BEAR
by
ERIC M. LOUGH
On this day, November 29, 2005, life, as I knew it, ended for me. I no longer care if I live or die, as I am dead inside now, anyway. It makes no difference.
On November 19, 2005, my dog, my best friend, the reason I could be happy with what little life I had, fell thru the ice on a beaver pond. She went thru the ice at a place that could not be seen from the dirt fill across a small creek with a culvert running through it, behind some small willows, and the culvert made her cries for help sound as if she was about one-half up the side of a small mountain.
Even as a local rancher and I were listening to her calls for help, and we both thought she was up on the hill, we were standing within 30 feet of her. As I started to climb the hill after shedding everything but water, my handgun and clips, she cried out in fear and panic, and the sound came from behind me, below the fill with the culvert thru it.
I went down the bank, and finally found her with her front feet on the ice, and her head out of the water. Because of the depth where she was, I could not slide in and lift her to safety, the water was over 8 feet deep. I went into the pond thru the ice in a shallow part; it came up to my armpits. I had driven up the hill three times trying to locate her up there, she heard me drive off, but she still hung on.
I used my handgun for a hammer to break the ice in front of me so I could get close enough to get her and carry her back to the bank where I had entered the pond. I took some nitro tabs, picked her up and carried her to the base of the hill where the SUV was parked. She weighed about 55 pounds dry, and her inner coat had about 10 pounds of water in it, but it had acted like a wet suit and kept her alive.
I ate some more nitro and picked her up, and tried to climb the 30 foot hill, but I only made it about half way, laying down on my back in the snow, with her on top of me so what little warmth I was giving off might help her. I thought I might die from a heart attack, from the ice cold water, the icy snow covered steep hill, but she was going to get to the top and the sunshine even if it did kill me.
The next try we got to the car and I got her inside, the car was warm because the sun had been shining in. I started it and put the heat on high and got out of my wet stuff, leaving my wet underwear on. I took my extra dry coat, a clean and dry sweat shirt, and a light jacket to towel her down as much as I could to get her as dry and warm as I could.
We got home, and we both were in a warm bath for a long time, when it would cool down I would put more hot water in the tub. Then I toweled her off using 5 towels to get her almost dry. She then took a long nap, had dinner, went outside, came back in and slept next to me on the bed.
That was Saturday; Sunday I left her home where it would be warm and quiet, and went back to that place to get the things I had left the day before; my rifle, camera, and other gear; and take some pictures. I thought she was going to be alright. Monday morning she was having small seizures and I took her to the vet, he kept her overnight, and sent her home with a syringe of valium, and some anti-biotics. I had to give her the valium injection the next morning, her seizures were worse.
That was Wednesday morning, and I took her back in. The vet did not know what was wrong, but gave me three more syringes of Valium and some barbiturates for her. He was closed Thanksgiving.Friday she was worse, and the doc was not in, so I left a note on his door.
When he called I told him she was much worse, he just said to come in and he would give me more drugs to treat the symptoms. Monday morning I took her in, she looked really sad and sick; there was no doubt in my mind that she was dying and she needed something done right away. He said he would take care of her, and for me to go home and get some rest. I tried, but I didn’t get much sleep since I was worried.
The phone range early Tuesday morning, it was the vet; Bear had died during the night. She died alone, in a cold stainless steel cage, in a place she hated and was afraid of unless I was with her. I cannot put the feelings into words, and the tears are in the way. I left her in the water because I didn’t see here go in the pond, too busy taking pictures. I left her there for 30 minutes.
Then I left her home, alone, the next day to go up to the same place to get the things I had left the day before, and try for an elk and take some pictures of where I had killed her; not knowing then I had. Then, nine days later, I left her alone in a place she hated and feared; left her there to die alone. I should have been there for her all of those days she was alone.
She haD been with me practically every single moment of her life, and we had a mutual respect for each other, I did not own her. She was a furry bundle of unconditional love, always. God only made one dog like her.
I am angry with the Great Spirit, Bear never hurt anyone, she was always sweet and loveable, and she gave me a reason to carry on when I just wanted to die.
I love her with all my heart and she will always be with me, for I keep her in my heart. Oh God do I miss her.
On December 21, 2005, the vet called me to tell me her ashes we back from cremation and I could pick them up anytime. How do I live with ashes in a jar that once was my Bear? I only thought November 29 was the day my life ended as it was, it ends tonight.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: As you have noticed, I did not have the courage to pull the trigger that night, or any other since then. In 2008 I bought another Wolf Hybrid that I love as much as Bear, and she too loves me unconditionally, even when I am wrong, which is most of the time.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
LIFE IN THE MOJAVE DESERT
By
ERIC M. LOUGH
In my younger days I was a lot more active and movable than this old man is. The curiosity is still active, and, I guess even more so than when I was young. With all my security clearances, getting hired was not a problem, so my resume is about the same size as the yellow pages for a small town like Los Angles, California. I was busy.
When I was stationed in Tonopah, Nevada, I had a lot of free time since we didn’t work 7 days a week, except the drillers on the two rigs. We were up there to drill two 180” holes over a mile deep for some Megaton Nuke tests and the drilling was slow with a bit that size. It was 62 miles from my trailer in Tonopah (a Ute word meaning “no wood”) to the base camp, and had two sets of hills, range cows, and three straight stretches about 10 to 15 miles long.
The bus taking the workers to the site stopping at the trailer next to mine was my alarm clock and when it would wake me up I would shower, dress, and go. I had the car warming up after the bus came by so it was nice and warm and road ready so I would stop and get a paper and a cup of coffee to go and still beat the bus to the base camp. The site manager was always on my case because his government furnished vehicle only did about 120mph, and I would cruise at about 135 on my way to work and pass him every morning. I know this for a fact because a Nevada Highway Patrolman hit me with the radar and told me my speed, the speedometer didn’t go that high. Since at that time there was no speed limit on Nevada Highways and my car was in great shape, I didn’t get a ticket. Oh well, you only live once.
Tonopah at that time was almost a ghost town since the Air Force radar station had closed and all the personnel had moved on. Tonopah is also a great place to watch where you step, since the entire town is built over mine shafts; they are everywhere. My neighbor bought his small children a swing set and put it between our trailers for the kids. One day the entire set went down into a shaft about 30 feet in and instance: The kids where inside the trailer having dinner and nobody got hurt, thanks be to God. It was always on the back of your mind after that happened; made it darn hard to sleep. Tonopah has always been a town of boom or bust.
The whole thing turned out to be another waste of your money and our time out there. Some PhD ordered about two miles of 90” drill casing wrapped in a strand of fiberglass until the glass was three or four inches thick on the outside, and then decided not to use that casing and ordered another two miles of non-wrapped 90” casing. Not one inch of it was ever used. It was still sitting on the wooden “pallets” the last time I drove out to the long gone rig sites. One of the rigs was near an old stage coach stop, complete with an old barn and what was left of a garden; a great place for animals. When the cafeteria food got tasteless, about one meal, a friend and I would go shoot wild pigeons, quail, rabbits, and an occasional duck.
I carried a Coleman stove, cooking utensils, plates, dinner ware, and other items in the back of my truck. So while others were eating garbage in the cafeteria we ate like Kings of old. The drillers helped out our menu with an occasional hind quarter of a mule deer and we would give them any extra animals we had shot in return. The drillers, world wide, are special folks, and my hat is off to them all for it is a dangerous place to work. I happened to see a Kelly pin break one time, and despite the hard hats, they had to ID three bodies by the finger prints.
“Our” drillers outside Tonopah were no different: One time their friends in Louisiana chartered a DC-3, loaded it to the maximum weight with all different kinds of sea food from Louisiana, and had it flown to the old Tonopah runway where the training for the Doolittle fire bomb raid on Japan was held, and invited all the test area workers out there for a sea food gorge, and gorge I did.
It took over a year before the drilling of both holes was complete in and we were ready to case the holes when the word came down from Washington D.C. to shut down, fill the holes with mud and anything else, put a barbwire fence around the drill sites, and send everyone home. If you Google the site on Google earth all that is left is a long paved runway in the middle of nowhere on Nevada Highway 6, with some buildings on the picture, vehicles, and trees. Now I know there were no trees there some 40 odd years ago, but the runway is all bright and shiny new, hmmmm?? I wonder what our government is doing out there now with our money?? I will never know, and you probably won’t either, so nothing new there folks. I will probably get in all sorts of trouble about this part of my story, but it is hard to threaten a dying man.
There were no trees, hence the Ute name, or anything else for animals to hide behind and jump out in front of you, except for the occasional arroyo, so it was usually smooth going. The range cattle would sometimes get in an arroyo and climb up on the road, oh shi* oh dear, because there was no stopping in time if that happened. Passing thru a small herd of cattle at 135 was to say the least interesting, especially the time one of them kicked a tire she was so close. Do not get range cattle confused with your regular cow; range cattle are wild animals and will charge if bothered.
One weekend I toured the area north and west of Tonopah and found several Playa’s w/o any dirt tracks leading to them, and just like in Death Valley, there were rocks with trails in the Playa surface behind them. Those photos are unfortunately long gone, but they are available online. Jackrabbits surround the Playas in large numbers; using the sage at the edges of the dry lake bed for shade in the early morning and late evening that I would shoot a hole thru their ears instead of killing them from several hundred yards away to keep in practice. During the day they go deep underground where it is nice and cool. Lizards of all shapes, colors, and sizes abound in the rocks around the lake beds also.
The larger rocks have fossils in them from a far earlier time since the water has gone elsewhere. It is estimated that to add ¼ of and inch of water to the water table deep under Phoenix takes about 10,000 years; and Phoenix is pumping it up and out at the rate of about 2” a year. You do the math. I believe that Phoenix will be the first and largest modern Ghost Town to appear in this Century. I wish I would be around to see that happen, I don’t like people messing up my desert. As a matter of fact, I have shot over a few who got a little to close to my claim outside of Tonopah.
On one occasion after I had been gone for a couple of months, some city jerk built a log cabin on my claim, so I shot holes in his stove pipe, shovels, and gold pans from my porch until he got the message. It seems like my sense of humor lacks something.
Most people think that the Mojave Desert is a lifeless place for animals, and the plants will stab you if you blunder into one or your horse needs a laugh and dumps you in the middle of some Cacti. The Choia (or jumping cactus) is my worst enemy in that department since it is about waist high and actually grabs you. It doesn’t let go anytime soon either, by the way, and the needles are two inches long.
Vise-grip pliers are a necessity for city folk out there. But the desert is full of animals, most of which are nocturnal. The heat at the ground surface sometimes exceeds 200° during the daytime and the air temperature is about 120°.
Some lizards dare the heat in the summer and spend the day looking for something to eat that won’t eat them, but when standing still they balance on one front foot and one opposite rear foot. When those feet get too hot they switch to the other two for a while. Most snakes avoid the heat by staying in the shade or in burrows other animals have made, or in the shade of you car if it is parked for very long. Those are usually one of the three types of rattle snakes found in that area. Oh Lord that is a surprise when you walk back to your car to leave and there comes the sound of a scared rattlesnake coming from under it. Other snakes, like the Red Racer and the Black Racer that don’t seem to mind the heat and hunt all day, and you cannot run fast enough to catch one of those.
A small note of interest for those who roam the southern part of the Mojave desert: One of the above mentioned rattlesnakes is the Mojave rattlesnake and it is in a class of it’s own as far as snake bite and the treatment thereof in the contiguous 48 states. The Mojave Rattler has both the Neurotoxin like Cobras, and Hemotoxin. Other rattlesnakes have only the Hemotoxin. The latest studies are showing that the Western Diamondback is developing this duo-venom also. The Mojave has a very dark face with a white line under each eye, a much darker all-over look than most other rattlesnakes, and an attitude like my ex-wives: Nasty! So if you are unfortunate enough to get bitten, kill the snake and take it to the ER with you and tell the Doctor to look up what anti-venom to use or you will die if it is a Mojave. I do not and am not for killing snakes because they are snakes, I believe they have a right to live here also.
Most life is nocturnal, as stated above. At night the animals come out in force: Coyotes, snakes, kit foxes, burrowing owls, lizards, toads (when it rains), bats, kangaroo rats, mice, and the UCLA biologists who trap all of the above for study. My favorite lizard out there is the Gecko who has no or tiny scales, and is almost transparent. Hold a flashlight under one and you can see his heart pumping, and all of his insides. Those Gecko’s are flesh colored with brightly colored spots on them; and they have two to three, sometimes four, pupils in each eye. They are kind of alien looking, but harmless, especially since they are only about 3 inches long. They also have the membrane in the back of their eyes that catches all light and reflects it so you can see them a mile up the road.
Since the desert cools off very fast and gets very cold the reptiles crawl up onto the pavement so catching them is a matter of driving slowly down a paved road since the black road surface gathers in heat during the day and gives it off at night, and look for them. On a collecting trip to Guymas, Mexico one summer we stopped many times for broken fan belt snakes, rope snakes, wire snakes, stick snakes, and the list goes on; but we did not catch one single reptile snake in over 200 miles that night. They are like gold in the respect that you find them where you find them.
When the rains come, they come in scattered storms. It might rain where you are standing, but not 100 yards away. And when it does rain hard during the fall, winter, and spring, (very seldom in the summer) the Playa’s fill with water. Ducks flying high will look down on a dry lake with four inches of water in it and see the reflected blue sky and try to land, usually breaking their necks. But when the dry lakes fill, life abounds, even in the lake.
There are documented cases of a dry lake not getting rain water in sufficient quantities for the miracle to occur for 75 years, but when they do get water to complete the cycle eggs laid 75 years ago hatch. Nobody knows how it happens that eggs laid 75 years ago knows that there is enough water to hatch; mate, lay their eggs, and die. What are these creatures? They are two different species of fresh water shrimp. An inch of water does not make it happen, but the same lake bed with four inches of water in it allows the eggs to hatch. But how do eggs know how much time the water will be there? The lake fills with shrimp from ¼ to ½ an inch long and the wading birds gorge on them until the water evaporates. The shrimp hatch out, mate, lay their eggs in the mud, and die; the birds leave. The shrimp die and dry and blow away with the wind. The mud in/on the lake is as lifeless as the surface of the moon until the rain collects deep enough for the cycle to start over. How the shrimp know the water will last long enough to complete the cycle is a complete mystery and I do not have clue. The egg has finally scrambled the human mind for a change!!
By
ERIC M. LOUGH
In my younger days I was a lot more active and movable than this old man is. The curiosity is still active, and, I guess even more so than when I was young. With all my security clearances, getting hired was not a problem, so my resume is about the same size as the yellow pages for a small town like Los Angles, California. I was busy.
When I was stationed in Tonopah, Nevada, I had a lot of free time since we didn’t work 7 days a week, except the drillers on the two rigs. We were up there to drill two 180” holes over a mile deep for some Megaton Nuke tests and the drilling was slow with a bit that size. It was 62 miles from my trailer in Tonopah (a Ute word meaning “no wood”) to the base camp, and had two sets of hills, range cows, and three straight stretches about 10 to 15 miles long.
The bus taking the workers to the site stopping at the trailer next to mine was my alarm clock and when it would wake me up I would shower, dress, and go. I had the car warming up after the bus came by so it was nice and warm and road ready so I would stop and get a paper and a cup of coffee to go and still beat the bus to the base camp. The site manager was always on my case because his government furnished vehicle only did about 120mph, and I would cruise at about 135 on my way to work and pass him every morning. I know this for a fact because a Nevada Highway Patrolman hit me with the radar and told me my speed, the speedometer didn’t go that high. Since at that time there was no speed limit on Nevada Highways and my car was in great shape, I didn’t get a ticket. Oh well, you only live once.
Tonopah at that time was almost a ghost town since the Air Force radar station had closed and all the personnel had moved on. Tonopah is also a great place to watch where you step, since the entire town is built over mine shafts; they are everywhere. My neighbor bought his small children a swing set and put it between our trailers for the kids. One day the entire set went down into a shaft about 30 feet in and instance: The kids where inside the trailer having dinner and nobody got hurt, thanks be to God. It was always on the back of your mind after that happened; made it darn hard to sleep. Tonopah has always been a town of boom or bust.
The whole thing turned out to be another waste of your money and our time out there. Some PhD ordered about two miles of 90” drill casing wrapped in a strand of fiberglass until the glass was three or four inches thick on the outside, and then decided not to use that casing and ordered another two miles of non-wrapped 90” casing. Not one inch of it was ever used. It was still sitting on the wooden “pallets” the last time I drove out to the long gone rig sites. One of the rigs was near an old stage coach stop, complete with an old barn and what was left of a garden; a great place for animals. When the cafeteria food got tasteless, about one meal, a friend and I would go shoot wild pigeons, quail, rabbits, and an occasional duck.
I carried a Coleman stove, cooking utensils, plates, dinner ware, and other items in the back of my truck. So while others were eating garbage in the cafeteria we ate like Kings of old. The drillers helped out our menu with an occasional hind quarter of a mule deer and we would give them any extra animals we had shot in return. The drillers, world wide, are special folks, and my hat is off to them all for it is a dangerous place to work. I happened to see a Kelly pin break one time, and despite the hard hats, they had to ID three bodies by the finger prints.
“Our” drillers outside Tonopah were no different: One time their friends in Louisiana chartered a DC-3, loaded it to the maximum weight with all different kinds of sea food from Louisiana, and had it flown to the old Tonopah runway where the training for the Doolittle fire bomb raid on Japan was held, and invited all the test area workers out there for a sea food gorge, and gorge I did.
It took over a year before the drilling of both holes was complete in and we were ready to case the holes when the word came down from Washington D.C. to shut down, fill the holes with mud and anything else, put a barbwire fence around the drill sites, and send everyone home. If you Google the site on Google earth all that is left is a long paved runway in the middle of nowhere on Nevada Highway 6, with some buildings on the picture, vehicles, and trees. Now I know there were no trees there some 40 odd years ago, but the runway is all bright and shiny new, hmmmm?? I wonder what our government is doing out there now with our money?? I will never know, and you probably won’t either, so nothing new there folks. I will probably get in all sorts of trouble about this part of my story, but it is hard to threaten a dying man.
There were no trees, hence the Ute name, or anything else for animals to hide behind and jump out in front of you, except for the occasional arroyo, so it was usually smooth going. The range cattle would sometimes get in an arroyo and climb up on the road, oh shi* oh dear, because there was no stopping in time if that happened. Passing thru a small herd of cattle at 135 was to say the least interesting, especially the time one of them kicked a tire she was so close. Do not get range cattle confused with your regular cow; range cattle are wild animals and will charge if bothered.
One weekend I toured the area north and west of Tonopah and found several Playa’s w/o any dirt tracks leading to them, and just like in Death Valley, there were rocks with trails in the Playa surface behind them. Those photos are unfortunately long gone, but they are available online. Jackrabbits surround the Playas in large numbers; using the sage at the edges of the dry lake bed for shade in the early morning and late evening that I would shoot a hole thru their ears instead of killing them from several hundred yards away to keep in practice. During the day they go deep underground where it is nice and cool. Lizards of all shapes, colors, and sizes abound in the rocks around the lake beds also.
The larger rocks have fossils in them from a far earlier time since the water has gone elsewhere. It is estimated that to add ¼ of and inch of water to the water table deep under Phoenix takes about 10,000 years; and Phoenix is pumping it up and out at the rate of about 2” a year. You do the math. I believe that Phoenix will be the first and largest modern Ghost Town to appear in this Century. I wish I would be around to see that happen, I don’t like people messing up my desert. As a matter of fact, I have shot over a few who got a little to close to my claim outside of Tonopah.
On one occasion after I had been gone for a couple of months, some city jerk built a log cabin on my claim, so I shot holes in his stove pipe, shovels, and gold pans from my porch until he got the message. It seems like my sense of humor lacks something.
Most people think that the Mojave Desert is a lifeless place for animals, and the plants will stab you if you blunder into one or your horse needs a laugh and dumps you in the middle of some Cacti. The Choia (or jumping cactus) is my worst enemy in that department since it is about waist high and actually grabs you. It doesn’t let go anytime soon either, by the way, and the needles are two inches long.
Vise-grip pliers are a necessity for city folk out there. But the desert is full of animals, most of which are nocturnal. The heat at the ground surface sometimes exceeds 200° during the daytime and the air temperature is about 120°.
Some lizards dare the heat in the summer and spend the day looking for something to eat that won’t eat them, but when standing still they balance on one front foot and one opposite rear foot. When those feet get too hot they switch to the other two for a while. Most snakes avoid the heat by staying in the shade or in burrows other animals have made, or in the shade of you car if it is parked for very long. Those are usually one of the three types of rattle snakes found in that area. Oh Lord that is a surprise when you walk back to your car to leave and there comes the sound of a scared rattlesnake coming from under it. Other snakes, like the Red Racer and the Black Racer that don’t seem to mind the heat and hunt all day, and you cannot run fast enough to catch one of those.
A small note of interest for those who roam the southern part of the Mojave desert: One of the above mentioned rattlesnakes is the Mojave rattlesnake and it is in a class of it’s own as far as snake bite and the treatment thereof in the contiguous 48 states. The Mojave Rattler has both the Neurotoxin like Cobras, and Hemotoxin. Other rattlesnakes have only the Hemotoxin. The latest studies are showing that the Western Diamondback is developing this duo-venom also. The Mojave has a very dark face with a white line under each eye, a much darker all-over look than most other rattlesnakes, and an attitude like my ex-wives: Nasty! So if you are unfortunate enough to get bitten, kill the snake and take it to the ER with you and tell the Doctor to look up what anti-venom to use or you will die if it is a Mojave. I do not and am not for killing snakes because they are snakes, I believe they have a right to live here also.
Most life is nocturnal, as stated above. At night the animals come out in force: Coyotes, snakes, kit foxes, burrowing owls, lizards, toads (when it rains), bats, kangaroo rats, mice, and the UCLA biologists who trap all of the above for study. My favorite lizard out there is the Gecko who has no or tiny scales, and is almost transparent. Hold a flashlight under one and you can see his heart pumping, and all of his insides. Those Gecko’s are flesh colored with brightly colored spots on them; and they have two to three, sometimes four, pupils in each eye. They are kind of alien looking, but harmless, especially since they are only about 3 inches long. They also have the membrane in the back of their eyes that catches all light and reflects it so you can see them a mile up the road.
Since the desert cools off very fast and gets very cold the reptiles crawl up onto the pavement so catching them is a matter of driving slowly down a paved road since the black road surface gathers in heat during the day and gives it off at night, and look for them. On a collecting trip to Guymas, Mexico one summer we stopped many times for broken fan belt snakes, rope snakes, wire snakes, stick snakes, and the list goes on; but we did not catch one single reptile snake in over 200 miles that night. They are like gold in the respect that you find them where you find them.
When the rains come, they come in scattered storms. It might rain where you are standing, but not 100 yards away. And when it does rain hard during the fall, winter, and spring, (very seldom in the summer) the Playa’s fill with water. Ducks flying high will look down on a dry lake with four inches of water in it and see the reflected blue sky and try to land, usually breaking their necks. But when the dry lakes fill, life abounds, even in the lake.
There are documented cases of a dry lake not getting rain water in sufficient quantities for the miracle to occur for 75 years, but when they do get water to complete the cycle eggs laid 75 years ago hatch. Nobody knows how it happens that eggs laid 75 years ago knows that there is enough water to hatch; mate, lay their eggs, and die. What are these creatures? They are two different species of fresh water shrimp. An inch of water does not make it happen, but the same lake bed with four inches of water in it allows the eggs to hatch. But how do eggs know how much time the water will be there? The lake fills with shrimp from ¼ to ½ an inch long and the wading birds gorge on them until the water evaporates. The shrimp hatch out, mate, lay their eggs in the mud, and die; the birds leave. The shrimp die and dry and blow away with the wind. The mud in/on the lake is as lifeless as the surface of the moon until the rain collects deep enough for the cycle to start over. How the shrimp know the water will last long enough to complete the cycle is a complete mystery and I do not have clue. The egg has finally scrambled the human mind for a change!!
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