Don't Name the Ducks

by Wendy Dudley

  We had taken a pass on just about every real estate listing within commuting distance of Calgary, but we kept looking, enjoying the exploration and the anticipation. Late one Sunday, turning east off a paved secondary highway, we fell silent as the car banged and rattled along a gravel road pitted with potholes. Around each turn we were greeted with a vista of valleys prickly with spruce trees, soft with grazing meadows, and wild with deadfalls and swamp. Then, out of nowhere, a red-tailed hawk swooped over the hood of the car, its wings within inches of feathering the windshield. Like a mirage, it vanished, swallowed by the orange afternoon light. Raptors are powerful omens, and I took this as a sign of good things to come.

  We were now sidewinding through a narrow valley, where aspen thickets ambled down gentle slopes and willows dipped their toes in a slender creek. The close hills were a weave of dark towering spruce and open fields thick with belly-deep grass. What a beautiful little valley, I thought. Not a building in sight, just hillsides speckled with cattle, their white faces shining in the afternoon light and their bristly tails twitching at bothersome flies. This was the high country, and I felt the wilderness tapping my shoulder.

  Rounding a sharp bend, we spotted a For Sale sign at a gateway leading to a home burrowed in the bush. A small red barn crouched in an overgrown pasture, next to a neglected paddock circled by a weathered and peeling, white plank fence. Rising from the long orchard grass and nodding purple-headed thistles was a cattle chute, its floorboards still intact from a time when it shook under the hooves of range cows.

  "Oh, my gosh," I whispered. "Quick, back up the car," Mom said. "I think the home is log." Straining to see through the tangled jungle of matted aspen leaves, we could see filtered light bouncing off honey-coloured timbers. The house grew out of the landscape, its square corners rounded by spruce boughs, ferns, and baneberry. Finally, here was a home that suited its surroundings and did not scream self-importance. Its warmth enveloped us like a cozy feather-lined nest, just as our northern Ontario cabin had done before.

  After scribbling down the realtor's phone number on a scrap piece of paper, we inched along in silence, looking back down the valley, where the creek wandered like sinew through sedges and willow. Here was the privacy we were looking for.

  By the time I called the realtor, I had convinced myself that such a picturesque place was probably beyond our budget.

  "How many acres?" I asked.

  "About forty-five."

  "Forty-five acres?" I gasped. "Gee, I don't know whether I should bother asking the price, but go ahead. Tell me."

  Mom watched as my face went blank. The asking price was lower than any other home we had viewed! At that time, no one was interested in a large chunk of marginal land, much of it best suited for ducks, beavers, mosquitoes, muskrats, and other bog-loving creatures.

  Over the next two days, we visited the property three times. We walked trails flecked with the mottled light of aspens, their leaves showing the first hints of autumn yellow. We explored the creek and its many springs, delighting in the discovery of ancient wooden cattle troughs. Their decaying sides were speckled with orange and green mosses, and small trees sprouted from soil that had settled in the rotting bottoms. The fields were dappled with blue asters, silver-green sage, brown-eyed Susans and pink wild roses. A pair of mallard ducks paddled on a beaver pond, its sizable dam indicating the work of several beaver generations.

  Kneeling on the hillside was the log home, its beams as straight and strong as coastal totem poles. Large windows overlooked the marshy meadow where does, their fawns hidden in the tall ungrazed grass, gathered in the early evening to nibble on tender willow buds. This was a place where herons came to fish, and where cool rains gave rise to mists curling like smoky swirls in an Emily Carr painting.

  Uphill from the house, the simple red barn housed two dirt-floor box stalls, a bevy of mouse nests, a wooden saddle rack, and a tack room where insulation hung in ragged tufts from the ceiling. Several wasp nests dangled from the rafters. Inside, the air was heavy with dust and neglect. The barn was lonely, its stalls longing for a friendly nicker and the sweet perfume of fresh hay and used saddle leather.

  We made our final visit in early evening, when daylight and dusk join hands and everything is bathed in mauve.

  "What's that across the field?" I asked Mom, having spotted a flash of dark movement.

  "Looks like a horse and colt," she answered. "Are you sure?" I asked. Its size suggested something larger. "Look how it moves. Look at that gangly gait," I added. "That's a moose. A moose and its baby."

  Mom and I smiled. At that moment, we knew we had found our new home. We had come home to the land, a place that echoed our past. Here we would relive old memories and make new ones.

  Chapter Five

  Sweet Surrender

  I could live with a wood stove and oil lamps but, like most women, I would not fancy returning to the days of outhouses.

  The first year on our patch of paradise I spent alone. I assured Mom I could handle the homestead while she returned to Ontario to tidy up personal matters. I was a kid of the bush, so adapting to country living should be as easy as changing from hiking shoes to rubber boots. After all, we weren't exactly roughing it; we had electricity, heat, and running water.

  The cats, all four of them, and I spent a glorious first week in our new abode. What joy to open my window at night and hear the great grey owl hooting down the valley, to rise in the morning to a coyote choral concert, and to watch the boreal and mountain chickadees line dance across our deck. What a privilege to feel cool night air after a day of scorching heat, and to lie in bed and watch the moon slide across the sky, its silver light silhouetting the pointed firs. I had found heaven down here on earth.

  And then one morning disaster struck. Turning on the kitchen tap, I received not a drop of water. There was much spewing and spitting, but it was a dry cough. I turned the tap off, and then back on again. Nothing. With the record-breaking temperatures that sweltering summer, I thought the worst.

  "Oh no, the well's gone dry," I muttered. "I knew we should have had it tested before moving in."

  Counting in my mind how many jugs of bottled water it would take to fill the bathtub and toilets, I began to panic.

  My first country mishap, and I was falling to pieces! Darn it, if only I could be sure the creek water was safe, but with beaver ponds, grazing animals, and who knows what dead beasts floating in log jam debris, it would be foolish to use the brackish water.

  Again, I tried every tap in the house. Not a drop. I wonder what it costs to drill a new well? And what will I do if they can't find water? Maybe there's a local waterwitcher. My mind was racing with various scenarios, most of them disastrous. The foothills are notorious for erratic layers of subterranean rock. Drill a well in one spot and water gushes like Old Faithful. Move thirty feet over and the hole is bone dry.

  Opening the kitchen drawer, I thumbed through the jumbled lists left behind by the previous owner. Furnace repair. Legal land description. Emergency numbers. Septic cleaners. A livestock waterer manual. Ah, here it was, the phone number for a water well company.

  "So, does the pump still have pressure?" asked Sam, the young man on the other end of the line.

  "How can I tell?" I asked.

  "Well, what does the meter say?"

  "The meter? Where's that?" Sam replied with a thud of silence.

  Our waterworks were in a tiny room in the basement, a maze of pipes running every which way and connected to such gadgets as iron and sediment filters. There were red knobs, blue buttons, and black dials all Greek to me. I steered clear of this room, avoiding it like I would an ornery bull cornered in a pen.

  "Look, Sam, would you mind dropping by? I just moved here, and I really need a lesson in how all this stuff works." Hearing a sigh, I began to beg like a spoiled pup.

  "Sam, I know this is a pain, but I'll take notes, and that way I won't need to bother you again." I knew my career as a journalist woul
d come in handy if you don't know something, just ask a zillion questions and write everything down, even if it's in shorthand chicken-scratch.

  "All right," Sam said. "I'll be out some time this afternoon."

  It took Sam five minutes to size up the situation; it took him less than a minute to size up me. He was dealing with someone who didn't know a well pump from a septic tank.

  "Well, there's your meter, and it's showing pressure, so you know it's not your pump," he said. I studied the small clocklike fitting. It looked innocent enough.

  Unscrewing the casing for the sediment filter, Sam scrunched up his face, his hands now covered in grit and sludge. My water was dammed because the filter installed by the previous owners was too small; it could not have strained a drop of rain, never mind gobs of mucky goop.

  Wiping his hands clean on umpteen sheets of paper towel, Sam suggested I pick up a bigger filter, available in most hardware stores, he said. I started to fidget.

  "Don't you have any with you?" I asked.

  "No, they're back at the shop."

  "Well, I'll pay you to go get them, then drive back to put one in for me." Sam stared at me in disbelief. What strange breed of city slicker was invading his country?

  "Look, I know this is crazy. But really, I just need you to do it this once. Then I can do it myself. I promise." I could see Sam starting to calculate his overtime, recognizing the deal of the century.

  My course in Waterkeeping 101 went well. Sam taped shut every valve I was never to touch, and labelled every hose, while I stood by smiling and nodding, and taking copious notes. With the proper filter installed, we turned on the valves. "Counter-clockwise," I scribbled. Water gushed forth, wet and precious. Delicious. Nectar of the gods.

  My confidence began to bud. But I still wish I had enrolled in a fix-it program instead of home economics, where I was taught how to boil an egg and sew a shoe bag. Nothing truly useful, like welding, mechanics, or woodworking. One thing about the country nothing is static. It's either rotting, overgrowing, sick, falling down, dying, leaning over, flooding, or drying up.

  And sometimes it's just plain stinky, like the unsavoury odour that had me running around and splashing Javex on everything in sight. I began to suspect our home was a funeral parlour for neighbourhood mice. Within days of moving in, I discovered several of the dead critters squished in traps hidden behind the gas furnace. Why the previous owner had not emptied the traps beats me. Actually, she told me that during their two years in the home, she never saw one mouse. Egads, did that mean these mice had been resting in peace for more than three years?

  My dead specimens were deer mice, those sweet white-bellied rodents that the headlines had been warning us about. Beware the carrier of the deadly hantavirus! Touch their droppings, inhale the air, and I could be infected with a disease that would riddle me with muscle aches, a cough, and shortness of breath. Gee, that's how I felt every time I cleaned out the barn!

  Doctors were advising anyone handling the mice or their droppings to wear protective clothing so, feeling rather silly, I pulled on a pair of cold, clammy rubber gloves and a nose-and-mouth dust mask. I plucked the shrivelled rodents from the traps, then scrubbed the concrete floor with disinfectant. How come this kind of stuff is never written up in those glossy Martha Stewart magazines? After all, if this isn't country living up-close-and-personal, then what is?

  Next, thinking that mice had succumbed in the air ducts, I flooded the heating runways with Javex, but every time the furnace came on, there it was that putrid smell of something ripe and rotten. I began to ignore it, thinking the dead body would eventually dry out, dry up, and stop reeking.

  Then one day, while a neighbour and I were walking around the outside of the house, I was whiplashed by the foul fragrance. I looked at Ralph's face, but he just kept chatting. Surely he must smell it. Maybe he's being polite but he didn't even wince. Finally, I interrupted. "Ralph, don't you smell something? Something rotten?"

  "You mean that smell right here?" he asked, surprised I bothered to mention it at all.

  "Yeah, that," I said. "It reeks, like rotten eggs."

  "That, my dear, is the smell of a septic system. On warm days like this, you'll sometimes get a whiff, especially if the wind isn't blowing much. It comes out the vent, and sometimes you get a downdraft."

  I looked down at the ground, trying to hide my blushing face. I decided not to share my tales about tracking down mystery mice with a jug of Javex. Since then, I've been told to drop a dead gopher into the septic tank, just to keep the good bacteria active: a sort of super supplement to boost its health. I have to admit I haven't followed up on that one, but I do occasionally douse the furnace room drain with a pot of water to keep the backdrafts at bay.

  Having survived my initiation into country living, I no longer find it necessary to talk about septic smells. I accept the quirks of the water well system and the trespassing of an occasional mouse. Call it a sweet surrender.

  Chapter Six

  She Who Runs with Coyotes

  I have always thought coyotes were better suited to their Aztec name, coyotl, which carries an echo of their musical yodels.

  Having read late into the night, I was looking forward to a slow-footed morning; just one more hour in bed, napping and snuggling with the cats while the thinning darkness of pre-dawn drifted by my window. But there it was again, that lone coyote barking up a storm. I love a symphony of howling coyotes, but this stray was cheeky. There was nothing musical about his song, just a staccato of yips and yaps. It sounded like he was standing outside my window, beckoning me to come hither. Before long, he had every dog in the valley barking the same annoying chorus. Reluctantly, I crawled out of bed, mumbling to the cats to keep my spot warm. "And stay off the pillow, you guys, because I'm not going to be gone that long."

  I opened the screen door and squinted into the grey light. There was the occasional star and a phantom moon, but no coyote. I picked up the walking stick leaning against the logs just outside the door, a straight and sturdy pole with a metal tip, a crude spear for driving off cougars and bears. Well, not actually. Anything larger than a porcupine could snap it in half with one playful swat. Maybe I could just try to scare this critter off by calling myself Woman Walking With Big Stick!

  As I headed to the barn, where I thought I heard the coyote still teasing me with his love call, I called out, "You can't hide from me forever, you know. So come on, get out here where I can see you."

  Rounding the corner, I caught a glimpse of his grey-brown coat. I expected him to run off, but instead he held his ground, barking sharp yips and scratching the dirt with his front feet, all the time staring right at me with piercing amber eyes. I struck the ground hard with my stick and then waved my arms over my head, trying to look like a threatening predator. But he stared back, as if amused by my antics. Or was it my get-up? In my hurry to pursue Canis latrans, I hadn't bothered to pull on any pants. So here I stood, brandishing my big spear in a nifty pair of powder-blue longjohns tucked inside knee-high black rubber boots. Overtop the matching blue undershirt I wore a tattered green military jacket. Lord knows what I must have looked like to any beast or human passing by.

  I thought of my neighbour who drives the schoolbus, hoping he wouldn't be making an early run, his cargo of young faces peering from the windows while pointing their fingers and laughing at the crazy woman. Make that Crazy Woman With Big Stick. Rural communities thrive on gossip, and I didn't need to further fuel the burning phone lines.

  I could already hear the niggling voices: "Not even been here a year and she's already going crazy. That's what comes of keeping to herself. I told you she should get more involved. Imagine, a woman living there on her own. It's no good."

  I wouldn't normally fuss this way over a coyote. After all, this was his turf too. But he seemed rather aggressive for an animal that usually slips into a dip behind a hill whenever it sees people. Seeing him so close to the barn, I also worried about Mamma Cat, a feral calic
o that used the shed as her personal bed and breakfast. She was a masterful mouser, and I wanted to keep her around.

  After tossing a few small stones towards his pointed muzzle, I watched the coyote scamper off, but then he stopped, looked back, and barked. He began to dig again. And then he squatted, leaving a puddle of urine to trickle in the loose dirt down the hill.

  Was this some declaration of war? Was he expecting me to fight for this hill? I thought of Farley Mowat and his book Never Cry Wolf, in which he describes how he marked his campsite by urinating on nearby bushes. No way I'm doing that. My barn's on this hill; I've staked it as mine. This was one dominant coyote, but I wasn't about to submit. I was not going to cower or roll over on my back.

  The coyote continued to stare, waiting for me to make my next move. Aboriginal stories speak of the coyote as a trickster, a mischief-maker who can change shapes. He can either help or deceive humans. Maybe this wasn't really a coyote. Maybe I was disturbing something sacred. Was I standing on Native hunting grounds? I thought about these hills and valleys inhabited long before the ranchers arrived with their cattle, horses, and barbed wire. Or maybe this little brother was fighting for the spirits of all wild animals lamenting the loss of territory, crowded out by homes, roads, and oil companies that consider no piece of land sacred.

  I stared back at the coyote, my green eyes looking into his yellow ones. I'm sorry, brother. I don't know who or what you are, and I wish you no harm, but you must keep your distance, from me and from others like me.

  A chilly mist hugged the valley and tugged at my flesh. I was growing cold. Then I sneezed. A big one, a mighty blast that shook the valley like gunfire. As I looked up, the coyote's rump disappeared into the bush. I sneezed again, and he retreated deeper into the shadows. Little brother heard my message.