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The cascading notes of Ol’ Lilly’s
hunting horn were some of the signature sounds by which he was known, as
peculiar to the man as the recognizable songs of his mixed-breed dogs. It could be said that throughout his life, he was a man more relaxed and
intimate with wild places and his faithful, panting canines than with any
friend or wife.
Benjamin Lilly was one of the greatest hunters and most fascinating
characters of the quickly civilizing West. He dressed like a
mountain man, preferred sleeping outdoors to a proffered room and bed, and
would sometimes walked hundreds of miles in pursuit of a single elusive
bear. From childhood hunts in the 1870’s until his death in the
latter part of the 1930’s, Mr. Lilly
was what we’d now call an "anachronism:” a man still inhabiting an earlier
time– and in many ways, the last of his kind. Ben was an unrepentant
atavist, a proud throwback, a devout adherent to archaic ways of being
that he believed to be more meaningful and heroic. Or at least more
tolerable.... and more vitally experienced!
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Ben Lilly usually hunted with hounds.
"Down there by the river
is a man.... and he bears the look of an animal, and sees things no
animal should ever see. He has been driven beyond all towns and all
systems.... Though it is long past too far, he keeps going.”
-- Ricki Lee Jones
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Ben was
known far and wide for his incredible stamina when walking or running. He carried only the barest essentials in his surplus pack, with no
more bedding than a wool blanket and a tattered canvas tarp. When he philosophized that "Property is a handicap to man” he wasn’t
proposing some socialist manifesto, but rather, a recipe for camping
light! Long before beatniks, hippies and punks–
Ben Lilly preached the importance of owning little, so that our
things don’t own us. He preferred liberty and free time over
possessions he couldn’t carry on his back, and eschewed anything that
required constant maintenance and thus a sedentary life.
Lilly
was a latter day
Daniel Boone in his canvas pants, brogans and coonskin cap,
packing a Winchester 1886 or 1894 rifle and a huge handmade knife. Like
Boone before him, he endlessly sought out new vistas and
challenges, in an attempt to escape the population density and social
propriety that his relentless hunting of lions and bears had actually
helped make possible. He lives on as a larger-than-life legend
among the rural folk of Louisiana,
Texas,
New Mexico
and Arizona....
and particularly among the individualistic residents of the Gila
National Forest where he hunted throughout the latter half of his
life. Only recently have the last folks died who could remember
having met
Lilly, and their children and grandchildren continue to be the
keepers and tellers of his timeless tale.
As he himself tells
it in Frank Dobie’s The Legend of
Ben Lilly, "My reputation is bigger than I am. It is like a
shadow when I stand in front of the sun in late evening.”
He was not merely
blowing his horn, but hearing and heeding a call.
It’s said that some people are born
"marching to a different drummer,” leading them in a different
direction than the vast majority of their civilized kind. They
may be legendary heroines or salty folk heroes, long forgotten
heretics or anonymous hermits ensconced in their howling caves. And even Jesus needed forty days and forty nights in the wilderness–
away from the prattle and preconception of village life– in order to
fully experience the truth of self and the reality of God.
A few such
fringe-dwellers have managed to earn the accolades or acknowledgment of
their society through some combination of ability, fortune and
circumstance: Intemperate military officers, whose disobedience of
official orders somehow results in his army’s victory, in what turns out
to be a pivotal fight. Women with besmirched reputations and
incorrigible attitudes, who prove their mettle during a siege by "Red Leg”
guerillas or a frontier cholera outbreak. Individuals who are just
warming up when others are already running from the heat. Courageous
leaders and founders of important social, religious and artistic
movements, who started out the kinds of kids that not even the strictest
schoolmarm could make sit still in their seats. They are often the
last to give up the olden ways, and also the first to try something
strange and new. They may laugh or cry a little more freely than
others do– or else stubbornly cling to silence, and tightly cleave to
solitude.
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Their fevered allegiance
to a calling or a way of being has always come at a cost, be it
misunderstanding, oppression or neglect. Among
Native
American tribes such personalities were highly valued as soothsayers,
healers, teachers and agents of Spirit during moments of crisis.... but
the remainder of the time their wild eyed intensity could be just a little
too much for their brethren, resulting in medicine men and shamans usually
setting up their lodges at the extreme outer edges of any village or camp.
The Buddha would have
died unknown and been viewed as crazy while he lived, if no one had taken
the time to really listen to him. Joan of Arc may have been an
"emissary of the Lord” and bore his ring, but she avoided the fire only so
long as she served the interests of church, state and king. Sioux
warrior Crazy Horse was honored for his brilliance and excess during that
tribe’s frequent battles, but few people wanted to sit and have tea with
him in the peaceful weeks or months between. The pundits, party
goers and power brokers of Washington DC found famed Indian-fighter Davy
Crocket entertaining– but also crude, odoriferous and overbearing. And oddly enough, the issue that put an end to the famed Indian-fighter’s
career as a U.S. Congressman, was daring to object to President Jackson’s
policy of forcibly removing Indian tribes from the land of the ancestors
who lived, loved and died before them.
Ben Lilly was just such a man, neither noble nor licentious, but
authentic to a fault. He was in some ways closer kin to the lions
and bears that he hunted than either the settled country folk who adored
him or the government men who eventually paid his wage. Like those other
furry beasts of the forests and deserts, it could be said that the always
bearded
Ben Lilly was cut from a wilder cloth.
Ol’ Ben’s
fervent and archaic form of Christianity did not exclude drawing
spiritually from the natural world: "I always sleep better [on the
earth],” he tells us. "Something agreeable to my system seeps into it from
the ground.”
The early Greeks would
have called this "something agreeable” the "anima mundi:” the palpable
energies of the planet itself, and the native spirit of place. For Lilly it
was simply an unfathomable incarnation or creation of an obviously
outdoor-loving God.
Truly, the land was as a
bodily extension of Ben’s
being.... even if he seemed to sometimes treat his other affiliated parts–
his fellow creatures– coldly or harshly. At the same time that he
was making his living by killing, the hyperawareness of the hunt brought
him deeper into awareness and celebration of all life. He understood
how blue jays and tree squirrels functioned as aids and agents of his own
physical senses, alerting him to the movements of both people and game. He learned to hear through the ears each region’s animal sentinels, and to
see through the eyes of its watchful birds. The fields, hills and hollers
were more than pretty scenery or an opportunity for outdoor recreation–
more than a stage for the acting out of an individual’s personal dramas. Lilly
viewed nature as an unfolding lesson, as a book that any man could read
and understand if he only took the time to pay attention. And as a
sermon, and solution. As the challenge, and the reward.
"Every man and woman
ought to get out and be with the elements a while every day....” Ben
advised. The outdoors would alert, instruct, and inspire us. Reawaken our intuition and instinct, and stir our emotions. Reconnect us
to the basic elements of life like hunger and food, weather and fire. Strengthen our intent. Temper our steel.
If anything, Lilly
followed his own advice to the extreme: seldom stepping indoors except to
buy a few supplies or share a grateful rancher’s meal. Mabel Hudson
of the old Hudson Ranch near here, told about her parents spotting him
nest among his dogs in a roadside ditch one day, and how they offered him
a place to stay. "Thank you, but I prefer to spend the night right
here, if that’s okay.”
Perhaps as a result of so
much time outside, Ben was
physically impressive and a man of extreme determination. By the
time he was a young man he was already amazing the locals with his
unexcelled stamina, and he’d often perform feats of strength for their
entertainment. One such demonstration was to pick up a giant anvil by the
throat with a single hand. Dobie reports one occasion when he
was abnormally tired and unable to make the lift, but how he kept
straining and trying until blood literally "burst out of his fingertips.”
Old time Catron County
cowboy Lee Sturgeon passed down a story from his childhood, when one day
he and some other boys spotted Ben
carrying a hunter client on his back across a swollen river. "Get
off that old man!,” they shouted. The client yelled back that he sincerely
wanted to, but simply couldn’t. Lilly had
him in an iron grip, and he wasn’t about to let go!
And apparently he could be bluntly honest. One story making its way around various Catron hunting camps, tells of a
young boy asking Lilly if it
was true that his dogs "never run deer.” Bear and lion dogs are
trained to chase nothing else, and not to get distracted by the scent or
sight of other game. Needless to say, most proud hunters and dog
handlers would see the little fellow’s question as an opportunity to brag,
exaggerate, obfuscate or lie. But not
Benjamin Lilly. "I’ll tell you, son,” the by then old man
replied.... "sometimes they run them ragged!”
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