McDougall - Running with Sherman: The Donkey with the Heart of a Hero

I knew something was wrong the second the pickup truck pulled into our driveway. Id been waiting for Wes for more than an hour, and now, before he even came to a stop, the look in his eye warned me to brace myself.

Hes in rough shape, Wes said as he got out of the truck. Rougher than I thought. Ive known Wes for more than ten years, nearly from the day my wife and I first uprooted ourselves from Philadelphia to live on this small farm in Pennsylvania Amish country, and Id never seen him so grim before. Together, we walked behind the pickup and pulled open the trailer doors.

I took a look inside, then immediately grabbed in my pocket for my phone. Luckily, I had the number I needed.

Scott, youve got to get over here. This is really bad.

Okay, Scott said. You just make him comfortable and Ill be over in the morning.

Yeah. No. I think youd better, um, have to I paused a sec to untangle my tongue. Scott was the expert, not me, but I didnt think we had many mornings left to work with. I tried again to tell him what I was looking at.

Inside the trailer was a gray donkey. Its fur was crusted with dung, turning his white belly black. In places the fur had torn away, revealing raw skin almost certainly infested with parasites. He was barrel-shaped and bloated from poor feed and his mouth was a mess, with one tooth so rotten it fell right out when touched. Worst of all were its hooves, so monstrously overgrown they looked like a witchs claws.

Scott, seriously. Youve got to see this.

Dont worry, Scott said. Ive seen it all. Catch you in the morning.

The donkey belonged to a member of Wess church. Wes is a truly wonderful person to begin with, and as a Mennonite, hes committed by faith to helping anyone in needor, in this case, any creature. Wes had discovered that one of his fellow churchgoers was an animal hoarder who kept goats and a donkey penned in squalor in a crumbling barn. The hoarder was out of work, so his family was suffering from his fixation as well; money needed for food and rent was going for animal feed instead. Wes and several church elders had tried to persuade the hoarder to relinquish his pets, but he wouldnt budge. Finally, Wes took a deep breath and bent his iron-hard honesty to the limit. What if, he asked the hoarder, we take the animals away for two years? Just two years. Well give them to a good family and get them healthy, and that will give you time to put up some fences and clean out those stalls. It wasnt really a lie, Wes told himself. More like a hopethe hope that two years would be long enough for the hoarder to forget these poor animals and get on with his life.

Give it a try? Wes persisted.

Okay, the hoarder replied. But they have to go to a good family.

Wes got on the job at once. The goats were easy to placesomeone in Lancaster can always use a free lawn mowerbut donkeys are tough. Theyre famously ornery, known for biting and kicking, and serve no purpose on a working farm. They cant be milked or butchered or, in many cases, even ridden. Keeping them in hay and feed can be expensive, and thats before youre shelling out for dental care and deworming and vaccinations.

So why did I want him?

I didnt. Not when I got a good look at him, that was for sure. As transplanted city folk who knew zip about farm life when we moved to the country, my wife and I had gotten a kick out of trying our hand with a few starter animals. First up was a stray black cat that appeared at the back door, and when it survived and stuck around we advanced to some backyard chickens, and then a foster sheep that we took on loan from an Amish neighbor to see if we could handle it, like a kindergartner bringing home the classs pet turtle for the weekend. Wes owns the farm next to ours, and when he told me about the donkey he was trying to rescue, I figured why not? We could just turn it loose out back and let the kids feed it apple cores. I wasnt making any promises till we saw it, though, which was fine by Wes; the donkeys owner, he said, was a bit of a handful who felt the same way about me.

So one afternoon, my two young daughters and I headed over to the hoarders house to check things out. Secretly, that was just our cover story; the girls and I had already made up our minds before wed even gotten in the car that unless this thing was a rampaging maniac, we were bringing it home. During the drive, we schemed up ways to talk Mommy into this operation and debated names for our future pet.

Skullcrusher?

No!

Zorro?

NO! Actually, maybe.

But our happy chatter died once we arrived. The hoarders barn was sagging in a field of mud, looking like a sneeze would bring it down. We slogged inside, straining to see in the gloom and to pull our boots out of the sucking muck. A hard rain had fallen the day before, flooding one of the pens so badly that two of the goats had to stand on straw bales to stay above water. Next to the goats was another stall, this one as dark and tiny as a dungeon cell. Inside, another creature was barely visible against the back wall. The hoarder called and whistled, holding out a handful of feed.

Slowly, a shadow detached itself from the darkness. Its long ears rose, twitching nervously, as it struggled to take a step toward us. The donkey was mired nearly to its knees in manure and rotten straw, and so cramped by the narrow stall that it could barely turn around. The hoarder poured the feed into my daughters hand. She held it out, and the donkey stretched toward us to gently snuffle it from her palm. My daughters and I stared at him in silence. We didnt care anymore about getting a pet. All we cared about was getting him out of there.