Traveling Light

by Thalasinos, Andrea

  CHAPTER 9

  Next morning she thought nothing of driving up the steep incline from the guesthouse to Rick’s. Scent from a wood fire along with the nutty smell of burning leaves got stronger as she approached. Thick gray clouds like sooty cotton balls hung low over the lake, setting off the yellow leaves to glow brighter than the day before.

  “Stay here,” she said to Fotis, and parked. Closing the door, she clomped off in her stiff new work boots in search of Rick. Last night she’d taken Fotis on a long walk. Blisters already brewed on three toes; her big toe was at the mercy of the bend in the leather boot, while two others had just begun complaining. She wanted to tough it out, but the thick wool socks provided no cushion at all as she walked toward sounds of Rick foraging about in the otter enclosure.

  She was primed and ready to show off the new work attire. Hair pinned back, face free of earrings and necklace, black and yellow plaid flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. The tag in the back was irritating. She reached in and yanked; threads popped and a tiny patch of yellow came out. She stuffed it into her jeans pocket. A thick black polar fleece jacket had replaced the hideous sweatshirt. She pushed up its sleeves.

  Each step hurt worse; it would be a long day at this rate. There was a first-aid kit prominently displayed in the raptor room. Band-Aids might help. Thank God she hadn’t walked to work; it was at least a quarter of a mile. She’d have been barefoot by the time she got to Rick’s. The Ben Franklin clerk had suggested moleskin pads, “to cover those tender areas during the break-in period,” but Paula had taken the advice as some sort of marketing ploy, though the clerk had shook his head as if to say, It’s your funeral, lady.

  As she approached the otter enclosure, the smell of damp hay and warm mammal became thick. A garden hose snaked through the chain link. She spotted Rick bent over, cleaning. He wore grimy olive green rubber boots. The top of his sandy gray hair sprang in damp curls from the effort; the only clear view was that of the two back pockets of his jeans. “Okay if I put Fotis in with Sam again?”

  “Any reason you drove?” Answering a question with a question—she was getting used to it. Rick sounded more amused than peeved.

  Paula looked over to his house; the lakeside glass wall of windows sparkled like sheets of polished quartz. No sign of a lady friend.

  The lake mirrored a sky with no horizon. It was hypnotic.

  “Sam’s already out,” Rick called back.

  “Okay.”

  “There’s food in each kennel. Didn’t know if he’d eaten; just open the doors. They’ll go in.”

  “All right, thanks.”

  “Shut each gate; wait till they’re done before you let ’em out,” Rick instructed.

  “I will.”

  “Once they’re settled come on in,” he said. “I want to talk to you about something.”

  Fotis dragged her toward the backyard where Sam stood motionless, tall and shaggy like a cartoon version of a wolf. As they neared, Sam dropped down onto his front elbows and emitted a squeal before running off, inviting Fotis to chase. She stood watching the two of them romp like best friends. Her throat cramped; happiness hit so sharply it hurt. She breathed and looked up to the trees. They were noticeably barer than the day before. The freshly fallen yellow leaves formed circles beneath the drip line of the trees. As the dogs rustled through the leaves, she closed her eyes. She wanted to remember this scene forever.

  “Okay, you guys,” she called, and clapped her hands, walking toward the kennels. Sam ran toward her and Fotis followed. When she opened the gates, each ran like a bullet to his respective food bowl.

  Closing the gate to each kennel, Paula waited. Fotis’ rabies tag clinked on the side of the bowl. He finished first and looked to Sam, who finished and glanced back as if clocking in. “You guys done?” She unlatched each gate and Sam dashed off to the trees with Fotis chasing after.

  * * *

  “Okay, I’m back,” she announced before opening the otter gate to step inside. “How’s the eagle?”

  “Had a rough night, but his lead levels dropped a few points.”

  “Thank God.”

  “He’s not out of the woods yet.” Rick stopped scrubbing and looked up to get her attention. “Remember yesterday when you started to play with the otters and I told you to stop?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know why?”

  She looked down at her boots.

  “You invited them to imprint,” he said.

  The animals were irresistibly cute.

  “They’re not stuffed animals,” he said, scolding. “You play, they imprint, you’ve ruined their lives.” He went on. “Imagine one of them approaches someone’s kid in a campground and bites to initiate play.” He studied her for a few moments. “It’s seen as an attack and the animal pays.”

  The scenario played out in her mind. She nodded and looked down at the crease in her boot.

  “I see.”

  “When they’re imprinted, we become peers. They look to humans for food, for a mate.” He stood up, hands on hips to stretch his back, keeping his eyes on her. Foamy cleanser smelling like Pine-Sol dripped from his scrub brush. “Imprinting begins at birth,” he began. “Parents identify what to eat, how to hunt, who’s a mate. Human contact screws it up.”

  “Then what about the eagle?” She looked toward the metal building. Rick hadn’t shut her down as she’d murmured and stroked the bird’s chest feathers.

  “Adult raptors don’t imprint. We treat them, comfort them as best we can. Release is the goal unless injuries impair their survival. We want them well and back to their territory, their mates—therein lies the payoff. You’ll see when we release.”

  She thought of the eagle, alone in the box.

  “Wild turkey vultures on the other hand”—Rick turned and pointed with the brush to a large black bird with a bald red head of wrinkly skin—“are a different story. Which is why Sigmund here never goes away.”

  “He’s got a name?”

  Rick smiled wryly. His lips were a bit crooked. “Too bad they’re not good to eat.”

  “Hhhh—” She looked at Rick. “You don’t mean that!” One glance said he did.

  The vulture was a few inches shorter than the eagle; his head resembled fresh hamburger meat.

  “Why’s his head so disgusting?” she asked.

  “Easy, you’ll hurt his feelings,” Rick said.

  She laughed.

  “He’s got a crush on you,” Rick said.

  The vulture tilted his head to sustain eye contact.

  “Don’t let it go to your head, though; he falls in love with every female who works here.”

  “Seriously, his head looks like a giant hemorrhoid!”

  Rick suddenly bent over, laughing. It pleased her.

  He straightened, wiped his eyes and said, “If you had to stick your head into the rib cages of rotting, dead things for a meal you wouldn’t want a head full of feathers gathering bits of bacteria and rotting flesh either.”

  A mild gag reflex kicked in. Perhaps she was more squeamish than she’d thought.

  “After a meal they sun themselves. It burns off the bits of bacteria and dead flesh. They’re important players in the cycle of the forest.”

  She studied his expression. A bit of a smile turned his lips. Aside from sun damage, his skin was pitted in acne scars that had merged into wrinkles with the aging process. When he was talking about animals, twenty years peeled off; he became fresh, so alive.

  “Here.” Rick held out a pair of rubber gloves along with a pair of rubber waders that looked like overalls with attached rubber boots. “We’re cleaning this morning.”

  Sigmund took a few steps toward her. She stepped back even though there was a chain-link fence between them.

  “Vultures get a nasty rap, but they’re really quite gentle.”

  “So I could just walk over and pick him up,” she dared. Sigmund tilted his head as if displaying his best angle.

/>   “Go ahead. He’d love it.” Rick’s voice was low, almost a gurgle at Sigmund’s love-starved expression. “If he doesn’t he’ll vomit.”

  Paula looked at Rick. “Delightful.”

  “The stench from their stomach is so vile it drives away everything except for the females—they seem drawn to it.”

  “Yum.”

  “They also urinate on their legs to kill off lingering bacteria. Their urine is acidic for that purpose.”

  “Oh goody.”

  Rick looked at the otter shelter. “Imprinting’s only a threat with the young,” he went on to explain. “So we limit contact to feeding and handling only for medical procedures. Even with caution, imprinting is a risk.”

  “So how do you avoid it?”

  He bent over and picked out twigs, leaves, from the bottom of the otter pool. The three otters hid from him in the wooden shelter. “Very carefully.”

  One of them peeked out at her and then withdrew.

  He motioned for her to wait and stepped to close the door to their shelter.

  “I try not to even speak around them; I’m breaking my own rule,” he whispered.

  “They seem afraid.”

  He looked at the shelter.

  “Avoidant. Which is how they should be.”

  She looked toward two eagles sitting in the sun, each tethered to a stand by leather jesses on their feet. One puffed out his belly and leg feathers seemingly in bliss.

  “Does he like the sun?”

  Rick looked. “Animals love the sun. These two are flightless. Both about twenty years old. One’s a bald; the other’s a golden. Been with me for years. Normally we don’t get goldens up here; don’t know where he came from. He’s mostly blind, too blind for the wild—some sort of head trauma—the other lost part of a wing. He can’t hunt. Mixed it up with a power line over near Two Harbors. Sometimes they get so fixated on a field mouse they miss power lines, barbed-wire fences. These guys have ‘sanctuary’; we’ll see who outlives whom.”

  She wondered if Rick’s parents were still alive. He seemed so much more robust than Roger.

  “Both came in as adults, so they’ve not imprinted. They’re my foster dads.”

  “Dads?” She looked up as she unlaced her boots.

  “Males are often more attentive. If we get a young eagle while you’re here you’ll see,” he said. “They feed, raise the young, teach ’em to hunt.”

  “Even the blind one?”

  He nodded. “These guys have successfully reared dozens of chicks.”

  They were quiet for a few moments. Everything was contrary to what she knew about birds.

  She leaned against the fence, happy to step out of the boots and into the waders. She massaged her foot.

  “You mind if later I use some of the Band-Aids in the first-aid kit?” She made a face. “Blisters.”

  “Didn’t Clyde at the Ben Franklin get you some moleskin?”

  She said nothing.

  “Check to see if there’s still some in there. Works better than Band-Aids anyway. Let me know; I got some up at the house.”

  “Thanks.”

  Paula thought about the owl as she stepped into the rubber boots and secured the waders around her waist.

  “Imprinting with wild canids, wolves, foxes, is serious,” he went on to explain. “They’ll have no fear of humans. They’ll approach to play or think you have food for them. Imagine if a ninety-pound wolf walks out of the trees and approaches your five-year-old.”

  She cinched the straps tight on the waders.

  “Curiosity is natural; familiarity is deadly. They watch us all the time.” He looked out to the woods. She looked, too, searching for pairs of eyes. “It’s the people who try to keep them as pets that get into trouble.”

  “Like the people who had Sam?”

  Rick nodded. “They get unruly, so people dump ’em, thinking they’ll go back to the wild,” he mocked. “Instead they starve.”

  She hadn’t thought of instinct as something that could be lost.

  “Someone sees a pup or a chick and they think it’s abandoned. Often the parents are just out finding food. Just think how those parents must feel when they can’t find their young.” There was something so earnest about his face it made her want to comfort him.

  She mirrored his silence, imagining Sam wandering the highway.

  Rick then bent down and grasped one side of the otter pool. Paula took his lead. Together they lifted and dumped out the remaining water.

  “These guys were found in the woods,” he said.

  “You think their mother was killed?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to know.” He took a long pause. “It’s rare to find otters so far from a water source.”

  She wondered what circumstances had befallen them. It would be tempting to cuddle and keep them; she could see how someone might try.

  “After a few more checks this week, we’ll take them down to the shore.” He motioned west. “Several otter colonies there.”

  “Will they be okay?”

  He didn’t say directly. “If they don’t come back I’ll take it they’re fine.”

  She turned and looked at Sigmund. He spread his huge wingspan with the suddenness of Dracula’s cape and turned around to exhibit himself.

  “Oh brother,” she said with disgust.

  “He’s going for it,” Rick said in a singsong voice.

  Once the pool of water was empty, Rick handed her a scrub brush and a bottle of disinfectant.

  “You have the honors,” he said. “Scrub out all the slime and anything that feels suspect.” He let himself out and began walking toward his house.

  “Suspect?”

  “Yeah. You’ll know what I mean when you start scrubbing,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Fish for the raptors.”

  She was covered up to her midriff in rubber boots and up to her elbows in rubber gloves. The sun felt good on her face, and like the eagles, she stood absorbing it before bending on all fours to scrub.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon they treated the eagle again and tested his blood. He seemed more listless than the day before and she mentioned it to Rick; he said that the treatment could be rough on them. He put salve on the owl’s wounds. Though her blood blister looked ugly and serious, it was too dangerous to lance.

  Holding the owl was like holding the world. Though she was huge, Paula could feel the owl’s hollow bones and skeletal body in her arms as light as air. The feathered tufts on the bird’s head tickled Paula’s face as Rick used a giant syringe to suck up a baby-food jar of pureed liver and deposit it into the owl’s stomach. Next time they’d give her a mouse as a test to see if she was ready to eat. Rick taught Paula how to move the tube down the owl’s throat in the correct position, slowly releasing the food into her stomach and not the lungs.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Paula said as she lowered the owl back down into the box. “You’ll see. Rick says maybe six weeks or so you’ll fly back to your home.” The bird looked at Paula. Yellow eyes that mirrored her own: mysterious, clear-sighted like the eagle. Paula could see how people would impart all sorts of qualities onto this bird—wise and precognitive, secret keeper. She covered the box with the bedsheet, fastening it with clothespins.

  She was unaware that Rick was watching. He’d left to walk back to the flight room and she hadn’t heard him return.

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t realize.”

  “You did that really well,” he said.

  She looked at him and smiled, too humbled to even thank him. Moving toward the sink, she disassembled the components of the tube-feeding apparatus and began scrubbing it in warm water.

  “When you’re done, come on up to the house,” he said. “I have some forms for you to fill out.”

  She nodded.

  * * *

  The front door to Rick’s log home was wide open. No screen. Sigmund followed, teeter
ing on his scaly pink feet as if racing her toward the opening. “Don’t go in there.” She tried to shoo him away, chasing him out of the doorway, but he walked inside, making himself at home. “Sigmund,” she called. “Get out of there.” But the vulture disappeared deep inside the house.

  The home had the feel of a 1920s Adirondack lodge. She knocked on the open door; it was so thick her knuckles barely registered a sound. There was no sign of a doorbell.

  “Hello?” she called. She didn’t know whether to walk in like Sigmund or wait out on the deck. What if Rick was taking a shower?

  She stepped inside the foyer and called again.

  “Hey, Rick?”

  There was a stirring from somewhere in the house.

  “Come on in,” his voice echoed. She stepped inside and looked up. Vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, huge skylights lined the top near the peak of the roof.

  The inside was larger than it appeared from the outside.

  “Sigmund’s in here,” she called.

  “Ah, that’s okay. I leave the front door open or he’ll scratch off the finish.”

  She looked around, imagining the disgusting bird making himself at home in the luxurious great room, and then spotted him sitting on the back of a leather sofa, looking at her as if inviting her to sit down.

  The interior smelled like pipe tobacco, old leather jackets and wool. Weather-beaten leather furniture, iron floor lamps, tribal-looking Oriental rugs, wall hangings that looked Native American. Large logs and beams framed the interior ceiling. The inside walls were the same weathered dark brown as the outside.

  “Wow, this is amazing,” she said to no one. It was so tidy she imagined someone came in to clean.

  She spotted Rick down the hall. Brown reading glasses dangled on the tip of his nose. He waved at her to follow him down a long hallway to a room on the far end of the house.

  Bookshelves with legal books lined one wall. A massive cherrywood desk filled practically a third of the room, along with computer equipment and paper files. He sat down behind the desk as she stood.

  “Maggie tells me you’re an attorney,” Paula said.