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 been there not six weeks, Dust Bowl dirt still coating my young rowdy’s lungs—and despite my God-fearing ma, that’s what I was, a dirt-farm rowdy, pure as a cow pie, cunning as a wild hog, and already well acquainted with the county sheriff, the dust layering my every breath leaving little room for the Holy Spirit to breathe on me.

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.

There’s nothing more pitiful than a wandering creature who was never meant to be wild.

it always seemed wrong to think an animal’s life isn’t worth as much as a human’s. Life is life.”

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

“Life is life no matter who or what is living it, boy—a thing to respect,”

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. One whiff of dust whenever they clean my room and I’m back in the Panhandle staring down a brown blizzard. One glimpse of pink peonies and I’m back in WWII France, standing over a fresh battlefield grave.

haven’t you ever wanted something so bad you had to do it or die trying?”

destiny is a mobile thing—that every choice you make, along with every choice made around you, can cause it to spin this way and that, offering destinies galore.

“Home’s not the place you’re from, Woody. Home’s the place you want to be.”

The land you grow up in is a forever thing, remembered when all else is forgotten, whether it did you right or did you wrong.

“People look at you peculiar if you talk about the feeling you got for animals, saying animals have no souls, no sense of good or bad, no value up next to humans,” he said. “I don’t know about that. Sometimes I think animals are the ones who should be saying such things about us.” He shook his head. “Animals can tear your heart out. They can maim you. They can kill you dead on instinct alone and saunter into the next minute like it was nothing. But at least you know the ground rules with animals. You can count the cost of breaking the rules. You never know with people. Even the good can hurt you bad, and the bad, well, they’re going to hurt you but good.” He dropped his arm from the window to rub his gnarled hand. “It’s why I keep choosing animals. Even if it kills me. One day, it probably will.”

“That’s your first story, but it doesn’t have to be your only story. That’s up to you.”

“Do you know what I like best about photographs?” “What?” I said. “They stop time.”

It’s a strange thing how you can spend years with some folks and never know them, yet, with others, you only need a handful of days to know them far beyond years.

Some things are so much yours that you’ve got to keep them to yourself.

Time heals all wounds, they say. I’m here to tell you that time can wound you all on its own. In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you’ll ever make. That’s the moment your truest stories—the ones that made you the you that you became—are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best.

The challenge of creating historical fiction inspired by a true event like this one is to research well enough to capture what life was like when such a crazy idea seemed feasible. At the same time, a story is always a reflection of the present, since that is where it’s being read.