The Strange White Doves Read Free Page B

animals have given me warnings before, but this was the first time one had ever made me feel his thoughts. I was soon to learn that Turk was capable of much greater mental feats. In the next few days he taught me a lesson I shall never forget, and at the same time he cleared up a mystery that had been nagging at me for years.
    It had happened back on the coast before we came to the mountains. In a small palm grove beyond our place, a neighbor had placed a pair of goats to graze, tying each with a long rope to keep it from wandering away. One afternoon Alice and I went out to the station wagon, intending to ride into town for our mail. Before we could open the doors, one of the goats suddenly appeared. It rushed up to Alice, stared hard into her face, then whirled around to me and did the same thing.
    I couldn’t understand, and neither could Alice. Puzzled, we opened the doors and started to get into the wagon, but the goat jumped in ahead of us. I pulled him out, and we got in quickly and closed the doors, but when we started to drive off, the stubborn goat planted himself directly in front of the car and refused to budge.
    â€œWhat’s the matter with the crazy thing?” I muttered.
    â€œIt’s not crazy,” said Alice. “And it’s not stupid.”
    Goats are definitely not stupid, as I knew from experience. I remembered the goat Louis Bromfield told about, when writing of his farm. It was always managing to reach the opposite side of a fence that was much too high to jump. The truth gave everyone something to think about. The goat had formed a partnership with a donkey. By standing on the donkey’s back, it could leap the fence with ease.
    Worriedly we got out of the wagon, wondering what was wrong. The goat looked at us again, gave an entreating little “Ba-a-a!” and began hastening down the lane with the two of us following.
    When we reached the palm grove where it had been tied, we found the other goat unconscious on the ground. It was being strangled by its line, which had become looped tightly around its neck. Had we reached it a few minutes later, it would have been dead.
    I don’t know how the first goat, in a desperate effort to save his companion, ever managed to break his own line in order to go for help, and I shudder to think how slow we were to comprehend. It was a profoundly moving experience, and I shall never forget how hard he looked into our faces, silently trying to tell us something that any other animal would have understood.
    Not, of course, until I met Turk did I begin to realize that the goat was trying to tell us something in nature’s language, and became almost frantic when we failed to understand it. Naturally he went to Alice first because where animals are concerned, she is what might be called simpático.
    Simpático is a Spanish word that means a great deal more than just sympathetic, as it is usually translated. If others find you simpático, they feel in you an unusual understanding, a sort of closeness and kinship that is far beyond the ordinary.
    It had brought the goat straight to Alice without hesitation, and it brought Turk also—after he had sized me up and decided he could handle me. When he told me to keep my distance, he looked straight into my eyes, exactly as the goat had done long before. But Turk’s message was a threat, the simplest and strongest message that can be conveyed to a dull-witted human. Several days later Turk looked at me again, using that same hard, peculiar stare. But this time he wasn’t giving information. He was getting it.
    Here is the reason: Bob, our woodsman friend, stopped by one afternoon and saw Alice feeding Turk. He was fascinated. “What a dog!” he whispered. “I’d sure like to have him.” He added, “I’ve seen that feller before, chasin’ deer. He’s a wild ’un. If the warden ever gets a shot at ’im …”
    Turk had become a