There never used to be so many moose in this area. Historically, they ranged all throughout the West. Then Europeans – or maybe Native Americans before them – living on the landscape drove them northward. Back in the 1970s, the good people at the USFWS reintroduced them to the area north of Fort Collins, in Walden. They’ve been rompin’ and reproducin’ ever since.

Many make it down here to our valley of Tungsten, Colorado these days, attracted by ten acres backed up to the National Forest. The valley is replete with willows, one of their foraging foods. In the edge seasons – springtime and autumn – we see them often.

This morning, I hadn’t planned on it – but Smudges saw him first.

A young bull. Gorgeous and chocolately brown, I have him at about 800 pounds or so. It’s hard to tell when I’m fleeing and screaming for my errant Shepherd mutt at the same time.

They always sneak up on us. We were out for our morning walk before I settled in for a writing day in the barn. Blending in with the darkness of denuded foliage that is the winter landscape, I can no more discern a moose leg from a willow branch.

Then whoop, there he is…and there my dearest, most intelligent, two-year old Shepherd mutt goes. Off to remind him that he’s on the wrong side of the creek.

I snatch up my one-year old Labrador mutt in an instant – he backs out of his harness and he’s as free to join Smudges as she is to pursue our wayward wild friend. The mindset of a Labrador is different – a little less intelligent, I would argue – and a heck of a lot more obedient.

It doesn’t hurt to have lamb lung treats in my pocket.

Charlie – Charlie, please come…NOW, I whisper, bending low and pleading.

He sits down smack in front of me. I wrap a lead around his beautiful, naked, sleek black neck, stuff his mouth full of lamb lung treats, and dash for our nearby pickup truck. Our elderly, incontinent, diapered Shepherd mutt, Sheba, joins in hasty retreat.

We bound through drifted snow on the east side of the barnyard. Smudges’ indignant barking trumps those melodious mating Chickadee calls I was enjoying just moments earlier. For a second, I glance back to glimpse the moose shaking his gawky, gorgeous head. The blonde fur on the back of his neck is standing on end. He runs full out – galloping like a mustang – ears pinned back like a mustang in pursuit of a charging wolf. He is gaining on Smudges’ tan tush, trying to snatch her already bent tail. They are fifty feet away, her lead is flying wildly behind, and I can no more run through hard-crusted drifted snow in our woodlands than I can get her to obey my calls in the moment. I think of the calm voice the dog trainer employed when pulling her back on her 5-foot lead in the basic training class. Instantly, I feel inherently mocked by some invisible, authoritative voice of judgment.

Tossing Charlie in the pickup, I return to the woodlands nearby to attempt to grab Smudges. But she and our wayward wild friend are in a dance – I was just trying to browse – Hey, YOU! – You’re in MY WOODLANDS! – that I can only witness from a distance.

So I do the next logical thing my spinning brain came come up with at the moment: Call my husband at work, some 20 miles away. I am desperate for human involvement, if only remotely. And, I want him to know why Charlie has been in the pickup for 6 hours, Sheba is wandering around loose on our land, and Smudges is nowhere to be found…

As I lie collapsed from the onset of a massive coronary due to the sudden traumatic stress of it all.

Or so the story goes in my swirling mind. Continuing to call & chase for Smudges to return now in auditory witness of my husband from a distance, I run down further into the woodlands to find she is now chasing our wayward wild friend across the creek. Right up towards the gravity line, where the City of Boulder workers have been repairing the pipeline for weeks now.

My heart falls. I feel sad for the young bull moose, so very trapped between the loud Teramax machine and my errant mutt. He turns and charges again and again, she barks and runs, he turns and charges, he charges then retreats in circles, she barks, he turns and runs in her direction.

The entire dance takes somewhere between eternity and infinity. I can do nothing to reach her ten-foot dragline to pull her away from the taunting and harassing of our 800-pound wayward wild friend.

I scream for her to come, anyway.

Then, silence.

I look up to see an exhausted Shepherd mutt crossing the creek, returning in my direction. I welcome her as they say to do in dog training, employing my highest, least-agitated, affirming greeting. They never do tell you how to shelve your disappointment, frustration, anger and raw terror in the moment your dog fails to listen to your recall commands, much less screams of helplessness, in the presence of an 800-pound browsing moose.

I snatch up her lead and drag her back towards the pickup truck. Charlie is nestled in the back seat, curled up warmly in early springtime sunshine. Sheba putters back in her filthy, sopping-wet diaper back to the front porch. As for our wayward wild moose friend, I can’t precisely say where he ambled off to, though I’m fairly certain it will involve willows.

What do you want to be most known for? At the end of your life, what is it that you want people to be saying at your funeral?

For me, the thing I want people to known most about my time here is simple: I want to be known as the best advocate for animals I could be, the ones chancing across my awareness. The ones I know personally — and those from afar — because all animals need people to speak in the best voice possible.

And, being an animal advocate is challenging work. It is soul-derived, soul-driven, spirit-infused and life-inspired work. It is an undertaking of a journey which I began decades before. But it takes time to develop a place in the pragmatic world that is our capitalist culture, a different kind of undertaking that only reveals itself with patience, persistence, faith and a spirit-guided synchronicity…

***

I’ve always earned income. From the time I was eleven years old and I looked at my French immigrant father and Italian codependent mother I realized, these people can’t give me what I need.

So I broke through the fence, literally. It was separating me from the outside world. A barrier erected between the Chicago suburban apartments in which I spent my adolescence and the shopping center behind. I removed one of the slats, crawled through and began opening doors to every business there. Can I sweep your floors? Can I clean your house? Do you have a car I can wash? Do you have a cat I can babysit?

I started there. I never stopped. Until nine years ago, when divorce ended my life in law and a self-employment income. Since then, I’ve done many things: Mediation, writing, contract paralegal work. I’ve been wandering in the field of opportunities, chances and attempts ever since. I feel like The Handless Maiden, as shared by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in Women who run with the Wolves.

Anyone who’s ever gone through a divorce knows what a car crash it can be. It didn’t surprise me when four years on, I found myself perfectly lonely and focusing on my career.

It was then I met my government scientist, a man with whom I’d fall into natural love and marry. He loves animals alongside me — no arguments, and no questions.

I’m still working on the whole career thing.

This morning, I set myself about the task of looking on Internet job searches for things I could do other than writing about how we need to better treat animals. I was met by the words:

We’re a bunch of hip-happening professionals living mostly in Costa Rica (but some of us are in the U.S.) We need a highly skilled, experienced content writer for our start-up company.

They lost me at hip happening, a term I haven’t used since before the turn of the New Millennium.

Meanwhile, our rescue dogs look longingly at me. Three of our six rescue cats are caterwauling until I show up with what has become my briefcase — a basket containing the morning’s writing, fresh water and a few even fresher ideas for the day’s work – in my barn loft office. Pavie, our Maine Coon rescue, wails a loud greeting at me. I was looking for opportunities to help buy Fromm kibble, Pavie, sorry I’m late, I tell him, rubbing his head. Uncle Irving, our 17-year old Orange Tabby, yowls like the little old man cat he is until I scratch his chin. He rushes over to my desk, eager to rest his head on my forearm as I type.

I’ve taken to shooing him gently so as to get some space to write. I cannot type with cat-fur on my keyboard.

Meanwhile, our dogs whine. Aren’t we going for a walk? You do have all this free time, after all.

I am dying to continue the day. I’m already feeling discouraged – the worst thing one can do with any Monday morning is search the job board on the internet. It’s self-abuse. It’s all that anonymity. How do other animal advocates live, besides working for $12.50 an hour at a nonprofit or bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s for $15? Me,  I hold out visions for a few dollars more while I pour my energy into the day’s writing. This morning, it’s about a little dog rescue in Shawnee, Oklahoma, one struggling even worse then myself, to sustain to take in just one more dog for just one more day.

When I myself feel really discouraged, I think of the bag clerks at King Soopers. They’re working — at least – albeit, bagging groceries. This morning, I feel I could be a shoe-in.

Time for a break. I dash downstairs in my barn loft office for a quick walk. I feel as challenged to walk upright against February’s gusting winds blasting off the Continental Divide as I do to find places to sustain my advocacy work. I return quicker than the dogs want, relocate Uncle Irving to his perch, and sit down at my Mac. I focus on the connection I made on Saturday at the local wine shop:

Wow, you actually have your dog in a diaper?

I turned to meet an old acquaintance, a man looking for a writer to provide content for his sustainable communities nonprofit. My ears perked up as I eagerly took down his information. He bends down to pet my incontinent twelve-year old Shepherd mutt.

Maybe I can send him a sample piece on Black Bears and coexistence in the Rocky Mountains, I say to Uncle Irving. He yowls back at me.

I stare up at the bead boards in the ceiling for a while, recalling the time I cut and hammered in each and every piece in our six hundred square foot loft space. I used to live up here with my former, without running water on solar energy. After we divorced, I blew out the west wall to have a view of our mountain valley and installed a bamboo floor to have a brighter space in which to call my own for writing. I figure if I’m going to have a writing career I best cut down on the commute time (and expense) of having a separate office. Besides which, I can share the space with our cats.

I return to Uncle Irving, who is now purring. I think back to another acquaintance I made at a funeral I attended last week. A lover of Anatolian Shepherds (those exotic livestock protection dogs recently drafted into wolf mitigation programs), she’d adopted one from Oklahoma just last month. I think of connecting her to another woman, Sherry, who saved my own Oklahoma Labrador mutt, Charlie. She is struggling to find help to care for the Anatolian Shepherd hit by a truck last week. After they lifted the truck off his body and rushed him to the vet, Marmaduke’s surgery cost $3,000. Her nonprofit is modest. At seventy-four years young, Sherry herself drives the van from Oklahoma into Colorado several times a month, saving as many mutts and Anatolian Shepherds from neglect, abuse and death by gas chamber as she can.

If she can do it, so can I.

A new idea comes: Can I connect my funeral acquaintance with the Oklahoma rescue, find Marmaduke a sponsor? Why not?

***

Indeed, life as a sensitive advocate in this pragmatic, capitalistic-oriented society is a unique path. It is not about finding the perfect match for a job search on Indeed.com, ironically. It’s about persistence, patience, faith and devotion. It takes time for the larger human community to cultivate the same love I feel in my own heart for the rescue dogs in need. We are an inundated culture with everyone clamoring loudly for attention. But if we don’t stop to hear what’s most important — our deepest selves and our soul’s longings — how can we ever do our real life’s work?

I step forward and deeper into the morning, into one more opportunity to pursue this path with an open heart and a brighter mind. I don’t know if the prospective sponsor will say Yes, I’d love to help that Anatolian Shepherd or if the connection with my fellow wine-loving sustainable community guy will lead to the next freelance writing piece. I move into the week with inspiration gathered from those I follow these days – Lee Harris and Mike Dooley, the Notes from the Universe Guy – because they help enlarge my world, brighten my spirit and ground my creativity in a reality that I am certain exists if only I can find it in larger quantities. As a sensitive advocate, I need all the help I can find in like-minded community. This morning, it feels I need the breath of an angel to whisper the next move, right into my awaiting ear.