by Tarte, Bob
Tillie showed more annoyance than unease as Linda transferred her from the raccoon trap to a cage on the front porch. Less than a month earlier, Liza had abandoned her straw-filled pool to rejoin the backyard ducks, and it seemed natural to once again have a living creature outside the living room to keep the mice and spiders company. Uncertain what sorts of exotic microscopic creatures might be clinging to an apparent bird in distress, I took her to see Dr. Fuller after a few days.
“She does have lice,” he told me, as he began examining her.
“She’s a Birmingham Roller Pigeon,” I blurted out in her defense.
“Son of a gun,” he chuckled politely. My dubious identification was based on three minutes spent with a guide to doves and pigeons at a local remaindered-book outlet. I had wanted to buy the half-priced reference book, but was easily dissuaded by an expansive “Disease and Injury” appendix brimming with color photographs of bizarre growths, pustules, and swollen internal organs.
“She certainly doesn’t look like any wild pigeon I’ve ever seen,” I insisted.
“I don’t know,” he answered gently. “I’ve seen lots of color variation, including all-white birds. But they usually don’t last long in a flock. They stick out like a sore thumb to predators.”
Except for the bloom of lice scheming beneath her feathers, Tillie received a clean bill of health from our vet. Back home on the porch, I was shaking a can of bird insecticide from the pet store until my arm hurt when Linda came out to determine what the moaning was all about.
“Too much exercise,” I complained.
“What are you going to do with that?” she asked.
“Delouse Tillie.”
“Put her somewhere else while you spray her cage.”
“You’re supposed to spray the bird. That’s the whole point.”
“But that’s insecticide.”
“See the label? See the picture of the happy bird on the label? ‘Safe for birds.’ You have to spray the bird to kill the lice. Dr. Fuller recommended this brand.”
“It’s still insecticide,” Linda pointed out. “It will make her sick.”
“‘Safe for birds,’” I repeated. “I’ll spray the cage. But I have to spray her, too.”
“Don’t spray her with insecticide. You’ll make her sick.”
“You’re supposed to spray the bird.”
We went around and around like that until both of us were giddy. Releasing the bird from the cage to flutter around on the porch, I took the cage outside and liberally doused it with the spray. Linda watched, then went back to her business in the house. I chased down the bird, put the bird back inside the cage, and lightly sprayed the bird with insecticide. More of the insecticide dribbled onto my fingers than ended up on either cage or caged bird. I licked my fingers with no ill effects other than a sudden hankering for an arachnid canapé.
The longer we kept Tillie, the stronger she became. She also grew less satisfied with captivity and increasingly intolerant of her captors. For a few days we tried putting her in the dining room with the other birds, thinking that once she had gotten a taste of the pampered life, she would reclaim her identity as a pet bird. The only joy she eked out of perching on a cage top near the ceiling was launching pecks at Howard whenever he landed near her. In the larger free-flight area of the porch, she spent the majority of her time fluttering from window to window in search of a way outdoors. Gradually, we came around to realizing that Tillie was undoubtedly a wild bird after all. Dinner at my sister Joan’s house clinched it when Linda and I studied the sky-darkening flock of pigeons that had descended on her lawn around her bird feeder. Sprinkled amid the standard-issue blue-grey city pigeon uniforms were pigeons clad in brown, white, and green color mixes.
THREE WEEKS HAD elapsed between Tillie’s capture and the afternoon I took her cage outside and opened the door. “You can leave if you want to,” I told her, hinting that it would be ungrateful to actually fly away. With an energetic chugging of her wings, she rose as high as the second story chimney strut and stayed there. Throughout the remainder of the summer, she stayed close to the yard. She might disappear for hours at a time, but by evening we would always find her roosting on the chimney support as close to the house as possible, for protection against hawks. Sometimes when Linda and I were taking care of the ducks and we left a hose running on the lawn between pens, Tillie would swoop down, grab a drink, then return to the safety of the milk-house roof or our hackberry tree.
A few days after Tillie’s release, Linda ran into Tam and Steve at the Food City supermarket. The couple shared a house even smaller than ours with eight orphaned cats and owned a patch of land overrun at various times with wild turkeys (we had watched a flock from Tam and Steve’s living room window), deer, Canada geese, and raccoons. An industrious muskrat usually busied itself in the pond on the other side of their gravel driveway, while a fat possum they dubbed Electrolux had taken possession of a back corner of their garage.
“A friend of ours has a really nice rabbit in need of a good home,” Tam told Linda. “She’s getting married and moving away, and she can’t bring the rabbit with her.”
“Bob won’t let us have any more rabbits,” Linda said.
“The poor guy sits out in a cage in the barn all by himself.”
Faster than the eye could register it, Linda wrote down the telephone number of the rabbit owner. As if swept in on a tide of history, I found myself the following Saturday walking into a barn owned by Tam and Steve’s neighbor, Judy. I had spent the morning rehearsing any number of excuses in my mind why we couldn’t possibly take a third male rabbit, but I found myself laughing out loud when I laid eyes on Walter. As soon as he saw us, he hopped into the battered cardboard box that Judy told us was his favorite spot to hide. Hiding didn’t equal concealment, however. He couldn’t quite squeeze his entire body into the shadow of the carton. Compared to Bertie and Rollo, Walter was huge, a Checker Giant mix, tipping the scales at just over eight pounds. Despite the epic proportions of his rump and haunches, his head appeared comically oversize, and his jet-black eyes topped with an exuberant thatch of eyelashes added an irresistible element of pathos.
“He’s beautiful,” Linda beamed.
Beautiful and silly. After a minute or two, Walter determined that we didn’t represent enough of a threat to discourage him from abandoning his shelter for the feed dish. This gave me the opportunity to step back and attempt to take in his whimsical magnificence. It was as if a careless breeder had spilled a can of grey paint on the back and head of a pure white rabbit, and the paint had fanned out in symmetrical patterns on his right and left sides like ink on blotting paper. Before deciding to take him home, we tested to see if he would allow us to hold him without squirming and kicking. He failed, but the test was moot. No person of sound mind would pick up and cuddle an eight-pound rabbit, and neither would we. When Linda set him down on top of his large wood-and-wire cage and started petting him, however, he immediately hunkered down in anticipation of a prolonged spate of pleasure. That earned him a passing grade.
Received wisdom in rabbit circles speaks of bonding that can occur between rabbits of vastly different sizes. While bunny brothers Bertie and Rollo fought voraciously on the few occasions that they shared a room without benefit of a wire grid between them, we held faint hopes that Walter and Bertie or Walter and Rollo might buddy up and simplify our lives. As it turned out, Walter showed no trace of aggression toward Bertie. He liked Bertie. No, he loved him. Eagerly and incessantly, he tried mating with the rabbit that was a mere one-third his size. Bertie was invisible beneath Walter’s bulk, and we marveled that he hadn’t suffocated before we could reach them amid the tangle of dining-room table and chair legs.
Burdened with three rabbits that required constant separation, I created a triad of fencing loops in the basement anchored to a central pillar. Outdoors, I subdivided one of the rabbit runs, leaving the largest of the three for our Checker Giant. On temperate days, the boys enjoyed
a romp in the fresh air during the afternoon and a romp in the moldy basement air after dinner. Then Walter was free to explore the kitchen while Bertie gnawed up the living room and placid Rollo sat upon my lap for an hour of television (his choice of program). Next, we would catch Bertie and return him to his cage in the dining room, allowing Rollo his turn desecrating the living room furnishings. After twenty minutes or so, we retired Rollo to his cage for the night and removed the board between the dining room and living room so that Walter could blunder in and rub his chin on every object in view, scent-marking them until the next day when the entire wearying process would begin all over again.
As if simple logistics didn’t keep us busy enough with the rabbits, we discovered that Bertie suffered from a malocclusion, a condition in which the teeth do not meet properly but overlap in bucktooth or underbite fashion. Though dental defects are cute as can be on waifish supermodels, they’re potentially lethal to a rabbit, whose teeth grow more than a quarter-inch a week. Unchecked, Bertie’s upper incisors would curl in on themselves like a party blower, while his lower incisors would ultimately pierce the roof of his closed mouth, though he’d be unable to eat long before that occurred. An unhelpful book I found on dwarf-rabbit varieties, written by a German expert, recommended euthanizing any bunnies with tooth problems, but this struck me as counterproductive. Instead, Linda would haul Bertie into the bathroom about once a week, wrap him in a towel, and pry open his mouth while I clipped his teeth.
Initially I used a tool designed for trimming dog toenails, abandoned it for human toenail clippers that didn’t fit the contours of rabbit dental anatomy much better, then, upon advice from Dr. Fuller, settled on the smallest pair of wire cutters I could find. The trick was to quickly truncate the teeth in two or three clips before Bertie decided to clamp his mouth shut. If I took off too little of the tooth at the wrong angle, I ended up sculpting knife-point fangs and creating an attack rabbit. If I took off too much at a single clip, I risked the stomach-turning consequence of splintering his teeth down to the gumline. Apart from causing eating difficulties, splintering an upper incisor could also inflame the rabbit’s tear duct and even lead to pasteurella, a potentially lethal bacterial infection. When done correctly, the amputation apparently hurt Bertie less than it did me. Rabbits’ teeth lack the nerve endings that ours have and more closely resemble thick versions of our fingernails, but the procedure never failed to set my own teeth on edge.
Meanwhile, backyard lodging became a few feathers less crowded when I unexpectedly found a home for our pugnacious greenheads. For weeks at a time, the Khaki Campbell–mallard hybrids shared the same pool with their Khaki Campbell father and uncle without a single incident of domestic abuse. But proximity to the females in the adjacent pen would suddenly send duck testosterone levels soaring, forcing us to confine the youngsters to the inevitable wire loop in order to give Stewart and Trevor respite from pecks, bites, and wing-flapping. I carped about the situation on an Internet poultry newsgroup, for some reason populated mainly by English farmers. Average Americans were probably too busy trimming rabbit teeth to spend much time on-line. Richard and Jeri Pellston not only sympathized with our excess-duck problem, but also offered to take the greenheads off our hands. Remarkably, they lived in Michigan. Though their home was near the tip of the “thumb” region, clear across the Michigan “palm” from us, Richard’s job as a database consultant occasionally took him to, of all places, Lowell.
“We got a couple hens. Two Barred Rocks and a Rhode Island Red,” Richard told me in an e-mail that made me wonder how much the ability to count figured into his government job. With heartbreaking innocence he added, “We want to try some ducks.”
After promising to build a raccoon-proof pen complete with a non–Ninja Turtle plastic swimming pool, he and Jeri showed up on a late July afternoon when the weeds in our yard were at the peak of ripeness. I thought of them as weeds, but Richard begged to differ. Shortly after stepping out of a shock absorber–challenged station wagon that cleared the ground by as much as a few millimeters, he immediately started stabbing greenery with his cane. “That’s lamb’s-quarter,” he pointed out. “You can cook it or shred it in a salad.” Jeri nodded in agreement. “That’s pokeweed over there.”
“I love the purple berries it gets in the fall,” Linda told them.
“I like to eat it. You ever heard of poke salad?”
“I’ve heard the song ‘Poke Salad Annie,’” I offered, though Richard was fifteen years too young to recall the song.
“They eat it down South,” said Linda.
“I eat it,” he repeated, as he hobbled across the yard two steps ahead of us. His sparse brush of a chin beard and truculent tone, which I interpreted as shyness, suggested he could spend an afternoon grazing an overgrown meadow in goaty bliss. “I bet you’ve got all kinds of edibles out here,” he marveled.
“You are keeping the ducks as pets?” Linda ventured.
Richard turned his head in surprise.
“You’re not planning on eating them?” I clarified.
“We might breed them,” Jeri answered, “But we would never kill a duck. We don’t eat our chickens, either.”
“We eat chicken,” Richard explained with a burst of gusto. “We just don’t eat our chickens.”
With his battered military jacket and wide-wale corduroy pants with whole sections of cord worn away, Richard didn’t strike me as particularly fastidious. But his first comment about the greenheads voiced an aesthetic concern. “What’s the mark on that one’s beak? It looks like his beak’s peeling.” Sure enough, if you studied the duck with microscopic intensity, a fleck at the edge of his upper bill disclosed a darker shade of olive than the rest of his beak.
I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. The Khaki Campbells get that, too.” Either Stewart or Trevor—we had no idea which twin duck was which—betrayed a similar nearly imperceptible cosmetic flaw. “There’s a thin layer of tissue that coats their beaks, and sometimes it gets worn away,” I bluffed.
“So it will grow back,” he frowned.
I shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. It’s never gotten any worse.”
Satisfied that the greenheads had a reasonable shot at attaining perfection, he agreed to take the pair, though Linda insisted on further assurances that the ducks would be housed properly, kept as pets, and spared a seasoning with savory herbs. Richard leaned thoughtfully on his cane and supervised while Linda and I packed the greenheads into a cardboard box and loosely sealed it with the obligatory duct tape. Jeri opened the tailgate of their cluttered station wagon and managed to clear a few square feet of space by rearranging a dozen or so heavy cartons containing dot-matrix computer printouts presumably brimming with confidential government data. Just as the couple was about to drive off, Richard smiled at us for the first time. “Maybe we’ll stop by again next time we’re in town,” he told us. “Maybe we could have a cookout.”
The pair did prove good on their word to take good care of the greenheads. Within a week, Richard e-mailed me a photo of the ducks frolicking in a floral-print wading pool inside a high-walled chicken-wire pen.
TILLIE THE PIGEON had witnessed the greenheads’ exit from her perch on the chimney strut. She seemed fully dependent upon the scratch feed we tossed onto the roof of the milk house each day, and as summer gave way to a chilly, windy fall, we wondered how she would cope with the coming snow. Hiding in a pile of scrap lumber in the barn was a crudely made wooden box that looked as if it had a full year of life still ahead of it. One of the small children of the former owners of our house had apparently cobbled it together with a native carpentry skill that I could admire but never duplicate. Taking exceptional care not to stress the workmanship, I looped a rope through a handy knothole in the most reliably solid slat and slowly hoisted the box to the gently sloping roof above our dining room, positioning it just under Tillie’s favorite roosting spot.
“I hope she’s smart enough to use it once the weather ge
ts cold,” I told Linda. Our visiting pigeon turned out to be even smarter. When the first blustery day arrived, Tillie was nowhere to be found. Judging that a good thing had reached its logical end, she apparently flew off to petition for readmittance to her flock.
Not all departures from our bird community were happy. One fall afternoon, Linda called me out to the barn to try and help one of our turkeys that was thrashing in pain on the concrete floor. By the time we got back to her, she was already dead. “Some animal chewed up her wing,” Linda said, and we also discovered wounds on the bird’s right side. There was no indication an animal had climbed over or burrowed under the five-foot-high fence, and the other three turkeys appeared as unruffled as ever. We couldn’t figure out what had happened, unless a hawk had been bold enough to swoop into the enclosure. But a raptor was usually far too wary to enter the relative confinement of an outdoor pen except under circumstances of extreme hunger, and in that case a hawk wouldn’t waste its time on prey too large to carry away.
Puzzling over the unexpected death of our turkey kept us occupied off and on as a snowy fall blew into a frigid winter. We certainly had sufficient time to mull the mystery over, since we were no longer visiting pet shops, answering the phone, shopping for food, or glancing out our windows for fear that another addition to the circus would land at our feet. But I couldn’t avoid my job; in early January I received an e-mail at the office from my sister Joan, which set a flurry of events in motion.
“MY GIRLFRIEND B.J. IS SEEING A BIG WHITE DUCK AT RICHMOND PARK SWIMMING IN A LITTLE CIRCLE OF WATER THAT HASN’T FROZEN YET,” Joan wrote me before her discovery of the caps lock key. “B.J. DOESN’T THINK THE DUCK CAN FLY. HER NEIGHBORS NEAR THE PARK ARE WORRIED THE DUCK DOESN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO EAT.”