Column by Hal Walter
Livestock – February 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH moved on to that high desert in the sky during the Winter Solstice, 2002. After years of caring for Jack in his old age and declining health, I had often wondered how it would end. But I had no idea he was leading me to such a mystical experience.
In the morning I noticed that Jack had wandered out of the corral. I looked all around our bigger pasture, finally finding him in the far northwest corner. I walked down to him with his food, attached the grain-bag strap behind his ears. He walked around in circles but didn’t appear interested in eating.
Friends had invited us to holiday celebrations, one in Beulah and the other in Westcliffe. I checked on Jack before we left in the afternoon. He had not eaten any of the feed and I took the bag off him. He stood there weakly, and I scratched him behind his ears for a bit before walking away.
Between the party in Beulah and the get-together in Westcliffe we decided to stop back at the ranch to let the dogs outside and to check on Jumpin’ Jack. I walked down the hill carrying the grain bag and looking for him where I had last seen him in the sunlight. The moon, full two nights before, was just rising from a point far to the northeast.
I scanned with my flashlight, looking for him to be standing there amid the currant bushes and rabbit brush. I also scanned the ground before me. My other burros, Clyde, Spike, Ace and Redbo, appeared in the gathering moonlight and followed me for a bit but then fell behind.
Just as the moon came fully over the ridge, the four younger burros set about braying, raising a racket that echoed off the rocks. The braying would reach a crescendo, then fall. Then one of them would start it up again and the remaining three would join in raucous chorus.
This went on for a short while. It was strangely terrible and beautiful. Then suddenly they stopped. I walked in their direction, looking about, but could find nothing. I decided that I needed a brighter flashlight and started back for the house.
But just as I turned to go, Redbo, the youngest of all our burros, let out a weak bray. I turned and could see he was looking in a specific direction. Ears forward, he was pointing the way. I took a step and then I heard the breathing. Labored rushed breaths. I walked toward it.
There Jack lay, head pointed to the southwest, eyes wide open but shut from the world, with his badly worn teeth partially bared. I stood over him with the combined light of the moon and the tiny flashlight. And I listened to his breathing. After a short while I headed back to the house to tell Mary that Jumpin’ Jack was dying.
THERE WAS A DISCUSSION about what to do. Should I put him out of his misery? Or should we let him go naturally? Both choices seemed equally right and wrong. I described the breathing to Mary and she told me that she had heard that type of breathing before, the final breaths of a young terminal cancer patient she had attended to when she was a nurse at the Leadville hospital. She even spoke of a medical term for this type of breathing. But terminology scarcely mattered, as I decided to walk back down there. When I arrived Jack wasn’t breathing at all.
I crouched down and touched him behind his ears, as I had earlier that day. Jack had been deaf for the last few years of his life. But now as I touched him there, both ears moved. It was the last neurological twitch he would make and I considered it a sign that, unencumbered by his physical being, he could now `hear’ me. So I spoke to him out loud, telling him things that shall remain between him and me in speech that only wild beings could truly understand.
For all I know Jumpin’ Jack truly was old as the hills. If I had to put a number on it I’d say over 40. I can account only for his last 20 years, and remember that he wasn’t young when I first saw him standing with his trademark broken ear in a pasture along Highway 50 in Poncha Springs.
He was a wild burro from the California desert, and the adventures I had as a young man trying to tame and train him were epic — and also quite comic and to some degree futile. In the years 1982 through 1985 Jack and I made eight trips to the top of Mosquito Pass in the Fairplay and Leadville pack-burro races. In those years we ran close to 20 races together but never came close to winning one. There were day-long back-country training missions and overnight packing trips.
Once we spent a week trekking in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness. We traveled up and over Brown’s Pass from the east side, then down the west slope to climb above timberline again to high lakes Claire and Rebecca, and then returned over Brown’s Pass. I later dedicated an essay in my book Pack-Burro Stories to some of my adventures with Jumpin’ Jack.
IN RECENT WEEKS Jack had not strayed far from the corral where he received his twice daily feedings of Equine Senior. I had been feeding him with a mesh nose bag to prevent him from scattering and wasting much of the feed. This trick seemed to work and allowed me to keep him with the other burros for company. His condition actually appeared to be improving.
But animals know more than we do and Jumpin’ Jack must have known it was time to move on. He was born wild and he would die wild. Forever I will remain in wonder about how he chose the solstice day to wander away from the corral. I will marvel at how the other burros brayed a goodbye chorus as the moon rose that evening, and how the youngest pointed the way for me to see the oldest one alive one final time. And most of all I will always be mystified when I remember how Jumpin’ Jack twitched his ears as a final farewell.
Later, as Jumpin Jack Flash’s carcass froze hard in the single digit temperatures of the longest night of the year, Mary and I sat inside before a blazing fire and toasted his life with small glasses of very elegant sipping tequilla. We should all strive to live lives worthy of such vivid and enduring remembrance.
Hal Walter constructs prose and raises burros at his small ranch in the Wet Mountains.
