastures with wild rams breeding wild ewes—there must have been tough, wild lambs being born, where mothers protected lambs, could protect their offspring and shelter them and teach them to live.

Then man took over with genetic-breeding concepts and altered the animal to produce more and more wool, thicker and fatter meat, and virtually no brain at all, and the upshot is what we have now: ewes that have to be almost literally hand carried through lambing, coddled and sheltered, or many of them would simply walk away from the lamb when it was born.

Then man took over with genetic-breeding concepts and altered the animal to produce more and more wool, thicker and fatter meat, and virtually no brain at all, and the upshot is what we have now: ewes that have to be almost literally hand carried through lambing, coddled and sheltered, or many of them would simply walk away from the lamb when it was born.

The end result is that lambing on any sizable farm or ranch is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, sleeping in your clothes, grabbing a sandwich now and then, dozing standing in a corner or lying on straw and hoping it is free of sheep urine and manure.

So a twenty-four-hour watch was kept on them by sitting outside under the eaves of the barn, and when a ewe began to go into labor, she was quickly taken into the barn and put in the first pen, alone, where she would have her lamb and be left with it for a day or two.

True, Art had an old and very experienced man—Louie—to help him, although Louie was so shattered and warped by arthritis that he could barely move and kept going in and out of a kind of semi- senility when he became exhausted.

My job was soon relegated to working in the pens, moving the sheep from one to the next to let them learn to recognize their lambs before it got more crowded.

They were coming back from having been hunted down for bounties, but as she came in the dark and I turned on the lights in the back of the barn, I could see that it was a large coyote.

She hit the back of the flock, tearing ears and udders, indiscriminate and savage, throats, stomachs, rear ends, disabling six or seven sheep in less than two or three minutes—a horrible attack.