by Tarte, Bob
“You hear that?” he asked me, laying down his stethoscope. “There it is again. You can hear a definite click whenever she breathes. Dr. Hedley was certainly correct prescribing Baytril for pneumonia, but I don’t think we have that here. From her labored breathing and weakened condition, I suspect she’s suffering from aspergillosis. It’s common among waterfowl and raptors. Many of them are carriers, and the acute stage can be brought on by the type of stress that the male mallards probably caused her. To be certain, we would need to perform an aspergilla titer.”
My head was swimming. “What was that you said she has?”
“She probably has aspergillosis,” he repeated. “It is a fungal infection that birds can pick up in damp conditions that favor mold growth, especially if their immune system isn’t working like it should. Wet straw usually provides favorable conditions for the fungus, which is why we sometimes see this in animals kept in barns. Humans can get aspergillosis, too, so you have to be careful if you have close contact with an infected bird. It is not something you want to get,” he cautioned. “It resembles tuberculosis and it is very stubborn to treat.”
“Is it fatal for a bird?” I asked, trying not to gulp. I stretched out a hand and placed it on Liza’s back for moral support.
“Not necessarily,” he told me, with a rise in his voice that indicated it usually was. “What I would suggest is that we keep Liza overnight for observation. She’s pretty weak, so I would like to do a tube feeding to get some nourishment in her, and we’ll give her a vitamin injection. Aspergillosis is difficult to positively diagnose. We need to take a blood sample and send it to a lab in Chicago for an aspergilla titer. The result can take four or five days, so I would recommend that we assume she does have aspergillosis and begin the appropriate treatment immediately with an antifungal medication.”
I didn’t know what a titer was, but I nodded my head while groping for a suitably intelligent facial expression. I left Liza in Dr. Fuller’s hands with far more optimism than the situation warranted. But his thoroughness impressed me with the belief that if anyone could turn the situation around, he could.
Back home I hopped onto the Internet and posted a question on a pet-bird newsgroup, asking if anyone had successfully treated a bird stricken with aspergillosis. A few hours later I received an e-mail from a woman who called herself Toucanlady. “I treated an Amazon parrot that had the acute generalized form of aspergillosis. He was emaciated and very ill. He eventually recovered, but it is a long hard road. Good luck.”
I headed back to the vet’s the next day to pick her up. The staff was all smiles once I stated my name and was recognized as the goose person. “We just love Liza,” a technician told me. “She’s so sweet.”
“She didn’t try to bite anyone?” I asked.
“Liza?” asked the technician incredulously. She reacted as if I had disparaged a lifelong friend with whom she used to share a carton of milk in kindergarten. “Liza wouldn’t bite anybody.”
“No, no, of course not,” I assured her, recalling the muddy beak prints she had embossed on various shirts I owned. “Not Liza.”
Dr. Fuller greeted me in the examination room, then led me through a secret doorway and into the inner recesses of the clinic. Guided by flickering torchlight, we trudged through miles of winding corridors before ending up in a squeaky-clean hospital area where hard-luck cases received constant care. Liza trumpeted a hello before I spotted her in the second tier of a shiny aluminum-sided high-rise of pens that somehow reminded me of restaurant ovens. I half expected to find our goose resting on a bed of wild rice.
“Liza has been doing very well, haven’t you, Liza?” Dr. Fuller asked. She answered with an enthusiastic volley of staccato notes. The technician handed him a clipboard, which he glanced at briefly. “She took the tube feeding with no problem, and she’s been eating on her own. Aside from her getting her medication on schedule, her recovery depends on making sure she receives sufficient nourishment each day.”
“Linda has already set up living quarters for her on our porch,” I told him. “Or maybe those are for me, and she’ll be moving into the house. At any rate, we’ll wait on her hand and foot until she’s well.”
“In that case,” he said, while writing on the lab report, “I would list her prognosis as ‘Guarded’ upgraded to ‘Fair’”—he circled both words with ballpoint whorls—“as long as she receives the proper care. And I see that she’ll be getting that.”
“She is our golden goose from now on,” I replied.
That remark proved frighteningly accurate once I totaled up the bill for Liza’s treatment and lab tests, then added the cost of a pricey prescription that we couldn’t get filled just anywhere. Her antifungal medication wasn’t an off-the-shelf item. It needed to be compounded, meaning its chemical constituents had to be carefully measured and mixed by hand. Apparently, few pharmacists in the area did anything more ambitious than transferring pills from large containers to small bottles and filling out insurance forms. The closest drug store staffed by pharmaceutical initiates skilled in the ancient alchemical principles of compounding turned out to be a drug store located on a nearly impossible-to-access triangle-shaped block of businesses in the Grand Rapids suburb of Walker. Cars whizzed past me as I gathered cobwebs in the shadow of a stop sign on the busiest side street in America. From the condition of the drug store’s archaic glass-brick façade, its neon sign promising a soda fountain, and a yellowed portrait of Speedy Alka-Seltzer, few motorists apparently braved the left-hand turn to the Park Hills parking lot.
The slatted wood floors inside the Park Hills Drug Store squeaked and groaned like a patient in a sickbed as I threaded my way through narrow aisles stocked with unfamiliar palliatives and elixirs. Ahead of me in line at the pharmacy counter stood an elderly woman so frail of frame, I wondered how she had ever darted through the traffic out front until I realized from the slow pace at which Park Hills conducted its business that she had undoubtedly been waiting for her prescription since Reagan’s first inaugural. When my turn finally came and I informed the pudgy pharmacist, “I’m here to pick up a prescription for Tarte,” he couldn’t have been more excited to meet me.
“You’re here for the goose?” he asked, blinking his large eyes.
“Yes, prescription for Tarte, please,” I repeated.
“Matty,” he called to the sixty-something woman rattling glass vials behind him. “It’s the man with the goose.”
“How’s the goose doing?” Matty brightly asked me.
“We put her medication in a liquid medium as your veterinarian requested,” the pharmacist explained, as he removed a small plastic bottle from a refrigerator next to the cash register. “I tried to choose a flavor that I thought your goose would like. This one is liver. We had a fish-flavor base, but I didn’t know if geese cared for fish.”
“Not as much as they love liver,” I assured him. “Anyway, she won’t have much of an opportunity to taste it. I pretty much squirt it straight into her crop with a syringe.”
“You use a syringe?” he asked in wonderment, widening his eyes so far, he seemed positively owlish. Who cooks for you, I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t want any trouble. “I guess you couldn’t use a spoon.” He chuckled as he popped the medicine into a bag with a handful of pro bono syringes.
“I hope your goose gets better,” Matty told me. “We’ve done cats before, but never somebody’s goose.”
“That would explain the liver and fish flavorings,” I replied, as I edged away.
Linda set up living quarters for Liza on our enclosed porch that would have been the envy of any housebound goose. Filling a wading pool with straw, she topped it with one of several bed sheets that she changed and washed throughout the day. After dark, she tossed a lightweight blanket over Liza’s back and would have offered her a pillow if she could have wrested mine away from me. A space heater took the chill off the May nighttime temperatures.
Within easy reach of Liza’s pool were
bowls containing water, scratch feed, and mud, though she preferred us to hold the bowls whenever she ate. She required dirt for the strictly utilitarian purpose of grinding and predigesting the raw corn kernels in her gizzard, but she attacked it with the vigor of a gourmand devouring a sinfully rich dessert. Half submerged in mud, her beak snapped open and shut almost too rapidly for the eye the follow, and in her eating frenzy she would all but knock the dish out of my hand. To supplement her bowl foods, I gathered dandelion leaves from the yard.
“Look at these beauties,” I’d brag to Linda. “I found them near the mailbox, mixed in with some annoying grass.”
Liza relished dandelion leaves even more than mud, tootling her appreciation with alto-saxophone slurs while yanking an entire handful from my fingers at a time. “Liza, you made me drop them all,” I’d complain, and she would honk gleefully between mouthfuls.
Despite her good spirits, Liza remained too weak to walk or even rise to her feet on her own. If the sun was shining, and we didn’t want her to have to spend all day on the shaded porch, we would carry her down to the duck pen and set her in an area on the girls’ side that I had fenced off. Sequestering her discouraged the others from their genetically-imprinted urge to pick on the weak, and it also kept them from getting close enough to catch her aspergillosis. Once or twice I carried Liza out to the front lawn and placed her in the middle of a virile cluster of dandelions, hoping that she would help herself. But even after twenty days on her antifungal medication, she remained gravely ill.
“Sweetie.” I looked up from the newspaper on a cool June evening as Linda came into the living room from the porch. She spoke softly, breaking bad news gently. “I don’t think Liza’s going to make it through the night. She’s having a lot of trouble breathing.”
I took a cushion onto the porch and sat on the floor next to our goose. She rallied briefly when she realized that I was there, even favoring me with a conversational honk, but a few seconds later she lowered her head to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut. I tried tempting her to eat with a fresh bowl of mud and a handful of tender dandelion leaves, but she wouldn’t take any food. Her entire body strained each time she took a breath, and her wheezing was unusually loud. “I’m sorry, hon,” I told her, petting her neck. Linda came out to spread a blanket over her and adjust the space heater. Finally both of us told her good night and went back into the house.
“She sure has been a nice goose,” Linda told me sadly, as we settled into bed. “I sure have enjoyed our time with her. I like it when we’re watching TV and she honks because she wants us to go out and fuss over her.”
“I just hope she isn’t suffering too much,” I said.
In the swamp below the backyard, the last of the spring peepers were singing. Only five or six were still left in the shrinking seasonal pond, and each time a car rumbled past our house, they immediately fell silent only to resume their chirping several seconds later. Ever since moving to the country, I had loved the song of the frogs, and despite my aversion to fresh air, I’d occasionally crack the window open on chilly spring nights to bring their voices closer. But as I lay in bed worrying that Liza was dying, I wondered how I’d feel about the frogs the next time I heard them. Bertha had died at the height of katydid-calling frenzy, and hardly an August night went by when their zip-zip song didn’t evoke a memory.
I awoke the next morning with my stomach knotted by dread. Crawling carefully out of bed so as not to disturb Linda, I eased shut the bedroom door and unlocked the door to the porch. I was still twisting the knob and hadn’t even taken my first step outside when Liza was already honking hello. She peppered the air with excited bleats and attacked her scratch feed with gusto when I held the bowl. It took two trips to the front lawn to gather enough dandelion leaves to satisfy her hunger. I was so thrilled that her vitality had returned, I generously waved at a passing motorist who was rude enough to beep his horn at your average everyday pajamaclad man squatting in the grass plucking weeds.
We experienced a few more shaky nights with Liza, when she barely had sufficient strength to breathe, but by the end of the fifth week, she would occasionally succeed in struggling to her feet after soaking up the sun on our front lawn. She even managed a wobbly step or two to great vocal encouragement from her caregivers. One morning during week six, Linda called me from the bedroom to witness Liza standing proudly at the threshold to the porch all the way across the room from her wading-pool bed. That same afternoon, as the ducks and Hailey fanned out across the backyard while we changed their water, Liza rose from her spot in the warm grass, walked to the front gate, and honked at us to let her join the others.
“Should we let her go?” Linda asked me. “I can’t see what it would hurt.”
“Let her through!”
Few sights would seem to hold less drama than a goose waddling through a garden gate, but to us the occurrence was every bit as monumental as if the Sphinx had climbed down from the Giza plateau and moved into our barn with the turkeys. Walking slowly, Liza honked nonchalantly to Hailey and joined her grazing under the redbud tree. Toucanlady had been correct. The short trip from our front porch to the backyard had turned out to be a long, hard road indeed. Our goose had been so sick for so many weeks, I had never expected her to get better, and I felt overjoyed at her recovery. Liza’s return to health apparently affected her emotionally, too, since she immediately underwent an unusual form of amnesia.
A year and some months earlier, our geese had come to us from their previous owner habituated to human company and not yet in the throes of hormonal changes that would later cement their interests exclusively to members of their small waterfowl society. Gone were the days when I could plop down on the lawn and find a goose in my lap without a favorite food item to tempt her there. After Liza had fallen sick enough that she had lost her ability to walk, however, she placed her care in our hands with unstinting confidence, not merely tolerating but welcoming physical contact with us. The touch of a hand reassured her, and she no more feared our approach when we walked over to her pool to feed her than would the family dog. But once a healthy Liza strolled back into the pen with her sister, Hailey, and her duck accomplices, all memory of the niceties of human contact fled. The very next day when I let the girls out for a romp around the yard, I headed toward Liza to give her a pat and wish her well. She honked and skittered away as if to say, “What on earth are you doing? What kind of a goose do you take me for?”
“That’s good,” Linda answered. “She’s really back to normal.” And she was right.
From time to time after Liza’s recovery, I would hear the barred owl hooting from our woods. On more than one occasion, it sounded like the owl was calling from the walnut tree on the edge of our backyard, where I had caught it in my flashlight beam on that fateful spring night. “Who cooks for you?” the barred owl inquired. “Who cooks for you all?”
I was tempted to hoot back with my boyish trombone imitation. After all, a summons from such a magnificent and powerful bird was an honor that deserved a reply. But remembering my manners, I restrained myself and muttered to the window instead, “Forget it, owl. What kind of a superstitious fool do you take me for?”
CHAPTER 12
Comings and Goings
Avoiding pet stores wasn’t enough to keep our animal population from expanding. Neither was snipping the phone line to block requests that we take in yet another winged or long-eared orphan. Occasionally a new animal would literally drop from the sky.
One summer afternoon, Stanley Sue sounded the shrill alarm-call whistle that usually indicated she had spotted a hawk from the dining room window. I peered into the yard and up through the skylight, but didn’t see anything more threatening than a nuthatch, until a tan-and-white pigeon plopped down from our hackberry tree onto the flat roof of the milk house. While pigeons are as common as in-laws in most neighborhoods, they never visited us in the country. A few shy mourning doves pecked the ground under our bird feeders in frigid seasons wh
en natural food was scarce, but we were definitely far removed from pigeon thoroughfares. In an attempt to satiate every bird within a two-mile radius of our house, we usually supplemented the food in our bird feeders by dumping vast quantities of seed on the ground and on the milk-house roof. Ground-feeding birds such as blue jays, along with finch flocks, attacked the scattered seed with gusto, but with nothing resembling the desperate greed exhibited by the tan-and-white pigeon. Once the bird had eaten its fill, it stayed put even as I grimaced at it though different windows and from different angles, attempting to assess if anything was wrong.
“I think it might be someone’s pet,” Linda concluded. “Maybe it’s a racing pigeon that got knocked off course by a hawk.”
I pooh-poohed the idea even as I considered the possibility that it might be true. Wherever the pigeon had come from, it didn’t demonstrate overt fear of humans—or at least not of me, failing to budge from the roof even after I had unfolded the stepladder next to the shed, clomped quavering to the top, and sat upon the eaves not three feet away from the presumed stray. Reaching out to tweak its beak proved a step too far. The bird flew to the metal strut on the second story of our house that buttressed the chimney of our basement wood furnace. Once I returned to ground level, the pigeon’s love affair with the milk-house roof resumed.
“I think that bird might be someone’s pet,” I explained to Linda patiently.
“She looks like a Tillie,” Linda surmised.
Deciding that the pigeon sought our help, I sent her flapping back to the chimney support by lugging our trusty Humane Live Animal Trap to the top of the milk house and loading it with a virgin pile of scratch feed sweetened with a pinch of the parakeet seed that Howard loved. I watched with Stanley Sue through the dining room window as Tillie dropped down to the roof, paced in front of the open door of the trap bobbing her head with each step, and after a moment of indecision, hopped inside. I worried that she didn’t weigh enough to trip the trigger, but a few seconds later she fluttered her wings in panic as the door snapped shut behind her.