Рита Браун: Animal Magnetism

One day, Chaser looked up with those large warm eyes. He’d started into renal failure. It wasn’t bad yet, and I was going to make sure it never reached that point. We talked. The kennel’s interior bunk is long so we could sit side by side, pressed close. We said our goodbyes. He left this earth with love and gratitude and he kept his dignity.

Chaser loved me and I him. He was kind to other creatures, even during the occasional insufferable cat visits to the kennels. My former whipper-in, Dana, lived across from the kennels and one of her cats, Maybelline, is a real pisser. No other word for it. Maybelline would sashay down to the kennels and sit outside the chain link fencing to inform the hounds what she thinks of them and dogs in general. It is not complimentary.

Behind the kennels, a Manhattan of fox dens covers the earth. Hidden in the undergrowth and pines, those reds come and go. At night they, too, will sit outside the kennels. Sometimes the hounds announce their presence. Other times I swear they swap stories. I’ll find fox scat all around the kennels.

Chaser knew these foxes. When we’d hit one—not often, because they’d recognize hunt kit and go home (very unsporting)—anyway, on the odd occasion when we’d pick one up, Chaser would sing and sing. Then he’d go to the den and sit down. No point digging. He knew that. He could be so funny about it.

So here I sit. The Blue Ridge Mountains, those ancient sentinels to time, face me. Behind me, Ennis Mountain offers a hint at the glaciers’ power. Some of the boulders at the top of the ridges look as though a stonemason smoothed their sides. They’re beautiful, and also full of foxes.

These mountains, once the tallest in the world, now soft and caressed by time, threw up the first barrier to westward expansion. I can see, far away on the other side of the Shenandoah Valley, an Allegheny peak, another barrier that stretches all the way to Charleston, West Virginia—of course, it was all part of Virginia until the War Between the States. Once past Charleston you approach the Ohio Valley, a source of such rich soil.

The Blue Ridge separates Celtic and English ways from German ways, for the Valley is very German. On this side there is a tacit recognition that people are no better than they should be, that life is theater, so play your part. On that side, they tend to be more serious. If they stray from the straight and narrow, I think they carry more guilt. A few of us here might carry some, too, but mostly we figure to be human is to make a mess. The point is: Is it an interesting mess? The worst sin we can commit is to be boring. Small chance of it, I declare.

People ask me, “Where do you get the ideas for your stories?” All I have to do is look around or plumb my family or anyone else’s family history. What an inexhaustible vein of pure, pure gold.

While people give me the ideas, animals give me the energy. I draw sustenance from them, perspective, wisdom, and such loyalty. By their loyalty they put ours to shame. Mostly, I live on the love.

Lately I have been entertaining the idea that God might not be an American. Allied to this is the suspicion that this Great Spirit doesn’t resemble us at all. To say we are made in God’s image is outrageous human vanity. But if it truly is the case, then man was the experiment; woman, the perfection. Poor old Adam and his rib!

Animals eschew stories like that. Their spiritual dimension is deeper. We used to embrace this back when we worshipped the twelve Olympians and the various demigods. The American Indian—I just can’t say Native American, it sounds like an insurance company—still believes.

As an aside, the people changing these designations like undergarments usually are doing so for some political gain or to siphon money out of Washington. Someone told me you can’t use “Native American;” now it has to be “First American.” The first American was a protozoan.

Whatever you call them, when you think of the sheer guts of those people who took on the army even when they saw the technology we possessed, the only word that is appropriate is “warrior.” Those who don’t understand how they could ride to their deaths have neither honor nor heart nor animal courage.

Unfortunately, that covers so many now. Animals certainly have courage. As to honor, I believe it. Chaser had honor. My beautiful Diane had it in spades. A cat may have honor but it’s not quite the same. Some humans will scoff at these ideas should they ever pick up this book. I can’t help them. They are not as smart as they think they are, and in good time, life will make this abundantly clear.

As to heart: whatever the species, we recognize this. As we trod across the rubble of many civilizations, what pulled us through? Heart. No matter how intelligent, if you don’t have heart you won’t work for your salvation or anyone else’s.

The core American experience is loneliness. A New World. Vast spaces. Miles and miles before coming upon another human, whether of European, African, or Warrior descent. Sometimes days, months. It’s deep in our character.

But alone as one might have been back then, there was probably a dog walking with you and your horse, should you have been fortunate enough to own one. Cats killed the mice even if you lived in a sod hut. We never were truly alone.

And neither are you.

I hope you are lifted by the love of a cat, dog, horse, even a parrot like Mother Brown’s Franklin. More, I hope you recognize it and return it. I pray, and I mean pray, that you will send a few dollars to your local SPCA to help those that have been abandoned, some mistreated.

We are all in this life together. We need one another.

I hope that those animals and people I missed—creatures who were in need—will forgive me. I’ll try to forgive myself. It’s vanity not to, because it implies that I should be better than anyone else. I’m not. I hope my dear horses out in the pastures and my house full of rescues will be patient with me and continue to guide me. I’ll do my best and I think you will, too.

Remember: we left Eden, they didn’t.

Photo by Danielle A. Durkin .

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Judy Sternlight, who on visiting the farm was so taken with Chaser, one of the foxhounds, she suggested this book. She was a dream to work with and loves animals, too.

About the Author

RITA MAE BROWN is the bestselling author of the Sister Jane novels— Outfoxed, Hotspur, Full Cry, The Hunt Ball, The Hounds and the Fury, The Tell-Tale Horse , and Hounded to Death —as well as the Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries and Rubyfruit Jungle, In Her Day, Six of One , and The Sand Castle , among many others. Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Brown lives in Afton, Virginia.

www.ritamaebrown.com

Copyright © 2009 by American Artists, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-345-51693-0

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