Chipper Mule, the old fellow who shared life here for a few years, was a creature with transcendental messages. At least with respect to myself. With a bray like a train wreck, he created a train wreck or two here. Yet the results brought changes that needed making. From him I learned how rich and sweet it is to give a home to an old, unwanted equine, to be wiser about the kind of danger I would expose myself to, to take better physical care of myself though I had no time or patience for that, and the hard lesson of saying goodbye and going on, though not so much alone. This is not a mule story that very many people will like; yet that contrary and careful spirit of the animal shines through.

He’d been through a livestock auction or two, no stranger to the discourtesies and cattle prods of hurried men wanting to make a buck off his flesh; somebody said he’d been a children’s mount years earlier. Thank goodness he escaped the meat buyers. All I know is that he showed up here one day on a rope. His former owner led him from a tiny pen on the next street, which he’d shared with a lovely thoroughbred bay who chewed him up. She got him through our gate with a stud chain across the gums. In his gentlemanly, though firm, manner, Chipper saw no reason to enter a pen occupied by two smaller donkeys who were glaring at him.

In appearance he was skeletal before a senior diet began padding his ribcage. Many thought him a pale grey horse dotted with tiny, dark speckles such as in chocolate chip ice cream. When we first saw him he was called Blue for the fleabitten color; we renamed him Mr. Chips for the sprinkles and for his great dignity. His head was a trifle large for the rest of him, and his tail had a long bone and sparse long hair, clues for the initiated. Anybody who heard his braying call knew instantly that this was no horse. His hooves were shelly and the walls tended to separate with the first drops of rain. White line disease existed in those hooves, ringbone in the fetlocks. As he moved, he creaked. Some time in the 28 or 30 years of life before he was delivered to our gate he had torn his lower eyelid, a fact which his gorgeous long white lashes over deep, dark eyes did much to conceal. He looked out at the world with cool assessment, and when he decided you were okay those big eyes would take on a sly, wicked gleam as he devised tests of your mule-worthiness. Things like popping his huge head over your shoulder when you had no idea he was close by, tickling you with his chin whiskers. Or evading capture by showing you his smooth trot, one steady yard ahead of you, doing laps around the field. When he got bored, or felt like conversing with the horses riding by along the ditch bank, he’d raise that great head and emit the loudest, rustiest, wheeziest racket, scaring the daylights out of strangers. Sounded like trains when the wind blows, rolling through a couple of miles east across the Rio Grande River.

Since he was thin upon arrival with signs of kidney problems, we took him off the pure alfalfa diet he had been given at his previous digs, and began offering grass hay with bowls of equine senior, rice bran and supplements. This caused the donkeys, Jasper and Gigi, to take a shine to his chow and steal it every chance they could. Fairly new to the ways of equines, and jobless at the time, I took to myself the task as Donkey Diet Police. To wit, I stood beside him while he serenely chewed his way through his bowl of goodies -- leaving me to chase off opportunistic donkeys five times a minute while composing bits of poetry that never did see the front side of paper. Chipper showed his appreciation by munching with majestic slowness, pausing often to study me -- and donkeys, dragonflies, roadrunners.

A few days of this, and we got a panel pen set up for mulie meals. To this I would march from the hay storage area on my crutches two or three times a day, bearing a large LL Bean tote stuffed with hay. About then, Mr. Chips gave me his great big heart. Though he continued to enjoy rough and tumble romps around the pen with the donkeys, whenever I was around he slowed down and kept cautious pace with me, never too close, yet near enough to feel his warmth. Whoever says that mules know to a millimeter where all parts of their bodies are in relation to surroundings is dead on. For instance, one day it started raining while I was out feeding the trio. My crutch slid in the clay mud as Chips and I walked towards his pen, him looking ahead. Down I went, hard, before I knew it -- right beneath those enormous hooves. I thought my last sight in life would a hoof coming down on my head... No way! After a second or two my green eyes opened and inches away, peering around a suspended front leg, was Chipper’s brown eye -- about popping with concern. Not a millimeter did he move until I rolled out from under and sat up. Slowly, gently he reversed direction to pace alongside as I crawled the muddy distance back to the barn, where there was a plastic chair to help me get up. Afterwards I felt like a mud wrestler as hooves, feet and crutches slip-sliding, tote bag dripping mud, we repeated the trip back to the corral. It took a while to fully realize just why I had not been trampled. Mule sense! Small wonder that mules are star attractions on Grand Canyon trail rides, where trails edge precipitous drops and there’s no room to turn. Those long-eared, rusty-voiced, scrawny tailed characters are special, damn special.

*********
Fast forward a few months. A divorce loomed, and my state of mind was as blue as the thunder sky above the paddock. In the USA, New Mexico is second to Florida for lightning strikes.  We have terrific boomers, too.  While skies blacken, grit-ladened wind smacks into anything before it, including your face.  When rain comes horizontally through the wind it is like being power washed by demons.  Bolts of lightning pierce the earth, javelins hurled from space.

On such a summer evening, I fed the longeared crew hastily, trying to get them sheltered with soft piles of hay before the wind and rain would strike. It didn't work. When I left their shed, wind hit like whirling sandpaper. In moments the rain would gush, as gently as an open hydrant.  I struggled towards the gate -- invisible in the sudden sandstorm. Storms have always fascinated me, and this one came up to engulf us so fast. My feet rooted themselves to the ground. Also, I recall a somewhat incoherent thought about my life not going very well just then, so what did it matter if I should be struck by lightning?

I held my arms out, soaked through and through beneath the light show above.  Nor did I note Chipper's approach until great white whiskers, dripping, hung over my shoulder and sly black eyes beneath drooping white lashes peeked at me.  Chipper, who disliked getting wet, had crept silently out of the safe shed, and come to stand with me.  When I didn’t move, he stepped a few feet away and looked pointedly at the gate.  "Go back in!" I yelled, staring at the little building.

The stubborn one went on standing there.  A bolt or two flashed, struck home somewhere.  Hypnotic.  Gazing towards the last of them, my neck very suddenly felt eerie, prickly.  Instantly Chipper touched me again, a thing the aloof old fellow rarely did.  A blasting crack -- white, flaming lightning whamming into earth about a hundred yards away.  So close,  as when another bolt blasted an elm to bits at my childhood home just before I came down with polio.

The mule and I felt the earth shake. Chipper calmly looked me over, then, swishing his long, thin, dripping tail, he stepped deliberately back into the shed to dinner.  The rain stopped, the wind died. My jaw dropped.

This little interlude and Chipper’s protective attitude turned my thoughts, and on we went with life. I had a new, fun job, strong in body and mind as a stubborn polio survivor can be, nothing was getting my spirits down. In fact, I hopped around doing a lot of heavy yard work, leaning on the crutches and squeezing the nerves in my arms. I wasn’t remembering that a person can lose the use of their arms that way, that a neurologist, several orthopedic doctors, physical therapists and a hand surgeon had warned me not to do this, that the husband I had divorced had nearly had fits about my habit of doing this, and that if I lost the use of my arms there would be little of me that was not paralyzed. You could say that I was acting pretty stupid. Maybe even stubborn as a ... mule? It was my way of telling “fate” that now the hardest time was over, I was going to do whatever needed doing around the place, come hell or high water.

Here I should be pretty clear that what happened I attribute to a slight miscalculation on Chipper’s part. Clearly, however, he was the cause of my finally getting the message about sparing my arms the day he aimed a light kick at my German shepherd dog. Instead of connecting with quick-footed Oso -- who was trying to herd the big mule -- the hoof nicked my left crutch just enough to knock it out from under my arm. Landing with full force on my right hip on a large chunk of concrete from a fence hole, I instantly knew I was in big trouble. Chipper ran a short distance, turned and stared while I groaned, “It’s broken, it’s broken.”

My teenage daughter brought out a chair so I could try getting myself up. No way. Even the attempt to sit up proved impossible; an ambulance was called. In the Emergency Room the results of an exam and x-rays revealed not a broken hip, but a sprain. The medics told me to go ahead and walk out the door... The pain was severe enough that I could not so much as stand up from the wheelchair they had provided, to get into my truck, yet those people told me to walk out and everything would soon be fine. It was three long months on short term disability before I was able to walk even a little. An orthopedic doctor told me that given my small bones, affected by paralytic polio and a lifetime of using long leg braces, a break would have healed faster than the sprain. Regular folks would have recovered in a week or two.

*********
Chipper’s kick was what it took to convince me that it was time to stop saying, with the pride of the physically challenged, that I’d rather be dead than use a wheelchair. Soon I acquired an electric wheelchair, got back to work on a part-time basis with it, then discovered how much easier all sorts of yard work was using that thing. The angel who spared me the nerves in my arms was the old, arthritic mule. We don’t always see trouble as a friend, but the Baha’i words, “My calamity is my providence” again imprinted themselves on my brain after this episode. In his largely silent way, he commiserated with me afterwards, in my altered state of mobility. While I bumped around doing chores, he often followed or snoozed nearby. I can’t say that he recognized or regretted what happened, but Chips was unfailingly gentle towards me...

... Until, apparently, the last time the vet came to examine him and give him a shot or two. Haltered, lead rope ready, Chipper serenely watched the vet and assistant approaching his metal loafing shed. The moment the assistant’s hand reached for that rope the sweet little trot swung into action and, ladies and gentlemen, he’s offffffffff! Around and around the little building’s exterior, just the tiniest bit faster than the assistant or the vet could run, holding out their arms to form a human barrier.

Wearying of mulie antics pretty quick, I saw him squeezing between fence and shed wearing his gleeful look -- and without a thought, swung myself in the big wheelchair smack in front of him. I registered the look in his eyes, registered the blanching faces behind him and felt the merest touch of flank fur against my arm as he soared straight up in the awesome manner of mulies, softly across my lap, hooves inches above my knees. Heads shaking, the two medical professionals found Chipper peacefully waiting behind them after this final circuit. For my part, stupid though my action looked to that vet (who never did came back here), I knew Chipper would not harm me. I had no fear when I pulled in front of him, but I sure did want him to understand that his rotations were over. He got the message. We had our understanding, after all.

He was so beautiful when he ran, mane and tail streaming, body flowing smoothly, feet swinging without ever affecting that smoothness. A gaited mule?

"Everything that is, is, was, and will be.  Things do not pass away in time.  Every moment remains."

~ Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.

March 11, 2004, over a week into the 19-day Baha’i Fast. There was Chipper at the back gate, ears perked up alongside the donkeys as the trio awaited my daughter’s breakfast delivery. Off to work I hustled. At the call center I sat down, donned the headset, punched the button to take my first web tech call of the day. I was talking to a querulous elderly gentleman when an Instant Message flashed onto my computer screen. My daughter said: “Mom, we don’t need to fix the gate to Chipper’s run in. There’s a white tail sticking out the middle door in the shed, lying on the ground.”

To say that time stopped and the earth lurched is a mild way to describe what happened next. The old man talked on, but off fell the headset and I was well on my way towards dropping also when a supervisor friend’s hand grabbed my shoulder. She asked what was wrong, I pointed mutely at the message. Unflustered, she took my headset and I heard her say, “Sir? Sir, I’m sorry, Emily was just called away and I’ll be taking over....” Tears watered my jacket all the way to the truck. Cold it may sound, yet the deaths of my parents did not affect me so strongly. The only shock anything like this occurred one winter night when I was seven; my grandmother was struck and killed by a car.

An intriguing friend had gone. Nor was I there to comfort him in the few minutes he lived with a burst artery, to rub his big silver neck one last time. An old mule with a bad heart murmur, ringbone, kidney problems and a great, mischievous spirit, a small person with a handicap who never should have had large animals, much as I loved horses from the age of three.

Perhaps through that mysterious “living by voices we shall never hear” Chipper performed his role in those few difficult years. Even now, when the sun is low, his big light shape and dark, dark eyes gaze back at me, in faithful expectation... Sometimes when desert winds blow, the train wreck call comes echoing...

Bought a ticket for a runaway train
Like a madman laughin' at the rain...
~ From the lyrics to Runaway Train, by Soul Asylum



A tribute to mules: