West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened. —Anatole France, Nobel Laureate, 1921

I’d say I was lucky, but I hadn’t had enough of a relationship with the word to use it.

whenever I locked eyes with an animal I felt something more soulful than I ever felt from the humans I knew, and what I saw in that sprawled giraffe’s eye made me ache to the bone.

goober-looking guy with cauliflower ears and enough Dapper Dan pomade on his hair to grease an engine—

I'm a Dapper Dan man

He started pulling at the smashed planks himself,

I thought it was good news until I remembered they shoot horses for less.

When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, that’s all life is—you’re nothing but a feral thing chasing your hunger every minute of the day.

its famous lady director, Mrs.

the odyssey,

It is one

he’s got himself a good driver, he’ll get them through

Foreshadowing?

With a last look back at the Old Man’s cabin,

he pulled out the hidden flask and started tippling, swigging right past that tobacco juice, a combination only a souser could love.

Yuck

Because from them came a caterwaul so bone-chilling I still despair at its memory. People say giraffes don’t make sounds. But I’m here to tell you they do—and this one was a moaning, bellowing, wailing piece of giraffe-terror that surely had met the hurricane itself. It

throats

Didn't know that

He glanced at me sideways and started chortling. “Your name’s Woody Nickel?”

But if you really want to know, it always seemed wrong to think an animal’s life isn’t worth as much as a human’s. Life is life.”

“We’re all lions except a few like these darlings, God love ’em.”

“Animals are complete all on their own, living by voices we don’t get to hear, having a knowing far beyond our paltry ken. And giraffes, they

“Here you got two darlings in your back seat. You should be asking them about those secrets while you got the chance.”

“Don’t take any wooden nickels!” the round cop called as we pulled away. The Old Man outright cackled. “Too late,” he called

back, cutting his eye at me.

Lol

By the way, you got a feeling for animals yourself whether you and your pa like it or not.” He nodded up at the giraffes. “The darlings know it. They knew about Earl, the sumbitch, and they fixed that, didn’t they?”

got philosophical about it. I got to thinking it was sort of a last noble duty of a damn noble breed, and I’ll tell you a secret. Early on, I started thanking each one of them—just like Hawkeye.”

“Life is life no matter who or what is living it, boy—a thing to respect,” he said. “You don’t get that, then you’re just a waste of skin.”

Christian

Margaret Bourke-White.” “Who?”

And Dorothea Lange

Memories stick to things. Out of nowhere, something finds your nose, ears, or eyes and you’re on the other side of the country or world or in a whole other decade, being kissed by a doe-eyed beauty or punched by a drunken pal. You’ve got no control over it, none at all.

So attached to the senses

“A woman is the boss of the whole San Diego Zoo?” “That’s right,” he said, propping his arm on the windowsill. “Looks like a granny, dresses like a schoolmarm, swears like a sailor, and still charms snooty zoo galoots with their fancy educations.”

And made it one of the best zoos in the country

“What else could she do? She carried that big baboon back to its pen—with six grown men watching, struck dumb at the sight.

This story is wonderful!

I didn’t want to lie big so I lied little.

The shovelers were a Civilian Conservation Corps crew, he said, part of FDR’s Hard Times program, like the Works Progress Administration that put out-of-work men to building things all across the country.

where the sun was shining down on the Shenandoah Valley. It was lusher and greener than anything I’d ever seen in my Panhandle life. It was like looking at a Dust Bowl farmer’s idea of heaven. It looked like Californy. “The top, boy,” the

They moved as close as they could to me, the way they had to each other their first night in quarantine. Like they were circling the wagons around me. Surrounded by such colossals, I should have felt shaky and small, yet their mammoth presence made me feel big, and calm, and sweetly safe in a way hard to describe and even harder to resist.

The giraffes crowded close, so close that their fur was brushing against our dangling legs.

Reminding me of Life of Pi

“Forget the skullduggery. You’d want to bring the wrath of God down on them just for how they treat their animals.”

“Got yourself in a tight spot,” he said.

Scylla and Charibdys: another Odyssey reference

“Did you know giraffes in the wild only live about twenty-five years at the most?

myself, temptation as bad in inches as in miles.

Now, though, with Girl’s sweet head in my lap, it was rushing through every last inch of me, my heart swelling full and warm and pure and kind in a way I’d clean forgotten it could. I was lost in it, its surging tenderheartedness taking my breath clean away.

He's been trying to forget this feeling.

For the first and last time in my life, though, not being able to make a choice was the right choice.

“Everything holds a goodbye someday, Woody.

“A hobo’s not a bum. A hobo’s proud of being a hobo.”

“Do you ever think about the fact they’ll never be free again?” “The monkeys?” “All of them,” she said. “Even the giraffes.”

He left his eyes on me longer than he had to,

giving me the same look, full of mercy, that the giraffes gave me after I’d opened their rig for my piece of gold—and it hit me like a punch in the gut. He was forgiving me, too.

Choked up here

home, like Red said, was not where you came from but where you wanted to be, then the

rig, the Old Man, and the giraffes were more home—and more family—than any home I’d ever had.

fact, if the Boss Lady had her way, the weather’s so nice they’d fence in all of Balboa Park and let the animals roam.