BRAVE AND LOYAL: A Book Review

Many years ago I was driving to East Glacier from Browning in a snowstorm so heavy that I could hardly see the road.  I was the only one out there.  Big feather flakes plastering the road and the windshield so thickly that the wipers could hardly keep up.  It was late, I was exhausted, and half-hypnotized, feeling as though I’d passed through a curtain into another world.

Suddenly from one side a huge white dog charged out of the dark at the van, raging at it, running alongside for what seemed like a mile.  After the first moment of erratic steering, I managed to keep on steadily and by the time I was home, it seemed as though I’d only dreamt a phantom of a white wolf.

The next morning when I drove back down to Browning, I saw a band of sheep along the road and realized that their guardian had come out to challenge me.  I could see the sheepherder’s wagon but he must have called the dog back from the highway traffic.  It was neither dream nor illusion, but the high prairie work of survival.

In the mail I received a review copy of “Brave and Loyal: An Illustrated Celebration of Livestock Guardian Dogs” by Cat Urbigkit and was filled with joy.  I hadn’t expected it, so it was a real Christmas present.

This book is from Skyhorse Publishing, beautifully produced with thick glossy paper that supports the exquisitely detailed photographs by Cat.  There’s a problem.  The dust jacket prompts the bookstore to put this book in the category of “pets.”  It is NOT about pets.  There are great dog stories and most pet owners will love the book, but it should properly be classified as “pastoral ecogeography.”  It is about the synergy among landscapes with indigenous predators, people who raise herds of animals there, and the guard dogs that make it possible. 

Pastoral economies, the management of grazing flocks of sheep or goats, have been a mainstay of mid-continental Eurasia since long before the Christmas angels visited them.  In mid-continental North America the practice was taken up by the SW tribes on arid lands, most famously by Navajo.  They are a way of surviving that is minimal in terms of profit, but near-spiritual in terms of interfacing with land, animals and even plants.  The practice is supported by dogs, who are capable of whole-hearted devotion and obedience to humans and, on their behalf, to other species.

Cat occasionally posts to http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com, so I’ve known her writing for a couple of decades.  Her work is part of a network of people who know hawks, both the guardian dogs and hunting dogs of middle Eurasia, guns, history, and so on.  I found them when thinking about condors on the prairie in buffalo times.  She is a careful, clear writer who provides example after example of what she talks about but never closes down in “dogma” — there is always new insight — and always based on home, not a lab.

Strategy and reflection have worked out the system for getting huge guardian dogs to live with sheep bands, repelling and — if necessary — killing predators as big as bears, in that case working as a team.  But also attending births, guarding mothers who instinctively go off alone, and then eating the afterbirth debris to keep from attracting such marauders as ravens or foxes.  It’s easy to understand how a puppy raised with lambs can imprint and bond.  It’s a little harder to figure out how these guardian dogs are sentinel with penguins, but it’s been done.  And at Cat’s ranch, burros are part of the mix, ready to trample coyotes.

All of this has major implications aside from making a profit.  The more northern and mountainous parts of the middle Eurasian countries are emptying out as the people shift to cities, partly for less arduous lives and partly because authoritarian regimes hate pastoralists who are hard to locate, name and control — independent to the point of potential rebellion, even now that the herders carry sat-phones and microchip their sheep and dogs.  

The result of the lack of steady grazing is overgrowth of woody shrubs and the flammable understories of woods.  It is hard to reclaim.  The loss of herders means the loss of small commerce in shops.  Planners who only recognize major and industrial resource developers with major energy requirements don’t value pastoral economies though in the aggregate they make major contributions.

Here on the east front of the Rockies, predators are real and personal.  This summer the young searching grizzlies, sometimes with their mothers, were coming into Valier.  The leash law, which is very much enforced, meant that the bears were unchallenged.  In Browning, the slightly larger town on the adjoining Blackfeet Rez, the street dogs — who in size and shagginess would look familiar to a Croatian — would never tolerate a bear, a wolf or a coyote.  In East Glacier, a tourist town, the Bison Creek Ranch for dudes, has always kept airedales, big aggressive ones.  If I were a rancher with children who lived in grizz country, I would read this book carefully and look for a supplier of guardian dogs.  (And train the children as carefully as the dogs.)

But the genius of this book is that you needn’t even read the text so a child can turn the pages and see what Cat tells readers in words.  Puppies and lambs, but also ewes and rams, interacting happily.  Big potentially ferocious dogs rear up on hind legs to “kiss” faces of humans.  The predators are seen at a distance — but from the front porch.  This is not a book about destruction and blood, at least not in photos.  The scariest images are the spiked collars the most fierce fighters wear, but even they are managed with caution because they learn to use them as weapons as well as defences.

As the shocks and fractures of globalization show up, it is reassuring to see this biologically basic strata of human culture that is so universal and so protection-based.  I don’t romanticize sheep.  (My relatives raised them in the fenced way and used guns against coyotes.)  That would be the Christians, though from my heretical point of view I rather prefer goats.

When I used to travel in and out of Helena, I would pass the Sieben ranch where lived the Baucus family and — before them — Malcolm Clark with his Blackfeet wife.  Sometimes I saw the goat herd, large enough to flow over the land like a mantle, eating weeds and scattering manure.  

Slowly we are restoring wisdoms that were temporarily lost, except maybe among people who were passed over by “progress.”  I just hope the authorities don’t decide to microchip sheperds as they watch their flocks by night.  Someone besides the government might want to give them a message.  My message is “Bless you and long may you thrive!”

A CONDOR FEATHER STARTED IT

Early on in my adventure into blogging, I wrote something about the condors that were once on the prairie and in the Midwest.  I had swallowed whole the book called "Freckles" by Gene Stratton-Porter, a red-headed female ornithologist and photographer of the Limberlost, a swampy forest of hardwoods in Indiana.  Many girls know “A Girl of the Limberlost” which is about a girl with a poverty-hardened mother whose helper is a thinly disguised version of Stratton-Porter.  Fewer know “Freckles” which became a movie starring Audie Murphy.  After seeing it, I sent him a fan letter and received a nice note and photo in return.  But the star of “Freckles” was really a condor, who dropped a feather on the boy. 

There are articles about the Plains Indians’ relationship to condors, which included a dance imitating them.  But I had to go looking for those articles.  “Freckles” was one of my grandmother’s books.  When I was growing up, the bookshelves were salted with books from earlier generations, including my father’s books about explorers and natural history writers.  In addition, I was devoted to Isak Dinesen’s books.  

So when my post about condors attracted the interest of writers on Stephen Bodio’s Querencia  (stephenbodio.blogspot.com), that contact has meant I’ve kept up with his blog ever since.  Several fascinating people post there, including Cat Urbigkit, a sheep rancher and a natural history writer/photographer who knows antelope and wolves, and raises big guard dogs.  A good sample at http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2016/08/its-fairly-predictable-that-within.html

Traditional hunting trio

Steve himself was passingly a Montana writer in the Bozeman cadre before going on south to Magdalena, NM.  He’s a connected guy through Saluki dogs, eagles and hawks, fine guns, Eurasia and a first marriage to Betsy Huntington (who died of cancer) and a second marriage to Libby, a strong partner.  He is female-friendly without being icky, but he’s also an exemplar of manliness, which he has centered in Eurasia, one of the most horseback macho warrior territories on the planet.  Born in Boston, he came to natural history through the great museums that resulted from the exploits of men now often demonized -- both those who went out across the country like Teddy Roosevelt and those who financed expeditions sometimes preposterous and often deadly.

http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2016/07/visiting-american-museum.html

Peter Matthiessen

Bodio says:

I ate it all, indiscriminately, as I did that of a generation nearer my own; Peter Mattthiessen, and the playboy turned edgy artist and conservationist Peter Beard were obviously cut from the same cloth. It says something about my naivete that I never even thought of the fact that, as Betsy Huntington put it with mild exasperation, "All those people were richer than GOD".  I thought everybody had adventures and wrote about them, so I found ways, and did. Later I was inducted as a fellow into the Explorers Club, a sort of unofficial annex across the street. Bakewell was recruited as a member of the crew of the first circumpolar flight in the bar of the EC! Before the war, adventurers seemed to belong to the Social Register, the AMNH, and the Club. Kirk recently sent me some xeroxed pages about Carter Burden's Komodo Dragon expedition in the 20's (I have the book- isn't he the grandfather of the editor of Vanity Fair?), from a book called "All About Scientific Expeditions", and seeing that it also had Beebe  et al, I asked if it should better be called "All About Scientific Expeditions by New York socialites”?. . .

It was really a meritocracy, though, and you didn't have to be rich, a New Yorker, or even an American to belong.

But it sure did help to have money.  Might not save your life — it didn’t keep Rockefeller from being cannibalized.  The transcendent end of the scale was Richard Halliburton swimming nude in the reflecting pool of the Taj Mahal by moonlight.  By today, people have walked across Africa with a GPS in their pocket and David Quammen, a Bozeman guy, is part of the new natural history urgent exploration pursuing the deadly passengers on mosquitoes that “Spillover” on us, as deadly as tigers. Like HIV.

So here’s the swerve.  Having followed all the Brit 19th century explorations of Empire, I didn’t exactly walk in their footsteps but instead, parallel, came to Blackfeet country, where the earliest aristocratic and filthy-rich Europeans came up the Mississippi/Missouri to the high prairie.  At the time I didn’t know that history.  It gradually emerged and almost continued as a virtual pattern.  The Sixties with Bob Scriver was focussed on the life a hundred years earlier, which meant that every day was a century milestone of adventure.  Natural history museums were also a strong shared tie, both the big institutional ones and the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, now dispersed.

This background prepared me for a decade-long writing friendship with Tim Barrus, at the end of years of intercontinental airplane travel by the gay community.  I heard about the inclusive relationships with all races and economic levels from bare survival to elegant hotels.  Atypical sexual orientations, rapidly surfacing to identified viability, turned out to be a kind of passport, an access to many other people outside the white male corporate hegemony.  Incredibly, sexwork gave trapdoor access to its underbelly.  (Women have always known that.)

What’s remarkable about T. is that he kept his attention always on neglected, abused, and traumatized children, mostly boys.  Because boys soon become men, this has resulted in a webwork of relationships and strategies, sometimes political but mainly focused on survival.  They are not made “normal,” but are inspired to help each other on their own terms, more humanities than science.  Now it’s not the airplane but the internet that is a way to explore.  

When I thought about boys huddled in cardboard boxes behind dumpsters in alleys, I thought about tough guys like Mattheissen surviving through the Tibetan mountain nights with strange foods and lurking pye dogs, in partnership with George Schaller, that redoubtable field biologist.  I thought that boys on the edge of civilization were as interesting as snow leopards, which are also maimed — at least the ones in zoos because they are caught by the foot.  Snow leopards cannot be taught to tell their stories, but boys can — even the ones who have been sexually abused, beaten up, dependent on drugs.  

Boys cannot and should not be kept behind bars, which is the solution our culture has for both leopards and troublesome kids.  It’s only another level of abuse.  I spent five years thinking about street animals when I worked animal control, but now I’ve spent ten years thinking about street boys.  When I saw some of their crazier vids, I thought of Peter Beard’s famous photo of himself jammed into a dead crocodile.

Peter Beard in a Crocodile

Only now am I becoming hopeful because of the new understanding that all life is connected, in process, interpenetrating, interdependent, and both constituting and exploiting the environment.  I live on the high prairie against the Rockies and never forget it, never let poetry lift my feet out of the grass, but now I want to know about my thinking instrument: my body as a recording organism up against the environment.  I watch the sky for falling condor feathers.  Or falling stars.

All that political thrashing we’re enduring is the death of another Empire, rather more various than the British one now jammed into the jaws of Brexit.  It’s a paper empire that lives on fungible exchanges through the Internet. I think it is doomed, but I don’t know what comes afterwards.  I’m interested in survival and therefore I turn to the “Smash Street Boys,” “Show Me Your Life,” and “Real Stories Gallery.”  I want to know how they make it through the night.