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At the Davidson Fruit Company

The title of this post is an example of a rebus: a combination of letters, words or doodles that says something familiar in a new way. Can you guess what it is? It's a beeline. When a worker bee (always a female) has gathered a full load of nectar and pollen she goes straight back to the hive even if she wandered all over looking for flowers. A bee is a paragon of all work and no play, hence "busy as a bee". Unfortunately for us and European honey bees their numbers are declining. Our linden tree is usually literally humming with bees when it is in flower. This year I could see some but there were not enough to make their wonderful music. This post is about animal words and phrases having to do with work except for a digression later into some money words and one more rebus although neither has anything to do with animals.

Another animal admired by a boss is the eager beaver. This animal works from dawn to dusk cutting down trees and building dams. He doesn't seem to be playful like his fellow water-lover the otter, but is usually hard at work whenever anyone sees him. He seems to only take time out to slap a warning on the water when a person gets too near.

Have you ever heard a car salesman say "Let's talk turkey!" This phrase originated in America just like the bird and was in use by the mid-nineteenth century. Some folks speculate that it arose in colonial days when the Pilgrim fathers offered the Indians many things in return for turkeys. The Indians would greet them with "You come to talk turkey?". Others suggest it originally meant pleasant conversation or sweet nothings so a young man would try to talk turkey to his girl. Some time in the ensuing 60 or so years the turkey's gobble became sterner and the phrase came to mean to talk about basics or about cold, hard cash.

Cash, from the Latin word for box, capsa, originally referred to a money-box and later became synonymous with the money itself. Money comes from Moneta, the name of a Roman temple dedicated to Juno, the queen of the gods. Romans often had cash-flow problems (conquering is expensive) so they asked for Juno's aid. Her priests evidently helped and the grateful Romans built the temple to show their gratitude and gave it the Latin name for advisor. 

Our main unit of money, the dollar, has a round-about history too. Silver was discovered in the valley of Joachim near Prague in 1516. The Count of Schlick, owner of this mine, minted his own coins (a common practice of the time for anyone who had access to gold or silver). His coins bore the picture of St. Joachim and became known as Joachimsthaler, literally "of the valley of Joachim". Later the name was shortened to thaler. The English either not knowing or not caring that the term just meant "valley" used it to refer to Spanish pieces of eight (so named for the large "8" on one side of the coin which meant it could be cut into eight pieces or bits for smaller coins). The Fathers of our country based their new currency on the Spanish pieces of eight and called them dollars.  One quarter of a dollar is two bits.

Irish sixpence

Bartering was first done with animals and food. Later pieces of metal took the place of the actual objects. Until converting to the Euro Irish money still had pictures of animals of various values on one side of their coins. Now transactions often just use computer transfers via credit cards and banks. Have we come a long way babe?

This brings me to my final rebus. A boss pays a worker a salary. Can you guess what PAY PAY is? A toupee! Enough said!

MOUNTAIN LION LADY: Chapter 7 (first half)

Zoo Time

The first winter season was behind me. It had not been at all what I had anticipated. I did not approach the summer with the same degree of confidence that I had gone forth in the fall. I would be working with captive mountain lions of known ages to develop a method to determine the ages of wild lions. It sounded pretty easy, but I had thought chasing wild ones would be physically taxing but straightforward. It was not. What surprises did I have in store for the summer?

A Cap-chur gun was used to immobilize all of the wild mountain lions because they were usually more than 20 feet away and up a tree.  We needed closer-up methods for the captive ones. Some of the zoos had squeeze cages. The zookeepers would urge the lion into the cage then narrow it down with a lever so the animal couldn't turn around and was pressed against the side bars. It was easy to inject the immobilizing drug directly into a hind leg muscle and let the lion back out into the big cage before the drug took effect.

Blow gun and dart 

Another method involved a blow gun. Lots of lung power was needed for this one since the same kind of dart was used as with the Cap-chur gun and the dart was heavy. Sometimes if a squeeze cage wasn't available a jab stick would be used for an animal confined in a small cage. This one was the trickiest of all since the operator had to give the lion a jab in the hind leg and pull back quicker than the lion could turn around and swat the stick. I was fortunate the zookeepers were familiar with whatever method we had to use and would usually do the immobilizing.

My tour of zoos which had expressed a willingness to let me work with their known-age mountain lions started with the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. They had two female lions, a 13-year old and another one of unknown age. I had worked on one captive lion in Denver and two wild ones. I sort of knew what I was doing. I was lucky that everything went smoothly. 

One of the first things I noticed was the difference in the teeth. The wild lions' teeth had no tartar buildup but the captive ones usually had a great deal. This made measuring gumline recession difficult and not very accurate. The tartar had to be scraped off, sometimes leaving the gums bleeding. When I thought about it, it was pretty easy to understand why there was more buildup in zoo lions. Most of the felids in zoos were fed a soft meat product. Wild mountain lions used a natural toothbrush: rib bones. One of the markers of a deer killed by a lion was the ribs would be chewed off often almost all the way to the spine. The broken bone edges would scrape any tarter off the teeth before it even had a chance to coat the tooth.

Wild male footprint

Captive female footprint

Another difference was in the ink prints I made from the hind foot. The wild lions' feet were furry and the pads were cracked, sort of like the callouses my feet got when I went barefoot in the summer. Zoo lions' pads were as smooth as if they had been given a pedicure.

After my positive experience with Cheyenne Mountain Zoo I was feeling more confident when we reached the Brit Spaugh Zoo in Kansas. I shouldn't have been. The two animals we worked on first were females and everything went as planned.

The trouble started with the next one, a fat old male. Fat lions look the same as skinny lions from above because they carry their extra weight in a sagging belly. This old boy's belly was really sagging! Several people from the zoo were watching me so I did the easy things first. The body measurements went okay. Weighing him was strenuous but doable. A whisker was easy to snip off. Then the hard part. I got disoriented when I went to take the blood. I mistook the ankle vein for the knee vein because his belly hung below the knee vein. Ankle veins aren't very big on mountain lions. I went through the vein in one leg causing a big hematoma to form (blood seeped from the vein into the tissue surrounding it). I collapsed the ankle vein in the other leg by trying to draw the blood too quickly. The veins were too deep on the forelegs so I tried to take blood from the tongue veins. I was getting desperate! I switched to a smaller needle and my advisor Ken held the lion's tongue. I carefully slid the needle into the vein and slowly, slowly drew back the plunger. The lion had been under for quite a while and was starting to come out. His tongue was not made to spend much time out of his mouth and was drying out. To correct his discomfort he tried to pull it in. Ken hung on with determination but asked me to hurry. I didn't want to collapse this vein as well but understood the need.  I hurried and the vein collapsed with only about half the amount of blood I needed. We let the lion moisten his tongue then tried the vein on the other side. By the time he tried to pull it in I figured I'd stop when I was almost ahead. I had almost enough blood. 

Taking a blood sample from a zoo mountain lion

On to the Topeka Zoo! We were in for a delightful surprise. The young male mountain lion snarled at us from the small enclosure behind the exhibit cage. I thought I was imagining things because his canine gleamed! Teeth, even very clean teeth, usually don't gleam. The zookeeper was watching for my reaction.

"Does he have a silver tooth?" I asked incredulously. He beamed and told me the story. The lion's canine had been broken when he fell on his face after a routine immobilization and the nearby dental school had come to the rescue. The students had fitted him with a stainless steel crown. Good experience and p.r. for the students and great p.r. for the zoo! It wasn't actually necessary because a lion eating soft food really doesn't need his canines. 

Even some wild lions are able to make do without, sometimes to the detriment of ranchers. A lion was killed in Utah that had broken all of his canines and was gumming his dinner (sheep) to death with the stubs. Pretty hard work I imagine. Sheep were probably easier to hold onto during the process than deer. Another lion with a disability was killing sheep and shot by a rancher. He noticed the fur was worn off on the inside of the lion's front legs. Further examination revealed stiff wrists from arthritis on its forelegs making it difficult to grab its prey with its claws. It could hold a woolly sheep with its forelegs just fine while it delivered the fatal bite. A deer could probably have just slipped away. 

A stainless steel canine didn't make any difference in the parameters I was measuring. I just measured the gumline recession on the other side. Everything else for the two lions was routine and we thanked the zookeepers and headed back to Fort Collins to get ready for our next zoo visits.

The only real zoo tragedy happened when we visited the zoo in Salt Lake City.

A Horse is a Horse!

Because a new justice will soon be chosen and before we get to horse words I'd like to share a delightful quote that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in one of his decisions: "A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used." English is a living, changing language unlike the languages that are no longer spoken (remember the students' lament, "Latin is a dead language as dead as dead can be. It killed off all the Romans and now it's killing me!"). Seeking the origin of phrases is like searching the DNA for the ancestry of an organism.

"Recalcitrant" is a word that originally meant to kick back such as a stubborn horse would sometimes do to his traces. Most of us now don't even know what traces are, but we understand the word means stubbornly defiant. When we say that something is curtailed we mean that it is cut short. Four hundred years ago this meant a bobtailed or curtal-tailed horse. A child who is out-of-sorts may be called sulky. He may just want to be left alone. The single-seated racing cart is known as a sulky for the same reason - the driver is of necessity left by himself.

"A horse canters lifting its fetlocks high. The rider gently draws back on the reins of the hackamore and brings the horse to a stop next to the field where the farmer is spreading manure." 

After Thomas à Becket was murdered in the Canterbury Cathedral  in 1170 many people made pilgrimages to pray at his shrine (remember Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?). It was believed that if you prayed at a shrine you would either be cured of a disease or get into heaven more easily. Some people rode horseback on these pilgrimages but few were in a hurry. The sight of these leisurely travellers was very common and their style of riding became known as the Canterbury pace later shortened to the Canterbury and finally to canter.

A small bunch of hair is sometimes called a lock (many a mother saves a lock of her baby's hair). Some people believe "fetlock" was originally "footlock" or the tuft of hair at the horse's foot.

A hackamore is a bitless bridle used by some western riders. Its name comes from the Americanization of the Spanish term for halter or headstall, jaquima. 

"Manure" was originally a verb which came from the French word "manouvre". It meant to work by hand and later came to mean the stuff that is worked into the soil to make it fertile.

Several racing terms have come into our every day language. If a horse is excited and prancing when a race starts it will take off much more quickly than one standing with all four feet on the ground, hence to be caught flat-footed means to be slow on the uptake. A dark horse was originally a race horse about which nothing is known and everyone was kept in the dark. Harness races at county fairs years ago were difficult to get started because the jostling  horses with inexperienced drivers would frequently get out of line. "Hold your horses!" the judges would cry to call a driver back. The idea behind the phrase was used even earlier in Homer's Iliad. A translation is "Antilochus - you drive like a maniac! Hold your horses!" 

"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" means to not examine a gift for defects (i.e. to see how old the horse is). Similar expressions can be found in French, Italian and Spanish. "Straight from the horse's mouth" means the person heard something from the best authority. When deciding to buy a horse the most reliable way to know the horse's age is to look in the horse's mouth at the tooth wear and not take the owner's word for it.

An mildly poisonous nut known as a horse chestnut has the botanical name Castanea equina, a direct translation. A sixteenth century writer tried to explain that the people in the Far East used the nut to cure a horse's cough.  Another explanation is that "horse" merely indicates a large nut (like "horseradish" means a large member of the radish family) that looks like a chestnut. I don't think this holds much water either because a chestnut and a horse chestnut are about the same size. I don't think it has to do with what is called a chestnut on a horse's leg which is a callosed formation above the knee. That chestnut might be what is left of a vestigial toe or a vestigial scent gland. It is also called a night eye. Heaven only knows from where that term comes!

"Horse play" probably comes from the same meaning of "horse" as in horseradish. It means rough, rowdy play where someone is liable to get hurt.

I was talking with a friend about a relative who was ignoring a symptom that could lead to something serious and the phrase "You can lead a horse to water but cannot make him drink" came up. This expression was first written down in a sermon from 1175 and is pretty self-explanatory.

A little settlement in Shasta County, California was originally called Clear Creek Diggings in 1849. A gold miner might have felt that calling it a town was pretentious and referred to it as a "one horse town" meaning insignificant. The name stuck but was later shortened to Horsetown before it became a ghost town.

In the 1850's a lame race horse was called a Charley, so when a person is temporarily lamed by a muscle spasm in his calf (why are those muscles called a baby cow?), he is said to have a Charley horse.

In the 1780's working horses were not used for riding but rather were to pull plows or carts. The aristocracy used their leggy, high-strung horses for riding. If someone tells you to get off your high horse it means to quit behaving in such a superior manner.

Horses often raise their tails when they run away, so now I'm going to hightail it out of here!

MOUNTAIN LION LADY: Chapter 6 (second half)

Word had gone out that we were not catching many lions. Suddenly the world was full of experts. Reports of mountain lion sign and tracks started coming in. One old boy swore he had a lion kill in the middle of his cow pasture. Since lions don't like to dine in exposed places and are quite capable of carrying their meal elsewhere, leaving a carcass in the middle of a field didn't sound very likely but we decided we'd better check it out. This was the first time he had volunteered an opinion of anything that could be verified. 

This rancher was one of a dying breed of country cowboys. He stood about 6'2" and was as skinny as the rifle he had mounted in his truck. One finger was missing on his left hand from some mishap years earlier in a bar room altercation. 

"He was a sparky 'un!" his wife later confided when she told me the story with a shake of her head and a proud, tight smile.

He heard our truck coming across the meadow and sauntered out with his shifty-eyed dingo dog to meet us. We got out of the truck and he stuck his hand out to Joe. 

"Howdy," he solemnly greeted us with a little nod. He didn't offer me his hand. Then he hunkered down on the dirty road.

"Well," he started with slow deliberation. All talk was then suspended while he drew a packet of cigarette papers from his front shirt pocket. He carefully removed the top sheet and tucked the remaining packet back down into his pocket. Fascinated by his studied concentration we watched him take a pouch of tobacco from his hip pocket, tap a little row of flakes across the waiting paper, roll it up into a skinny sausage and seal the edge with a careless swipe of his tongue. The ritual was not complete until he'd placed the sagging bundle into the corner of his mouth, casually flicked the wooden match into fire with his thumbnail and lit the nether end of his creation.

Joe and I felt rather formal towering over him so we hunkered down too. We wanted to get a look at the supposed lion kill but knew the old boy would take his own sweet time before bringing it up. Skirting the subject was a western art form and it was considered cheating to jump right to facts. We waited.

The peculiar weather, abysmal cattle prices and foolhardy politicians were all torn apart bit by bit. We wandered nearer to the subject of lions when we got to the serious business of dog training for cow dogs then on to hounds. At last we reached the eating habits of eagles, coyotes and lions but that was too close to the subject of wolves and he had an opinion about them too. We veered off and had a discussion about the possibility of reintroduction of wolves into Colorado. He swore they'd already been released and no gentle reassurance on my part would convince him otherwise. Instead of entering into the wolf discussion Joe tried to steer him back to lions. My right foot started tingling. I shifted to the left. My left leg muscles became cramped so I shifted back. It didn't help. I just wasn't used to hunkering.

Finally after several lengthy, silent pauses to roll a new cigarette we sidled up to the real point of interest.

"Yup, just last night a lion killed a deer in my pasture."

"You sure it was a lion kill?" Joe asked skeptically.

"Yup. Lion kill."

I was relieved to think we were moving on and gratefully lifted my body to a standing position. It felt good to stretch. The old boy stayed hunkered down. I was too hasty. With a mental sigh I eased back to a hunker. We still had to get through deer eating haystacks, lions eating cattle and lion hunters cutting fences to talk about. We had to reassure him that we would never cut fences or leave gates open. 

I had learned silent rule number one: act and talk like the locals because they hold the trump cards by owning the land we needed to hunt on. I stressed that even though we didn't kill the lions (his preference), without our fact-gathering lion hunting might be stopped by "them tree-huggers".

Satisfied the old boy rose. Again I tottered to a stand and leaned against the truck while my legs woke up. The kill it turned out was no more than 50 yards from us. We passed it on the way in.

Typical lion kill

Four things usually indicate a deer killed by a mountain lion. The lion doesn't harry the animal so it is a clean kill with no hair pulled out during the chase. The lion kills the deer by breaking its neck. The third is not always present but a lion usually chews the ribs down as in the photo. The fourth thing I already mentioned: it doesn't eat its kill in the open. Long before we got to the carcass we saw a scattered trail of deer hair leading up to it. Coyotes bite at the deer's hindquarters pulling hair out during the chase but lions don't. The most obvious thing about the carcass when we reached it was its throat was torn out and its hind quarters lacerated. The final fact was it was in the middle of a pasture and no attempt had been made to conceal it. It was a very typical coyote kill just as we had suspected when we heard about it.

Joe, gentle, nice man that he was, did not want to offend the old boy by contradicting him so he brought his hounds over to check the scent. That was the wrong decision; an arrogant assertion that it was a coyote kill would have been better. The old boy's feelings and opinions were iron-clad. Bringing the hounds over didn't change his mind when they snuffled around and didn't give voice to the scent because they knew they weren't supposed to chase coyotes. The stubborn old goat decided the hounds were worthless as lion hounds and spread his "knowledge" far and wide in the community. It piled on adversity to what was already a difficult season.