Barnheart Read online

  The next morning, and the mornings thereafter, were not anything like the documentary about well-trained dogs on open moors. My three sheep loathed and reacted violently to being herded. I had been warned that the only sheep to get should be dog-broke, meaning “used to working with a border collie.” Mine were more interested in breaking dogs. Maude stamped her feet, then sprinted into the fences in a panic. Marvin glared at the little black dog as though she’d just killed his fiancée. Sal looked at us, then the fence, then us again and hopped the fence like a friggin’ white-tailed deer. He happily munched grass on the opposite side of the pen while Maude and Marvin dealt with the wolf.

  Eventually, we’d get to a place where Sarah was moving them and I was on the opposite side of Sarah. We’d do this maybe fifteen minutes a morning in our small training space. I was constantly worried she’d get hurt, but Sarah didn’t seem to mind the fuss. When the sheep and I were panting, I’d scoop her up and say “That’ll do,” and we’d go inside. Those short sessions were never enough for the young dog. She’d bark at the door while I was in the shower or making dinner. She needed to be outside more than Jazz and Annie and I were used to.

  For a few weeks we kept up the training outside, until one morning Marvin taught me a lesson I still remember, and limp on, to this day. Sarah and I were working in the pen, moving the sheep and trying to balance the flock between us, when, somehow, Sarah found herself in the corner of the pen near the gate. Marvin saw the bane of his existence trapped and acted fast. I was three steps away from the scene and rushed to break up what I knew was about to happen. Marvin reared up, lowered his massive skull, and was about to head-butt the small dog with all the force he could muster, ending the reign of terror NOW. Seeing what could be the death of my new dog, I threw my body between them and felt the force of the blow hit the right side of my right knee with a bullet of pain and a crack so loud I screamed. It was broken, I thought. It had to be. Using what wits I had left, I screamed at Marvin to back up and scooped up Sarah, hobbled out of the pen, slammed the gate behind us, and blacked out.

  I woke up with Sarah sitting next to me, unconcerned, eating a stick. I tried to move and couldn’t. I started crying. All I could think was “Everything my mother ever told me was right.” I was taking on too much. I shouldn’t be alone out here. I would get hurt if I wasn’t careful. I should be married. I should be dating. I should wear lipstick. … I army-crawled back to the house and realized that work started in half an hour. I called my boss, wailing into the phone about God knows what, and (I think) explained I’d be late.

  It took a few weeks of walking with a cane to recover from the torn muscle. And a few months for me to actually bend and move my knee like a normal person. But it did heal. And while it did, neither Sarah nor I dared herd my anarchist sheep. I didn’t know what to do now. I had the wrong sheep. Should I sell them and get new ones? Should I add two old sheep-dogged ewes and buy more hay? Would my landlord allow that? Did she even know about Sarah? I hadn’t told her, but I worried my neighbor might.

  As her one outlet for spending energy disappeared, Sarah became nervous. Without sheep to herd, she had no purpose. She was once again a skittish pet without a job. She started nipping at me when I walked across the room, occasionally really biting into me. I’d yelp and correct her but blamed myself for the poor behavior. After all, if I had proper sheep, I wouldn’t be limping around a bored and nervous dog.

  My heels were not the only things Sarah bit. She snapped at a friend’s kid who ran past her swiftly and then at the father when he did the same. They were both very calm about it, but I could tell it was more than a love nip. Then one day at a bookstore in town, she went too far and bit the leg of a passing staffperson. I had been bringing her into the bookstore for weeks, using the dog-friendly place as a training and socialization area, and she had never acted like this before. The person whirled around and screamed at me in front of everyone in the packed store, using many choice words and threatening to sue. I broke down in tears, apologizing, terrified of an actual lawsuit. I worked it out with the store manager but was never allowed to bring Sarah anywhere near the place ever again.

  Then the final and most serious infraction occurred, at my parents’ house over Thanksgiving. Sarah ran across the kitchen floor and bit my father in the leg. My dad cried out. I once again scooped her up and apologized. My father demanded that she stay in my bedroom for the rest of the visit. We had young children coming the following day and couldn’t risk one getting hurt. My stomach felt as if it was filled with concrete, and panic began to set in. I knew what I had to do. I had to take Sarah back to Barb. I couldn’t contain her, and now she had hurt four people. She could no longer be my dog.

  Crying the entire ride, I drove the four of us north. Jazz was asleep in the backseat, Annie was curled up in the passenger seat as usual, and Sarah was in her crate in the back. I pulled up to Barb’s farm and instantly lost it when I saw her. I knew, and she knew, that I had messed up. The dog needed work, and a real flock, and someone with the time and patience to train her and show her how to live in the world. I was not the person Barb or I had thought I could be. I knew handing back that dog was giving up on an animal. I felt like I’d failed the club, the trainer, and my destiny. Barb assured me that Sarah would be fine and would be placed on a working farm without children; I didn’t have to worry about her. But I did and couldn’t stop crying. Relinquishing a dog, for any reason, is admitting you’ve made a mistake that you aren’t able to fix. Now she’d have to find yet another home.

  I thought I was going to be her savior, and she would be my shepherd. I thought we’d be at the post, side by side, at sheepdog trials. In some way I thought she could train me to the work that seemed so right. Instead, I’d given her eight hours of solitude each day, three crummy sheep, a near-death experience, and two apathetic canine roommates. I’d failed her.

  I drove home to the cabin with just two dogs. When I got back to the farm, I put the sheepdog videos in the cupboard. I was not who I thought I could be. Not yet.

  TURKEY DRAMA

  ANYONE WHO DOESN’T BELIEVE that birds evolved from dinosaurs has never raised a turkey. A few months into my first Vermont summer, I felt like a curator at the Museum of Natural History. The little poult I’d picked up from the feed store in May had grown into the giant of the henhouse. When the dog days of late August took over and the streambeds were bursting with high ferns and tall grass, I watched him prowl. He was a hefty, free-ranging white bird weaving through the bush like a velociraptor on the hunt. It’s a happy (and rare) sight, this stalking. My boy happened to be the most popular breed of farmed turkey in America — a Broad-breasted White, the same kind you buy at the supermarket. His brethren in industrial production sites all over America would never know what a day among ferns was like. But this boy, he was living large, and it made me beam.

  Some evenings I would be relaxing in my hammock in a happy place with a banjo in my arms and some hard cider at arm’s length, and as I was about to close my eyes around the B section of a waltz, I would hear that mighty roar right behind me. GOOBBBBLLEECOBOGBGOBGGOBLLLllllssshhGlg! I’d just about fall off the ropes. Verbal sneak attacks like this were common, and eventually I learned to tell when he was coming. My ears had never been that attuned to ruffling feathers before. If someone dared to wear a feather boa, she’d better watch out; I’d spin around on her so fast that we’d both get whiplash.

  I got used to the Butterball-alternative life. Every morning TD (Thanksgiving Dinner) met me with gobbles and fantail shows. I watched him follow the geese and ducks all over their small paradise. Often, he would wander down the dirt road to my neighbors Dean and Nancy, who put seed in their driveway for whatever avian wildlife found it first. Some mornings I’d drive off to work to find him sharing some sunflower seeds with the crows and scrub roosters. He was unfazed by most things, a calm monk among the loud chickens and car alarms also known as geese. He fit in. He lived well. He seemed happy. Livin
g with a turkey so far had been pretty wonderful.

  Many poultry-care guides advise against housing chickens and turkeys together in one coop. But what if the chicken coop in question only had one turkey? Disregarding convention, I decided to let TD shack up with the laying hens, two ducks, and my pair of geese. He seemed to have no qualms about the arrangement. At night the birds would fly up into their roosts on one side of the shed-cum-coop and the waterfowl and turkey would bed down in the straw on the other side. (I think they used to share one side, but the lower-level birds decided that waking up with chicken turds on their back wasn’t such fun, so they switched sides.)

  TD wasn’t like the other birds, though. They were egg producers; he was an entrée. This tubby wanderer was my first-ever meat animal, and that wasn’t an idea I took lightly. I had raised my own eggs, vegetables, and angora wool, but as a vegetarian. I had opted out of the bloodier side of homesteading and was generally happy I had. But my life on the farm was beginning to change me in important ways.

  The moral vegetarianism I’d adhered to so strictly as a college kid was beginning to ebb. After holding the vegetarian line for so long, after reading all the books and handing out PETA tracts, it was starting to become less of my edible faith. I was finding it difficult to make an argument for not eating well-cared-for animals that were raised for food.

  Raising food myself had changed my ideas about humans and animals, but not in that macho way, in which people think that other living things are theirs to exploit. No, this was not a question of possession. It was a question of equality. Back when I was lining my dorm-room desks with anti-meat stickers, I thought that equality meant protecting the rights of all animals to live without being dinner.

  But folks, that’s not how nature works.

  Treating animals as equals doesn’t mean treating them like people; it means seeing humans as animals. We are all pieces of one big puzzle. Before I became so aware of the life and death involved with everything we eat, I saw us as separate. Us and Them. But as I evolved from a consumer to a producer, I began to see humans as the animals we truly are. We’re all food, organic matter that will either feed the soil or another animal. Eating meat is what predators do, and human beings are nothing if not predators. I had no problem with a wolf eating me or my eating a deer. We were all in this together.

  I was losing my vegetarian religion, and because of it I was at peace with the fate of this particular mini-dinosaur. He would live out his days through the summer and into fall, and then somehow I would find someone to come to the farm and help me do him in and prepare him for the oven.

  One weekday morning at Wayside, I was getting coffee and engaging in neighborly conversations at the round table (the wooden table, which once belonged to a famed fly fisherman, in the back of the country store that was the conversational hub of Sandgate). Sipping coffee and enjoying doughnuts and breakfast sandwiches were a collection of locals, mostly older men, who made sure to be at the round table early to weigh in on all matters town and country. One gentleman politely asked me what was new on my little farm. I was slowly growing a reputation as the girl who turned her rented cabin into a backyard farm and then wrote a book about it. I talked with the men at the table about the chickens, egg sales to coworkers, and the new sheep in their pen, and mentioned that I had this extra feed-store turkey that was getting huge and needed to be harvested for Thanksgiving. When I got to that last part, I must have spoken with a little extra pride. Raising meat is an honorable occupation in these hollows. The men beamed back, proud of this new country girl getting ready to enjoy her first-ever homegrown holiday meal.

  Truthfully, I was shocked at how proud I sounded. Did this vegetarian really gloat that she had been raising an animal for food? I had, and without apology. I’d recently decided that TD would be my first nonvegetarian meal in almost eight years. It felt like the right choice. I’d signed up to farm meat, ensure that the life of this bird was good, and see that his death was as humane as possible. Also, I wanted to be a part of the big family dinners of my childhood again. I missed them. I missed swapping recipes with friends, splitting the wishbone with my sister, and sharing in the hard work of my father, who would spend the morning preparing the animal for the family table. I didn’t want to turn up my nose at the holiday bird set before me.

  Though I was getting more comfortable with the idea of returning to meat, I didn’t feel ready to eat anything that had been raised in a factory. I was both concerned about the animals’ welfare and scared of the diseases they carried; your average turkey in the grocery store might as well come with a biohazard sticker on it. But the fat turkey roaming in my backyard could lead the way back to carnivory. There would be no remorse for his death when I knew what his life had been like.

  I didn’t share any of this with the men at the round table. They had no idea how epic a meal it would be for me. I simply told them I was looking forward to the dinner, but I had to find a processor. Who would help me dress one turkey?

  The men raised their eyebrows as I talked about the holiday bird, and Tom, a fit, clean-shaven man in his late forties, told me he would be helping the Pickerings process their birds and that I should join them. Pickering’s Farm was a bit down the road, and they were longtime turkey growers. Locals had ordered their fifteen-pounders back in the spring, and now, as fall closed in, it was time to deliver on the deal. If I wanted to, I could bring TD down to the farm on the Saturday morning they were killing turkeys, and I could see to it that it was done outside in the open air on the farmers’ land. I thanked Tom over and over and handed him my phone number. He said he would let me know when the big day was going to be.

  I’d started this whole poult-to-processing project with mixed feelings. I’d purchased this turkey at the feed store because I knew that, no matter how I chose to eat, my family would be serving a bird for Thanksgiving dinner. Honestly, I think back on raising this meat as an act of kindness. If my family were intent on having a turkey, they could eat this beautiful, huge, healthy, free-ranging bird (for free, by the way) and not take part in eating an animal that had been overdosed with antibiotics, then strung up on an assembly line in some sunless slaughterhouse packed with turkeys, ten thousand to a room.

  My bird was growing larger than I ever imagined he would. At five months he was no longer a cute little fluffball with scaly feet; he was a lumbering gobbler. Having reached his sexual maturity, he was also very friendly to the other poultry on the farm. And his romance didn’t stop there. He was friendly with my grain bucket, T-post pounder, bags of chicken feed, and the pitchfork. Turkeys apparently don’t raise the bar very high when it comes to getting some. This gusto was wearing all of us thin. And yet, despite his sexual faux pas and his mammoth size, he was a fine animal. The kind of bird Williams-Sonoma shoppers would pay more than a hundred dollars for. I was starting to look forward to the big day. I cleared everything out of the freezer.

  The day for his slaughter was a cool, cloudy one in late October. I took Annie’s dog crate out of the bedroom to line it with straw for TD’s last road trip. We would be heading into West Arlington, just past Wayside, to Pickering’s Farm. I trucked outside into the overcast morning and grabbed a scoop of scratch grains from the metal bin inside the coop. I called out my patented chicken call, “Hey, chickchickchick chiiiiiikeeeen,” which is as much of a hick cliché as is linguistically possible, and I saw the birds come a-running from all over the property. TD sauntered up as well, and as easy as picking up a watermelon, I lifted the turkey into the dog crate. If he had an idea what was about to happen, he didn’t seem to be having any sort of existential issues about it. With my turkey loaded in the Subaru, I headed down the mountain toward our date with the plucking machine.

  As I came up to the farm, I saw Tom — and Pickering himself — down by the turkey pens. They had a basic but effective setup for their day’s work: a suspended rope for hanging a turkey by the legs for the killing and bleeding out; a scalding tank for loosening the f
eathers; a giant plucking machine; a deep gulley of a pit for burying entrails; and a few steel tables laid out with knives, pliers, and hoses for the real grunt work.

  I stepped out of the car and waved, a bit self-consciously (not sure how one should approach an abattoir). I shook hands with Tom and Pickering and thanked them for their help. We fell into the usual conversations people have in the country. Local news, weather, gossip heard at Wayside, the goings-on at other farms. I was deep into the chatter when a large steer wandered up to us. “Oh, him,” said Pickering. “He’s like a dog. Don’t mind him.”

  I walked up to the big beef. I assumed he was a bottle-fed dairy calf, being raised here for the family’s winter meat. Around here the dairies are lousy with male offspring, and you can get a beef steer for free if you know the right people and ask politely enough. To me, whose largest food animal to date was the one in the back hatch of my station wagon, he seemed beyond massive. All I could think of was “How could anyone eat all of that?”

  I told you this farm was changing me.

  When Tom and Pickering had time to deal with TD, they asked me to unload him from the car. When they saw me lift the giant bird, they were both bemused and impressed. The fact that I brought my bird to its slaughter appointment in a comfortable dog crate screamed “flatlander,” but they sure couldn’t scoff at what I had produced. My turkey was almost a third larger than the birds they were working on. Since he’d had an entire neighborhood to roam around and scavenge food from (on top of his daily rations), he was enormous. Tom whistled and complimented me on how white the feathers were, which was a new sight on this farm. The pen the farm birds lived in was well kept but hard-packed with dirt, which of course turned to mud in the misty rain we were sharing.