Aug. 12--It would be easy to mistake Jerre Fisher for a sweet, loving, slightly naive grandmother, the kind who says, "That's nice, dear" a lot.

Fisher, 72, is exactly that in many ways. At her rural Greeley home surrounded by corn, she keeps, among others, a horse she named Prince and a donkey and several ducks that she yells at when they fight. The Canada goose, the one she's had for many years after it broke its wing from flying into a telephone wire, hangs out with the ducks.

"I hate to let anything die," she said. "I even feed the mice in the hayshed."

She's made hundreds of soft, intricate, colorful blankets for the babies at North Colorado Medical Center, and she instructs the nurses to give them to the mothers who come in alone and leave with a baby alone.

Her exasperated doctor told her to stop watching the news because it makes her cry too much, like when she sees reports about a dog being eaten by a mountain lion.

She was so concerned about cooking and spending time with family during the holidays, when doctors told her to come in and address the lump that was growing for a second time in her breast, she told them to wait.

But then, well, there's this other side. The side who married Fish, a biker who took her on trips and crashed twice with her. Fish, whom she married in 1999, was much better than her first husband, a drug addict who tried to kill her.

She is grateful for the first crash, the one on a mountain road that stripped most of the skin on one side, because it made her swear to always wear a helmet. The second crash surely would have killed her without one.

She got through the first crash with a lot of gauze, six beers and a lot of ibuprofen.

The second, in 2004, threw her 30 feet and cracked her skull. She spent six weeks in the hospital. But she made it. The helmet didn't.

Her friends from the Greeley chapter of the Harley Owners Group love both sides. They call her the matriarch, even if she quit riding after that second crash. Fisher writes the newsletter for the group besides acting as Mom or Grandma.

"She is the sunshine," said Terri Hilderman, a member of the Greeley H.O.G. who lives east of Galeton. "She's always got a smile and a hug and holds us all together."

The hugs, Fisher said, keep her alive, and when you meet her, you'd better not be shy about giving one out.

Yet Hilderman also giggles when a recent visitor tells her that Fisher dropped a four-letter bomb or two. Yep, she said, that's Fisher.

Fisher admits that she'll need that tough-as-leather side, maybe as much as the hugs. She beat breast cancer the first time in 2003 and did not think she would ever battle it again. But the lump, amazingly, returned, and now she's in a fight for her life, with Stage 4 cancer in her blood and liver and what's left of her breast, and doctors think she may have to be on chemo the rest of her life.

But for this fight, she has soldiers. She has a little terrier she calls "Amazing Grace" who helps her through the chemotherapy. During the treatments, as the poison pours into her body, Gracie, with a pink ribbon in her hair, sits on her chest and gives her an occasional kiss with her beetle-sized tongue.

When the poison makes her sick, Gracie helps soothe the pain. It's possible all her animals have kept her alive. When she wakes up and feels like throwing up, which is almost every morning, she knows her animals need to eat, and she's the one who feeds them. So she gets up and gets moving. That's something.

She also has her family, of course. Her family of children and grandchildren and the biker husband. And she has her family of biker friends, too.

"I'll tell you what," Fisher said. "If I beat this, all the members of H.O.G. are going to go out, and we're all gonna drink Jack Daniels."

Probably only after she thanks them with a hug.

-- Staff writer Dan England covers the outdoors, entertainment and Fort Lupton for The Tribune. His column runs on Tuesday. If you have an idea for a column, call (970) 392-4418 or write dengland@greeleytribune.com.] To see more of the Greeley Tribune, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.greeleytribune.com. Copyright (c) 2008, Greeley Tribune, Colo. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.