Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  As we transferred Chloe to the bunny cage, Linda reminded me of how Daphne and Peggy had managed to peck the call duck ducklings through the bars. Birds just could not resist ferreting out weakness in their flock and trying to drive off underlings, presumably to ensure the survival of the group. Dominance was another issue that led to bullying. Howard and Stanley continued to jockey for power in our dining room, no matter how close an eye we kept on them. We talked about encircling Chloe’s cage with the ring of fencing that had protected the ducklings, but the fence proved unnecessary. As soon as I placed the cage in a corner of the duck pen, Peggy plunked herself in front of it and would not let Daphne get anywhere close. She did her best to menace us, too, forcing us to shoo her away whenever we wanted to give Chloe food or water.

  Altruism in animals is unusual. I’ve read books about extraordinary pets like Philip Gonzalez’s The Dog Who Rescues Cats: The True Story of Ginny, which chronicles a pooch whose goal in life is finding injured or abandoned cats and convincing her big-hearted owner to take them home. But you expect a certain degree of heroism in dogs that you don’t expect in other pets. Otherwise, Saint Bernard might be the name for a gargantuan breed of helpful rabbit, fire stations could use a speckled goose as mascot, and Lassie might signal danger by meowing strenuously. Talk to anyone who spends hours a day around animals, from farmers to zookeepers to misguided individuals like myself. They’ll probably express admiration for their charges. They probably won’t ever describe them as motivated by selflessness. But Peggy was an exception.

  Peggy always relished her periods of freedom from the pen, when she could search the yard for worms, exotic varieties of mud, and other delicacies too refined for human tastes. During the weeks that Chloe was confined to her cage, Peggy barely budged from sentry duty. Once in a while, succumbing to Daphne’s forlorn squeaks or the call of a luscious puddle after a heavy rain, she might briefly join the Muscovy for a jaunt across the lawn. But these outings were rare. Her place was at the convalescing patient’s bedside, where her raspy voice offered occasional quiet mutterings of encouragement. “How’s that drumstick today?” she might quack, in an attempt to cheer up the brown duck. “Your food looks good, but the grub’s much better in the garden.”

  When three weeks passed and we could finally release an increasingly restless Chloe, Peggy seemed to anticipate the moment of liberation as much as we did. She darted around my feet as Linda kneeled down on the dampish straw of the duck pen, reached through the door of the bunny cage, and gently placed Chloe on the floor beside her. Chloe didn’t keep us in suspense. Her chubby body immediately popped up on a pair of working legs that propelled her out into the yard. Wobbling significantly but still maintaining her balance, she moved with surprising speed toward an alluring patch of weeds, followed closely by Peggy, who, for perhaps the only time in her life, let Chloe take the lead.

  I was still thrilled at Chloe’s recovery when I held her in my arms at Dr. Hedley’s office a couple of days later. He shared my joy, but his face grew tight as his fingers probed the length of her leg, carefully working her limb in every direction like a video-game joystick. Chloe’s face, in contrast, was unperturbed, wearing the same look of mild forbearance that a duck acquires almost as soon as it lurches out of the egg.

  “Do you mind if I take another X ray?” he asked. “I won’t charge you for it. I just want to satisfy my own curiosity.”

  He was visibly more relaxed when he returned with Chloe, though my stomach clenched when he explained that the bone hadn’t actually knitted back together at all. “The femur is still broken, just as I had thought. But she’ll still do fine.”

  “If the leg is broken, how can she possibly walk?”

  “The muscles in her leg are supporting the broken bone. Ducks are incredibly lightweight for their size, and their muscles are quite strong, as you would know if you ever tried to handle a large bird that wasn’t this cooperative.”

  I grimaced. “Won’t that hurt her to have the loose bone end spearing her muscle?”

  “The muscles grip a large enough section of the bone to act as kind of a shock absorber,” he explained, capping the fingers of his left hand with his cupped right hand in another of his dexterous broken-bone pantomimes. “ I don’t think she’s experiencing too much discomfort, or she simply wouldn’t walk at all. A few years ago we had a condition similar to this with another kind of bird—”

  “A flamingo,” I suggested, anticipating an anecdote about a zoo.

  “Oh, good heavens, no,” he chuckled. “Where on earth would I get my hands on a flamingo? No, it was a Magellanic penguin, the kind you see swimming off the South African coast. We never thought this little guy would ever walk again, but despite a break not unlike your duck’s, he did very well for himself.”

  Dr. Hedley turned out to be right about Chloe. Her leg supported her throughout the summer, and when winter came she kept vertical as successfully as any South African penguin, Magellanic or otherwise. Thanks to her wide feet—the same clumsy boats I had laughed at during temperate months—the ice that sent me sprawling headlong down the hill barely troubled her at all, nor did the six inches of snow that fell one night shortly after Christmas. Buoyed by the fluff, all three ducks half-walked, half-swam away from their pen, kicking their legs to toboggan across the yard, leaving tattletale trenches behind them. But with no seasonal treats to forage for except varied flavors of slush, they only sledded as far as the closest patch of sun, basking contentedly while I wrestled miserably with the usual pushbroom, hose, and shovel.

  WHEN SPRING FINALLY wormed its way loose from the beak of a fierce Michigan winter, a familiar visitor made his first appearance. While other raccoons played the part of stylish partygoers by waiting for darkness before dropping by, a young male favored us with his presence in the late afternoon. As early as five o’clock, we would find him on the flat roof of the milk house just outside our dining room window eating seeds I had flung up there for juncos, cardinals, and jays that would not use the hanging feeder. As we ate dinner, he scrounged whatever the birds had left behind. Soon he was joining us for breakfast, too, showing up at a sunlit hour when other self-respecting nocturnal creatures had long since retreated to their hidey-holes or closed the lids of their coffins.

  Under normal conditions, I simply ignored the raccoon population, but this was anything but a normal spring. Raccoons and possums usually poked around our feeder as a lazy alternative to scavenging natural foods. But an uncharacteristically dry April and May evaporated a swamp that should have squirted out mosquitoes by the millions. The lack of rain also squelched other insects and early-blooming weeds that in past years our animal residents had plucked from nature’s big buffet. Conditions were so desperate that bug- and berry-loving Baltimore orioles were reduced to eating our sunflower seeds. We had never seen that before. Linda split an orange in half and skewered it on the end of the bird feeder support pole. A male and female oriole pecked the fruit down to the pulp within hours. Soon she began putting out two orange halves each day. Since the raccoon’s survival prospects seemed dire, I decided to share leftovers of Linda’s tortilla-chip-crumb-and-potato-water casserole (“I never made that,” she claims), skillet-fried tofu shapes, faux-tuna Tuno burgers, and failed bread-machine experiments.

  While I trusted a human-habituated raccoon to steer clear of our ducks, we still took the precaution of keeping the girls inside their pen until the sun was high in the sky. Early mornings and late afternoons were off-limits, no matter how loudly Chloe quacked for freedom. We also double-checked the pen door latches at night to avoid a repeat of the attack on Martha. We were vigilant. We just weren’t vigilant enough.

  I was at work when I received an anguished call from Linda. She had waited until midmorning to let the ducks out, heard a commotion twenty minutes later, and found a frightened Daphne and Chloe wandering more aimlessly than usual. Peggy was missing. A trail of small white feathers leading to the back fence told a tale with a terrible end
ing.

  Too upset to do anything else, I drove home from work and spent several pointless minutes calling for a duck we knew couldn’t possibly come home. We didn’t even find anything we could bury, though I stopped short of searching beyond the black raspberry bushes for the kind of grisly remains that Martha had left behind. I didn’t want to remember Peggy like that. I wanted to remember her brimming with an intensity of life far out of proportion to her size, a lioness inhabiting the body of a twelve-inch-tall duck. There was no question in either of our minds that our daylight raccoon had extended his usual visiting hours for a meal on the wing. And Linda had no doubt that slow-moving Chloe was his intended target and that Peggy had intervened to save her life.

  “I can just see Peggy protecting Chloe,” Linda told me, after we had calmed down a bit. “She probably tried to chase him off while Chloe and Daphne ran away. She wasn’t afraid of anything. That’s exactly what she would do.”

  I missed Peggy more than I ever expected to miss a duck and turned my sorrow into rage against the raccoon. Whenever I saw him on top of the milk house, I tore outside and chased him off with a broom. Whacking the handle against the side of the roof from ground level, I scared him into jumping down, then ran to the back of the shed and threatened to pummel him with the broom head as he made a beeline for the back fence. His agility and my essential cowardice saved us both from harm. After a few of these chases, upon hearing the angry slam of the basement door, he would climb out of broom range up the hackberry tree overhanging the milk house. I peppered him with a hail of pebbles as he clung forlornly to the trunk. I sprayed him with jets of water from the backyard hose. I hollered at him until my throat hurt, “Kill my favorite duck, will you?” and “You’re not welcome here anymore!” The raccoon just wouldn’t take the hint. Staring down at me with a slightly perplexed air, he bided his time until I stalked back into the house, then resumed his usual seat at out rooftop cafe. Nothing I did had any effect.

  “I’m just glad I don’t own a gun,” I said to Linda. Otherwise, of course, I might have shot myself in the foot.

  I had trouble sleeping, sick about losing Peggy and obsessed with ridding our property of every last marauding raccoon. The following Saturday, on my weekly visit to the feed store, I asked the owner, Ted, if he sold live traps large enough to catch a raccoon. He had exactly the model I needed. The cardboard box even featured fanciful artwork of a captured raccoon whose wide eyes indicated he was anxious to make a fresh start at a remote location.

  “You won’t go wrong with this one,” Ted said. “I use one of them myself.”

  “Is it tricky letting them go?” I asked. “I’ve read about people getting their leg chewed on by an animal they’ve just released.”

  “I don’t release them,” he said with an insinuating squint. “I take care of them.”

  The irony of using live traps to lure animals to their doom not only was lost on Ted, but it also escaped the trap manufacturer. Bait-and-capture instructions were provided, but not a word from the Humane Live Animal Trap, Inc., literature mentioned how to spring the raccoon. In fact, the pictured list of features referred to the Quick-Release Rear Hatch with Easy Slide-Out Bolt under the heading of Bait Insertion Door, though the door was clearly designed for the animal’s escape. The whole procedure seemed so ominous from the raccoon’s perspective, I shook the empty cardboard box to make sure I hadn’t overlooked an included Humane Gutting Knife.

  Once I had mastered the art of prying open the spring-loaded door and securing it to a hook that set the trigger without the door snapping shut and breaking my fingers, the trap was easy to use. Just before the raccoon’s usual afternoon arrival, I positioned the primed and ready contraption underneath our bird feeder. Tipping open the rear escape hatch, I inserted pungent bait—week-old tofu stir fry plus a dollop of canned cat food—then slid in the Easy Slide-out Bolt. I barely made it back indoors before the raccoon sauntered into the neighborhood’s newest miniature diner and found himself clapped behind bars.

  I hated to make him spend a couple of hours in the trap, but I wanted to wait for nightfall to release the raccoon, not wanting to be seen releasing a raccoon. Stealth definitely required a trade-off. Darkness put me at a disadvantage with a nocturnal creature accustomed to biting and clawing in inky blackness, so I compensated by packing a flashlight and protecting my hands with leather gloves so thick and stiff I couldn’t operate the flashlight. I swaddled my torso in a knee-length down jacket, stuck my feet into hiking boots the size of file-cabinet drawers, and pulled on a stocking cap to guard against a desperate lunge for my hair. After I was fully suited up, the full scope of the heat-generating ability of the human body hit me. I wasn’t especially mobile inside my portable sauna, but at least my captive wouldn’t be grabbing free samples of my flesh.

  The caged raccoon’s huddled posture and offended look tempted me to let him go on the spot. I stiffened my resolve. “Sorry, but you’ve got to find a new place to live,” I explained, picking up the carrier. “Don’t worry, you’re all right.” The centrally located handle put trap and trap carrier wildly off balance as the animal scuttled from one end to the other. I wrestled the oscillating apparatus into the trunk of my Camry, tuned the radio to a suitably dramatic piece of classical music, and took a back road into Lowell.

  My first choice for release on the Grand River was nixed by necking teens in a station wagon certain to be unnerved by the Michelin Man. I crossed the river and chose an access road alongside the railroad tracks. Nervous and cooking inside my protective suit, I set the trap on the ground, aimed it toward a shallow woods on the riverbank, whisked the bolt from the escape hatch, and flopped back into the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind me.

  The raccoon did not budge.

  Breathing hard, I cautiously left the car again and lifted the escape hatch with a screwdriver to demonstrate that nothing but a hinge impeded his departure. “You’re free,” I urged him. “You can go now. Go on!” He hid his head. The third time I raised the hatch, this animal—that I had never seen move faster than a lumbering trot—issued a menacing snort that sent me flailing backward and streaked into the trees faster than my eye could imprint.

  Over the next two weeks, I trapped four more raccoons and released them at the same spot on the river. I congratulated myself, until I stepped outside the basement door one night just before bedtime to call our cat and saw another three raccoons beneath the feeder. I caught these as well, but more still came. They were as plentiful as mice. In fact, the snarl of successive raccoon shifts punching in throughout the night woke me up over the course of the summer.

  The following August, Linda’s friend Deanne was having dinner with us when a fat raccoon in search of a canapé wandered into the trap. The sun wouldn’t set for another couple of hours, but Deanne was eager to witness the animal’s joyous moment of freedom. I had never let a raccoon go in daylight. It just seemed to go against the catch-and-release lifestyle. But because my release spot was sheltered from prying human eyes, I agreed to show off my wildlife skills for our guest. Despite a voracious mosquito population near the river and a feisty raccoon that growled at me with uncharacteristic savagery, the liberation went off without a hitch. But just before we drove away, Deanne pointed to a break in the wall of trees that stood between the railroad tracks and the river and asked me, “Isn’t that someone’s driveway? I’m sure I see a house back there.”

  “Oh, no, nobody lives out here,” I insisted. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  Linda pressed her head against the glass. “I see someone’s house. It’s yellow. And there’s a red car in the driveway.”

  “There can’t be,” I whined, turning around on the access road as quickly and quietly as possible. “I would have noticed someone living here.”

  “We’d better get out of here,” Linda urged. “Someone might come out with a gun. They’re probably looking for you.”

  Her warning was surely excessive. Or maybe it wasn’t
. In the fifteen months since Peggy had died, I had dropped off at least thirteen raccoons on those people’s doorstep. That’s thirteen raccoons added to the local raccoon population—thirteen raccoons bitter about having been caught in a trap.

  The realization of what I had done filled me with terrible guilt. It also increased my paranoia. Now, after dark, whenever a car grinds to a halt on the shoulder in front of our house, I no longer assume it’s an innocent passerby stopping to check a map. Instead, I’m certain that some sneak with an animal problem is dumping raccoons on our property. And come to think of it, that’s probably how we got so many of them in the first place.

  CHAPTER 8

  Enslaved by Ducks

  Jacob Lestermeyer was going on and on about the pharisee next door as he led us from one farm building to another in search of the mystery duck. We started in a sprawling barn with a baffling maze of pens and cubbyholes. We rooted through squads of protesting hens, eyeballed nervous ducks resting on ancient straw bedding as hard-packed as driveway dirt, combed a food-storage room cluttered with spilled feed sacks, and slowed to admire dozens of day-old pheasant chicks trickling in and out of the heat circle cast by a brood lamp. Out the back door, we dodged a pygmy goat with a taste for shirt buttons in an otherwise deserted chicken coop, craned our necks behind a two-tiered wall of rabbit cages, stuck our heads into a shed so gloomy, Big-foot could have lurked inside unnoticed, and collectively lifted one end of an overturned wooden cart that hadn’t rolled anywhere on its spoked wheels since long before our host’s beard had gone grey.