Enslaved by Ducks

by Tarte, Bob

  The drive from Lowell to Ionia along M-21 always provided a wealth of interesting sights. My favorite was an ancient Standard Oil gas-station sign embedded in the bank, or perhaps the Dumpster built to resemble a miniature house. Linda’s favorite had been a complex of pens containing tame white-tail deer near the village of Saranac, until the owner blocked her view with a stockade fence to protect them from trigger-happy, beer-besotted hunters. She also enjoyed a barnyard where white Charolais cattle ate constantly from their trough. One Sunday, as she drove to church, she noticed a tiny enclosure on the Charolais property with a large bird inside. On her way home, a closer look revealed a dirty white Muscovy duck confined to a cage so small he didn’t have room to flap his wings. Never one to shy away from promoting animal welfare—especially when it involved the chance to knock on a total stranger’s door and engage in conversation—Linda decided to ask the farmer to sell her the duck.

  I met Linda in our driveway after church. Peering through her car window, I noticed that the animal carrier had migrated from her trunk to the backseat, but I couldn’t tell for sure if the duck was inside. “Did you talk to him?”

  “He was a really nice guy.”

  “Then why was he keeping a duck in a cramped little cage?”

  “We might not know what to do with him, either,” she answered.

  “Why is that?”

  “He didn’t want to sell him to me. I offered him ten dollars, but he wouldn’t take it. He said he was a really mean duck that they originally got as a Christmas present for the grandchildren, and they used to fuss over him all the time. Then when he got bigger, he started hissing at the kids—he hisses at everyone—and chased them around the yard. He became such a nuisance trying to bite people, he eventually had to put him in a cage. He used to be in with another duck, but he thinks he might have killed it, because they woke up one morning and the other duck was dead.”

  “Well, we don’t want that kind of duck, either.”

  “He looked so pathetic in that cage, I asked the farmer, ‘Would you sell him to me?’ and I tried to give him ten dollars, but he told me no. He said the duck was only worth twenty-five cents, and that’s all he would take. He made me give him a quarter. But he told me not to take any chances, to keep the duck away from us and keep him away from the other ducks. So you’ll have to put up a fence to keep him separate.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a fence’?”

  “Like the loop you put in the pen to separate the call ducks,” she answered cheerily. “I want to call him Hector.”

  “I don’t want him at all. He sounds too dangerous to keep.”

  “He looks like a Hector.”

  “I’ve still got the loop,” I conceded. “I saved it.”

  “Make sure he can’t get out of it,” Linda said. “I don’t want any of our ducks getting killed.”

  With trepidation, I trudged briskly to the lower level of the barn, where I had left the wire loop curled up next to the disassembled tree-branch “teepees” that had supported Linda’s pole beans the previous year. Even the geese seemed nervous when I dragged the fence into their pen, and honk restlessly as I nailed it to the wooden posts with poultry staples. Finishing the task with a couple of hammer whacks, I brooded about a sociopathic twenty-five-cent Muscovy possibly disrupting our peaceful duck and goose society. Hector’s introduction also put my own well-being at risk, as defined by Dr. Glaser. Despite the occasional bouts of animal injury or illness, pet care had settled into a series of routines and rituals, from bedtime vocal concerts to elaborate parrot feedings. Hector stood poised to add an element of chaos. He threatened to complicate rather than simplify my life. What would come next after taking in a killer duck? Living with bears in the hollowed-out side of a hill?

  “It’s done,” I told Linda, who waited outside the duck pen with the animal carrier in tow. “You might as well grab him out and bring him in.”

  “I’m not picking him up!”

  “Then put the carrier inside the loop.”

  The carrier entered the circular enclosure as I stepped out of it. Leaning down, I popped the latch with as little finger contact with the front grate as possible. Clutching the top handle and the smooth plastic back, I tipped the carrier forward, releasing the Muscovy in the same way I had released the raccoons. My first glimpse of Hector shocked me. He was as wiry and tough a duck as I could have imagined. His feathers were white but soiled by streaks of dirt. Patches of yellow on the flat of his tail suggested a recent dabbing with iodine. But his face was the immediate attention getter. While Daphne wore a demure mask of bare facial skin, the entire front of Hector’s head was encased in a bright red fleshy, knobby mass that no stretch of the imagination could term visually appealing. He didn’t need defenses against rivals or predators. Appearance alone would discourage attack. Compounding the effect of this visceral hood, a narrow crest of feathers rose from his head in a series of connected spikes. Beak wide open, steely eyes flashing, he panted a gravelly succession of hisses whose vehemence made me retreat from the fence, swallow hard, back out of the pen, and wish the other residents the best of luck.

  The spectacle of Hector compelled me to reconsider Dr. Glaser’s insight to my dreams. Maybe they didn’t reflect my love of habit and routines after all and were as bland as unbuttered toast for a far more obvious reason. My days included such improbabilities as a parrot that could reason, a dove-breeding magician, bunny songs, the night-night hat, a duck that personified a raging id, and my role as a tree for our birds. With waking hours that outrageous, who needed an excursion to Xanadu after dark?

  CHAPTER 10

  Let’s Talk Turkey

  Sweetheart, come out here quick! Hurry, sweetheart.” A fresh layer of snow tried to muffle Linda’s voice. But her summons still reached me upstairs from the backyard, penetrating two panes of glass, thirty feet of diagonal space, and the pleasant whoosh of heated air through the furnace duct. I was lounging in my office enjoying a cup of ginger tea and savoring the fact that Linda was taking care of the ducks on a frigid January afternoon while I read a detective novel with a warm cat pressed against my leg.

  “Sweetie, come quick, it’s Hector!”

  Bolting out of my chair, I thudded down a flight of stairs, dodged a twenty-five-pound bag of rabbit food in the living room corridor, and bounded toward the basement. Various unpleasant scenarios crowded my brain. The farmer who had sold us Hector three months earlier was right about our Muscovy’s mercurial personality. Hector could have injured one of our ducks, though so far he had reserved his aggressive attitude for people. That meant he might be chasing Linda. When gripped by a darker mood, he would not be deterred from latching on to a leg or article of clothing with his wickedly serrated beak. Or the blowhard could have clashed with our neighbor’s dog or a raccoon on snack break from hibernation. Clomping across the basement floor, I expected the worst as I threw open the back door. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

  Dressed in a nylon jacket and crowned with the inevitable stocking cap, Linda stood beaming on the back deck with a large white duck perched on her shoulder.

  “What is he doing up there? Are you okay?” I demanded, fearful that Hector might have bitten my wife silly.

  “He flew up there himself. Well, he didn’t exactly fly. I was bending down to pick up the hose, and he sort of climbed up all on his own.”

  “You must be very proud,” I muttered above the hammering of my heart. “Both of you.”

  “Take a picture of us, sweetie!”

  WE HAD AT FIRST treated Hector with such extraordinary caution, he might as well have been a fer-de-lance. Isolated in his wire loop, he was safely prevented from inflicting any evil on our geese and ducks that his Muscovy mind might devise. I was especially wary of him. When dangling an arm into his loop to give him water or a fresh bowl of feed, I moved in exaggeratedly slow motion, speaking in the same reassuring voice that Dr. Glaser had used successfully with me.

  “Now, I
’m just giving you something nice to eat, Hector,” I’d quietly explain. “Here, I’m setting down the bowl, and in no way should my fingers remind you of edible pink worms. They are far too bony to enjoy, not succulent like Linda’s, if you get my drift.”

  After a couple of days of keeping Hector in solitary confinement, Linda complained, “This isn’t any better than the way he lived before. He needs room to move around.”

  “How about Idaho?”

  “Just let him out. He looks utterly harmless to me.”

  “So did Ollie, and Hector’s a lot bigger.”

  But the next time the ducks were grazing in the yard, Linda deemed it a good opportunity to test Hector’s social skills, despite my whining protests. “It’s a huge area,” she pointed out. “He shouldn’t feel territorial or hostile toward the ducks or geese.”

  “How about toward the person who picks him up?”

  With a dismissive sigh, Linda reached into Hector’s pen, pulled him out without incident, and deposited him on the grass near our geese Liza and Hailey. I took two long steps sideways that simultaneously took me closer to the geese in order to protect them in case of an attack and also closer to the basement door should I decide to run for it instead. The geese continued nibbling at the lawn as Hector waggled his tail and waddled a few steps toward them. The female ducks busied themselves patrolling the area near the spirea bush in search of fresh patches of gourmet mud. Stewart and Trevor shadowed the females at a distance, confused by their low autumnal hormone levels as to what they should do next. A tanker truck thundered past the house. A sulfur butterfly fluttered in a splash of sunlight on the border of our woods. Hector moved closer to Liza, flapped his wings, and ambled off on his own in another direction.

  Once back inside the pen, the story was different. The geese and female ducks gave the liberated Hector a wide berth, as if they were noticing him for the first time, while Stewart and Trevor quacked in whispered gratitude for the fence that separated them from the Muscovy. Hector walked to the water bucket, towing a perimeter of empty space around him. Looking bored, he gave the feed dish a perfunctory peck, toddled toward Maxine, who scurried away from him, then began preening the base of his neck with his beak. From the open basement door, I leaned toward the yard, expecting a ruckus at any moment. During dinner, deafened to the outside world by the indoor birds, we peered through the windows. A placid white shape stood by as the geese splashed in the pool. Then it was dark. There was no trouble the next day, either.

  Hector turned out to be a complex Jekyll and Hyde of a fellow who seldom socialized with the other ducks. For days at a time, his behavior was innocuous almost to the point of invisibility, as he kept silently to himself while brooding over weighty matters known only to a waterfowl who doesn’t enjoy the water. His antipathy toward the pool was responsible for the dirt-streaked feathers that gave him the air of a tough from the wrong side of the marsh. Even by Muscovy standards, the preen gland at the base of his back wasn’t up to snuff. Try as he might to groom his feathers, his beak either came up dry or globbed his tail and lower back with yellow spots. Once Linda realized how agreeable our “Ducker Jekyll” could be, she occasionally whisked him into the basement, plunked him in the laundry tub, and lathered him up with baby shampoo. “I think he likes it!” a soaked Linda would holler up the stairs to me, as Hector thrashed in the basin. She never quite got him clean—industrial solvents would have been required—but he looked substantially better after a bath and sported an agreeable Johnson & Johnson scent.

  Hector’s Mr. Hyde aspect would descend upon him without warning. One day he’d be docile and withdrawn. The next day, without so much as the portent of a full moon, he would undergo a personality cataclysm. As if seized by the spirit of a rabid lapdog, he would follow us around the yard panting with great gusto, his crimson-masked head thrown back, beak thrust open, crest raised, and glassy eyes lit with incomprehensible intent. “He just wants to be petted,” Linda explained, and against any prediction I would have made, he huffed and puffed contentedly in place as she stroked the back of his neck. If she sat down in the grass, he would actually climb upon her lap in search of affection.

  But petting him could be risky. His hissing just as often gave way to aggression, as he defended what he considered his territory. When Hector was out of the pen and out of sorts, I seldom ventured into the backyard without a pushbroom to push between my body and his jagged-edged bill, capable of inflicting frighteningly hued hematomas. If he was bent upon attack, there was no cowing him. On one occasion, each time he came at me with blood-lust on his brain, I picked him up and tossed him in the air, but he would not be discouraged. Fluttering to the ground, he resumed the attack unceasingly and tirelessly. When he was in such a state, there was no herding him back to the pen with the others. Carefully avoiding his snapping beak, I picked him up, clamped him against my chest, and plunked him down inside the pen. But he never transferred this hostility to his fellow inmates. He wandered sullenly but nonviolently among the ducks and geese, as disconnected from their social order as a tortoise at a bridge tournament.

  Though Hector’s good days and bad days were evenly doled out, we doted on his outgoing personality most of the time and found more comedy than threat in his rages. He was mysteriously selective in his judgments about people. Whenever my parents and sisters, Joan and Bette, came for a Saturday lunch, we inevitably lured them into the yard. Without hesitation, Hector would bypass my well-nipped legs in favor of launching beak strikes at my mother. She was, in fact, the first of us ever to suffer a Hector attack, and because she was so engrossed describing a friend’s latest ailment, she didn’t even notice that a large duck was chewing on the hem of her dress until I pulled him away. Just as quickly as Hector categorized my mom as beak fodder, he tagged Linda’s friend Deanne a romantic interest.

  “Isn’t he sweet,” cooed Linda, as Deanne sat under our hackberry tree holding and stroking the love-struck miscreant. “I hope he decides to become Daphne’s husband. Rupert Murdoch said that Muscovies make the best mothers.”

  “What a thought. That would mean more ducklings,” I pointed out.

  “I would love it if we had some baby ducklings.”

  “Muscovy ducklings,” I added, but Linda still didn’t get my drift.

  “Growing up into big Muscovies. Like Hector,” Deanne prompted. Sensing that he was being insulted, Hector scuffled his clawed feet until Deanne set him on the ground.

  WE DID END UP with baby ducks, but Daphne wasn’t the mother. Before the first snowfall of the season arrived—and a month before Hector turned himself into my wife’s epaulet—Daphne grew listless and stopped eating. Linda brought her indoors late one afternoon to spare her from a cold and windy night, and by morning she was dead.

  “I think she was older than we knew,” Linda said. “She looked old when we first got her.” And it was true that even in death she seemed worn down rather than at rest. She had carried the heavy burden of ushering us into the world of poultry and had witnessed the passing of three friends—Phoebe, Martha, and feisty little Peggy. She was not only our first duck, she was our sole mouse-devouring duck, and her passing saddened us.

  Although our waterfowl dormitory was segregated into male and female residences, we frequently allowed the boys and girls to mingle in the yard once spring had passed and Stewart and Trevor were no longer constantly chasing the hens—and I use that word correctly. Female ducks are hens. Male ducks are drakes. And duck owners who permit unchaperoned conjugals are asking for unplanned embryos. We were accustomed to Maxine and Chloe disappearing into their doghouses and sitting on a nest of unfertilized eggs for days on end, rarely abandoning their vigil to eat, drink, or upbraid our lawn. So we didn’t take the latest round of incubation behavior seriously until the morning we were greeted with the sound of peeping from the pen. Maxine jealously guarded four brown-and-yellow gobs of fluff. Chloe had just one duckling of her own. Considering her broken leg and limited mobility, one young
ster was probably all she could handle. Chloe proved that she could handle me just fine when I reached for the tiny brown baby and she flew at my face. Miraculously, she missed my nose—only to catch my wrist with two rattlesnake-quick bites.

  Linda was ecstatic about the babies. She laughed when they came out from their shelters to peck crumbled duck meal, whooped when they flapped their stubby, featherless wings, and nearly exploded when three of them tried swimming in their water bowl. But she also felt the weight of worry that any new mother undergoes. “What if Hector’s mean to them?” though he was too self-absorbed to even acknowledge their presence underfoot. “What if they get stuck in the swimming pool and drown,” she fretted, but they were too small to climb over the rim. “Do you think they’ll be safe out in the yard?” Behaving like miniature adults, they followed the other ducks around the lawn, the synchronized twitching of green sprigs betraying their presence in the tall grass.

  Even I got caught up in the excitement, phoning my friend Brian in Washington, D.C., to brag, “We’ve got baby ducks!”

  “So do we,” Brian replied. “We’ve got them in the pond behind the condo.”

  “But these are ours,” I emphasized.

  “We’re raising them.” “We’ve got all kinds of them,” Brian bragged. “You’ve got to come out here and see them.”

  By midsummer, the ducklings had grown as large as their parents. They had also sprouted adult feathers and acquired determinable genders. Chloe’s Clara was her double. Via one or both of the male Khaki Campbells, Maxine had produced the mostly brown Gwelda, who wore a mallard’s white and blue hashmarks on her wings, and the miraculous Marybelle, who accessorized a coat like her sister Gwelda’s by adding a beige ring around her neck.