by Bob Tarte
“SWEETIE, COME HERE, come here quick!” Linda called from the dining room. “Come here and look outside.”
In an attempt to expand my intellectual scope, I’d been reading John A. Keel’s book on strange phenomena The Mothman Prophecies—but for only the fourth time—as the home-redecorating show While You Were Out tootled in the background. Grumbling, I set down my learned tome on the coffee table, stepped over Moobie, who had already started her evening shift of begging for countless cat treats, and shuffled toward Linda’s voice.
“You’ll never guess who’s out there!”
“The aliens?” I asked just a bit hopefully.
“Skunky.”
“She’d better not be back.”
“Why not?” Linda asked as I joined her at the window to watch a skunk root beneath our bird feeder.
“I thought you meant Eileen.”
“Isn’t that Skunky down there?”
“Looks like it,” I said.
On the evidence of my nose, I knew that skunks visited us after dark once in a while, but in the fifteen years that I’d been living in our farmhouse, I had never actually laid eyes on one. As far as seeing skunks, I’d been skunked. Thus, it seemed reasonable to assume that Skunky had indeed stuck around to raid the spilled-sunflower-seed spoils since escaping our barn. Hoping to capitalize on our brief but successful relationship, I braved a spraying by tiptoeing out the basement door clutching a bag of grapes to my cadaverous chest. But the skunk took umbrage at having small pieces of fruit tossed in its direction and skittered away into the evening gloom.
Just before we went to bed, Linda checked for the visitor again by shining a flashlight through the dining room window. A quavering oval spotlighted an obese possum ill-advisedly squaring off against the skunk. “You shouldn’t be doing that,” Linda muttered. The first time old pointy nose snapped at the polecat, the skunk simply backed off and continued foraging under the feeder for seeds and bugs. But when the possum exhibited its bad buffet etiquette again, the bombardier spun around, reared up its back, and raised its tail to high heavens.
“Did Skunky just spray Possy?”
“It sort of looked that way, but I don’t smell anything.”
I had spoken a moment too soon. A wall of skunk scent slammed into the house like a stinky eighteen-wheeler. The skunk stomped off but, with barely a wrinkle of its nose, the possum continued consuming every seed within reach. Either he lacked a sense of smell or personal hygiene ranked at the bottom of his priorities.
I had never been at ground zero of a skunk blast before. The effect was, to put it mildly, impressive. The gas attack stripped the finish off our furniture. The living room carpet curled up and ran out the front door. “It’s not so bad,” I coughed as I groped my way toward the bedroom through the low-hanging cloud, only to find myself in the back seat of the car talking to the transmission hump. Back inside and safely under the sheet, which kept floating to the ceiling, I writhed and tried to sleep. Finally, with a T-shirt knotted across my nose and mouth, I either succumbed to the fumes or passed out from lack of oxygen.
A merciful wind outdoors and a battery of electric fans in the house dissipated the smell by the following evening. We had just settled down for an odor-free night on the living room couch and floor, reading our respective books, when Linda sniffed loudly and announced, “Guess who’s back.”
“I’ll try the grapes again,” I told her. But when I stuck my face against the dining room window, I didn’t see Skunky beneath the bird feeder. It was Possy, wearing Skunky’s cologne.
“Oh, great,” Linda said. “Now we’ve got two smelly animals.”
“I’d better call Agnes inside. We don’t want to make it three.”
THE PHONE RANG. What a surprise.
I had just started cleaning the birdcages after holding a bowl of water three-eighths of an inch off the bathroom floor for Moobie, squirting a syringe of antibiotics between our goose Squawk’s jaws in the backyard waterfowl pen, and tossing a soft rubber ball for Penny. Our grey cat would crouch on the top landing while I stood at the bottom landing and flung the ball. She would either leap up and catch it in midair or let it bounce off the upstairs wall and charge down the steps after it. At least that was how the game was originally played. Advanced age and typical feline perversity had changed the rules. Now she would lie at the top of the stairs and occasionally make the slightest halfhearted feint toward the ball, delighting instead in watching me scramble out of breath up and down the stairs to retrieve it whenever it didn’t putter all the way to the bottom. She could play this game of watching me play with the ball for hours, but would reluctantly call it quits once I’d collapsed in a wheezing heap.
As I tidied up after the birds, Bella stood on the countertop, indulging in her second-favorite out-of-cage pastime of hurling an empty Zoloft pill bottle to the floor as quickly as I could put it within range of her beak. She had apparently consulted with Penny about this, because she seemed to enjoy seeing me fish the bottle from beneath the dining room table as much as she reveled in tossing it into a hard-to-reach spot. But her favorite activity was flying across the room and landing on my shoulder just as I had delicately balanced the parakeets’ water and food dishes upon the plastic tray that I had extracted from the bottom of their cage. If she didn’t succeed in making me spill the whole caboodle to the floor, the wind power generated by her wings scattered a snowstorm of seed husks throughout the room.
I had, however, temporarily curtailed her mischief by laying out food items on the countertop for her to chew and throw, including a couple of grapes. So I felt safe answering the phone, especially when the caller ID informed me that Joan, and not some heretofore forgotten former grade school classmate, waited on the other end of the line.
“I’ve got two pieces of good news, Bob,” she told me. “The first is that Beethoven is doing fine. He’s acting like a brand-new ferret again.”
“That’s amazing.” I hadn’t expected him to pull through last week’s surgery for a pancreatic tumor, but Dr. Hedley had performed with his usual excellence.
“He’s all bright and chipper and just raring to go each day as soon as he wakes up. But that’s not the only thing. I just visited Mom.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, she was in a really good mood. She was the best that I had seen her in years. She was all smiles when I had lunch with her at Testament Terrace, and would you believe that when the food took a while to come, she called over one of the nurses and said, ‘Waitress, is our lunch almost ready?’ I could hardly keep from laughing. So even if she isn’t exactly sure where she is much of the time, she isn’t asking to go home.”
I began to tell her the saga of Skunky when suddenly a clatter of wings arose behind me, and toenails in need of trimming clamped onto my shoulder. “Bella, stop it,” I complained. “She’s pecking at the phone,” I told Joan. “I’ll change ears.”
“I’ll let you go.”
“That’s probably best. When she’s out of her cage, she hates being ignored.”
For a while Bella behaved politely on my shoulder as I pulled the tray from Ollie’s cage and washed it in the sink. But as I fell into a shallow reverie, I apparently lingered too long in a single spot, failing to provide the constant change of scenery that the exuberant parrot required. I had been thinking about how quickly the two of us had bonded, and how happy she seemed in her massive green cage, swinging from an impressive array of toys—any one of which would have terrified Stanley Sue. I had to admit that she was more amiable than her predecessor, never launched into a bell-ringing fuss at night insisting upon yet another peanut, and hadn’t shown a proclivity for attacking our other birds. She clearly had advantages over Stanley Sue, and just as this thought began prickling my conscience, she rewarded me with a perfectly timed nip to my ear.
“Ouch, stop it! That’s very bad,” I told her, scooping her onto my hand and carrying her back to her cage. I had to bribe her into stepping off my finger and
latching onto her perch by wiggling a peanut in front of her. She shot me a mischievous look before deciding to take the treat.
“Bella certainly has a naughty streak,” I said to Linda as I walked into the living room, but Linda wasn’t there. A cacophony of goose honks indicated that she had gone outdoors to change the water in the pens, hose down the gravel, and replenish their food.
I plopped down on the couch, uncertain whether to grab the mystery novel from the coffee table, a birding field guide, or a CD from Bill Holm. I thought about Perry Mason, Kenn Kaufman, and Harry Nilsson, but I couldn’t think clearly. My ear was throbbing. I thought about Bella. And I thought, Well, this is love.
CHAPTER 16
The Creature in the Woods
Took, took, took, took, took.”
I was busy battling the fair-weather version of the hose demon. As I pulled the hose to drag it from the girl ducks’ pen into Angel’s, the demon pulled back, snagging it on the tiniest and most self-effacing pebble in the entire yard. Yet no matter how hard I yanked, I couldn’t tear the hose loose, forcing me to trudge up the muddy bank, miss my footing, catch myself from falling with one hand, and further denigrate myself by having to lift the hose off and around the merest speck of gravel that had somehow ensnared it.
I was stomping back down the hill, scattering female ducks Clara, Gwendolyn, and Marybelle, when I heard the sound from the woods again. “Took, took, took, took, took.” I had heard it a few years earlier while slaving over my duck chores, followed it to a tree near the river, and come up empty. When I’d described the call to members of a birding newsgroup, suggestions for its source had included a black-billed cuckoo, northern saw-whet owl, and green heron. But when I’d listened to my well-worn birdsong CD, none of the bird vocalizations filled the bill.
“Took, took, took, took, took.”
Shutting off the spigot, I eased myself down the slippery slope and found myself unexpectedly bathed in sunshine as soon as I stepped over the backyard fence. I maneuvered around three piles of scratch feed that Linda had arranged for visiting turkeys and the fat woodchuck whose burrow had collapsed the cement floor at the entrance to our barn. Just before I reached the bone-dry swamp and the beginning of the path that I had cut through the weeds, a flash of movement in a hackberry tree caught my attention.
Through the branches I could just make out the grey breast of a pigeon-size bird, but the bird was climbing toward me. Pigeons and doves don’t climb. I cursed myself for failing to run into the house for my binoculars. How did I expect to find the took-took bird without them? Fortunately, the grey bird didn’t seem bothered by my presence, and it was close enough that, with a bit of luck, I might be able to identify the species.
I did better than that. I called the bird by name.
“Stanley Sue,” I said as she clambered down to within an arm’s length away. “What in the world do you think you’re doing?”
I didn’t expect death to have given her powers of speech that she hadn’t enjoyed in life, but if anything her eyes were more expressive than I had remembered. She cocked her head for comic effect, then opened and closed her beak in a parody of my question. She swiped her beak on a twig, hung upside down as if to step onto my extended hand, thought better of it, and retreated to the broken stub of a branch near the tree trunk.
“Took, took, took, took, took.”
She looked toward the river and the source of the call. When she whistled sharply in annoyance, I imagined that I also heard the clatter of her bell. She fluffed her feathers as if to relax. Then, shooting me a sly glance, she hopped off the branch, pumped her wings a few times, and soared off toward the sound with the confidence of a hawk.
“Wait,” I told her. In my typical nonathletic fashion, I raced after her. But in a confused tangle of limbs that barely approximated a run, I found myself trotting back up the hill instead. Against the blue-grey background of our house, goose Liza glanced up from excavating the lawn to honk as she caught sight of me. The other geese followed suit, accompanied by the ducks, erupting in a cacophony of brass and woodwinds in expectation of the lettuce snack that I didn’t have.
From the pen behind the barn, first one hen and then another wailed a lament at missing out on the entirely phantom treat as I began reeling in the hose. Chickadees spun their wings, battling for a prime spot at the sunflower-seed feeder, while a white-breasted nuthatch landed upside down on the suet holder. From the woods came the drumming of a woodpecker and a cardinal’s inevitable trill.
All this excitement proved too much for the indoor birds. Bella and Dusty competed to outwhistle one another. A disturbed Howard cooed. The perpetually crabby Ollie squawked. I started to close the basement door behind me, raising an arm toward the river to wave good-bye to Stanley Sue, when black cat Agnes shot inside, then immediately rubbed against my leg, begging for a dollop of canned cat food.
“What’s going on out there?” Linda called to no one in particular from upstairs.
Scuffing the mud off my feet, I called back to no one in particular, “Hold your horses, I’ll be right there.”
Acknowledgments and Culpability
Thanking everyone who helped in some way with Fowl Weather would involve more vowels than my publisher has allotted me, but I do need to mention a few hundred of the noteworthy—including my extremely supportive wife, Linda, who bears the blame of first bringing animals into our lives. Her love, strength, and good humor dazzle me.
My two sisters, Joan and Bett, reviewed each chapter and contributed suggestions on passages about our mom. I also owe them a significant debt for their care of her, especially in situations where I’m useless. And that means most of the time.
Bill Holm not only read and pontificated on Fowl Weather as it progressed, but he also helped reconstruct and confabulate dialogue for scenes in which he appears. “Anything to make me even less likable,” he told me.
Others who have read and commented on portions of the book include Mike Bombyk, Donna Munro, Brian O’Malley, Dave Hucker, Pamela Brown, Dennis Keller, and Christina Websell.
Special thanks to my agent, Jeff Kleinman; my editor, Kathy Pories; the superb publicity department at Algonquin: Michael Taeckens, Aimee Rodriguez, and Katherine Ward. Maureen Mackey at Reader’s Digest; Shelley Irwin at WGVU radio; Paul Ingram at Prairie Lights Bookstore; my dramatic rights agent, Howard Sanders; and Patricia Heaton, who bought the dramatic rights to Enslaved by Ducks.
Finally, for their friendship and support, I would like to thank Wayne Schuurman, president of Audio Advisor, Inc.; pet sitters Jamie Beean, Linda Coppard, April Anderson, Ben Carson, and Kelly Carson; birders Dirk Richardson, Dan Minnock, Bruce Bowman, Su Clift, and Susan Falcone; handyman extraordinaire Gary Dietzel; Peg and Roger Markle of Wildlife Rehab Center Ltd.; rehabbers Sjana Gordon, Dawn Koning, and Shannon Lentz; veterinarians Richard Bennett, Edward Farnum, Roberta Zech, and Bruce Langlois; Scott and Barbara Carpenter of Blue Ribbon Feed Company; Greg VanStrien of VanStrien Heating and Plumbing; Philip Hemstreet; and all of my readers.