Running with the javelinas

5-18-09
I got back from Show Low just before dusk with just enough daylight to take Bela for a quick, leash-less run behind Cobre Valley Community Hospital. It’s a hilly area with horrendous erosional damage from ATVs but it’s close to my house and allows Bela to run at full speed with relative safety in any direction that interests her. We’ve walked this area dozens of times and aside from an occasional contact with cottontails, quail, dirt bikes, or someone else walking their dog, our little treks are generally uneventful.

We started out in the typical fashion with Bela running a hundred feet ahead of me. She generally follows the road or trail on these hikes but she’s also easily lured by smells and other distractions in the surrounding vegetation. In this case, the plants were a dense cover of shrubby mesquites with plenty of catclaws, sotols, and prickly pears, all in flower except for the sotols. I generally give a quick whistle or “Let’s go!” when Bela moves too far out of my comfort zone and that usually brings her back to me at full gallop, or at least brings her out into the open, close enough for us to make eye contact that signals that all is well. Such is our typical hiking style that suits us both amicably.

Tonight, the light was going fast and Bela had disappeared into the brush on the left side of the road near the top of the second of a series of steep hills. After whistling three or four times for her, I heard a low pitched “hurumph, hurumph” sound and then I saw Bela in profile, leaping high through the prickly pears and catclaw and running as fast as the obstacles would let her. I could barely see the top of her back as she ran but behind her, I saw the tops of two other hairy humps more clearly, arching over the vegetation and right on her heels. At first I thought they were dogs but as all three of them burst into the middle of the road at nearly the same time, I realized that Bela’s two pursuers were javelinas.

She ran down the hill towards me as fast as I have ever seen her run with both javelinas coming straight towards me at the same speed. My first and only reaction was to get “large” and threatening and run straight towards them, the same technique used to scare off a bear. I ran at them with total abandon, yelling “aaaaaggggghhhhh” as loud as I could, wildly moving my arms over my head and down to my sides, up and down, up and down, like an animated Vitriolic man. It wasn’t a well thought-out maneuver, but it was all I could come up with in the nano seconds I still had to survive.

Both javelinas stopped in mid step, ran a few feet away from us, and then turned towards us again. I quickly grabbed Bela’s collar, just in case she might be thinking that these animals were only interested in a little play time. I had heard too many stories about encounters with javelina that included negatively motivating words like disembowelment and evisceration to vividly illustrate the outcomes of interactions with dogs and other domestic animals. The stories involving humans were more intestinally retentive but still spoke of shredded tendons, torn ligaments, and long muscle tears below the knees.

I turned and started to run down the steep, loose gravel trail with Bela well ahead of me. I looked quickly over my shoulder and saw that one of the javelinas had stayed behind but the other was running after us again. Since my Vitriolic wild man had worked so well the first time, I stopped and charged towards it again, screaming even louder than before. I was running at him uphill and I probably looked a little smaller and less threatening, but he stopped nevertheless. This time though, he didn’t retreat, he just stopped and looked down at me. I was struck by how skinny he was when looked at straight-on. Javelinas' heads are so thin that their eyes don’t appear to be capable of binocular vision. Their bodies have a certain ferocious daintiness and vulnerability with tiny little hooves and the body thickness and roundish shape of a bluegill. They look unbalanced too, as if they would just fall over on their side like a bicycle if they ever stopped their forward momentum.

Bela had trotted tentatively back to me and I sensed that she was now well aware of the urgency of the situation. We both started running again, a little faster now that we were on more level ground with ruts that weren’t so deep and treacherous. The javelina was still chasing us but not as aggressively. I stopped and ran towards it a third time, with the same crazy screaming and waving, and it stopped again, but then immediately started towards us, walking slowly as if considering its next move. It was thirty or forty feet away and closing slowly which gave me time to start picking up some nearby rocks to use as dissuading projectiles. I used the underhand bowling technique, hoping that the rocks would skip along the ground and then, at just the right time, get deflected airborne directly under the javelina’s chin. None of this worked of course, but it bought us enough time to get down to the bottom of the last hill nearer to my parked truck.

As the chances of our survival increased, I started to laugh at the absurdity of the situation as I ran: here was a grown man and his dog, fleeing for their lives, alternately running in two different directions and yelling, all while a large, hairy bluegill with dainty feet raced after them.

The rocks had slowed it down but it never stopped following us. Bela and I were walking now but each time I looked back, I saw it. It just seemed to want to keep tabs on us—it had run us off and it just wanted to make sure that we were safely away. For an animal with such reportedly poor eyesight, it didn’t seem to have any difficulty seeing us. We may have just been large blobs to him but threatening blobs we were.

There was a patient from the hospital with an open, loose fitting print gown walking in the parking lot near where my truck was parked. She was being lead around by a nurse or a family member, just below where Bela and I had made our escape; there was no question that she had been close enough to have heard every nuance of my panic, including at least three primal screams that I let out during our retreat. She took tiny baby steps, with the heel of one foot barely passing the toes of the other with each step. For all I knew, the poor woman had just had her spleen removed and was out for a little post-op exercise but now had to face the probable maniac whose screaming had already terrified her from up on the hill. I wanted to apologize and explain what had just ocurred but somehow I didn’t think that she would buy it. She and her companion avoided all eye contact, probably thinking that if the surgery didn’t kill her, the crazed man and his dog walking towards her just might.

I’ve retold this story several times and most of the people that I’ve told it to, particularly those that have spent considerable time in the desert, have similar stories. Those less fortunate than me have been chased into trees or into the backs of pickup trucks, or have had to pay $1500 veterinarian bills to have their dogs sewn back together. Other than the few dozen prickly pear spines that I had to remove from Bela’s legs and belly, we came out relatively unscathed. I loaded her into the truck, and we started home along the far edge of the parking lot, just in time to see a woman in a print grown make her way through an automatic sliding door, towards the safety of her hospital bed.